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Slavery in the us from 1830-1860
Slavery in the us from 1830-1860
An overview of slavery in the 1800s
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It was during 1850, when I arrived at the Callaway County, as another family’s property. A human property is a term that describes my fourteen-year-old life. During this time, slavery has become a substantial changing factor for many farmers. A belief was spread throughout the union, slaveholding is held in high esteemed because they prosper more and produced more crops. How is owning another person acceptable to the eyes of these societies? How is slaveholding enabled the farmers to pursue their dreams of economic prosperity? It is unjustified and cruel to use another human being the same way they use cattle. Robert Newsome is a greedy man; however, in the eyes of the society, he is considered to be an ideal representative family farmer who
John D. Rockefeller as a Robber Baron A "robber baron" was someone who employed any means necessary to enrich themselves at the expense of their competitors. Did John D. Rockefeller fall into that category or was he one of the "captains of industry", whose shrewd and innovative leadership brought order out of industrial chaos and generated great fortunes that enriched the public welfare through the workings of various philanthropic agencies that these leaders established? In the early 1860s Rockefeller was the founder of the Standard Oil Company, who came to epitomize both the success and excess of corporate capitalism. His company was based in northwestern Pennsylvania. A major question historians have disagreed on has been whether or not John D. Rockefeller was a so-called "robber baron".
Hammond’s voice was very loud when it came to the issue of slavery. He was not ashamed to let everyone know how much he supported it. In 1831, Hammond became the owner of a cotton plantation called Silver Bluff. There were 147 slaves at Silver Bluff when Hammond arrived to take possession of it. They were eager to meet their new master. “Hammond had acquired seventy-four females and seventy-three males, a population with a median age of twenty-five. He would certainly have noted that forty-six, nearly a third of these slaves, were not yet fifteen, too young to be much use in the fields but a good foundation for a vigorous future labor force. Undoubtedly, too, he observed that sixty-four of the slaves were between fifteen and forty-five, the prime work years. These were the individuals upon whom Hammond would rely to plant, cultivate, and harvest the cotton and corn that would generate most of his yearly income” (Faust, 71). The rest were older slaves that couldn’t really do a lot of hard labor in the field, but they could do chores that didn’t require such demanding work ethics like watching over the children whose parents are out working in the fields.
Owning a person to work for less or no money has been practiced for years. Like other countries, people in the United States also owned slaves. Since the north was mostly industrial, they didn’t need slaves. On the other hand, southerners owned thelarge plantation and they needed cheap labor in order to make profit. Slavery was a backbone of south’s prosperity. Yet, arguments on whether to emancipate slavery divided the nation in half. To keep the country united, both sides tried to convince each other why slavery is right or wrong. There were many documents written about slavery. One of the document that talks about why slavery is beneficial to our society is the excerpt of Cannibals All by a slave owner, George Fitzhugh. While there are document that support slavery, there are also documents written by fugitive slave that talk about their life as a slave. One of them includes Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave by Frederick Douglass. He was born in
The narrative enables Douglass to flaunt his hard-earned education. As stated before, his diction brings pathos to his work. He describes his experiences in a way that lets his audience feel the indignity of being owned by another person. For example, D...
Within the “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave” Douglass discusses the deplorable conditions in which he and his fellow slaves suffered from. While on Colonel Lloyd’s plantation, slaves were given a “monthly allowance of eight pounds of pork and one bushel of corn” (Douglass 224). Their annual clothing rations weren’t any better; considering the type of field work they did, what little clothing they were given quickly deteriorated. The lack of food and clothing matched the terrible living conditions. After working on the field all day, with very little rest the night before, they must sleep on the hard uncomfortably cramped floor with only a single blanket as protection from the cold. Coupled with the overseer’s irresponsible and abusive use of power, it is astonishing how three to four hundred slaves did not rebel. Slave-owners recognized that in able to restrict and control slaves more than physical violence was needed. Therefore in able to mold slaves into the submissive and subservient property they desired, slave-owners manipulated them by twisting religion, instilling fear, breaking familial ties, making them dependent, providing them with an incorrect view of freedom, as well as refusing them education.
The issue of Slavery in the South was an unresolved issue in the United States during the seventeenth and eighteenth century. During these years, the south kept having slavery, even though most states had slavery abolished. Due to the fact that slaves were treated as inferior, they did not have the same rights and their chances of becoming an educated person were almost impossible. However, some information about slavery, from the slaves’ point of view, has been saved. In this essay, we are comparing two different books that show us what being a slave actually was. This will be seen with the help of two different characters: Linda Brent in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Frederick Douglass in The Narrative of the life of Frederick
To understand the desperation of wanting to obtain freedom at any cost, it is necessary to take a look into what the conditions and lives were like of slaves. It is no secret that African-American slaves received cruel and inhumane treatment. Although she wrote of the horrific afflictions experienced by slaves, Linda Brent said, “No pen can give adequate description of the all-pervading corruption produced by slavery." The life of a slave was never a satisfactory one, but it all depended on the plantation that one lived on and the mast...
The primary source for this assignment is a handwritten, May 2, 1863 cash receipt for the purchase of two enslaved people from Crawford, Frazer & Co. The bill of sale, located at the Atlanta History Center , details the objects of this sale as, Harry, said to be “about age 34,” and Hannah, “30 yrs of age.” Both people are pledged as slaves and warranted to be “… sound in body and mind …” and they have been made available for sale through grant of “… right and title…” Written to Mr. John P. Hulst, the receipt confers ownership of “… the above named slave(s) …” to Mr. Hulst, his “… heirs and assigns …” and protects his purchase “… against the claims of all persons whomsoever.” The receipt is s sworn and witnessed legal document, signed by I. H. Andrews for Crawford, Frazer & Co., and duly acknowledges payment in full for Harry and Hannah in the amount of $3,600.00.
Long ago in the year, 1863, on a many acred farm, there lived a man by the name, Augustus McCallister. McCallister was a wealthy,scoldful and greedy man who inherited land formerly owned by his father in which flourished with many crops and income. How could a single man run such an abundance of land, you may ask? The land was ran by slaves who day by day, harvested crops with gloveless hands which were torn and battered by the thorns of the brush. Who walked on dried,rough and tilled ground with shoeless feet. Who worked in the heat of the day without an ounce of water or a shirt on their back. McCallister would whip the men till they were blue in the face, if the commands he gave at the beginning of the day were not met. He would beat the women till they no longer recognizable for simply making a dish that he did not fancy. The children were cursed at and scolded for playing instead of working. He was a very cruel man and he enjoyed every second of it.
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, brings to light many of the social injustices that colored men, women, and children all were forced to endure throughout the nineteenth century under Southern slavery laws. Douglass's life-story is presented in a way that creates a compelling argument against the justification of slavery. His argument is reinforced though a variety of anecdotes, many of which detailed strikingly bloody, horrific scenes and inhumane cruelty on the part of the slaveholders. Yet, while Douglas’s narrative describes in vivid detail his experiences of life as a slave, what Douglass intends for his readers to grasp after reading his narrative is something much more profound. Aside from all the physical burdens of slavery that he faced on a daily basis, it was the psychological effects that caused him the greatest amount of detriment during his twenty-year enslavement. In the same regard, Douglass is able to profess that it was not only the slaves who incurred the damaging effects of slavery, but also the slaveholders. Slavery, in essence, is a destructive force that collectively corrupts the minds of slaveholders and weakens slaves’ intellects.
The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave details the progression of a slave to a man, and thus, the formation of his identity. The narrative functions as a persuasive essay, written in the hopes that it would successfully lead to “hastening the glad day of deliverance to the millions of [his] brethren in bonds” (Douglass 331). As an institution, slavery endeavored to reduce the men, women, and children “in bonds” to a state less than human. The slave identity, according to the institution of slavery, was not to be that of a rational, self forming, equal human being, but rather, a human animal whose purpose is to work and obey the whims of their “master.” For these reasons, Douglass articulates a distinction between the terms ‘man’ and ‘slaves’ under the institution of slavery. In his narrative, Douglass describes the situations and conditions that portray the differences between the two terms. Douglass also depicts the progression he makes from internalizing the slaveholder viewpoints about what his identity should be to creating an identity of his own making. Thus, Douglass’ narrative depicts not simply a search for freedom, but also a search for himself through the abandonment of the slave/animal identity forced upon him by the institution of slavery.
What difference did it make in a slave’s life if he or she belonged to a great planter or to a small farmer?
The summitry between this tragic tale, centered around the fictional plantation Sutpen's Hundred and the true history of the South is quite striking. For the work vividly contradicts the popular history of the Old South so tightly wrapped in visions of stately columned plantation manors surrounded by bountiful fields, worked by contently sated Negro slaves, who were paternally nurtured and well cared for by the benevolent stalwarts of Southern elitism, the rich, and overwhelmingly white planter class. Any white man who reached this pinnacle of success, was accepted as a member of respectable society regardless of their background or the circumstances which created their situation. In exchange for their care and protection, the slaves gratefully toiled in service to their masters, feeling as though a part of the family of the estate, each with his or her own small stake in the prosperity and reputation of the whole. The masters and their families lived a life of graceful ease up in the big house, tasked only with the planning and management of their estates and “people” in this romanticized version of the ...
Slavery has been a part of human practices for centuries and dates back to the world’s ancient civilizations. In order for us to recognize modern day slavery we must take a look and understand slavery in the American south before the 1860’s, also known as antebellum slavery. Bouvier’s Law Dictionary defines a slave as, “a man who is by law deprived of his liberty for life, and becomes the property of another” (B.J.R, pg. 479). In the period of antebellum slavery, African Americans were enslaved on small farms, large plantations, in cities and towns, homes, out on fields, industries and transportation. By law, slaves were the perso...
property to another man, that it is an injustice. Douglass suffered firsthand the brutality of