Historical Defense Of Slavery Essay

Slavery is the state of being owned by another. The first Europeans to come on contact with Africans are the Portuguese in 1435 and they established a trading post along the African coast in 1435. In 1441, the Portuguese brought ten African slaves back to Europe and the following year 235 Africans were brought to Europe since they were so popular. By 1455, the Catholic Church gave their permission for the enslavement of Africans with the reason being that were infidels and had dark skin. After a while slaves were transported in the millions from the fifteenth century to the nineteenth century. The first African slaves were brought to America by the Dutch in 1619 to Jamestown, Virginia as aids for cash crop production like tobacco. The first
The historical defense to keeping slavery was that slavery has been a part of history since time began and every great culture has done it at some point in time and several great societies did it. The religious defense was that slavery was God ordained in the Old and New Testaments and that God created Blacks to be slaves because of their dark skin. The Economic Defense was that The United States needed and depended on slave labor, even in the North because the North bought and traded with the south. Around two- thirds of U.S exports were even produced through the labor of slaves and it was very profitable to those who had many slaves. The Legal argument was that if blacks were kept in slavery they couldn’t revolt and cause war, so every state had slave laws, even Free states, to keep slaves in bondage. The scientific defense for slavery was, according to Samuel G. Morton, that black people were a separate species from white people and they are biologically and intellectually inferior to whites. Morton and Samuel Cartwright, another doctor, also came to the conclusion that Black couldn’t survive outside of bondage and this was for their own good.