The Foundation For African American Participation Essay

2111 WordsJun 6, 20169 Pages
The foundation for African-American participation in the Civil War began more than a hundred years before the outbreak of the war. African-Americans had been in bondage since early colonial times. In 1776, when Jefferson proclaimed mankind’s inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the institution of slavery had become firmly established in America. African-Americans worked in the tobacco fields of Virginia, in the rice fields of South Carolina, and toiled in small farms and shops in the North. Foner and Mahoney report in A House Divided, America in the Age of Lincoln that, “In 1776, slaves composed forty percent of the population of the colonies from Maryland south to Georgia, but well below ten percent in the colonies to the North.” The invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney in 1793 provided a demand for cotton thus increasing the demand for slaves. By the 1800’s slavery was an institution throughout the South, an institution in which slaves had few rights, and could be sold or leased by their owners. They lacked any voice in the government and lived a life of hardship. Considering these circumstances, the slave population never abandoned the desire for freedom or the determination to resist control by the slave owners. The slave 's reaction to this desire and determination resulted in outright rebellion and individual acts of defiance. However, historians place the strongest reaction in the enlistment of African-Americans in the war itself.
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