Slavery: Affecting Every Party Involved

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.

The most evident type of suffering slaves had to go through was the brutal physical burden placed on the shoulders of slaves. The great amount of intense and exhausting work led to many slaves “in consequence of being over-worked, and I was sick a long time.” (Bailey 356). Many slaves were force to work so much that their bodies could not take the physical toll anymore. While they were sick, they were finally allowed much needed rest, but immediately after they got better they would be put to work once again. One of the main tasks slaves were forced to do was picking cotton. “They picked until their shoulders and fingers ached to the bone” (Oates 22). Slaves also had to endure brutal and typically unwarranted physical a...

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...h pens and ledger books moved down the line, examining slave and animal alike and assigning each a value” (Oates 30).

Even though tremendously rare, there was also brutal violence committed by the slaves against their slave owners. Filled with rage and longing for revenge some, though very few, slaves poisoned their slave holder’s food, killing them. Secondly there was at least one slave insurgence. The most brutal and ghastly one was Nat Turner’s rebellion. During Nat Turner’s rebellion many atrocities occurred against white slave owners. One of these killings included slaves hacking “Joseph and sally both to pieces, bringing his ax down again and again” (Oates 70).

The brutal effects slavery had on African American slaves were wretched. Slaves were born human beings, but deprived of their supposedly unalienable right and treated as though they were brutes.