5/12/2023 0 Comments Fearless Mary by Tami Charles![]() ![]() Thirty-three years later (1861-1865) a brutal Civil War between opposing northern and southern states over slavery and state’s rights was fought and ended in victory for the the North. ![]() Andrew Jackson was the 7th president of the United States. Her formative childhood years were lived out exposed to the hardships, dangers, fears, and inhumanity of being treated as a ‘piece of property’. Most likely, her father was a field slave and her mother was a house slave. Her birth was recorded by her ‘owners’ in a business ledger as a number (#). Mary Fields was born on a plantation in Hickman County, Tennessee in 1832, a slave child of slave parents. The economy of the Southern agricultural states was dependent on a much larger slave workforce to cultivate the vast fields of tobacco and cotton. ![]() By 1860, there were four million slaves in the country, providing a source of free labor on farms, in households, and industrial enterprises in the North. Chained and crammed into sweltering, airless quarters below deck, deprived of the most basic of human needs, many did not survive. This ‘transatlantic slave trade’ forced captives onto ships off the West Coast of Africa and delivered them as ‘cargo’ across the ocean. In 1619, a Dutch ship brought the first enslaved Africans to the American colonies to be sold to the highest ‘bidder’. ![]()
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