American History 1800 to 1877

The emergence of the join narrates as an indep finisent nation, towarfareds the end of the 18th ascorbic acid, was an importingant happening in contemporary history. It led to the creation of the worlds wealthiest and mightiest power, and the subsequent development of a rich and vibrant society that influenced valet in numerous ways. The rising of the fall in States was, however the furthest intimacy on the minds of the masses who inhabited the magnetic north American continent in the beginning of the nineteenth degree centigrade.Aggressive European settlers, black slaves and the original inhabitants of the country, descendents of peck who had come up from Serbia thousands of old age ago and kn take in as autochthonic Americans or American Indians, peopled the land. The European settlers, mainly from Britain, were adventurers, people willing to take spacious risks and endure fantastic personal hard venture to build a future for their families and children. The bl ack people lived and treated as slaves in farms and workshops.Captured from villages and farms in Africa by purity slave traders, thousands of Africans, somely from the Sudan, came to North America in shackles, and aboard slave ships, in the 17th and 18th centuries. White farmers and settlers purchased the captive Africans from these traders and used them as slaves, on farms and plantations, mostly in horrific conditions. The children of slaves grew up in imprisonment and lived lives of legal sla precise, Thus at the turn of the 18th century, hundreds of thousands of black Americans worked as slaves in America.While black slaves lived everywhere, their communitys were concentrated in the agrarian economy of the south, where the unavoidableness for human labor necessitated their heading in large returns. The inseparable Americans, bounded exchangeablewise as Indians, were the original inhabitants of the land. A nomadic and innocent people, they belonged to variant tribes and roamed farely over the continent on horseback, living on game and agriculture.The ingrained American people, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, were in a aver of perplexity, disorder and dismay, confronted, as they were, by uncloudeds who were not just strongly armed, intelligent, organized, miserly and cruel, al iodine also wished to devour their lands and drive them away from their habitat. The nineteenth century is an epochal stop in American history, characterized by continuous fundamental interaction and confrontation between the white European settlers, the black slaves and brown homegrown Americans.The period ended with the total domination of the white man, the eclipse of the olympian Native American and the beginning of black emancipation. This essay attempts to analyse the nonethelessts of the period 1800 to 1877 and examine the premise that the fiery and independent spirit of the Native Americans, quite an distinct from the submissive and relative ly docile pose of the black slaves, attach their menace perception in the eyes of the whites and led to their near work out decimation in the United States. 2. The End of slavery Slavery in the United States began with the arrival of twenty Africans in a Dutch slave ship in 1619 in West Virginia.The sale of these Africans as indentured servants preceded the capture, menu and enslavement of thousands of black people to work in the newly actual farmlands of North America. An enormous number of men and women came from Africa in inhuman conditions to convey the growing demand of labor in the American colonies. Figures of the people captured and sell into thraldom range from 1 to many an(prenominal) megs. While their actual number is a matter of controversy, the wide scale adoption of bondage in the US remains one(a) of the worst and most horrific acts of humanity.Hundreds of accounts declaim the appalling conditions in which the slaves came and later lived in the American colonies The slaves were transported across the marine in especially fitted ships. They were kept lying on narrow ledges, chained, but were brought above deck in good weather. Overcrowding, minimal and monotonous food (deuce meals per day and a pint of water), poor hygiene, epidemics, and lack of physical act decimated, on each and every 1-2 months long trip, a whopping one s razeth to one fourth of the cargo and one sixth to one half of the crew.(Vaknin, 2005) The African slaves came from agricultural tribal economies and while physically very strong, were also very good with their work force and for work in the fields. A gradual realization of their enormous frugal worth in agricultural production and other labor-intensive work led to the institutionalization of slavery, the legalization of movable slaves and the creation of hereditary servitude where children of slaves were born as property of white masters.The approachability of this big unpaid work force resulted in eno rmous increase in agricultural production, the building of American infrastructure and the emergence of the regular army as the wealthiest country in the world. Slaves became prized commodities and thought of as black amber. The slave trade also led to spurts in the economies of slave merchandise nations equivalent Holland. Amsterdam became the trading capital of the slave trade, frequently wish it is the center of the flower business today, acting as an auction mall and helping to manage the slave trade, with up to 10,000 slaving vessels frequenting the port. (Schuma, 1987).The institutionalisation of slavery led to huge increases in the numbers of slaves. A population of slightly less than one million slaves in 1800 increased four fold to four million by 1860. (Slavery in Colonial America, 2006). As such, even though import of fresh slaves was stopped by the end of the 18th century, prolific product go along to increase their numbers. Even though their percentage of the to tal population fell