Slaves in U.S. History (Slavery)

Cape Coast Castle, Inner Courtyard, Ghana, 1986 

Slaves were imprisoned here in appalling dungeons prior to departure. Today, it is a popular tourist attraction along with nearby Elmina Castle and the Maison des Esclaves (slave house) at Gorée Island, Senegal.

Cape Coast Castle, Door of No Return

This was the door leading to the slave ships. When a slave walked through this door he was leaving his African homeland forever.

Slaves had to do the tasks that they were required to do (had no say on the tasks they were required to) and they had no control over how long they worked. Slaves were used in northern states in factories to produce manufactured goods but most slaves worked on plantations in southern states.

Slaves were used on plantations for a variety of tasks which were picking cotton, harvesting sugar cane, planting and harvesting rice, harvesting tobacco, growing and harvesting coffee, building railroads, working in the dairy, weaving, carpentry, washing clothes, cooking, and butchering and preserving.

The Underground Railroad were secret routes that helped fugitive slaves in the United States escape to the North and to Canada.

Harriet Tubman was a slave herself too but then she escaped from slavery and helped other slaves escape.

Harriet Tubman was one of the most well-known "conductors" of the Underground Railroad's. During a ten-year span she made 19 trips into the South and escorted over 300 slaves to freedom. And, as she once proudly pointed out to Frederick Douglass, in all of her journeys she "never lost a single passenger."


Sources: http://www.slaverysite.com/index.html
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/features/99/railroad/tl.html#top
http://www.historyonthenet.com/Slave_Trade/slaveryexplain.htm
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p1535.html