Slavery: A Cycle of Victimization

Slavery is a long history that has happened in the United States of America. For years the south in the United States long had slaves working out on the fields, picking cotton or some other task the slave masters had for them. Some had it a bit easier then the ones out on the fields doing domestic chores inside the slaves master house. The slaves weren’t able to read or write and for a reason it was kept like that. The women who worked inside the house could be known as a sex object for the slave master. The “southern code of conduct” did not protect slave women. The religious messages the slaves took from black Christianity contradicted what their master church has been telling them. Men ran away more often then women due to many reasons. Lastly, the Louisiana Purchase helped sustain slavery in the south.

Slavery was the greatest atrocity committed to a human being in America. “The Fires of Jubilee” a book written by Stephen B. Oates, helps further this argument with gruesome details of the atrocious and brutal practice of slavery. It describes the long working hours, the lost of dignity and destruction of the opportunity to self improve. Slaves were forced to toil the scorching fields for countless of hours in their lives without a chance of improving their occupation, social status or how they lived their lives. The brutalization that slaves had to endure is more apparent than brutalization suffered by the slave-owners. Fredrick Douglas stated “At this moment, I saw more clearly than ever the brutalizing effect of slavery upon both the slave and the slave owner.” It seems that slavery was advantageous to slave owner. This is far from the truth. Slavery caused slave owners to degrade into brutes after being brutalized by the evil of slavery. The validity of Fredrick Douglas’s statement is unquestionably accurate.

For this assignment we were asked to read the book Modern Medea written Steven Weisenburger, which deals with slavery in the mid-nineteenth century. In my paper I will discuss how the book portrays the daily life as a slave, the issue of freedom, and the racial realities during this time. This particular book tells the story of a slave by the name of Margaret Garner, who one day escaped from her plantation in Covington, KY, and took along with her Robert which was her husband, her four children, and Robert's parents. They loaded up on a stolen wagon and rode it down to the ice covered Ohio River where they would use that to cross over into the state of Ohio which was a free state. Once they had successfully made it across, Margaret and everyone who came along headed to a safe house, which was owned by one of her cousins, until they could connect into the Underground Railroad. While in hiding, the owner of Margaret and her family had tracked the slaves down, and brought along deputies as well as U.S. Marshall's, to bring them back to the plantation in Kentucky in which they belonged. In a desperate attempt to prevent her children from having to return to the harsh life of slavery, she took a knife she had and nearly decapitated her two-year-old daughter killing her, but before she could turn to the other three the deputies had broke in and taken them over.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, brings to light many of the social injustices that colored men, women, and children all were forced to endure throughout the nineteenth century under Southern slavery laws. Douglass's life-story is presented in a way that creates a compelling argument against the justification of slavery. His argument is reinforced though a variety of anecdotes, many of which detailed strikingly bloody, horrific scenes and inhumane cruelty on the part of the slaveholders. Yet, while Douglas’s narrative describes in vivid detail his experiences of life as a slave, what Douglass intends for his readers to grasp after reading his narrative is something much more profound. Aside from all the physical burdens of slavery that he faced on a daily basis, it was the psychological effects that caused him the greatest amount of detriment during his twenty-year enslavement. In the same regard, Douglass is able to profess that it was not only the slaves who incurred the damaging effects of slavery, but also the slaveholders. Slavery, in essence, is a destructive force that collectively corrupts the minds of slaveholders and weakens slaves’ intellects.

In this book, the author discovered that many historians believed that the practice of leasing convicts of the South was an abuse to the African Americans. Even though many see as it was just one of the many things that occurred in the large sweep of the racial evolution of the South. The cruel and brutal punishments toward the blacks was unjustified.

Slavery is a very touchy and uncomfortable topic for many of us. It was a harsh, degrading, and painful part of American History, but due to the suffering of so many African Americans, laws were written and placed into action that we still live by today. Slavery has been a very important part of our history. It is the very reason that our country has evolved into a country of freedom and equality. The laws that have been written by our ancestors are why the United States is the melting pot that it has become with the diversity of cultures, religions, and ethnic backgrounds. Believe it or not, we (our country) went through the ugly part of our culture to get to what is now set up to protect not only Americans, but many people that now live in the United States today that are not quite American citizens.

African American Slavery African American trades. African American trades started around the 16th century to 19th or you can call it slavery. African American slave trade started at Europe and trades. Soon when the South and North Americans started buying slaves there soon was large amounts of Africans were brought to America from the western side of the continent. The ones who ordered slaves by volume were the British the Spanish the French the Portuguese the Dutch and the Americans.

More slaves came to America from Africa than anywhere else. The first slaves were in New York; the Africans came to the new world in 1530. Most African slaves did not know when or if freedom would come. The Africans lived a very harsh life; the white men did not care about the Africans slaves; only their labor. The African Americans were skilled workers. Many African Americans tried to change their religion to Christian, because the white men were not supposed to enslave Christians, but they did not care. Some African Americans became half free, which meant they could own their own land, but the children could not become half free.

White slavery is a Progressive Era term used to loosely describe the entrapment, transportation, and supply of women and children for the use of sexual slavery. Many of the women who were part of white slavery were forced into it this trade against their will. These women and children became enslaved into prostitution and transported domestically within the United States and internationally. Efforts to control white slavery can be seen as early as 1870 in the United States, but little was done to enforce it. No real significant legislation or enforcement occurred until the early twentieth century. White slavery induced fear among women in the United States. Stories circulated through media outlets about women and girls getting kidnapped and brought to the United States and forced to partake in prostitution. By the early twentieth century progressives in the United States believed in exposing and eradicating white slavery. By 1910 the passage of the Mann Act was initiated in efforts to prevent the transport of women for immoral purposes.

Slavery by Another Name For most American’s especially African Americans, the abolition of slavery in 1865 was a significant point in history, but for African Americans, although slavery was abolished it gave root for a new form of slavery that showed to be equally as terrorizing for blacks. In the novel Slavery by Another Name, by Douglas Blackmon he examines the reconstruction era, which provided a form of coerced labor in a convict leasing system, where many African Americans were convicted on triumphed up charges for decades. The convict leasing system started because after the civil war and the passing of the thirteenth amendment, abolishing slavery, poor soother states had to contend with the addition of African Americans living freely in society but also contend with black criminals. Before the reconstruction era slave holders were in charge of punishing criminals and always did so privately.