Slavery was a part of the American culture for almost a whole decade (1776-1865), and during that time, many people had to suffer inhumanly for the only solid reason of being a bit different from someone else. There is no way of wiping the past from the memories of those who have struggled, which means that the terror of slavery will always be a part of the human history.
As the experience shows, world history is far from being pretty. It has presented its evils so many times that merely counting them would take ages. Every major society, every more or less developed country had to go through some of atrocities. People never stop creating new ways of hurting other people, and what a human is capable of doing to another human is a true mystery (and it rarely contains anything nice). Fascism, genocides, terrorism, mass men-slaughter – all these are just a few examples of how terrifying it is to live in the world. Slavery stands among all of them, proudly taking one of the top positions.
It existed in every country at some point or another: people were taken slaves during the Osman Empire, people were taken slaves after bigger and smaller battles; people have always searched for ways of enslaving each other, of putting someone else beneath their position. However, never in the whole history has slavery been as terrifying and dehumanizing as it has been in the United States.
For a vast period of time, the whole human race was turned into a sort of merchandize: into speechless, rightless and powerless quarter-humans only meant to do the hard and dirty work, never allowed to be equal with the white men. An experience like this has scarred the world, has left an indelible mark on its face. Consequents of slavery are far-reaching, they have imbedded themselves into the public memory, into the very human identity – there are still those who believe that their skin color makes them better than someone else is, there are still those, whose anger for the wrongs done to their ancestors blinds them and strips them of all human.
It would be very wrong to allow this past to define both the present and the future, therefore perpetuating its influence further in time. In spite of everything people had to go through in the past, it is wrong to let that past to affect them any longer – we as humanity have to remember everything horrible that our ancestors have done, but not in a way that would make us stay angry and/or bitter, far rather in a way that would prevent those horrors of ever being seen again.
Being of the African American origin myself, I know that the history of slavery has been embedded in the cultural identity of our race. It has always been a major part of my life when growing-up, it has always been giving definition to who I am: either in a form of feeling sorry or angry for my ancestors, or in a form of feeling different on the base of skin color, or in a form of feeling soul-broken and devastated for the injustices of the n-word. It sure is difficult to explain to a white person what it means to feel worse than them, to understand that at some point of time their grand-grand-grand-grandparents might have owned someone from my relatives.
Sure, with all the time that has passed, the idea of race-based slavery should have faded out a little bit, the pain of it should have begun to disintegrate, especially knowing that even with all its horrors, slavery is not the worst that has happened on the planet, and that nowadays there are still countries that have it much harder. However, the healing process is much more complicated with the way society treats the African Americans: many people still think that if it is a black person, they are poor, if it is a black person, they are aggressive, if it is a black person, they are uneducated, hopeless, bitter, wild and so on – racism never went away, it is still as essential to the American identity as hamburgers and french-fries are. Things only become a stereotype when they are spread so wide anyone would think that about a person they see: unfortunately, racism is one of the real stereotypes, which can still be attributed to the hefty majority of American society.
Definitely not every American, but still a lot of them are racist in one form or another – when they walk on a different side of the road right after noticing a group of black males, when they call the poorer parts of cities along with those living in there ‘urban’, when they use the n-word whenever they know it will be fine, whenever they think less of a person after only seeing the color of their skin: all this is racism, the echo of the past, the sad reality of our present, which has been dragging on for quite a bit.
The real problem is that slavery has done much more than anyone could have ever expected, it has changed the identities of not only those who used to be slaves, but also of those who used to own slaves. It has created a gap between the two races, and this gap cannot be filled with anything but acceptance and forgiveness.
However, in order to accept and forgive, one must understand and have courage of letting the past go. Forgiving does not mean forgetting, but it sure does symbolize maturing and becoming free. In order to forgive slavery and racism, one has to understand where the wound has come from in the first place, and go through the intensive pain it causes for one last time in their life. It is in understanding who we were that will free us to embrace who we now are (DeGruy, J., 2005, p. 40).
The institution of slavery was not started in the United States. There is evidence of slavery from Neo-Babylonia (sixth century before the Common Era), and slow from the Tuphinamba (Brazil) at the time of the first European Encounter (Davis, D. B., 2006, p. 27). Slaves were owned, sold, and enslaved at any given time throughout the history. Needless to say, there are still people involved in human trafficking in the twenty-first century.
