Slavery During the Antebellum Period

We have been learning about slavery in America during the 19th century. There were a few essential questions for this lesson. They were: How did slavery become economically entrenched  in American society by the early 19th century?, How does a system of slavery based on race affect  human dignity?, and What human characteristics does such a system tend  to ignore? The documents and charts we analyzed as well as the movie we watched helped us to answer these questions.
To answer our first question, we looked at charts on slavery growth between 1790 and 1860. In 1790, cotton was an insignificant crop and the French and American revolutions led people to believe that slavery was coming to an end. Many slaveowners were planning on emancipating their slaves. However, after the introduction of the cotton gin, slavery skyrocketed. Cotton was easier to produce and therefore became a more profitable crop. But to keep up with the increase in cotton production, more slaves needed to be brought to the southern states. This graph shows a 57% increase of slaves in 1860 when cotton production hit 2.2 billion pounds per year.

To answer our second and third questions, I turned to "The Prince of Slaves", a movie we watched in class about Abdul Rahman. He was a prince in Futa Jallon who was captured and sold to slave traders. He was taken to Natchez, Mississippi and was bought by a man named Foster. One scene in the movie really stood out to me. When Rahman was brought to Foster's farm, he had to get his hair cut. Foster had to tie him down because he was struggling so much. Rahman didn't want to cut his long hair because it was a symbol of where he came from, his nobility, and his manhood. Rahman's attempts to convince Foster that he was a prince were futile and they cut his hair anyway. To me this shows that slave owners really had no care or consideration for human rights when it came to slavery and didn't even treat them as real people with past lives.