Respuestas
Of the 8,289,786 free people who inhabited the 15 slave states, 393,967 people (4.8%) owned slaves, making the average owner about ten slaves. [1] Most of the slaves were owned. of plantation owners, who are defined by historians as those who owned twenty or more slaves. [2] Ninety-five percent of black-skinned people lived in the South, representing one-third of the population of that region, by comparison in the northern area where black people only represented 2% of its population. [3] Slave labor was an important factor in the accumulation of wealth in the United States in the first half of the 19th century. [4] [5]
But with the Union's victory in the American Civil War, the slave labor system was abolished. [6] This contributed to the postwar decline of the southern economy, although it was further affected by the continuing decline in the price of cotton. at the end of the century. [7] This complicated the recovery of the region after the war, as well as a comparatively lower level of infrastructure, which caused a lack of products in the markets. The south faced competition from foreign cotton producers such as India and Egypt. Northern industry, which had expanded rapidly before and during the war, emerged more strongly behind it than did the agricultural economy of the south. The industries of the northern states ended up dominating many aspects of the life of the nation, including social aspects and some political issues. The social class of the southern planters temporarily lost power. Rapid economic development following the Civil War accelerated the development of the modern industrial economy of the United States.
Twelve million Africans were brought to America between the 16th and 19th centuries. [8] [9] Of these, an estimated 645,000 were sent to what is now known as the United States. Most were transported to Brazil. [10] The slave population in the United States had grown to four million according to the 1860 census. [11]
In 1860 the last American slave ship, the Clotilde, arrived in Alabama. On board were more than a hundred slaves captured in Africa. Until 2019 it was believed that the last survivor of that group was Oluale Kossola, Cudjo Lewis, who died in 1935, but a 2019 investigation pointed to a woman named Rodisha, who was named after Sally Smith by her master, as the last African slave as she died two years later, in 1937. Sally Smith appeared in a documentary shot by the Department of Agriculture and premiered in 1938 with the title The Negro farmer ('The black farmer'), which gave a white and white paternalistic vision. segregationist of African Americans. In 1932 she was interviewed for The Montgomery Advertaiser, and there she explained her place of origin, West Africa. [12]