The idea of race-based slavery developed in a very tangled way, so that it cannot be neither explained nor followed through in any sort of linear way. It is the complexity of racism built upon the race-based slavery that makes it so difficult to eliminate. The only thing that can be said for sure: people became racist primarily due to the fact they encountered a kind of humans that were at the time less educated and less developed both culturally and industrially.
Then, because human nature has the desire to rule and gain powerful positions, they would catch those people and make them their workers, of course thinking in their mind that they were doing something good – connecting the poor souls to the goods of civilization. Such justification allowed people to feel human and considerable while making profit and causing millions to suffer.
In the United States, for instance, many people (primarily from the Southern states) advocated that slavery was indeed something good and necessary, although agreeing to the fact that the atrocities of it were inhumane in their core. In his 2003 book Evil Necessity: Slavery and Political Culture in Antebellum Kentucky, Harold Tallant explains in great detail this notion of the ‘evil necessity’ on the bases of Kentucky, which, even though it did not have a large number of slaves, was still one of those states that was against the abolition of slavery in the U.S.
He describes there the very idea of ‘evil necessity’: Kentuckians would merrily agree that their English ancestors acted inhumanly and immorally by enslaving people when they did, but would at the same time perpetuate the belief that their modern current generation was not doing much harm, as they were just continuing the process of enslavement with those who have never seen any freedom, and therefore did not lose anything (Tallant, H. D., 2003, p. 13).
In the other words, they were just using the same argument that many meat-eaters use now when told that reducing meat consumption would greatly help the environment and their own health, as well as that eating animals is cruel and evil: “They were grown to be consumed anyway, so why should I care?” Of course, why should one be guilty of something they did not start, and just merely had to keep up?
This was not the only argument made by the ‘evil necessity’ believers. Interesting, but not the last part here was played by the sweet and holy Christian religion, meant for all people to be happy under the single God. One of the beliefs was that slavery was just a tool, a mercy that should have helped people to “restrain the sinful behavior of fallen humanity” (Tallant, H. D., 2003, p. 13).
Another one argued that slavery actually better for the slaves themselves than it was for their owners. In fact, it was widely accepted that slavery was at the time the best possible conditions for the black population of the United States, given their state of wealth and education; besides, it was also beneficial to their exposure to the light of God and to the goods of Christianity (Tallant, H. D., 2003, pp. 7 – 8).
Many people truly believed for quite a long time that their actions were nothing but the light of benevolence, and that by enslaving black people that had a chance to give them the cultural benefits of religion and some sort of education. Of course, these beliefs would be widely supported by the slave owners in the first place, especially during the Abolitionist movement. It was important for them to make as many gullible people to believe in the goods of slavery, as it was necessary in order to help save their power and their wealth.
These words were of course soon debunked, considering that whenever slavery was happening, it was happening before the eyes of people, and of course considering that there were those who set their goal on the destruction of this cruel institution. Fortunately, there was not a lack of such people, and Theodore Weld was one of them.
His American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (1839) should be considered the best book to read for those who still thinks that slavery was not even that bad. This book, every single word of it is a testimony to the horrors of slavery, it is a collection of evidence that the slave owners were not telling the truth when describing how kindly and nicely they treated their property.
Not only that, but this is not a book written by a single man who wanted to present his own vision of things, it is a large collection of personal narratives of slaves and slave owners (both current and former at the time), which allows learning about what man can do to another man, and how thickly the true actions of slave owners were sugarcoated with their false words.
He, his wife and her sister (as all three of them had their fair share of work on this book) wanted to present to the world evidence that slaves in the U. S. were treated with “barbarous inhumanity”; that they were “overworked, underfed, wretchedly clad and lodged, and [had]insufficient sleep”; that they were punished inhumanly, that they had to struggle on the fields every day, had no chance of escape, were often hunted down with hounds like animals, were maimed, mutilated, lynched and burned (Weld, T. D., 1839, p. 9).
