Over the first two-week of class, I have learned a lot about slavery. After the lectures and after reading the two chapters from Carl Schermerhorn’s book I realized that my knowledge about slavery from high school was very poor. My knowledge before this class mainly revolved around how slavery affected the civil war. In my high school, it was not discussed a lot about how early America dealt with and handled slavery. However, these lectures and reading have opened my eyes to some key topics on slavery. The first of these topics was that I had not thought a lot about was how slavery had a large impact on the United States economy. Also the topic of how the rules in the northern states on slavery and the certain rules they followed before the civil war were also interesting. Finally, the last topic that was interesting to me was the new york times 1619 project and how there seems to be a large push to learn more about his period of American history.
After thinking about all the topics we discussed and my previous knowledge my research question would be How did slavery affect the economy of America before and after the civil war.
The first thing I would look for is the financial reports from that time period. I would look on websites such as the Library of Congress and other online sources. I would try and see if there was a financial report from individual states and reports on the country as a whole. Some of these original papers even may be saved in libraries. With this report, I think I could get a good understanding of the topic. Then I could get a general answer to my research question. After looking through my finding I may what to reframe my question and get more detailed into one sector of the economy that was severely changed by the laws after the civil war. My next step for this project would be to gain as much data and personal reports from people and start to map out how the countries economy was changed after the civil war.
I think this broader approach towards the “long” economic history of slavery and its national implications before and after the Civil War is a great foundation. Using financial sources would provide a lot of insight into this question; with more digging into this subject, I would be interested in learning what specific pieces of information would you hope to locate? Bills of sale (of enslaved people, products produced by enslaved labor, etc.), personal financial records, and perhaps census-type information on imports and exports would be fruitful. Additionally, I wonder how the historical experiences of enslaved people could be incorporated into the findings. All good things to consider.
Hi Brett, I really enjoyed your post and I think you bring up a good point in addressing the flaw in which we are educated about the extent of slavery. I also found myself shocked at the lack of knowledge I had regarding slavery and I fell that this was a common theme amongst all of us in this class, and deserves to be corrected.