A South Plantation Owner's View of Slavery
For hundreds of years, slavery has been practiced around the world. At this time, abolitionist Americans have no right to deny this tradition. Our founding fathers, in fact, had slaves of their own. One must concur that slavery is not morally wrong but rather needed for the growth of America. The abolitionists of the North have weak arguments that can be overruled by all the advantages of slavery. These advantages include white supremacy and the advantages of living as a slave, the kingdom of cotton, and the reality of the United States' Constitution and its Amendments. The South will not lose slavery over a bunch of abolitionist fools view's of the wrongs of slavery, but will instead remain in charge of their black slaves and keep them working the fields of cotton.
The Northern states are against slavery because they find it morally incorrect to own another human being. Well, my friends from the North, first off you have no right to argue something that our founding fathers practiced and secondly, black slaves are inferior to our white Anglo-Saxon race. One thing is for sure, they should not be free to walk around the United States and act as an equal to the white race. If the slaves were free, they would be far outstripped or outwitted in the chase of free competition. Their fate would certainly become extermination. The Negro's providence of habits and moneymaking capacity is incomparable to that of the whites. Had they remained in Africa, they would become idolatrous, savage and cannibal, or be eaten by other savages and cannibals (Fitzhugh, 247). They should thank us for relieving them from the far more cruel slavery in Africa. Although they are inferio...
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...avage lifestyle and taught them Christianity and gave them things free laborers will never have or own. They are inferior to the Anglo-Saxon and if they are freed they will eventually die off since they are certainly weak-minded. Besides these factors, the Constitution clearly leaves it up to the states to decide upon the issue and with due process, must be compensated for any slave that is freed. Without slave labor, cotton exports may decrease and will drastically change commerce with other countries. The blacks were destined to be our slaves and this should not be taken away from us.
Bibliography:
Works Cited
Calhoun, John C. "Either Slavery or Disunion".
Christy, David. "The Kingdom of Cotton". 1860.
Fitzhugh, George. "The Failure of Free Society". 1854.
Fitzhugh, George. "Slaves Without Masters". 1857.
In the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass depicts his life as a plantation slave, offering misinformed northern Christians and reformers in-depth accounts of the physical and emotional cruelties of slavery. As Douglass recounts his relationship and interactions with the harsh Mr. Covey, he disputes the basis on which southern slaveowners defended slavery. Douglass dispels their claims of encompassing a Christian duty to civilize blacks who they deemed naturally inferior by proving how they actively worked to keep slaves from assimilating and contributing to society.
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Slavery thus became an increasingly Southern institution. Abolition of slavery in the North, begun in the revolutionary era and largely complete by the 1830s, divided the United States into the slave South and the free North. As this happened, slavery came to define the essence of the South: to defend slavery was to be pro-Southern, whereas opposition to slavery was considered anti-Southern. Although most Southern whites did not own slaves (the proportion of white families that owned slaves declined from 35 percent to 26 percent between 18...
During the nineteenth century, there were a variety of diseases that affected both slaves and their masters in the Antebellum South of the United States. Tuberculosis, yellow fever, whooping cough, malaria, worms, cholera, and diphtheria were some of the many medical conditions that affected much of the population. Childbirth also had a large impact on the health of women and newborn children, due to a lack of knowledge about proper nutrition and prenatal care. As a result, there were many accidents during childbirth and a high mortality rate ("Plantation Medicine and Health"). The same medical solutions to these diseases were often used for both masters and their slaves, however it was ultimately the slave master's decision about the health care of their slaves. James O. Breedon, editor of Advice Among Masters: The Ideal in Slave Management in the Old South, stated, “In matters of health care, slaveowners often extended their ideas concerning domestic medicine to their slaves. In many cases, the owner provided the same care for the slaves as he did for himself and his family. In order to exercise what they felt was their
During the time prior to the twentieth century our world accepted slavery as a normal part of life. Aphra Behn and Phillis Wheatley, both female authors born about 100 years apart, had their own views of slavery and wrote poems and stories about the subject. These women were physically different, Aphra was a Caucasian, and Phillis was an African American, and their lives were rather different as well. Aphra was a spy and playwright, who lived the middle class life and Phillis, was a slave who was taken from her homeland, brought to America, sold into slavery, then later freed. I believe that both writers’ views were difficult to figure out, especially by just reading their works.
When we learn about the history of the United States in schools, it is generally taught that the North was strictly anti-slavery and that the South was pro-slavery. They are described as two separate, opposite entities. However, they were more like two sides of the same coin, with the truth somewhere in the reeded edges. In my personal opinion, the North was very hypocritical when it came to slavery. While the North claimed to be "above" slavery, I believe that the majority of the North quietly reaped the profits of slavery while the minority loudly declared the source of its fruits an abomination. While slavery is indeed a scar on the face of American history, I don't believe that the North abhorred slavery the way history thinks it did. The North benefited greatly from the importing of slaves and the exporting and reception of slave-grown goods, and they were every bit as racist as the South.
Slavery was not always an accepted practice. Early American settlers remained divided as to its morality and legality. Though, in its infancy, the North accepted slavery and practiced its use, it was the South that delved deep into its practice. The majority of the North did not approve of slavery culminating in the introduction and passing of the Emancipation Proclamation. The South remained opposed to the notion of releasing slaves. The South depended on slaves to work on their plantations and provide free labor to ...
Slave Life The warm climate, boundless fields of fertile soil, long growing seasons, and numerous waterways provided favorable conditions for farming plantations in the South (Foster). The richness of the South depended on the productivity of the plantations (Katz 3-5). With the invention of the cotton gin, expansion of the country occurred. This called for the spread of slavery (Foster). Slaves, owned by one in four families, were controlled from birth to death by their white owners. Black men, women, and children toiled in the fields and houses under horrible conditions (Katz 3-5). The slave system attempted to destroy black family structure and take away human dignity (Starobin 101). Slaves led a hard life on the Southern plantations. Most slaves were brought from Africa, either kidnapped or sold by their tribes to slave catchers for violating a tribal command. Some were even traded for tobacco, sugar, and other useful products (Cowan and Maguire 5:18). Those not killed or lucky enough to escape the slave-catching raids were chained together (Foster). The slaves had no understanding of what was happening to them. They were from different tribes and of different speaking languages. Most captured blacks had never seen the white skinned foreigners who came on long, strange boats to journey them across the ocean. They would never see their families or native lands again. These unfortunate people were shackled and crammed tightly into the holds of ships for weeks. Some refused to eat and others committed suicide by jumping overboard (Foster). When the ships reached American ports, slaves were unloaded into pens to be sold at auctions to the highest bidder. One high-priced slave compared auction prices with another, saying, "You wouldn’t fetch ‘bout fifty dollas, but I’m wuth a thousand" (qtd. in Foster). At the auctions, potential buyers would examine the captives’ muscles and teeth. Men’s and women’s bodies were exposed to look for lash marks. No marks on a body meant that he or she was an obedient person. The slaves were required to dance or jump around to prove their limberness. Young, fair-skinned muttaloes, barely clothed and ready to be sold to brothel owners, were kept in private rooms (Foster). It was profitable to teach the slaves skills so that during the crop off-season they could be hired out to work. Although they were not being paid, some were doing more skilled work than poor whites were.