If this testimony does not prove the point, there is another book to read and learn about the truth behind compromises of slavery being the ‘necessary evil’. It is Wilma King’s Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America (2011), where the author describes lives of children in slavery with all their little activities and huge non-child struggles.
Probably, the heaviest part of this book is where King writes about the education slave children received (or, more likely, about the one they seldom did). “Knowledge unfits a child to be a slave” – this was a widespread belief among the slave owners (especially of those in the South (yes, the same ones, who believed that they were doing well by their slaves when uniting them with the civilized society and religion) (King, W., 2011, p. 169).
Parents were the primarily source of education received by their child, and this education most of the time was constituted with the knowledge on how to serve their masters in the way that would not get in trouble neither them nor their families (King, W., 2011, pp. 170 – 171). Logics behind such politics is very easy to understand: an uneducated slave is a slave that might be gullible enough to believe that slavery in a virtue and that even if there was a chance to escape, the prospects of being a fugitive that knows little to nothing are not very bright and merry.
Therefore, the goodness of slavery is non-existent, it was always a terrifying institution meant to simultaneously lie about its desire to help humans and at the same time do everything it was capable of doing to dehumanize them. Every single horrible thing done during the times of slavery, every single tear shed by a mother whose child was whipped, or killed, or sold, or raped or anything else – all this is to never be forgotten.
Just like the Genocide of the World War II – it is a mirror of the human inner darkness, and its solid purpose is to show the humanity where to go by crossing out the wrong directions on the map. However, humanity is stupid (no other word fits here), because not only humans ignore the educational part of history, they also tend to cling to whatever power or higher position they believe they wither had or still have above other people.
Both American Slavery As It Is and Stolen Childhood, whose purpose was to present the past, are for some unknown but very sad reason are also works that can shed the light on the present. Although the word ‘racism’ was not really used in the United States before 1936, the notion of it has been existing since the very moment slavery itself has, and in the eyes of many abolitionists (Theodore Wright being one of them), it was even worse than the slavery itself, thus it had to be overcome first (Davis, D. B., 2006, 48).
Racism of course did not start slavery, but racism is a cute little gift that slavery has enlarged and left after itself. The most basic idea of racism is quite simple: one is worse than the other is, because their skin has a different color, and their skull has a different form, and just simply because they naturally differ from one another. Slavery has scarred the humanity, and racism is a part of the post-traumatic syndrome that has been flourishing ever since.
‘Why’ and ‘how’ are questions that can be answered with Joy DeGruy’s book Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America's Legacy Of Enduring Injury and Healing (2005). It is a magnificent work researching everything that slavery has done to the United States, considering both the current state of business and all possible implications and prospects of the racism-driven behavior in this country.
In the second paragraph of this essay, I described my personal feelings after encounters with racism, but they do selflessly fade a little when DeGruy describes the experience of racism driven for the society as a whole. Of course, this racism is not the wild cruelty of the Ku Klux Klan, and is not the painful unfairness of the racial segregation, it is in its core much softer, but this is actually what makes it worst – hidden racism cannot be pointed out publically, and therefore cannot be fought against as effectively is it might have been.
There is a very good example in Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, where the author describes a 2002 study «Are Emily and Brendan More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment On Labor Market Discrimination,” conducted by the researchers at the University of Chicago and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Marianne Bertrand and Sendlhil Mullainathan (DeGruy, J., 2005, p. 430).
They wanted to measure the reality of racial discrimination in the labor market. In order to do so, researchers sent approximately 5000 resumes to the employers of various positions available at the market at the time. The first group of resumes was divided into two categories: half of them had on them the typical ‘white’ names such as Emily or Brad, and another half had the typical ‘black’ names such as Tremayne or Aisha, but the rest of the information was completely identical.
The second group had the same names as in the first one, but contained information with different work experience: half being high and half being low (randomly, without any separation by the names). The results were not as shocking as they were physically painful: white-named resumes received 50% more callbacks; white names with high quality experience received 30% callbacks while in the black-names category it made no change.
This is a recurring situation in the American society. Let anyone say what they want, but African Americans are underprivileged: it is often harder for them to get a good job, enter a nice university, and do many other such things that white people consider to be a given.
