Cartwright's One-Sided Thoughts On Slavery

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The first hand accounts giving in the readings of Brent and Cartwright both provided great insight on how life was like during times of slavery. Brent's story provided an in-depth personal account on how it was for a slave girl to grow up. Brent life story took all sides of slavery into account. She considered factors like the effects that slavery was having on everyone whether they were white, black, female, or male. Cartwright provided details of his life in his writing, and he gave his account of how bad of an institution he thought slavery was. Cartwright greatly opposed slavery, but he did not really consider himself to be an abolitionist because he believes that their views on slavery were somewhat one-sided. He believed that the abolitionist felt so strongly that they distanced themselves from slave holders and destroyed any chances for either parties to sit down and discuss the issues. What Cartwright did not realize was that his arguments about slavery were also one sided because he was just representing the white male who did not own slaves, and also did not know much about slave conditions. Cartwright was mainly representing the outside world looking in at slavery. Cartwright realized that slavery was a bad thing, but because he was not a slave himself or a slave holder he could not give an informative account of slavery. So though Cartwright strongly opposed slavery, he did not fully understand the evils and the effects of slavery as Brent did.

One way that Cartwright did not understand the effects of slavery was that his only concerns over slavery revolved around the ill effects that slavery had on the whites. It did not seem as if he was really concerned about how slaves were being treated by their slave masters, though he did see slavery as a moral evil. To Cartwright, slavery was a moral evil because he believed that it made whites slave holders lazy. He felt that since slave holders had their slaves doing all of the housework, then they believed having to do so themselves would be like lowering their status. In other words the rich slave holders had lost the value of work to the point that if they had to do so themselves would be like lowing themselves to the same level as slaves.

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