And Leave The Same Hopeless Inheritance To His Children, In Order

That He May Live In Luxury And Indolence?"

From the landing of Christopher Columbus until today, this nation has struggled to become a realm of idealism. We have fought mightily along the way, and for a period of time during the start we nearly didn't find the right path at all. Slavery was viewed differently by all involved. It was justified by the Southern slaveowners and despised by the oppressed African Americans. It held back the development of the South by self-inflicted oppression of the poor whites and was the most shameful period of American history.

Somehow, Southern slaveowners managed to persuade both themselves and Northerners for many years that slavery was not the vile institution that the slaves purported it to be. In fact, a slaveowner said that the slave, "is happier here than on the shores of his own degraded, savage, and most unhappy country" (Shi and Mayer 530). Further to justify slavery, according to one slave owner, the slave is, "scarcely acquainted with the word care. He never suffers from unwholesome food. No fear of want disturbs his slumbers. Hunger

A southern slaveholder also argued "the slaves of the South are protected from abuse or wrong by liberal laws...The laws protect the slave as fully as the white man: they go further, and, as the slave is supposed to be completely dependent upon his master, they require that he should be supplied with the necessaries and comforts of his station, and treated with unvarying kindness" (529). Frederick Douglass speaks to these laws in an account of their overseer, Mr. Severe, whom he had seen "whip a woman, causing the blood to run half an hour at the time; and this, too, in the midst of her crying children, pleading for their mother's release" (513).

Shi, David E., and Holly A. Mayer. "From The South Vindicated from the Treason and

The farmers would rather use their slaves to do the work. They considered the poor whites to be "a distinct and a rather despicable class" (520). They only hired white laborers to make up the work when they had hired out their slaves to work on railroads and in tobacco factories. As one farmer put it, "You never could depend on white men, and you couldn't drive them any; they wouldn't stand it. Slaves were the only reliable laborers - you could command them and make them do what was right" (250).

and cold are strangers to him; and in sickness or age he knows that he has a protector and a friend able and willing to shield him from suffering"(529).

York, London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999: 521-524

Shi, David E., and Holly A. Mayer. "From Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Shi, David E., and Holly A. Mayer. "From the Case of Nelly, a Slave (1861)." For the

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