The Slavery Of The United States - 2561 Words

Did you know that there are more slaves today than there were at any other point in human history? Not in Roman times, not even in 1860, when 12.5% of the US population was enslaved, were there more slaves than there are in 2016 (Goodheart). Chances are, you weren’t aware of this, as was I until a few weeks ago. What I had always been taught in school was that slavery happened a long time ago and that it’s over now and all the issued it caused are fixed. But that’s simply not true. Slavery still exists. People living in extreme poverty, as 1.2 billion people worldwide are today, are extremely vulnerable to being exploited and enslaved, and they often don’t even know that the way they’re being treated is not okay (Giugale). Young kids may†¦show more content†¦Though it is a worldwide problem, the eradication of slavery will need to start small, which is why this particular paper will only focus mainly on slavery in the United States of America. The United States have had a long and terrible history of slavery. Soon after the first colonists arrived here, they started having poor Brits working for them as indentured servants, who were always freed after a few years. Eventually, Americans started outright transporting humans to their country and keeping them, their children owning those slaves children, their grandchildren owning the slaves grandchildren, and so on for generations. The government did not do anything to help the slaves until Abraham Lincoln became president and knew that it needed to do something. The citizens of the United States at first thought that slavery was a necessary evil. As time went on, however, most people, especially those in the South, came to think of it as a positive good, because it helped the economy. However, if instead of enslaving people, plantation owners had just hired workers, black or white, and paid them fairly,they could have still made a very large profit. In fact, by the time of the Civil War, the North was doing better economically than the South, without the use of slavery- proof that it could be done (Arrington). Yet these people took