Slavery's Destructive Impact on Family Structures

The Dehumanizing Effects of Slavery on Families Frederick Douglass believed that “the warm defender of the sacredness of the family relation is the same that scatters whole families,— sundering husbands and wives, parents and children, sisters and brothers,—leaving the hut vacant, and the hearth desolate.” The families of slave owners were torn apart while using their power to divide the slaves. Slavery had a detrimental impact on each relationship within families, affecting not only slaves but slaveholders as well. The degrading effects of slavery on the slave and slave owners were destructive to family structure for the child, mother, and father. Children that were born into slavery are brought up sheltered and isolated compared to normal

Taken from Stephen Crawford’s collection, “The probability of sale indicates that a significant number of slave children were sold from their families, a finding that may indicate the tendency of some slaveowners to break up slave families.” (Crawford 341). Families were broken and were not able to be with their birth family. The child could not follow the family or have a relationship when separated leaving devastating expectations of family ties and the vision of their own family. The perception of common knowledge and family is altered at a young age for

Douglass exclaims, “all its glaring odiousness … slaveholders have ordained, and by law established, that the children of slave women shall in all cases follow the condition of their mothers; and this is done too obviously to administer to their own lusts, and make a gratification of their wicked desires profitable as well as pleasurable; for by this cunning arrangement, the slaveholder, in cases not a few, sustains to his slaves the double relation of master and father”(Douglass 14). The ignorance of Douglass not knowing his father shows the lack of stability caused by the inhumanity of slavery. Biological fathers were commonly unknown, with the possibility of them being their own master. Crawford gives the information that “parental death and unknown fathers were common to both slave and free populations. But the reasons for the absence of fathers in slave families also includes sale and the fact that some fathers were white... Put another way, between 15 percent and 25 percent of the mother-headed households were formed because the father was white” (Crawford 336) . The intimidation of a father was different in the case of slavery due to the lawful abuse, control, and power exhibited by the master/father figure. Fathers did not have a strong figure or identity in slave