Drawing The Colorline Essay Example

Drawing The Colorline Essay Drawing the Color line by Howard Zinn gives light to some of the horrible truths of slavery, racism and early American History.The chapter from A Peoples history of the United States goes into detail on the slave trade, conditions of 17th century America, how and why slavery happened, and the many conflicts slavery brought about. Zinnfirst tells us how American was prone to getting into slavery because of the condition in the early 17th century.People were starving, and the settlers couldnt do enough work to feed even themselves.Zinn tells us that some were so starved in the winter that they dug up graves to eat the corpses(24).Also, many of the settlers werent used to working and didnt even know how.They didnt want to work, yet they wanted to eat and make money off of their new discovery of tobacco planting.They couldnt force Indians because the Indians were tough, resourceful, and at home in these woods (25).So, the early settlers got into the African slave trade.Zinn suggests tha t the colonists may have been so enraged that the Native Americans could so easily survive, even with little technology, that it made the colonist want to do anything just to keep up with them. Zinn explains that blacks were not the easiest of peoples to capture into slavery because they were 100 million strong, and the only thing that set them apart from whites was their lack of guns.Often times Africans were capturing other Africans for profit.They sometimes marched in shackles for 1,000 miles, 2 in 5 dieing, to be put in cages when they reached the coast.Choking in the stench of their own excrement(28) the slaves were shipped across the Atlantic, 1 in 3 dieing on the journey over, some jumping overboard to their death to escape further suffering. Although there were indentured white servant