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Hello!  I have been studying forced immigration in the last few months.  There was a lot of stuff that I learned about it.  I learned about Sarah Margru Kinson.  I also learned about slavery in general.  This post will be about all that stuff.

Slavery started in America (although it wasn’t America at that time; it was just a colony of Great Britain) in about the 1600s.  People were taken in chains from western Africa to the U.S.A.  People who died on the journey were simply thrown overboard, and slaves were only fed with water and sometimes a banana.  When they got to America, they were still in chains and were to be “bought” by slave owners.

Slaves would work on a plantation, unless with a 1% chance, they got freed.  If an owner didn’t want the slaves any more, he/she would sell them to a slave market, and then the slave market would sell them to another owner, not set them free.  Sometimes a slave would try to run away.  There were people hired to just patrol some places and punish any slaves that were trying to run.  Slaves could go to places like a store if their owner gave them a pass.  The people who punished the slaves sometimes even killed, but “punishers” had to check for a pass before they did.

Most people think that there were only slaves in the south.  But at one point, there were slaves in New York.  In 1991, someone was digging to make a building and found bodies from the late 1700s.  After doing some tests and finding many more bodies, it was found out that this was a burial ground for slaves.  (Free slaves probably buried them and not the whites, so it’s not like the whites showed any mercy.)  That building they were making obviously never got built, but an amazing site was made.  It is the place, located in lower Manhattan, where most slaves in New York are buried.

If a slave was trying to escape, he/she would travel on the Underground Railroad.  No, it wasn’t an actual railroad; it was a road that slaves took to freedom.  But it wouldn’t free them completely.  Once a slave got to the north, their owner probably would offer a prize to anyone who could capture the slave and bring him/her back.

Forced immigration was cruel, but almost everyone is glad it’s over now.  Hopefully it will never happen again.  And if it does, hopefully we can have another person who can stop it…