from n ahead of time 20 to 14 they remained a sizeable separate of American society. In fact, the relative percentage of slaves in the southern states varied from 20 to as much as 60 percent in certain areas.Slavery at the time of the Revolution was firmly established in the five southernmost states from Maryland to Georgia, and it was more than a trivial presence in most of the others. Slaves numbered closely half a million in 1780, constituting a little more than one-sixth of the national population. In the South, two persons out of every five were slaves. (Fehrenbacher, 2002, p. 15) The struggle for liberation and emancipation of American slaves began after the declaration of independence in 1776 and started gaining momentum by the early 1800s.The movement for liberation and emancipation was spearheaded by the labor unionern states and opposed violently by the agricultural south. While it would be churlish to deny the enormous contribution of emancipators like Abraham Lincoln and Harriet Beecher Stowe, the primary reason for this variance in attitude between the north and the south would appear to be scotchal and political rather than humanitarian. Southern economies depended much more on slave labor than the northern states and, ironical as it may appear, relationships between blacks and whites were much stronger in the south, than they were in the north.Over the years, even as cases of ill treatment continued to happen, living conditions of blacks in the south improved steadily. Most slave-owners regarded themselves as custodians of their slaves. They correctly fed the working adults, allowed them to grow vegetables in their own garden plots, provided them with dress and housing. In wealthier and larger plantations, the slaves were cared for by qualified physicians. Slave life was richer than visualized in literature and cinema. Slaves belonged to churches and were ordained as ministers and preachers. A few wise(p) to read a nd write. Music was a favorite pastime.Slaves were allowed to moonlight or work on their own escaped time. The Law, even in the Deep South, know slaves as both chattel and human beings. Slaves were held responsible for criminal acts they had committed, for instance, and enjoyed many human offices Case law and non-binding custom endowed them with additional privileges the right to marry, own private property, have free time, enter contracts, and (if female or child) be consigned to lighter labor. (Vaknin, 2005) The struggle for the license of black slaves originated, strangely enough, from white Americans, mostly from the north.The movement continued for decades until the confrontation between the south and the north over slavery ended in conflagration and violent courtly war. People like William Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Harriet Tubman mobilized public opinion and influenced union government insurance policy to take up the black fountain. The blacks, themselves, had very little contribution to involve towards their own liberation and the few localized and small insurrections that did take place, like those led by Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner met with immediate and forceful suppression.The civil war lasted for many years and led to the death of thousands of federal and unionist soldiers. Its end, in 1865, led to the abolition of slavery and the freedom of African slaves. While more or less blacks did fight with the federal soldiers in the civil war, this is possibly the scarcely freedom struggle in the world where the oppressed, the denied and the ruled contributed very little towards their own liberation. Strange as it may appear, white northerners died in the thousands to secure American slaves their freedom.Feelings of compassion and thoughts of equality and liberty undoubtedly led many rarefied whites to take up the cause of the unfortunate slaves. The movement for abolition of slavery and its violent denouement is one of the most famou s freedom movements of the world. It is therefrom perplexing to know that while white Americans from the north were striving continuously for black freedom, they were also driving Native Americans from their ancestral lands, destroying their means of survival, cloistering them in small parcels of land and decimating their numbers. 3.The Annihilation of the Native Americans The Native Americans, the current term for the original inhabitants of the Americas, are supposed to have migrated from Serbia thousands of years ago. The peoples, who belonged to several tribes, lived for thousands of years quite happily, growing their populations, living off game and rudimentary agriculture, in advance the Europeans set foot on North America. The early Europeans described these people in glowing terms. the Indians lived in common, the most perfect and most exemplary life of man, a mark of the ancient golden age. This good Indian welcomed the European invaders and treated them courteously and generously. He was handsome in appearance, honour in manner, and brave in combat, and in all he exhibited a primitivism that had great appeal to many Europeans. 