Why Is Slavery Wrong
The erroneous perspectives of proslavery advocates did not observe the fact that eventually the population of the South would be predominantly African descent and it appears at first glance like a Caribbean colony (later nation) of a European empire (later Commonwealth nations). Slavery was perceived as a natural and justifiable institution in any modern nation or empire at that time. It was considered an institution that would promote functionality in American society to benefit white society at the expense of the malleability of the African decent based on their mental inferiority coupled with the benefit of their brute strength and higher birthrate (fertility and durability). “In all social systems, there must be a class to do the menial
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duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement” (Hammond, 1858).
From a supposed moral perspective, advocates of slavery stated that even in the Bible there were slaves and the Bible justified slavery; even though, the original Constitution did not defend slavery. The Bible did not address slavery directly; nevertheless, the inception of the Declaration of Independence and later the U.S. Constitution, “all men [being] created equal” were solely non-immigrant, white men of 21 years of age (preferably property owners) according to Southern delegates and later delegates from the region. “God only can do it when he repeals the fiat, "the poor ye always have with you;" for the man who lives by daily labor, and scarcely lives at that, and who has to put out his labor in the market, and take the best he can get for it; in short, your whole hireling class of manual laborers and "operatives," as you call them, are essentially slaves” (Hammond, 1858). With this in mind, men could not own other men, but Negroes being considered a cursed race as children of Ham, slavery was justified based on pseudo-Biblical stratification of society. The problem is Ham was a son of Noah, both human, Noah was inebriated at the time, and the curse was actually on Canaan (fourth son of Ham) (Genesis 9:25). Such theological rhetoric defeated the Biblical allusion to the justification of slavery. Nonetheless, the aforementioned theological debate against ownership of another human was ignored by pro-slave advocates (Kolchin, 2003).
The anti-slavery movement was known as the abolitionist, it consisted of people who wanted to end slavery and the owning of people.
Slavery violated the right to life and the right to freedom. Slavery was abolished in the United States when President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1963. Even though Emancipation Proclamation did not free all slaves, it was a milestone for African American slaves. Overall, there are moral and financial reasons why slavery is not only wrong but foolish beyond mere social advocacy and political rhetoric. Essentially, slavery is morally wrong based on the fact that it contradicts the Judeo-Christian foundations upon which the United States based The Constitution and Bill of Rights. The concept of all men being created equal is interpreted in its simplest form as all members of mankind are created as equals and have certain inalienable rights or rights that are inclusive to them as members of the human race. Therefore, to own a person as if they are chattel, property, to be sold or traded as a commodity, not to be allowed to take action to maintain their natural-born autonomy is unnatural and works against the constructs of creation, the will of God (Kolchin,
2003). Anti-slavery writers noted that slaves were housed worse than inmates in jails at the time. Many were housed like animals in one room shacks with dirt floors, cracks in the walls allowing vermin and the elements to get into to their living quarters (Kolchin, 2003). “I call upon the professing Christians, I call upon the philanthropist, I call upon the very tyrant himself, to show me a page of history, either sacred or profane, on which a verse can be found, which maintains, that the Egyptians heaped the insupportable insult upon the children of Israel, by telling them that they were not of the human family. Can the whites deny this charge?” (Walker). The tin roofs gave them no warmth in the winter and essentially made the heat unbearable in the hot southern summers and early falls. The slaves lived in squalor, working from before the sun rose to after the sunset. The only day these slaves did not work was Sunday; essentially they were brainwashed and told how evil and savage they were if they did not submit to the word of God, and yet they were not allowed to be taught to read the Word of God. If they were taught to read, they would be beaten and chastised and if they taught others, they would be put to death. Therefore, the anti-slavery rhetoric further advocated for the end of slavery for its evil nature of purposely undermining the ability for people to think for themselves and define themselves as a matter of freewill given to them by the same Word of God (The Bible) the institution of slavery perverted (Kolchin, 2003). Many Whites, including Abraham Lincoln, felt freed blacks (former slaves) as well as “African Americans” that were free in the antebellum South previous to the legal end of slavery needed to be repatriated to the west coast of Africa as if they would be welcomed among their long lost brethren. However, many of these so-called African brethren of the “American Negro” previous to the Middle passage had engaged in the capture and sale of the ancestors of the modern African American. The problem with repatriation and the deportation