Slavery in South America

Slavery has been around for centuries in many different forms in many different areas of the world. Slaves were generally captured soldiers during war or even a religious group of people or race minority in an area. Slaves were often used for construction of big structures or cultivation of the land. Around the 1400′s, Europeans were very active in Africa rounding up slaves for their colonies and with the help of many African tribes many Africans were rounded up by the hundreds of thousands. The Atlantic Slave Trade was a big enterprise used by several countries like Britain, Portugal, France and Spain and many others to turn out profits for goods that were scarce in the Old World. When the New World was discovered slaves were taken from Africa to South America on huge slave ships were tons of slaves were kept. Conditions on these boats were horrible and just barely livable enough for a majority of the slaves to survive the journey. Once on the other side they were taken to a port town where the slaves were auctioned off to Plantation owners or small business owners in towns. Slaves were treated like property more than human beings and they were exchanged in this way. Even though many were given christian names when they arrived there were given little rights. Some did make money by taking the skills they had learned from their masters and using them to make a living once they were freed, but that rarely happened. Men and women had different tasks depending on the location and their condition. Slave men in urban areas worked with their masters if they owned a small business. For example, some were apprentices to their masters who worked as a blacksmith. Women in urban areas often worked at the homes of the masters that bought them, helping with the house work and helping with the kids of the house.  Slaves in rural areas had a different lifestyle and it was once again divided by sex. Men often worked in the fields doing the harder labor, harvesting and chopping wood while the women worked in the houses or even planted in the fields. Every now and then slaves would escape or revolt and those lucky enough got away but those that didn’t were punished severely and sometimes put to death and many of the up rises ended in bloodshed. But those slaves that did make it out would head to nearby free slave camps or just somewhere far away from their masters. Slavery was huge in the New World from around this time all the way until the Civil War in America during the end of the 1800′s but it still remains in some countries today and it’s really sad that countries still use people like that.