Essay 1 - Slavery

African Americans(both free and enslaved) encountered various hardships in the United States in the period leading up to the Civil War. In total, about four million enslaved African Americans suffered during this time.

However, among those millions of slaves were a select few people that lived to describe slave live(from their personal experiences) in great detail; Harriet Jacobs was one. She gives a great example in her writing about New Year's Day--a time for whites to celebrate but for slaves to be seperated from their families and sold off to new masters.

Another strong speaker describing slavery was Frederick Douglass. He had barely known his family, most importantly his mother, who he had only caught glimpses of in the night. Bearing witness his Aunt constantly whipped until blood rushed down her back was common, hearing her wailing through the night. Douglass also was deeply frustrated by the fact that he(and all other slaves) had no birthday, and that a slave's funeral consisted of being buried and moving on as if it had no special meaning at all.

What Douglass and Jacobs described were only the beginning of detailing how much slavery tortured African Americans across the U.S. When the Fugitive Slave Lawy of 1850 was passed, it made even free blacks in the North prone to being captured and sold into slavery. It also enabled slave catchers to be able to travel all across the U.S., and not just the South.

African Americans in the North did not have many rights in the first place. They were unable to vote, own land, testify in court and attend schools.

Slave codes limited African Americans even further. It restricted them from rights such as learning to read and write, leave their plantation without a written pass, and owning firearms.