Preview

Is Slavery Really A Good Thing?

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
681 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Is Slavery Really A Good Thing?
Hope is a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen or desire to trust. In addition, hope refers to African-American slaves wanting to be free or stay alive. Today’s question is hope good or bad, it could easily be both based off the kind of hardship the individual slave endured and how long they have left of slavery based off knowing slavery ended two years after the emancipation proclamation the individual might lose hope but they only had a little while left. For the sake of argument though, I think hope over ally is a good thing because look how far the united states has come and absolutely everything must start somewhere. If slaves were content or happy with slavery would we still believe it was inhumane. Slaves …show more content…
The slavery movement had hope that slavery would end and slaves would be able to live the American dream. Furthermore, hope for a slave is a good thing because of slave narratives like Equiano, Harriet Jacobs and Venture smith where they could fight for the American dream and even made references to their lives could have been worse. Continually, hope for slavery is good because of the strides it has made in the lives of many African-Americans. Slaves hope was a good thing because giving up is letting the white supremacist win, this is expressed most clearly in the slave narratives read in class. Truly, hope was also a good thing because it gave slaves a sense of finality or a reason to live. From the stories I can see that everyone between the three were hopeful and said they would have rather died then to keep the lives they had, but would not have been able to accomplish worldwide success if they had killed themselves. The individuals in the story show that black people have a place in the world and can contribute positively. To be honest, the life of a slave girl shows that women have far worse realities than just being beaten or tortured, but also shows the power of knowledge. Unlike many slaves, Jacobs and others

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Powerful Essays

    [slaves] in scarcely any other light than they do a draught horse or ox; neglecting them as…

    • 1867 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Slaved people with families…

    • 651 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    When I hear the word slavery, the only thing that comes to my head is cruelty. I could not even imagine how a human can threat another one like animals, as if they were and inferior or less because of the skin color. The idea of being able to read a book that was written by someone that lived during this years of brutality amazed me. Harriet Jacobs was taught how to read and write by her mothers mistress, this was not common for many of the slaves, and it is the reason why she used the name “Linda” to talk about herself during her stories, because if by any chance her master knew that she could read and write, she would have had the punishment of being whipped and put in jail. During the first chapters of her book we could notice that not all her years as a slave were miserable. In fact the first six years of her life were happy, because she didn’t know she was a slave, once she grew up her innocence started to fade, her days started to turn dark and sad. As described in her book the living conditions were like hell on earth. Slavery not only affected the slaves, it also completely destroyed moral…

    • 1236 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Summary: The New Divide

    • 977 Words
    • 4 Pages

    The slave owners tried everything they could to keep their slaves. They tried peonage, discriminatory laws, and gave them no education to succeed in life. The former slaves should’ve been given their freedom and justice when the war was over. Some basic justices they should’ve gotten include a chance at education and a type of compensation. This discrimination in the south lasted for about fifty more years until Martin Luther King Jr. saw the differences between whites and blacks. The justice for freed slaves took a long time to obtain and we should be aware of the difficulties the former slaves went…

    • 977 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Assignment 1 AMH2020

    • 654 Words
    • 2 Pages

    During reconstruction, the meaning of freedom suited many different types of interpretation; the perception of freedom between former slaves and their slaves masters were very contradictory. To begin with, African-Americans had suffered severe abuse over those years of slavery, so to them, the meaning of freedom was basically a hope that in the future, they won’t experience all kind of punishment and exploration that they have been experienced so far. Besides that, formers slaves were demanding equal civil and political rights. In the same way, they valued their freedom by establishing their own schools and churches, reuniting families that were separated under slavery and seeking financial dependence. Foner (2014) supports the same argument: “Blacks relished the opportunity to demonstrate their liberation from the regulation, significant and trivial, associated with slavery. They openly held mass meeting and religious services free of white supervision” (p. 557) . In addition, Foner (1014) also found “Former slaves’ ideas of freedom, like those of rural people throughout the world, were directly related to landownership” (p. 560) . On other hand, their slaves masters’ perception of freedom was different. For example, most Southerners reacted the emancipation with dismay, according to Foner (2014) , Southern leaders didn’t want to accept reality “Freedom still meant hierarchy and mastery; it was a privilege not a right, a carefully defined legal status rather than an open-ended entitlement” (p. 561) .…

