Slavery

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The Slaves’ And The Slaveowners’ Views Of Slavery “That face of his, the hungry cannibals Would not have touched, would not have stained with blood;-- But you are more inhuman, more inexorable, Oh! ten times more than tigers of Hyrcania.” Shakespeare I chose the topic about slavery for my research paper because I thought it would be an interesting experience doing research about slavery. It is American history and the more we know about it, the better we can understand what is going on today in our country. I think that because slavery was abolished very recently in terms of historical periods of time, it still has an impact on today’s economic and political life. Searching for the writings by slave owners was a more difficult task then searching for the writings by slaves. However, I found a lot of useful material in various sources.

The slavery in the United States is no doubt a shameful history of our country. White people transferred the slaves living in Africa to the New Land and treated them as their property, not as human beings. The living and working conditions of slaves and their food were extremely poor. Those were inhuman conditions in which the slaves had to survive. Endless executions of the slaves made the situation even worse.

Slavery was a period of time when one race treated the other race as animals, things, property, but not as people. Unfortunately, not everyone saw the situation as it was in reality at that time. As we can see from many different sources available today, the points of view of slaves and slave owners on slavery were the opposite to each other. That can be seen in various slaves’ and slave owners’ descriptions of slavery. Slaves described their dwellings, food, clothes, labor, and the terrible treatment of slaves by their masters.

On the other hand, slave owners described the relationships between slaves and their masters in a very positive way. They argued that slavery is very beneficial for the slaves and the slaves are very happy to live with their masters. Let us now consider both these points of views in details. First of all, let us look at the slaves’ description of the cloth they wore.

The clothes supply was as minimum as possible and the quality of the clothes was very bad. Here is how one of the slaves describes it. “Our dress was of tow cloth; for the children nothing but a shirt; for the older...

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...ings and memories of both former slaves and slave owners. We found out that the slaves and slaveholders saw the slavery in absolutely different ways. I personally believe the slaves’ accounts that described every detail in constructing the reality of slavery.

The slaveholders, however, talked in general without a single example from their experiences as slave owners. Also, very often, it is hard to believe what they say in their essays. But why these people could be so evil? I think the best answer for the question can be found in Inside View Of Slavery by C. G.

Parsons who was a visitor from the North at the time of slavery. He wrote that the system of slavery influences the slaveholder, and its “...tendency to harden the heart, to dry up all the fountains of human sympathy, to make one callous to the wrongs and the woes of these around him, is stamped upon the very surface of society throughout the South”(Parsons 203). Probably that is the answer to the question why the slave owners’ point of view is so different from the slaves’. Probably, it is true that the system of slavery affected them in such a way that they were not able to comprehend the reality of their evil.

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