Slavery becomes more and more of a problem because of the demand of the north. In the north, there were a lot of textile factories that were producing a mass amount of products. Because of the amount of products they were producing, they need the supplies. Cotton was a major supply that the north needed. Cotton was a big product in the south, therefore, causing more slaves to be needed. This made slavery become entrenched. In 1834, there were 2.3 million slaves in the United States of America. 24 years later, the number leaped up to 3.9 million slaves. That is simply because the number of cotton that was consumed per week in Lowell jumped from 235 thousand to 805 thousand.
This chart clearly shows how the increase of textile mills directly impacts the amount of slaves that were in America.
To answer the questions of "how does a system of slavery based on race affect human dignity?" and "what human characteristics does such a system tend to ignore?" we split into groups and were each assigned a slavery activists who had different views about slavery. My group was assigned George Fitzhugh, who was advocating slavery. He wrote 2 books and several articles about how he believed that all work should be enslaved. He also believed slaves had it better as free laborers. The system of slavery continued to forget about some human characteristics. Slavery ignored the fact that slaves were humans also and that they should be treated as humans too. We watched a docudrama in class that was about a slave by the name of Futa Jallon. He was ambushed and captured by an African group and then sold into slavery. He was forced to walk 100 miles while chained. He was then sent on a boat with many other slaves. They were in the bottom of the boat so the crew didn't even know that some of them were dying. This is some clear evidence that the system of slavery completely ignored some important human characteristics such as everyone is human.
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