The Build of Underground Railroad for the Slaves

Runaway slaves would ride a steamboat to Buffalo, New York. After they were in Buffalo all they had to do was cross the Niagara River to reach Canada. Although the North did offer a measure of freedom to slaves then the South did, Canada actually promised safety and a new beginning for the runaway slaves. Canada was known as the promised land to the fugitives. A man named William Wells Brown made this opportunity possible. He worked as a crew member of a Lake Erie steamboat that ran out of Cleveland, Ohio. He later writes “It is well known that a great number of fugitives make their escape to Canada, by way of Cleveland”. During the fifteenth century European traders first landed in West Africa with the intent on turning men, women, and children into slaves. The slaves would perform hard labor work in their colonies. The Europeans arrived in ships laded with gunpowder, firearms, rum,tools, and cloth. They traveled inland to exchange their goods for slaves. Slave hunters took men and women prisoners, chained them one to the other, and and forced them to march back to the coast. They then had a physical examination. The trader would abandon the weak and unhealthy and then brand the ones they planned on selling. They branded them with a hot iron. The captives that waited to be sent across the ocean were locked in dungeons. The dungeons were built of European fortress and many are still standing.

The Dutch, British, French, Portuguese, and Spanish took part in the slave trade over the next two centuries. They would cram as many slaves as they could onto ships, allowing them only half the space they allowed convicts. The ships carried sixty slaves, some even carried as much as six or seven hundred slaves. The slaves had little room to breath and no room to stand. They were so crammed that they had to stay in one position. They encountered one abuse after another for the entire passage. The passage would last for about six to ten weeks. Illnesses was an epidemic. The captives suffered from dysentery, smallpox, measles, or even other contagious diseases. They would have to sleep on bare floors with no covering. Men were often chained two by two and the women and children were generally left unchained. The slaves were fed boiled rice or cornmeal, a cup of water, occasionally salted beef, and sometimes vegetables and fruits such as yams, manioc, and plantations. They were fed twice a day. Pregnant woman had no privacy. They would give birth to their babies and if they survived would inherit a doomed future to slavery. The slaves were kept below the deck and the smell was so horrible that many would get sick and not eat. When a white man offered a black man food and they denied the white men would get angry and tie the black men up while the others flogged him. The slaves were originally supposed to be indentured servants. Indentured servants are people contracted to serve a master in America for a period of time, usually for about four to seven years. Indentured servants could be sold from master to master, but after a predetermined number of years would be granted their promised freedom. Soon Africans would lose their rights as indentured servants and were no longer granted their so called freedom.

Their children would now never know the benefits of freedom. The number of slaves brought to North American shores multiplied after 1619. In 1672, King Charles the second of England chartered the Royal African Company, which became one of the largest slave trading companies in the world. Virginia’s population included twelve thousand African Americans and eight thousand whites by 1708. 164 ships brought 4,528 slaves to Virginia between 1710 and 1718. The states population was evenly divided between African Americans and whites at the start of the American Revolution. With the increase in the number of slaves throughout the South it made it possible to run large tobacco and rice plantations. The cotton grown along the coast of Georgia and South Carolina had long fibers that could easily be separated from the seeds. But the cotton produced farther inland, in a less moist climate, had shorter fibers that stuck to the seeds, which made it difficult to clean. Eli Whitney developed a new machine that could remove the seeds from the cotton in 1793. This was called the cotton gin. This allowed for the cultivation of cotton on a grander scale. The increasingly prosperous cotton business transformed the economic status of the South. But the cotton gin was not the only thing that made this possible, it was also the exploitation of slaves. Most slaves would leave their quarters at dawn and would not return until after dark.

A master would provide his slaves with food. The food was typically twelve quarts of Indian meal, seven salted herrings, and two pounds of smoked bacon every week. Others would receive what was considered to be a “good” allowance of a bushel of cornmeal and sixteen pounds of hog meat every month, in addition to rye coffee that was sweetened with molasses. The masters would also furnish clothing for men, trousers of strong cloth, three shirts, shoes, and socks, one pair for summer pantaloons, a hat every second year, and every third year a winter coat and blanket. The master would give the women long capes instead of coats and handkerchiefs to use as hats. The slaves were forced to submit to codes written by state legislatures. The codes prohibited slaves from leaving their masters property without a pass. The slaves also were not permitted to gather in groups of more than five, practice medicine, own guns, raise animals, or testify against whites. Slaves could only preach in the presence of whites. The slaves would often attend churches presided over by white preachers.

Slaves were not legally allowed to learn to read and write with the exception of those in Maryland, Kentucky, and in the city of Washington. The punishment for breaking the codes were severe and flogging a common occurrence. Many of the slaves never lost the scars that marred their bodies. Judges would impose the death penalty on slaves who commited not only murder but also robbery, arson, and rebellion and on whites who assisted slaves in rebellion. Even though slaves could live together as husband and wife, their marriage contracts were not considered valid. When a master would sell slaves, they would often separate a husband from a wife and a child from a parent. The slave owners expected mothers of newborn infants to return to work after only a week after giving birth. Field hands were made to leave their babies unattended in the shade and were only allowed to feed them twice a day. One women even reported that when she returned to her baby son she found a snake curled around his body. She vowed at that moment to seek freedom for her and her child. Slaves in the Northern cities served their masters as carpenters, tailors, cabinetmakers, bakers, and blacksmiths. Although these slaves learned to read and write, were trained in various skills, and were allowed to marry, they could still be subjected to the same abuse by their masters. Vermont freed its slaves during the American Revolution through the constitution it adopted in 1777. Pennsylvania similarly passed laws to abolish slavery.