Richard Edwards

Prison Industrial Complex

Business Education

When the North American continent was first colonized by Europeans, the land was vast and the
work was harsh. There was a shortage of labor. Men and woman were needed to the land. White
bond servants paying their passage across the ocean from Europe through indentured labor, eased
but did not solve their problem. Early in the seventeenth century, a Dutch ship loaded up with
African slaves introduced a solution and new problems to the new world. Many slaves were most
economical on large farms where labor, intensifies cash crops, such as tobacco, and would be
grown.
Slavery in America began when the first African slaves were brought to the North American
colony of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. Slavery was practiced throughout the American colonies
in the 17th and 18th centuries, and African-American slaves helped build the economic
foundations of the new nation. The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 solidified the central
importance of slavery to the Souths economy. By the mid-19th century, Americas westward
expansion, along with a growing abolition movement in the North, would provoke a great debate
over slavery that would tear the nation apart in the bloody American Civil War (1861-65).
Though the Union victory freed the nations 4 million slaves, the legacy of slavery continued to
influence American history, from the tumultuous years of Reconstruction (1865-77) to the civil
rights movement that emerged in the 1960s, a century after emancipation. In the late 18th
century, the abolitionist movement began in the north and the country began to divide over the
issue between North and South. In 1820, the Missouri Compromise banned slavery in all new
western territories, which Southern states saw as a threat to the institution of slavery itself. In
1857, the Supreme Court decision known as the Dred Scott Decision said that Negroes were not
citizens and had no rights of citizenship; therefore, slaves that escaped to Free states where not
free but remained the property of their owners and must be returned to them. The decision

antagonized many Northerners and breathed new life into the floundering Abolition Movement.
The election of Abraham Lincoln, a member of the anti-slavery Republican Party, to the
presidency in 1860 convinced many Southerners that slavery would never be permitted to
expand into new territories acquired by the US and might ultimately be abolished. Eleven
Southern states attempted to secede from the Union, precipitating War. During the war, Abraham
Lincoln issued his famous Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves in all areas of the country
that were at that time in rebellion. This measure helped prevent European intervention on the
side of the South and freed Union army and navy officers from returning escaped slaves to their
owners, but not until after the Union had won the war and the subsequent passage of the
Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution were the American slaves officially freed.

By issuing the Declaration of Independence, adopted by the Continental Congress on July 4,

1776, the 13 American colonies severed their political connections to Great Britain. The
Declaration summarized the colonists motivations for seeking independence. By declaring
themselves an independent nation, the American colonists were able to confirm an official
alliance with the Government of France and obtain French assistance in the war against Great
Britain. The 13th Amendment to the Constitution declared that "Neither slavery nor involuntary
servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted,
shall exist within the United States, nor any place subject to their jurisdiction." Formally
abolishing slavery in the United States, the 13th Amendment was passed by the Congress on
January 31, 1865, and ratified by the states on December 6, 1865. Peonage was also called debt
slavery or debt servitude, is a system where an employer compels a worker to pay off a debt with
work. Legally, peonage was outlawed by Congress in 1867. However, after Reconstruction,

many Southern black men were swept into peonage though different methods, and the system
was not completely eradicated until the 1940s.