Antebellum Slavery

     During  the later part of the eighteenth century, slavery seemed to be on the decline. The American and French Revolutions gave many slaves an opportunity to escape servitude and become free. Also, revolutionary ideas spread throughout the Caribbean, Spanish America and the United states, convincing many slave owners to let their slaves go. However, during the early nineteenth century, slavery underwent a huge boom in the southern part of the United States and Spanish territories in the New world. The reason for this boom was mostly due to Eli Whitney's latest invention, the Cotton Gin. The Cotton Gin vastly sped up the cotton cleaning process allowing for garments to be made faster. To keep up with the demand of cotton, many more slaves were imported to the United States. To put it in perspective, in 1790, the entire South produced about 1.5 million pounds of cotton and in 1860 the South produced nearly 2.3 billion pounds of cotton. By 1860, slavery had become firmly entrenched in the South due to the increased cotton demand.
 
     By basing slavery on race, the race which is forced into slavery loses all their dignity because they are considered inferior to the race which put them there. For example, prince Abdul Rahman was considered royalty in his community in Africa until he was taken into slavery in Missouri where he was nothing more than slave. Also, His owner cut off his long  hair which was a strong symbol of pride and importance in his culture. Rahman had his dignity stripped away by being put into slavery. This system of race based slavery ignores intelligence thoughts and morality and just categorizes people based on skin color. This shows how flawed and fundamentally wrong slavery is.