of some four million former slaves is such a people would be in political (nationalistic), economic (commerce and trade), socio-psychological limbo without a sense of a country they belong to in addition to challenges to their sense of culture, means of establishing a society among potentially hostile “nations” in the region, and who the former slaves were as a conglomerate of cultures beyond the definition of their former captors. All African Americans know is the United States because they are Americans and an integral part of the development and success of the U.S. far before its inception (Kolchin, 2003). Frederick Douglas had a clearly different perspective from all of the other anti-slavery advocates based not only on the fact that he himself had been a slave and was self-emancipated (freed himself), but he himself was the product of a slave mother and slave-owning father. Psychologically he had to be in a battle with self-hatred as a reminder to his mother of her rape and yet loved by her until he was taken from her. He had to hate the racist, slave owner that raped his mother and fathered him, not fully understanding how a man could see a woman as less than human but perversely twist hatred in a fashion to satisfy lust at the expense of bringing him into the world. For Frederick Douglas slavery was an internal battle as much as it was an external battle, yet he found peace at least with the internal battle when he took a white woman, Helen Pitts (an abolitionist and suffragist) as his wife, following his first marriage to a free black housekeeper named Anna Murray in previous years. “Must I argue the wrongfulness of slavery? … Is it to be settled by the rules of logic and argumentation, as a matter beset with great difficulty, involving a doubtful application of the principle of justice, hard to be understood? How should I look to-day, in the presence of Americans, dividing, and subdividing a discourse, to show that men have a natural right to freedom?” (Douglass, 1852) David Walker had a different insight in that he had been a free “Negro”, closer to the concept of what African Americans strived for and yet the African in America was a denizen, similar to a national of today, yet beneath that description with limited legal protection and no real social status beyond simply not being a slave. Freedmen and freeman were still victims of racial attack based on the fact that they were an example to slaves of what they could be, physically and economically free, and they were a threat to slave-owners and poor whites alongside Northern whites who saw them as competition. The other abolitionists felt that the “Negro” was worthy of human rights as far as the release from involuntary servitude under a corrupt government that legalizes evil. However, as far as civil rights, most abolitionists did not feel the “Negro” was equal to white Americans and would never be viewed as equal as citizens in the United States, socially or culturally. The “Negro” would not be viewed as an American of African descent because the same whites who sought to free them sought to free America of them and supported repatriation of the former slaves versus integration with them as men and women with a common nationalistic outlook on the future economic and social development of the United States. “For the crime of having a dark complexion, they suffer the pangs of hunger, the infliction of stripes, and the ignominy of brutal servitude. They are kept in heathenish darkness by laws expressly enacted to make their instruction a criminal offense.” (Garrison, 1833) In that sense, proslavery and antislavery supporters were similar because they felt if the “Negro” remained among them, such people would remain second-class citizens and never have the social and cultural complexity or intellectual capacity to improve the country; they would simply be a burden, so the only choices were to remain in slavery or to be returned to their ancestral land of origin (Kolchin, 2003).
duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement” (Hammond, 1858).
From a supposed moral perspective, advocates of slavery stated that even in the Bible there were slaves and the Bible justified slavery; even though, the original Constitution did not defend slavery. The Bible did not address slavery directly; nevertheless, the inception of the Declaration of Independence and later the U.S. Constitution, “all men [being] created equal” were solely non-immigrant, white men of 21 years of age (preferably property owners) according to Southern delegates and later delegates from the region. “God only can do it when he repeals the fiat, "the poor ye always have with you;" for the man who lives by daily labor, and scarcely lives at that, and who has to put out his labor in the market, and take the best he can get for it; in short, your whole hireling class of manual laborers and "operatives," as you call them, are essentially slaves” (Hammond, 1858). With this in mind, men could not own other men, but Negroes being considered a cursed race as children of Ham, slavery was justified based on pseudo-Biblical stratification of society. The problem is Ham was a son of Noah, both human, Noah was inebriated at the time, and the curse was actually on Canaan (fourth son of Ham) (Genesis 9:25). Such theological rhetoric defeated the Biblical allusion to the justification of slavery. Nonetheless, the aforementioned theological debate against ownership of another human was ignored by pro-slave advocates (Kolchin, 2003).
The anti-slavery movement was known as the abolitionist, it consisted of people who wanted to end slavery and the owning of people.
