How Slaves Shaped American Culture

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How Slaves Shaped America Slaves began coming to the Americas in the year of 1619. Slaves first arrived in the Colony of Jamestown and from that slavery spread throughout the American colonies. Since then, slaves have been coming to the Americas in large numbers such as when the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade started. During the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade an estimated of “25 to 30 million people, men, women and children, were deported from their homes and sold as slaves”. (Transatlantic Slave Trade) Slaves have helped build America’s economy, they helped fight during the American Revolution, slaves have caused problems with American politics directly and indirectly, they helped effect religion in the U.S, and their culture was added to the American culture. Slaves helped build the economy in the early stages of the Americas by mainly providing cheap and efficient labor. Many of the slaves brought to the Americas were bought by large plantation owners. The jobs of slaves on large plantations could vary from working on the fields of the plantation or they could be a house slave taking care of the owner of the plantation. “Field work might consist of plowing, weeding, …show more content…
With the Americas small population of citizens and large number of slaves this helped tremendously. The Americas only contained about 6.5 million people by the year of 1776 and “only 1 million were Europeans. The remaining 5.5 million were African.” (Dodson) By the time of the Revolutionary War, many slaves wanted to receive their freedom. Political leaders such as Alexander Hamilton and John Laurens wanted to make that possible, while also benefitting from it. They made many battalions saying that if the slaves fought on the Americans side that they could receive their freedom, and to get plantation owners to agree with this was by warning “if they didn't offer the slaves their freedom, Britain would.”
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