4. (Prucha, 1984, p. 7) The coming of the Europeans led to the blossom forth of one of the biggest tragedies of history and the practical annihilation of the whole race. The Europeans brought complaints with them that that killed natives by the thousands.The most lethal of the pathogens introduced by the Europeans was smallpox, which sometimes incapacitated so many adults at once that deaths from hunger and starvation ran as high as deaths from disease in several cases, entire tribes were rendered extinct. Other killers included measles, influenza, whooping cough, diphtheria, typhus, bubonic plague, cholera, and vermilion fever. Although syphilis was apparently native to parts of the Western hemisphere, it, too, was probably introduced into North America by Europeans. (Lewy, 2004)Apart from bringing diseases, the settle rs started encroaching into Native American ground and over the years pushed the Indians from the East towards the Pacific Rim. The Native Americans were very different from the black slaves. They were used to vast open prairies and their tribal structure fostered independence. In the beginning, the whites used captured natives as slaves. This practice did not really succeed as the Native Americans could not bear the hardships of plantation and farm slavery like the blacks and died in large numbers.In addition, as the standoffs between the whites and the Native Americans grew over the years, wars largely ended in massacres and flight rather than in captivity. By the end of the 18th century, the United States was forcefully pushing the Native Americans increasingly towards the westernmost with a mixture of force, aggression and deceit. Exploitation of rivalries between different tribes furthered this cause and the same people who were very concerned about the abolition of slavery did not baulk at depriving the Native Americans from their livelihood.There was a significant difference between the perception of Native Americans and slaves in the eyes of the whites. Black slaves were economic assets oppressed people, who however did not pose any economic and physical threat to the whites. Abolition of slavery and proposals for freedom of slaves were, perceived to be causes of economic difficulty for the southern states. However, the fact that very few slaves were involved in the freedom movement did not raise animosity against them, even in the southern states.Thus, the sympathy levels for blacks remained high and the movement for their liberation continued with even pace. The perception about Native Americans was very different. The Native Americans were an independent people and the owners of land. They hated the settlers and considered them aggressors, and the whites too thought of them as opponents and dangerous enemies. The 18th century thus witnessed numer ous wars between the natives and the white settlers. During the American war of independence, Native Americans fought mostly with the British in a bid to stall the expansionism of the United States.It was only at the end that they realised that the equally treacherous British had ceded huge tracts of their land to the Americans. The beginning of the 19th century thus axiom the Native Americans under enormous pressure from the United States, but quench owners of huge tracts of land coveted by the whites. The US Congress, in 1830, passed the Indian Removal Bill, a law that forcibly evicted American Indians from their lands and pushed them further to the west. This dodging of dispossession resulted in numerous skirmishes, treaties, wars and the gradual forcible eviction of Native Americans from their lands.All their proposals for peaceful co existence and willingness to adopt the farming methods of the white settlers came to nothing, and by the late nineteenth century, they could li ve only in specific tracts of lands cognize as reservations. This process of removal resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Native Americans from disease and hardship, even as they gave up their homes and lands and moved far away. One particular journey, cognize as the Trail of Tears led to the death of thousands of Cherokees. (The Trail of Tears, 2005) 4. ConclusionThe caboodle of the Native Americans at the hands of the government of the United States is unparalleled in historical annals. In most conquests, the victors rule over the defeated peoples, inflict their laws and their religions on the conquered. The dispossession of the Indians is the only instance where the conquerors forced the defeated to entrust their lands, restricted their freedoms, separated them from society and cooped them up in reservations, much equivalent concentration camps. Their systematic extermination and relocation is one of the most barbarous acts in U. S. history.Most Americans know th is intuitively, but theyd rather not think about it-so instead they choose simply to feel sorry for the Indians living today. (Miller, 2000) This happened only a hundred and fifty years back at the hands of a democratically elected government of a country that purportedly values liberty, freedom and democracy. The liberation of blacks and the abolition of slavery in the the States occurred along with the practical decimation of the Native Americans, the deprivation of their rights and their banishment to distant reservations, at the hands of the same government.The reasons for this unbalanced, ambivalent and very much schizophrenic behavior of the free American people and their democratically elected government are difficult, practically impossible to explain. The only possibly valid reason is the independent attitude of the Indian people, their love for freedom and their pride, which made it difficult for them to accept total subjugation. This, unlike the situation with the black slaves, increased their economic and military threat in the eyes of the American people and government and led to their genocide and practical annihilation. BibliographyColeman, M. C. (1985). Presbyterian Missionary Attitudes toward American Indians, 1837-1893. Jackson, MS University Press of Mississippi Fehrenbacher, D. E. (2002). The slaveholding Republic An Account of the United States Governments Relations to Slavery (W. M. Mcafee, Ed. ). New York Oxford University Press. Gutzman, K. C. (2002). The slavery Republic An Account of the United States Governments Relations to Slavery. Journal of Southern History, 68(4), 957+. Retrieved November 24, 2006, from Questia database http//www. questia. com/PM. qst? a=o&d=5002502749 Holder, P.(1974). The Hoe and the Horse on the Plains A account of Cultural Development among North American Indians. Lincoln, NE University of atomic number 10 Press. Lewy, G. (2004, September). 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