Slavery violated the right to life and the right to freedom. Slavery was abolished in the United States when President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1963. Even though Emancipation Proclamation did not free all slaves, it was a milestone for African American slaves. Overall, there are moral and financial reasons why slavery is not only wrong but foolish beyond mere social advocacy and political rhetoric. Essentially, slavery is morally wrong based on the fact that it contradicts the Judeo-Christian foundations upon which the United States based The Constitution and Bill of Rights. The concept of all men being created equal is interpreted in its simplest form as all members of mankind are created as equals and have certain inalienable rights or rights that are inclusive to them as members of the human race. Therefore, to own a person as if they are chattel, property, to be sold or traded as a commodity, not to be allowed to take action to maintain their natural-born autonomy is unnatural and works against the constructs of creation, the will of God (Kolchin,
2003). Anti-slavery writers noted that slaves were housed worse than inmates in jails at the time. Many were housed like animals in one room shacks with dirt floors, cracks in the walls allowing vermin and the elements to get into to their living quarters (Kolchin, 2003). “I call upon the professing Christians, I call upon the philanthropist, I call upon the very tyrant himself, to show me a page of history, either sacred or profane, on which a verse can be found, which maintains, that the Egyptians heaped the insupportable insult upon the children of Israel, by telling them that they were not of the human family. Can the whites deny this charge?” (Walker). The tin roofs gave them no warmth in the winter and essentially made the heat unbearable in the hot southern summers and early falls. The slaves lived in squalor, working from before the sun rose to after the sunset. The only day these slaves did not work was Sunday; essentially they were brainwashed and told how evil and savage they were if they did not submit to the word of God, and yet they were not allowed to be taught to read the Word of God. If they were taught to read, they would be beaten and chastised and if they taught others, they would be put to death. Therefore, the anti-slavery rhetoric further advocated for the end of slavery for its evil nature of purposely undermining the ability for people to think for themselves and define themselves as a matter of freewill given to them by the same Word of God (The Bible) the institution of slavery perverted (Kolchin, 2003). Many Whites, including Abraham Lincoln, felt freed blacks (former slaves) as well as “African Americans” that were free in the antebellum South previous to the legal end of slavery needed to be repatriated to the west coast of Africa as if they would be welcomed among their long lost brethren. However, many of these so-called African brethren of the “American Negro” previous to the Middle passage had engaged in the capture and sale of the ancestors of the modern African American. The problem with repatriation and the deportation of some four million former slaves is such a people would be in political (nationalistic), economic (commerce and trade), socio-psychological limbo without a sense of a country they belong to in addition to challenges to their sense of culture, means of establishing a society among potentially hostile “nations” in the region, and who the former slaves were as a conglomerate of cultures beyond the definition of their former captors. All African Americans know is the United States because they are Americans and an integral part of the development and success of the U.S. far before its inception (Kolchin, 2003). Frederick Douglas had a clearly different perspective from all of the other anti-slavery advocates based not only on the fact that he himself had been a slave and was self-emancipated (freed himself), but he himself was the product of a slave mother and slave-owning father. Psychologically he had to be in a battle with self-hatred as a reminder to his mother of her rape and yet loved by her until he was taken from her. He had to hate the racist, slave owner that raped his mother and fathered him, not fully understanding how a man could see a woman as less than human but perversely twist hatred in a fashion to satisfy lust at the expense of bringing him into the world. For Frederick Douglas slavery was an internal battle as much as it was an external battle, yet he found peace at least with the internal battle when he took a white woman, Helen Pitts (an abolitionist and suffragist) as his wife, following his first marriage to a free black housekeeper named Anna Murray in previous years. “Must I argue the wrongfulness of slavery? … Is it to be settled by the rules of logic and argumentation, as a matter beset with great difficulty, involving a doubtful application of the principle of justice, hard to be understood? How should I look to-day, in the presence of Americans, dividing, and subdividing a discourse, to show that men have a natural right to freedom?” (Douglass, 1852) David Walker had a different insight in that he had been a free “Negro”, closer to the concept of what African Americans strived for and yet the African in America was a denizen, similar to a national of today, yet beneath that description with limited legal protection and no real social status beyond simply not being a slave. Freedmen and freeman were still victims of racial attack based on the fact that they were an example to slaves of what they could be, physically and economically free, and they were a threat to slave-owners and poor whites alongside Northern whites who saw them as competition. The other abolitionists felt that the “Negro” was worthy of human rights as far as the release from involuntary servitude under a corrupt government that legalizes evil. However, as far as civil rights, most abolitionists did not feel the “Negro” was equal to white Americans and would never be viewed as equal as citizens in the United States, socially or culturally. The “Negro” would not be viewed as an American of African descent because the same whites who sought to free them sought to free America of them and supported repatriation of the former slaves versus integration with them as men and women with a common nationalistic outlook on the future economic and social development of the United States. “For the crime of having a dark complexion, they suffer the pangs of hunger, the infliction of stripes, and the ignominy of brutal servitude. They are kept in heathenish darkness by laws expressly enacted to make their instruction a criminal offense.” (Garrison, 1833) In that sense, proslavery and antislavery supporters were similar because they felt if the “Negro” remained among them, such people would remain second-class citizens and never have the social and cultural complexity or intellectual capacity to improve the country; they would simply be a burden, so the only choices were to remain in slavery or to be returned to their ancestral land of origin (Kolchin, 2003).