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Abolitionist opponents published their own pamphlets, urging Americans to support the rights of
slaveholders and slave states. They argued that black people, like children, were incapable of caring for
themselves and that slavery was a benevolent institution that kept them fed, clothed, and occupied. Most
Northerners did not doubt that black people were inferior to whites, but they did doubt the benevolence of
slavery.
When Europeans first colonized the North American continent, the land was vast, the work was harsh,
and there was a severe shortage of labor. Men and women were needed to work the land. White
bondservants, paying their passage across the ocean from Europe through indentured labor, eased but did not
solve the problem. Early in the seventeenth century, a Dutch ship loaded with African slaves introduced a
solution—and a new problem—to the New World. Slavery was practiced throughout the American colonies
in the 17th and 18th centuries, and African-American slaves helped to build the economic foundations of the
new nation. Cotton replaced tobacco as the South’s main cash crop and slavery became profitable again.
Treatment of slaves ranged from mild to cruel and sadistic. Husbands, wives, and children were frequently
sold away from one another and punishment by whipping was not unusual.
Slaves processing tobacco in 17th-century Virginia
By the mid-19th century, America's westward expansion, along with a growing abolition movement in the North,
would provoke a great debate over slavery that would tear the nation apart in the bloody American Civil War (1861-65).
Neither the Revolution nor the Constitution solved the problem of slavery in the United States. But
they helped to create the problem of slavery. During the colonial era, very few whites considered slavery to
be a major social problem. During the first six decades of the 19th century, very few could deny that it was.
Slavery became a troubling inconsistency in America's democratic society. A number of states and territories
organized abolition societies, including Rhode Island (1785), New York (1785), Illinois (1785), Delaware
(1788), Maryland (1789), Connecticut (1790), and New Jersey (1793). In 1794 the American Convention of
Abolition Societies was established in Philadelphia to unite the various state societies.
The slave narrative was the first black literary prose genre in the United States. It helped blacks in the
difficult task of establishing an African-American identity in white America, and it has continued to use an
important influence on black fictional techniques and themes throughout the 20th century. The search for
identity, anger against discrimination, and sense of living an invisible, hunted, underground life
unacknowledged by the white majority have recurred in the works of such 20th- century black American
authors as Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison.
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