Slavery In Colonial America

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Due to the large amount of leisure time and money gained by slave owners, there were extensive actions taken to ensure that rebellion and escape wouldn’t occur. Before the slave trade, “white settlers” were “little inclined to work the land” and had a “frustrated rage at their own ineptitude” when compared to that of the thriving Native Americans. This ineptitude and laziness caused the settlers much trouble because they were growing few crops they were producing. Since the settlers couldn’t surpass their Native American counter-parts, they eventually came to the conclusion that “Black slaves were the answer” because of the immense amount of trade going on in places such as the Caribbean, Spanish colonies, and Portuguese colonies. The growing…show more content…
Although the slaves were suffering, their New World masters and the people buying them as property were flourishing, and, as a plantation owner puts it, he “could make $257 on every Negro in a year, and only spend $12 or $13 dollars on his keep”. Not only could those involved in the slave trade have great leisure from owning a slave, but they also profited from the wealth generated in the selling of other human beings, They had to control the huge slave population in the Americas, the white owners taught their slaves “to see blackness as a sign of subordination” and to set aside “their own individual needs”. This psychological tactic was only a small section of the greater sense of inferiority that permeated slave life and made some feel helpless to save themselves. The English language had become a medium for the perception that those of color when the Oxford dictionary depicted black as “Having dark or deadly purposes, … pertaining to or involving death, … [and with] liability to punishment” while the color white was consistently used by Elizabethan poetry “in connection to
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