Examples Of Dehumanization In 12 Years A Slave

Slaves’ Resistance Against Dehumanization
American slavery was an institution that relied on violence to secure the obedience and submission of enslaved African Americans. This violence was often not only physical but psychological as well, as the ultimate goal of slavery was to eradicate any and all claims African Americans had to their own humanity. Although the institution of slavery constantly and unrelentingly worked to dehumanize its subjects, slaves found ways to resist both its physical and psychological traumas. In Solomon Northup’s aptly named memoir “Twelve Years a Slave”, he describes the horrors which he had to endure when slave traders kidnapped him and sold him into slavery together with the ways in which he and his fellow slaves
found unique ways to assert their humanness. While navigating the new treacherous life he had been forced into, Northup aided his several of his fellow slaves in resisting the physical traumas of slavery by pretending convincingly to punish them and providing food and secrecy for them whenever he was able to do so and remain undetected. The slaves on Bayou Boeuf, including Northup, were further able to resist their dehumanization and weather the psychological traumas of slavery by providing each other small comforts and forming social units.
Under a cruel master, pain was often a slave’s constant companion.
Excessive violent punishments were the main tool in the slaveowner’s arsenal to obtain and maintain the submission of a slave. Oftentimes, slaveowners punish their slaves for the slightest misstep and even prematurely punished them to keep them from fostering the idea of misbehaving. Unfortunately but not unexpectedly, Solomon Northup became intimately acquainted with the senseless brutality of slavery on the very first day of his kidnapping, when his kidnappers beat him mercilessly for asserting his freedom (Northup 43-45). While Northup finds a small reprieve from the more atrocious aspects of slavery during his time as Ford’s slave, the horrors began anew when he was leased to Tibeats and worked on Turner’s plantation. During his time on that plantation, Solomon saw an opportunity to help a number of his peers evade punitive discipline. When Turner caught three slaves by the names of Warner, Will, and Major stealing melons on the Sabbath, Northup was charged with seeing out their punishment of locking them in the stockades for their “crimes”. Northup quickly realized the masters would be gone at church all day and decided to help them avoid their punishment - which they repaid him for by showing him the melon fields - and only put them in moments before the masters came back for the day (Northup
129-130).
A few years into Northup’s enslavement, he was tasked with being a driver out in the fields. Although he was meant to whip his fellow slaves if their work ever slowed, and was punished himself if he was seen to be too lenient, Northup actively resisted this subjugation. In the eight years he was a driver, he excelled at making a show of whipping his peers without actually harming them while the other slave screamed in mock pain in order for them both to elude punishment (Northup 226-227). Although the slaves were unable to use this tactic to avoid whippings when the slaveowner was too close, it nonetheless served as a small reprieve and a form of resistance from the senseless violence they endured in the clutches of slavery.
Given the swampy terrain of the Bayou Boeuf, it was not uncommon for slaves to seek reprieve from the endless work and pain that dominated their daily lives by hiding out in the marshes.