Empathy is the capability to understand a person’s experience and compassion is being sympathetic toward other. These distinctive qualities people can possess could potentially affect the importance in contemporary society positively. Compassion and empathy are what brings the community and the world together also keeping negativity in balance. These characteristics aren’t only positive, but can motivate people to help the mental, physical and emotional pains of others and themselves. Learning from the actions of compassion and empathy gives people a better idea of how to improve and change things in the society. During the many years of slavery in North America, the Southern had little to no compassion or empathy for the people kidnapped from their homelands. Instead, the slave owners continued to keep them occupied with tasks. Further on in the era, many slaves like Harriet Tubman and others decided if they weren’t going to receive freedom than they’d run away from their plantations. The consequences for these actions if runaways were ever caught made it hard for other slaves to choose whether stay a slave or die trying to earn freedom. Many slaves escaped, but there were always others that remained on the plantations and not all of the slaves had the ability or strength to leave. President Abraham Lincoln decided there should be a change in the U.S. for the slaves so he wrote the Emancipation Proclamation which ending up only freeing one slave. The states had to battle