When it comes to the casual forms of racism, people often underestimate its influence: a woman saying she does not want to date a black man is putting a whole race beneath herself; a mother saying her children to stay away from the darker kids is teaching them to put a whole race beneath themselves – all these actions perpetuate the ideas of racism, its core foundations. For the white people to consider any form of racism to be justified in any possible way is the same as for those Antebellum Kentuckians to say it is a ‘necessary evil’: a disgusting and dehumanizing form of hypocrisy.
With everything that has been described in this essay, it is clear that racism with all its atrocious terror cannot possibly be justified. However, one thing about slavery is that there is not a single person that could be handed accountable for this, which means that every white person that has at some point or another been pro slavery or pro racism is a part of the problem, it guilty in its wrong-doings.
This only leaves a way of hatred towards a huge group of people (most of whom are, thankfully, already dead), which is very similar to both racism and slavery in one notion: it is founded by cruelty, and cruelty will be the thing supporting it. Evil feelings such as hatred, envy, revenge and so on rarely do any good for solving the problem; they only destroy the hearts of those experiencing them.
Therefore, it is important to realize that there has already been too much bitterness and hatred in this world, and that it is better to cross out the roads that are led by them before life does it for us. In this unsure time for our country, when people stand against the government they did not choose, and when the President of our country believes in things unthinkable for a President of the United States to believe in, it important to stay firm of both feet, and to act with benevolence in heart. Remembering about the past is essential for creating the future, but those memories should only be a compass and never what determines the destination.
Being an American means believing in freedom, justice, and endless possibilities – none of which should be anchored down with negativity. It will take some more time for the wounds to heal, but while the process is going on, it is important to work hard and create a society that would be able of making a better future for all, regardless of gender, wealth, skin color, sexual orientation or anything else.
Annotated Bibliography
Davis, D. B. (2006). Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.
Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World is a book written by David Brion Davis and published in 2006. This is a large work, created to cover the very notion of slavery from its bottom to the top.
Inhuman Bondage portrays slavery in the American South, describing every aspect of it: plantations, the Cotton Kingdom, slaves’ lives, the notion of trade, ways in which slave owners were exploiting their workers, and so on. Not only that, but Davis also reviews slavery from its formation in the ancient times, until the development of racism against the black people. In the author’s view, racism has been crucial for the formation of the United States, it has shaped largely what this country in now, and what it will someday become.
In writing, the author does not confine himself solidly to the Atlantic slave trade, but rather makes sure to explain the notion of slavery in the international and historical contest, connecting nations, media, politics, and abolitionism in one global tapestry of understanding.
Unlike the other books, this one has a rather general character, concentrating on slavery as it is, and trying to make sure that every historical, social, economic and political aspect of it is well explained. Therefore, this is a perfect starting point for those who have just started learning and researching slavery and a wonderful in-depth work for those searching some deeper understanding of the matter. It will work perfectly for scholars, and ordinary people willing to understand the influence slavery has had on the evolution of the United States of America.
DeGruy, J. (2005). Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America's Legacy Of Enduring Injury and Healing. Portland, OR: Uptone Press.
Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America's Legacy Of Enduring Injury and Healing is an interesting book written by Dr. Joy DeGruy, Ph.D, and published in 2005. This is a result of many years’ work and research, aimed to understand the influence slavery made on African Americans, and how this influence in reflected upon nowadays. Basically, PTSS is a compilation of the culture (behaviors, beliefs and actions) that has formed in African Americans and their descendants over the years past slavery. It is believed by the author that this culture is a real part of the untreated nationwide Post Traumatic Stress Disorder caused by the atrocities of slavery.
It in the core of this book to prove that slavery with its racism, oppression, mass incarcerations, lynching, et cetera et cetera, has resulted into the formation of destructive behaviors in the African American population, which have originally occurred as a form of self-protection. Because these behaviors are often furthered into the minds of children (even though they are aimed to preserve their memory of the past so it does not repeat), such maladaptive behaviors keep being prominent in spite of being unnecessary. DeGruy believes that these behaviors cannot be easily cured through therapy, and that they require deep changes in the society and in the minds of people affected by them.
This is a good book for those researching the links between past and future, and trying to understand how something terrible done in the past can be of such a large influence on the future.
