Slavery, a great evil.

Class this week was focused around Slavery. In my opinion, slavery was an extremely hideous and terrible crime. The prospect of unwillingly capturing a human being and treating them as property just seems extremely wrong to me. It is like giving a human a life sentence to prison for doing nothing at all wrong, the soon to be slaves were just minding their own business. I also believe that it took the people of the United States far too long to abolish the practice of Slavery. It took until after the Civil War for this to happen. This means that slavery was in existence for a whole 245 years! That is about 4 or 5 generations if calculated with the average life expectancy of the time. In class we learned why slavery was important to the early economy of the United States. Slaves were the main reasons crops such as rice, tobacco, and cotton were so highly profitable. The slave masters got a high return of crops with little to none cost for labor. We learned how the balance in the Early US was kept equal, with a slave state entering the nation for every free state in the nation. South of the Mason-Dixon line was where most of the slave states were. The Civil War occurred when tensions rose and the debate spanned across party lines into a North vs South situation. This then resulted in the war, which finally brought an end to a very ugly chapter in our nation's history, slavery.

Women's Rights

A lot of the stuff that we did this week in class was centered around women's rights. For example, we read about the Lowell Mill Girls who obtained the liberty of being able to work and make a decent sum of money. It shows us how we as the United States progressed in history becoming more free and tolerant to different races, genders, etc. We also read a letter written by Mrs. Abigail Adams to her husband John Adams from their family home in Braintree, Massachusetts. At the time Mr. Adams was in the Continental Congress and Abigail Adams had sent him a letter about the rights of women. I personally believe that these two things were very influential in our nation's history, as the United States is known to be "The land of the free" so it is crucial to understand how we slowly started to truly become more free. In my opinion, class this week was extremely important.

Thomas Jefferson... A hypocrite?

This week in class, we read the Declaration of Independence as well as the Notes on the State of Virginia which were written by Thomas Jefferson. It showed us the mindset of many people in the early United States. Jefferson states that "all men are created equal" in the Declaration of Independence, which would make one believe that all people would be given the same opportunities. In the Notes on the State of Virginia. Jefferson was extremely racist towards Africans in his writing, he mentioned Africans to be “dull, tasteless, and anomalous" in imagination as well as "inferior to whites." These two statements completely contradict each other, Jefferson pledged to give equal rights to all and then writes eight years later that Africans are like a different species and inferior to whites. Did he say that all men are created equal just to give the people false hope? Merriam-Webster states the definition of a hypocrite to be "a person who claims or pretends to have certain beliefs about what is right but who behaves in a way that disagrees with those beliefs." Clearly, Jefferson is being hypocritical as he states that all are equal, although he himself is a particularly cruel slave owner. The New York Times writes, " He sometimes punished slaves by selling them away from their families and friends, a retaliation that was incomprehensibly cruel even at the time."