[3] although slavery is usually involuntary and involves coercion, there are also cases where people voluntarily enter into slavery to pay a debt or earn money due to poverty. As a result, the children of enslaved women legally became slaves Before the rise of the american revolution, the first debates to abolish slavery emerged. Many slaves were the offspring of slaves Some people were enslaved as a punishment for crime or debt, others were sold into slavery by their parents, other relatives, or even spouses, sometimes to satisfy debts, sometimes to escape starvation. Slaves worked harder, propelling their owners to new, previously unimagined heights of wealth and power
As they did, slave owners expanded their plantations and demanded more and more slaves, as slaves proved to be an extraordinarily valuable form of labor. History, however, is contextualized by the system of slavery that was imposed on african americans for 250 years—and how those born under that system and in its aftermath have crafted. As a result of the union victory in the civil war and the ratification of the thirteenth amendment to the constitution (1865), nearly four million slaves were freed. These narratives were collected in the 1930s as part of the federal writers' project (fwp) of the works progress administration, later renamed work projects administration (wpa) At the conclusion of the. Overview in the south, where the enslavement of black people was widely embraced, resistance to ending slavery persisted for another century following the passage of the thirteenth amendment in 1865
In many communities like montgomery, alabama. The monstrous institution of slavery was ended Now came the monumental task of reconstruction, of integrating former slaves into the economic, political, and social fabric of the nation—a task that is still, generations later, ongoing. It was intended to be the start of establishing an independent freehold of freed slaves, but it failed and was a main catalyst leading to the civil war.
OPEN
