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ENGL 1102
23 February 2012

Historical Inquiry Paper

From the time that the nation was founded, Americans were deeply divided over the slavery (Maltz 4). $.laves were always considered as the lowest class in the American

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society. They were poorly treated and had no legal rights. This paper aims to evaluate and interpret the slaves' rights on the Supreme Court trials before and after the Missouri Compromise.

Blacks first arrived on North American shores in the early 1600s, stolen from Africa
and held in bondage. The first English colony in North America, Virginia, acquired its

first Africans in 1619, after a ship arrived that carried. a cargo of about 20 Africansl. The
slavery started to come to touch every aspect of their life slowly and gradually2. Until the

latel600s, the blacks' population was less thanT percent of the population, however, by
contrast, in 1770, they were over 40 percent.

"In

1790, shortly after the ratification of the

Constitution, there were about 757,0003 blacks in the United States, over 90 percent

of

who were held in bondage. The vast majority of the total, a full 99 percent, lived in the South, almost 40 percent of them in Virginia" (Weiner 92).

In fact, there was a short period that slave's population decreased, because
started to believe that the slavery would be gradually unprofitable and

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it might eventually

wither away. Conversely, in 1793, a Yenkg_inventor named Eli Whitney is widely

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