On the ideology of slavery
Slavery is not just a form of labor, it is a culture that entails an ideology. While the 13th Amendment abolished the form of labor, the amendment left the ideology untouched.
Slavery is a form of human incarceration for the sake of profit and greed. Humanity has always found that practice repulsive and shameful. You may have heard how the God of Abraham killed the first born of every Egyptian in response to slavery. History has celebrated slave rebellions such as Spartacus against the Roman Empire or the Stono Rebellion (1739) and the Turner Rebellion (1831) against American slave owners. We remember those stories because we honor people’s right to be free.
Regardless of the period, the ideology of slavery has at least three common elements:
1. Absolute control: As a incarcerated labor, slaves are always trying to break free. For that reason, the plantation owners must create a system of physical and emotional punishments (i.e. whips or threatening to sell a family member) to keep the slave on a state of fear. A Slave must obey and be submissive.
2. Dehumanitization: To justify the system of punishments, a slave society dehumanizes the slave. Slave is not consider a person, but a savage or criminal. A slave is always “the other” and it is never “one of us.” Racism, as an extension of slavery, aims at dehumanizing those who are different.
3. Slavery benefits the slave: Based on the concept that “the slave is a savage,” slave owners often argued that slavery helps the slave. This idea depicts the slave owner, is not an individual driven by greed, but a benefactor who cares for the less fortunate.
In 1850, an American slave owner named George Fitzhugh said:
“The slaves are all well fed, well clad, have plenty of fuel, and are happy. They have no dread of the future- no fear of want. [The slaveholder] is the least selfish of men. The institution of slavery gives full development and full play to the affections” [1]
The slave owner feels entitled to decide what the slave needs and wants. According to the slave owner, the slave has no aspirations beyond food and clothing. Since slavery provides both, the slave have no “dread of the future-no fear of want.” The slaves “are happy” and the slaveholder is the “least selfish for men.”
Document analysis: My slave experience in Maryland (1845) Frederick Douglas.
After escaping slavery, Frederick Douglas become an activist against slavery. This is an excerpt from a speech Frederick Douglas gave in New York to an audience interested on knowing about slavery
Source: Frederick Douglass, “My Slave Experience in Maryland” (1845). Available at BlackPast, (2007) https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/1845-frederick-douglass-my-slave-experience-maryland/
(…) Slavery makes it necessary for the slaveholder to commit all conceivable outrages upon the miserable slave. It is impossible to hold the slaves in bondage without this.
We had on the plantation an overseer, by the name of Austin Gore, a man who was highly respected as an overseer proud, ambitious, cruel, artful, obdurate. Nearly every slave stood in the utmost dread and horror of that man. His eye flashed confusion amongst them. He never spoke but to command, nor commanded but to be obeyed. He was lavish with the whip, sparing with his word. I have seen that man tie up men by the two hands, and for two hours, at intervals, ply the lash.
I have seen women stretched up on the limbs of trees, and their bare backs made bloody with the lash. One slave refused to be whipped by him I need not tell you that he was a man, though black his features, degraded his condition. He had committed some trifling offence for they whip for trifling offences the slave refused to be whipped, and ran he did not stand to and fight his master as I did once, and might do again though I hope I shall not have occasion to do so he ran and stood in a creek, and refused to come out. At length his master told him he would shoot him if he did not come out. Three calls were to be given him. The first, second, and third, were given, at each of which the slave stood his ground. Gore, equally determined and firm, raised his musket, and in an instant poor Derby was no more. He sank beneath the waves, and naught but the crimsoned waters marked the spot. Then a general outcry might be heard amongst us.
Mr. Lloyd asked Gore why he had resorted to such a cruel measure. He replied, coolly, that he had done it from necessity; that the slave was setting a dangerous example, and that if he was permitted to be corrected and yet save his life, that the slaves would effectually rise and be freemen, and their masters be slaves. His defence was satisfactory. He remained on the plantation, and his fame went abroad. He still lives in St. Michaels, Talbot county, Maryland, and is now, I presume, as much respected, as though his guilty soul had never been stained with his brother’s blood.
(…)My own wife had a dear cousin who was terribly mangled in her sleep, while nursing the child of a Mrs. Hicks. Finding the girl asleep, Mrs. Hicks beat her to death with a billet of wood, and the woman has never been brought to justice. It is not a crime to kill a negro in Talbot county, Maryland, farther than it is a deprivation of a man’s property. I used to know of one who boasted that he had killed two slaves, and with an oath would say, “I’m the only benefactor in the country.”
**) Keep in mind the basic format: answer to question + “quote from source”+ analysis (explanation on how quote supports answer to question)
On three paragraphs, explain the core elements from the ideology of slavery. Keep in mind the concepts of control and dehumanization.