    • 654 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Harriet Jacobs was a slave girl who lost her mother at a very early age. Since then she lived in her master’s house until adulthood. Her reactions to her own experiences as a slave girl (in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl) show her hatred for slavery and her immense dislike for people that involved themselves in this malpractice. Jacobs saw slavery as dehumanizing. In the seventh chapter of her narrative, The Lover, Jacobs expresses her hatred for her slave master who deprived her of her right to love and be loved as a human. From this chapter we see that slave owners were wicked people who took advantage of the weakness of the black race and treated them as lower class creatures that did not deserve any good treatment from the whites. Besides ill treatment, slaves could not be sure of their “tomorrow,” as they could be bought up at any time from one slave owner to the other. This continuous movement from one owner to the other shows that slaves could not be sure of their happiness and in…

    • 1192 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Slavery has always been a controversial issue within the United States. Whether one considers its involvement with the Civil War or its obvious racial subjugation, slavery is thought to have been one of the most debilitating elements of American history. Slave labor, which profoundly embedded itself within both Southern and Northern societies, provided a method of economy for those who relied heavily on agriculture, while others were more concerned with industrialization. Its main supporters, Southern plantation owners, had everything invested in this “peculiar institution” and were devastated when it was abolished. Their economy simply revolved around slavery; without it they had nothing. It was an…

    • 2384 Words
    • 10 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    The article Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox, written by Edmund S. Morgan, shows how slavery can be paradoxically used to show the history of America and the rise of freedom for Americans.…

    • 670 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Why Is Slavery Wrong

    • 70 Words
    • 1 Page

    “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong (Abraham Lincoln).” Slavery was a big problem in America for as long as two centuries. Slaves were brought directly to America through the triangular trade (The triangular trade). They were taken directly out of their homes. Then through the middle passage they were brought to the thirteen colonies. The growing problem of slavery was caused by the Triangular Trade (The triangular trade).…

    • 70 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    I just heard about the passage of “The Emancipation Proclamation,” I am happy because someone has finally got the ball rolling about freeing us. However, I am also angry because I now know that there is a possibility that we might get freed, but we do not know when that will be. I am excited about doing what I want to do and not being under someone's control and having them tell me what to do. I am also looking forward to working and actually getting paid for my hard work. I will not be laboring anymore for free. Even though becoming free will be fantastic, I am still in fear that it will not actually happen and that we will be stuck here even longer until someone else is brave enough to bring up the topic of slavery. I am just hoping everything…

    • 162 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    From 1830’s, to overcome this problem, many American people started to think of a solution, and during 1840 and 1850, they argued about whether the slavery was rights or wrongs. After that, Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated as president during Civil War, and then he made the famous Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 -declaring “that all persons held as slaves” within the rebellious states “are, and henceforward shall be free” (qtd. in William). - This proclamation was followed by the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution in 1865 outlawing slavery (Jellaroo, 2012). Because of many people’s effort, various races includes black people could get the citizenship in the United States presently, and the rule of dividing car by races was prohibited,…

    • 143 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Why Slavery Is Wrong

    • 464 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Slavery was a harsh time period in America, but there were people who believed it was wrong and who fought for an end. Speeches, writing newspapers, and writing books were the main ways of persuading more and more people to believe that slavery was wrong. A very famous abolitionist was Harriet Tubman, who escaped slavery and risked going back to save more slaves, which showed how much she cared and her bravery. The American Anti-Slavery Society was a society formed by abolitionists to go out and speak about what they believed in. Slavery was not an issue that no one cared about.…

    • 464 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    It was a victorious attempt. Lincoln was able to end slavery in the young United States of America for good. But that’s not where it ended for the poorly treated African Americans. A fairly long time after the Civil War, African Americans still had to face discrimination.…

    • 450 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Even though Frederick Douglass was a son of a white slave-owner, but because his mother was a slave he was born a slave. This was normal in this era. It is known that slave owners had sex with the slaves in order to have a higher number of slaves. Early in life, Douglass saw all horrors and cuelity of slavery but he directed his spoken attack not only against bad attitude to slaves but also against the institution of slavery in general. In his Narrations he wanted to give his readers true information about the institution of slavery. As he states in his book: "The slave narratives emerged from obscurity and became a major tool by which historians were able to open the world the slaves made-their folk life, religious expression, modes of resistance, and psychological survival" (Douglass, 13). He uses an example of his personal story in order to show that such practice as slavery can not exist in normal society or be justified by any means.…

    • 366 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Slavery was an important and crucial development to the United States and Texas. This allowed their economies to grow and fuel the development of these states. However, as states started to join the union, slavery started to decline in the northern United States and increase in the Lower United State including Texas.…

    • 481 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays