Slavery 8

A detailed Summary of Slavery 8

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."

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 sla

The writing by Colonel Bingham, whom we have already seen, reveals a different perception of the relations between slaves and their masters. He denies a bad treatment of the slaves by their masters at all. He says that "...in the history of the whole world there never were as kindly relations existing between two races on the same soil as between the slave owner and the slave in the South before the Civil War"(Bingham 248). As a proof of his words he says that he always loved black people. He gives an example of how much he loved a black woman who helped his parents to raise him. He says that he "...loved her next to [his] parents"(Bingham 248). But how about other black people whom he exploited and punished pretty regularly? Did he love them, also? Definitely it is very week argument, but it reveals slave owners' seeing of the relationship between a slave and his master. We can see how distorted it was.

With so scarce food as the slaves had, it was almost impossible to survive. Charles Ball, a former slave, wrote that there were a lot of "...raids on the smokehouse..." (Feldstein 43). That was the only way slaves could get some extra food to feed themselves and their children. However, Charles Ball added that "...if a slave were caught stealing, his punishment would... be severe"(Feldstein 43). A former slave remembers that he used to steal some food from his master to survive. He says that if a turkey was stolen by the slaves, they tried to implicate an imaginary fox. When they stole potatoes, they tried to implicate the hogs (Feldstein 45). As we can see the conditions of the slaves were inhuman. They had to have a lot of endurance to survive in their situation.

Albers, Harry S., ed. Testimony Of The Canadian Fugitives. http://history.cc.ukans.edu/carrie/docs/usdocs.txt/

After writing this paper I realized that I did not really know that much about the history of the living conditions of slaves. I certainly knew many historical facts about slavery, but I did not know much about the conditions of the slaves, their food, dwellings, etc. The experience of writing this paper was quite useful for me in understanding the salves' life and in trying to understand different points of views on slavery. It was very interesting to think why salves' and slave owners' writings are so different. As a whole, thinking about the topic itself gave me an opportunity to study the very interesting period in our history. I am glad that I wrote this paper and I am satisfied with my paper as a result of my research.

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 ones a pair of pantaloons or a gown in addition, according to the sex. ... In winter, a round jacket or overcoat, a wool hat once in two or three years, for the males, and a pair of coarse shoes once a year"(Lester 65). This scanty list of items was the only things available to the slaves. Certainly, it was not enough for the people who worked very hard for more than ten hours a day. The clothes were very dirty and with holes all over the place pretty soon. Imagine if you have to wear the same shirt day after day for the long time. The masters did not care about slaves' children; they did not distribute much clothes for them either. According to the slaves, it was their problem what to put on their children when it was cold outside (Feldstein 45). However, some slaves say there were some masters who gave some extra material for the children, but it was not sufficient any way. Others gave any additional clothes only for extra work (Feldstein 45).

Bingham, Colonel R. An Ex-slaveholders View Of The Negro Question In The South. Asheville: European Edition Of Harper's Monthly Magazine, 1900. 243

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Approximate Word count = 3554
Approximate Pages = 14 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: History