Slavery. One of the harshest and most cruel ideas any human being has ever fathomed. The idea of bringing slavery to the Americas was one of the worst if not THE worst practices to have ever taken place in the history of our hemisphere. People torn from their native land(s), shipped across hundreds of miles of the ocean surrounded by disease and infestation, going days without food, and then forced to work in a land they never even knew existed. The entire idea of slavery seemed surreal but became very real; very quickly. Although slavery has never been justified, it will always remain etched in the heart of American civilization for as long as the world will survive.
             Family life during slavery was extremely influenced and shaped by oppression. Families were molded around and torn apart by the malice of their masters and the consequences of their actions. Children were sold away from their mothers and fathers, never to see them again, and put to work at an early age. The masters made sure that their slaves could not read and write for the mere fact that if they ever were to learn, there would be a rather large uprising of resistance. Some slaves did learn and escaped successfully. Others, however, were not as successful or as non-disabled as others and were by no means necessary able to control their own fate.
             Slavery also was heavily impacted by religion. Slaves sang songs, hummed spirituals, all to pass the time and release themselves from the gripping hands of slavery. They attended church on sometimes a regular basis, but it was not quite as it should have been. Whites constantly oversaw the masses and ensured that the Blacks were taught that slavery was good by White preachers. The slaves made up songs encoded with a message that only they knew so that they could communicate safely without having the master find out. They sang these songs in joyous times as well as in times of despair or sorrow.
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