Why Is Slavery Important To Freedom

Most everyone understands what slavery is and many can agree it was a terrible time in history, but only few realize that slavery was a stepping-stone to freedom. We hear the history of slavery through whispers and shadows because people don’t want to bring attention to a sensitive subject, but it is important to understand the hardships African Americans went through and how they overcame it. As we look at the two essays, Slavery and Freedom, we see that slavery was a leading factor to freedom. Walter Johnson describes how slavery was characterized in the New World by daily resistance. This took form in many ways, ranging from mouthing off, to arson, and even assault. Slaves would react in this way because they wanted to reveal the brittleness of their master’s control and show they wouldn’t just “roll over” and
Stephanie Smallwood defines slavery with the Oxford English Dictionary and it says, the state or fact of being free from servitude, constraint, or inhibition”. She admits it is a very abstract definition and doesn’t come close to representing the detailed ways freedom has “attained its central place”. The modern Western theory of freedom gives an image of how people thought of it; “it was a male, and his purportedly self produced economic independence derived at least in part from the labor of wives, children, servants, and other dependents whose political subjectivity was subsumed under his patriarchal authority”. This is ironic because slavery pushed America to freedom and now freedom’s vision to the society is to own slaves. Patrick Henry wrote, that a people who have been struggling so earnestly to slave themselves from slavery were nonetheless, very ready to enslave others”. Freedom has become to be incomplete without power over someone or something, which leads slaves to believe when they become free they need to continue the ruthless