King, W. (2011). Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America (Second ed., Blacks in the Diaspora). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America is a book first in its kind book written by Wilma King in 1995. The main idea of this work is to portray the lives of children under the often inhumane pressures of slavery. In her book, King makes it possible to understand, that even though slavery by itself is an atrocity, it was the children who were truly stripped of anything positive that childhood has to offer: long hours of work, definitely unfit for kids’ physical and mental abilities, severe corporal punishments, having to be taken away from their families, and so on made sure that children turn into obedient adults, and have nothing goo in their lives.
As it was definitely difficult to obtain many personal narratives from the children themselves, this book focuses mainly on their external living conditions as opposed to their internal feelings. King describes their education, religion, leisure time activities, work, relationships and everything else that constitutes a life of a normal child, but with addition of the terrible things that slave owners did, and how children often had to cope with them. All information she had from the reliable sources, such as diaries from plantation owners, census records, biographies and autobiographies, missionary reports, and interviews taken from the former slaves.
All this effort has resulted into an amazing book, that gives a very deep insight in the lives of children born in slavery, which by itself cannot be underestimated, as children are the future, and the understanding of what they had to go through is a key to understanding what their lives would be. A valuable source for anyone studying correlations between slavery and psychology, especially if they are interested in children psychology and want to know how certain past can affect the present.
Tallant, H. D. (2003). Evil Necessity: Slavery and Political Culture in Antebellum Kentucky. Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky.
Evil Necessity: Slavery and Political Culture in Antebellum Kentucky is a wonderful work by Harold Tallant, where the author examines the notion of slavery in Kentucky from 1829 to 1860. One of the most important parts of this book is Tallant’s discussion over the ‘necessary evil’ of slavery, which is what distinguished Kentucky and some other states from those strongly pro and against slavery. He makes an incredibly good point shifting the light towards the ‘necessary evil’ in terms of it both opposing slavery and protecting it. In the other words, people did understand how terrible slavery was, but what they also knew is that slavery has always been one of the largest economic levers, and white people had to keep their power, and had to maintain whatever control they had over African Americans.
It was interesting to learn how the white population of Kentucky has always perceived themselves as somewhat of a milder middle ground between the two opposing parties, but they still were not the fastest ones when abolishing slavery. In fact, their belief in the moderation of their nature has only strengthened slavery in Kentucky. This is exactly what Tallant explores in his work: how white people would talk loudly about the evil nature of slavery, but then talk even louder against any law against slavery, as if believing in one’s goodness is more than enough on its own, and no particular actions are necessary (surely, because slavery was money, and giving up money just is not something many people would do, no matter the cost). This is a truly valuable book, Tallant makes sure to explain his ideas clearly and comprehensively, by which it becomes possible for any scholar to learn about the complexity of connections between slavery, economy and politics in the time period before the Civil War in a relatively easy and a definitely pleasant way.
Weld, T. D. (1839). American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses. New York, NY: American Anti-Slavery Society.
American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses is a common work written by Theodore Dwight Weld, his wife Angelina Grimké and Sarah Grimké, his wife’s sister. It was published in 1839.
Weld became an active abolitionist when studying at Lane Seminary. It was there that he started converting peers into abolitionism, which greatly disappointed the faculty, and subsequently caused student uprisings, and as a result, Weld and some other fifty students had to leave the school. Weld did not stop his movement. In fact, he became even more entangled with his desire for justice and freedom, fighting for women’s rights together with his wife Angelina Grimké, promoting education, protecting libraries, helping African Americans from the South and so on.
The title American Slavery As It Is reflects the content of this book incredibly well: it is literally a compilation of stories, testimonials, and narratives about the atrocities of slavery, collected from both the whites and the blacks. There are description of what slaves ate normally, of where they lived, how they dressed, about their personal relationships and what it meant to be a slave in general.
This is an incredible book for those looking for a first-person reflection upon the reality of times, with the actual people telling real stories. A noticeable thing about this book is that it also has a reflection of some pro-slavery opinions, which allows to understand the notion from its inside. A definitely valuable work for anyone researching slavery, and will be of a great help for scholars of all ages and interests.
