Journey through Slavery part 4 - Judgement Day

Journey through Slavery part 4 - Judgement Day 

      Today Pierce Butler is commemorates as one of the founding fathers. He was born on July 11^th in

Pierce Butler

1744. He was a soldier, planter and statesman. He was the representative for South Carolina during the Continental Congress, Constituitonal Convention and for the US Senate. He publicly spoke out in favor of slavery for both personal and political reasons. He also introduced the Fugitive Slave Clause during the Constitutional Convention. The Butler Island Plantation was one of the largest rice plantations in the South. More than 500 enslaved African Americans worked the plantations which fundamentally made the Butler family one of the riches in the United States. During this time it was thought that the demoncracy was in the hands of the white men, slave owners of course. More money was being spent on slavery than any other investment in the Unites states. There were over two million enslaved blacks and were worth approximately a billion dollars in total. Most of the cotton, worldwide, was being proeduced and exported from the south. This required labor, hard labor, all done by the slaves. Cotton production was the basis and foundation of ship building, shipping, and even factories, etc.

Harriet Ann Jacobs was born on February 11^th in 1813, in North Carolina. She underwent the

Harriet Ann Jacobs

hardship of being a slave including sexual abuse by her owner since the young age of fifteen. Despite the fact that the owner had the government on his side, she had he will, desire, and determination to be freed from slavery. When Jacobs was twenty-one years old she finally decided to run. She first hid in the Cabarrus Pocosin swamp then ran to her Grandmother’s shed. She believed that hiding in a shed habituated by rodents was better than undergoing the cruel life she had as a slave. She hid in her grandmother’s shed for seven years. Through a small hole she used as a window she saw her cruel owner and even her children, whom she couldn’t speak to but didn’t dare leave behind.  During this time slaves disappeared overnight and it was a great disadvantage to the slave owners, they lost a great amount of money. After all, they were losing their free labor. Additionally, any attempt to escape slavery was considered an act of rebellion.

David Walker

During this crucial time period in history free blacks were a great threat to slavery. There was a total of 182,000 free blacks living in the South and a total of 137,000 living in the north. Not only was slavery a growing issue but so was abolitionism, at least to most of the white population it was. Slavery in the South had a unforgettable impact on every black person in the country where ever it was that they were. Even if they weren’t enslaved, most free blacks were greatly discriminated but also segregated. In the north, segregation was a major issue in schools and even in churches that claimed to support the abolitionist movement. Laws even prohibited intermarriage between blacks and whites. David Walker was born on September 27, 1797 in Boston, Massachusetts. He was an outspoken African America, but had never been enslaved, unlike his own father. In 1829 he started his own private war, which was fought to condemn both racism and its foundation, slavery. He fought in favor of all African Americans and their right to be free and treated as citizens of the United States. 

PRIMARY SOURCE: http://www.yale.edu/glc/harriet/15.htm