The history of mankind knows many tragic and gloomy moments. On the path to progress and enlightenment, practically all races resorted to such a terrible form of social development as slavery. The United States also did not escape this gloomy phase in its eventful history. From the very moment this country was formed, slavery in the USA has become an integral part and norm of American life.
Perhaps the strangest form of slavery in history has formed in the United States. Formed in the bowels of American capitalism, slavery reflected its formation in the agricultural sector of the economy of a young country. American planters, due to the extreme scarcity of the labor market, were forced to resort to the exploitation of black slaves.
The use of slave labor left an indelible imprint on the plantation bourgeoisie, turning it, perhaps, into the strangest and most unusual class of slaveholders in the history of the planet. The American planters of that time are an unimaginable and completely bizarre synthesis of typically capitalist and slave-owning traits.
Slavery in the United States is a complex set of socio-economic, civil, ideological, racial and socio-political problems, the roots of which lie in the depths of American history. The emergence of this form of social development is primarily due to the presence on the territory of North America of endless land spaces, which created the most favorable conditions for the development of the agricultural economy and its movement along the path of free enterprise.
No wonder it was here that all the prerequisites for the formation of such a liberal form of slavery as patriarchal slavery, in which black slaves were considered simply disenfranchised members of white plantation families, were formed. This mainly applies to the northern states. In the south, the situation was somewhat different. Classical slavery flourished here. On the eve of the outbreak of civil war, which put an end to this form of social development, 89% of black slaves lived in the south.
The last state to ratify the abolition of slavery was the southern state - the Mississippi. Plantation slavery in the USA, being a commercially profitable enterprise that brought fabulous income to the rising class of American capitalists, lasted for nearly two and a half centuries and caused sharp contradictions in the economic and political spheres between the North American and southern states. Slavery in the United States served not only the enrichment and development of the agricultural economy, but also the strengthening of the political and socio-social influence of large slave-owning planters.
It all started with the Dutch slave traders. Somewhat later, British shipowners joined this profitable business. The first Dutch ship with "live goods" moored to the coast of the North American continent in late summer 1619. He delivered twenty black slaves, which were instantly bought by wealthy white colonists. From that moment on, in the port cities and towns, advertisements for the sale of “live goods” began to appear regularly. Until finally, in 1863, a declaration of independence was adopted , which, in particular, mentioned the inadmissibility of the use of slave labor.