A scapegoat is a person or thing made to bear the blame for the mistakes or sins
of others. Scapegoats have been used all over the world and at all times, especially in
the 1700's, during slavery. For example, the Klu Klux Klan or KKK, used black people
as their scapegoats because they didn't like how the black people were getting rights and
the Nazi's used jews as their scapegoats because the Nazi's weren't the supreme power
so they blamed the jews for it. The blacks were the KKK's blame for everything that
was related to crime, violence, or plain old disrespect. The KKK formed a few years
after the blacks got their freedom and they started using black people as their scapegoats
when black people got the same rights as white people.
The enslavement of blacks began in the 1600's. Slavery flourished in the South,
where large plantations grew cotton, tobacco, and other crops. In order for the
plantations to thrive, many laborers were needed. By 1860, the slave states had about 4
million slaves. The slaves made up nearly 33% of the South's population. It would be
believable that every southerner owned slave's, but that is incorrect. Only 25% of the
white's in the South had slaves. Even though some of the Southerners didn't have
slaves, they still believed that their economy would collapse without slavery. Slavery
wasn't as important to the Northerners because their land was very rich, but the Southern
land was dry, hard, and needed much devoted time to get a crop to grow. In 1807, the
British Parliament passed a bill outlawing slave trade, but it continued secretly. Slavery
was abolished in the British colonies between 1834 and 1840. In 1848, France freed the
slaves in its remaining colonies in the Western Hemisphere. During the Civil War,
Northern armies freed most of the slaves in ...