A Brief description of american history

1. AMERICAN HISTORY
Shilpi Kanchan
B.A. (H) English
VI Semester

2. Slavery in America
• Slavery began in North America in 1619 at Jamestown,
Virginia.
• The treatment of slaves was brutal and degrading,
harsh and inhumane.
• Slaves were punished by whipping, shackling,
hanging, beating, burning, mutilation and
imprisonment.
• Rapes and sexual exploitation was common.
• The institution existed because it was “God’s will,” a
Christian duty to lift the African out of barbarism
while still exerting control over his “animal passions.”

3. ABOLITIONISM
• Abolitionism is a movement to end slavery, whether formal or
informal. In Western Europe and the Americas, it is a historical
movement to end the African and Indian slave trade and set slaves free.
“All men are created equal.” was its motto.
• America made slavery unconstitutional in 1865 after American Civil
War.
• After the Revolutionary War, most northern states abolished slavery
and by 1804 it was completely abolished in North States.
• In the 1850s, in the fifteen states constituting the American South ,
slavery was legal. While it was fading away in the cities and border
states, it remained strong in plantation areas that grew cash crops such
as cotton, sugar, rice or tobacco.

4. American Civil War (1861-1865)
• The Civil War started because of differences between the
free and slave states over the power of the national
government to prohibit slavery in the territories that had
not yet become states.
• Abraham Lincoln won the Presidential Elections in 1860
and pledge to keep slavery out of the nation, seven slave
states in the deep South formed a new nation, called the
Confederate States of America. Later four other states
joined.
• This endangered the sovereignty of United States and
gradually war started. It ended in 1865 with the victory of
Union and the merger of Confederacy in the United
States.

5. Free states and Slave States

6. Other Major Events
• Slavery in this country didn't officially end until Dec. 6, 1865, the
day the 13th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified.
• It didn't end on Jan. 1, 1863, when President Abraham
Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation. That was a
Civil War executive order that freed slaves only in parts of the
South that were not under control of the Union Army.
• If anything of lasting value comes out of our annual homage to
black history, this is designation of Dec. 6 as Liberation Day. It
was on that day in 1865 that America's period of black
enslavement, which lasted 246 years, officially came to an end.
• In 2008, Barack Obama became the first African American to be
elected president after 143 years of ending of slavery.

7. THANKS 