Patty Cannon: The Failures Of Free African Americans And Slaves

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Many people believed they were free from the torturous lives of others, but they slipped into the chains of masters. In the 1800s, free Africans used to be captured and sold to masters. When the victims explained how they were free, they still had their rights of freedom denied and the masters forced them to work. Acts of trickery in the kidnapping of free African Americans and putting them into slavery left families broken and more people beaten and killed. Men kidnapped free African Americans through many loopholes and lies. Their skin bared a different color, so African Americans had been treated as if they were not human. One of the famous female kidnappers of free African Americans included Patty Cannon. Her prejudicial beliefs were that African Americans were property to be sold and nothing more. When issued a search warrant, she was found in her home with twenty-one kidnapped African Americans and skeletons. “At trial, Cannon was sentenced to death. To avoid hanging, she took poison which killed her, but first led her to break down and confess to killing eleven people, acting as an accessory to twelve other deaths, poisoning her husband, and killing her three-day-old ” (“Patty Cannon”). Patty Cannon would do anything to gain money, even kill her family. Many of the kidnappers did not care about the lives their victims had previously, simply because they thought their lives had only one purpose, cheap labor. Making money was what they cared about and they would do anything to receive it. Solomon was a man that fell into these hands of misconception and kidnappers similar to Patty Cannon. Solomon Northup was one of the few that escaped the grasps of slavery. He wrote his own book, 12 Years a Slave, and even had a movie crea... ... middle of paper ... ... guilty. The high consequences helped the South recapture their runaway slaves and easily bring them back to the South. Sadly, this also made kidnapping easy because the victim had little chance of getting past the jury and could be wrongly accused of being a runaway. Wrongly accused African Americans were most likely sent into slavery with the kidnapper. This left African Americans no way to defend themselves against the prejudiced kidnappers and slave masters. Free African Americans, who should have been safe as any other person, were faced with the danger of being wrongly enslaved every day. They could be kidnapped as a result of an act put in place by greedy people that forced them to work in the cruel conditions of slavery. Free African Americans lost their lives to slavery, and most were not able to get it back. Hope kept them alive but whips beat them down.

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