ipl-logo

Sargry: The Slave Family

1372 Words6 Pages

Family is a place to fall back to for comfort, a place to always fit in, and a place to build memories, but for slaves families were supposed to be those things and they were not. The hardship of watching family members being sold away takes away the happy memories. Children growing up in slavery takes away the comfort of home because they were going to face the harsh reality of slave hood. Slaves never got the solid structure of a family because they could be broken with a blink of an eye. Therefore, while given the opportunity to marry and form families as comfort for the slaves it provided insurance to slave masters, and they proved to be the biggest heartbreaks for slaves themselves. In the beginnings of American Slavery there was no legal …show more content…

Marriages in slavery however were delicate and could be gone with one bill of sale. The pain of being sold apart from loved ones is described in several letters between husbands and wives. In 1840, Sargry Brown wrote a letter in distress to her husband who lived away from her. Sargry was nearly sending her good bye to her husband since she was going to be up for sale. Sargry writes, “If you don’t come down here this Sunday, perhaps you won’t see me anymore. Give my love to them all, and tell them all that perhaps I shan’t see you any more…I wish to see you all, but I expect I never shall see you all-never no more”. Situations like Sargry Brown and her husband were not uncommon. The fact that she had the potential to never see her family again would have been anguishing. The anguish of being sold apart from the family could have been prevented if slaves did not create the family units the slave masters encouraged for their own sake. Another marriage in the depths of being sold away was in 1852 the Perkins. Maria Perkins is writing a letter to her husband Richard explaining to him that the kids and her were being sold. In a desperate attempt Maria asks, “I want you to tell Dr. Hamelton or your master if either will buy me they can attend to it…if I should be sold I don’t know what will become of them [children] I don’t …show more content…

The origins of slave families becoming allowed on plantations could be stemmed back to the livestock species the slave masters considered them being. The marriage is at the heart of a family and when they were torn apart and shipped to different plantations miles and miles away. The marriage expands into children. When children are thought of as bundles of joy that bring all kinds of happiness into the world, however for children brought into slavery it brought more pain into the family unit as they knew everything would be downhill from the child from their birth, they could get separated from their family and they would watch all the horror associated with slavery. Overall slaves were supposedly more docile when families could form, but the misery caused by all the associated risks of raising a family in

Show More
Related
243 Words | 1 Pages

The wife’s masters owned the children of the marriage Samuel’s first master, Alex Hall, tried to keep slave families together. What prompted Samuel’s sale to Tennessee? The master Alex Hall died and the slaves were sold to different people

Read More
784 Words | 4 Pages

Plantation owners would and could easily sell husbands from wives, parents from children, and brothers from sisters (12). A women named Mary Armstrong, who experienced slavery said this about her owner and the separating for families "so mean he never would sell the man and woman and (children) to the same one. He'd sell the man here and the woman there and if (there were children) he'd sell them someplace else

Read More
1945 Words | 8 Pages

Following the Holocaust and aftermath of world war II, Heda Kovaly’s Under a Cruel Star provides one woman’s view on communism in Czechoslovakia. In this memoir, the author develops the theme of popular support for communism by explaining the people's thoughts during that time and her own experiences with her husband’s support for communism. She uses the lens of the Czech people, herself, and her husband, Rudolf Margolius, to develop her theme for popular support for communism. Her use of these viewpoints helps explain how the party was able to take over Czechoslovakia after the Holocaust through their persuasive ideals.

Read More
910 Words | 4 Pages

“I felt for a number of years, Brown later wrote in a letter to a young abolitionist, a steady strong desire: to

Read More
1906 Words | 8 Pages

By 1863 slave homes became 2 parents households with very strong family

Read More
655 Words | 3 Pages

Plantation owners loved having indentured servants because it really helped them save every bit of money they could. Indentured servants did suffer a lot especially with their working schedules but, with the laws that were later passed in Virginia throughout the years and any few freedoms black had were taken away making them feel hopeless at times because of the racial diversity in the America’s at the time. Servants were being optimistic at the time, they were hoping the laws being passed would not affect their rewards for all the hard work they had endeavored throughout the four to seven year long contracts. There was many uncertainty especially with how society would treat them because of their skin color. With all these new laws being passed, most plantation owners feared for their land, indentured servants were not needed as much anymore, plantation owners turned to slavery were they had more power of the individuals and were guaranteed no profit

Read More
517 Words | 3 Pages

During this time period, blacks had many different statuses. Some were slaves forever, some were like indentured servants. They were allowed to actually own property, get married and after they served their time they were freed. Slaves were at the bottom of the social order but the individuals above them were not much better. The white people that were poor did not have as many hardships because they always thought at least they were not slaves, even though they were towards the bottom of the social structure.

Read More
336 Words | 2 Pages

The treatment of slaves between the North and the South was drastically different. Slaves in the North typically lived in the same house as their master and worked by themselves, or in small groups (pg. 94). Slaves in the South tended to live in large plantations in which they were housed in plantation outbuildings (pg. 104). The difference between the North and the South in housing and working environment had a direct effect on the integration of African Americans into their new American society. When they were housed in the North with their masters and had limited exposure to other slaves, they tended to adopt the ways of their masters.

Read More
410 Words | 2 Pages

“Letter to My Master, Thomas Auld” explores Frederick Douglass’ view of slavery and Thomas Auld, his former slave master, in a smart and emotionally charged letter originally written in 1848 and published in the abolitionist newspaper North Star. Throughout the letter, Douglass uses his own experience as a slave to drive his views, often using sarcasm and a dark recognition of his trials to drive his own view of slavery; that slavery should be abolished and that it is inhumane and cruel. Douglass’ decision to publish this paper in the North Star allowed him to bring to light his experiences to push other readers of the newspaper towards an abolitionist stand point by bringing his first-hand accounts of slavery forward and explaining, at times

Read More
1036 Words | 5 Pages

Freedom is the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint. The foundation of America is freedom. Freedom from Britain. However, the freedom is limited to white males who own property. When colonists started to immigrate to America, they wanted to escape from under the rule of Britain.

Read More
1647 Words | 7 Pages

In the 1800’s slavery was a major issue in the United States which was dealt with on a daily basis in the South. The “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass” Fedrick Douglass himself expresses the differences in the lives of black people in the North and in the South. The South was known to have some of the wealthiest white people in the states, that wealth and power they had was due to the many slaves they had working in their plantations. In the other hand, the North had black people getting paid for their labor, their black people were free. They were treated like human beings and even though they might still encounter problems with some of the whites these problems where nothing compared to the retched life blacks had in the South.

Read More
487 Words | 2 Pages

The letter shows the loyalty that African Americans gave to their owners, despite all of the suffering they put them through. The letter showed that Anderson was intelligent and that he was no longer property of Colonial Anderson, but a man replying to another man. Never before could a slave write to their owner in such a way. Mr. Anderson states that “surely there will be a day of reckoning” for what he experienced in slavery. Anderson expresses that he, like the rest of the freed American slaves, would never turn back and never give up their freedom.

Read More
821 Words | 4 Pages

With slaves came the opportunity to work. With more hands that were not paid plantation owners only had more to gain as this went on through several states. Several slaves were sent in abundance to the West Indies to speed up the process of collecting sugar cane. This was extremely hard work for the slaves and only pushed the separation bar further apart. Along with Native Americans and slave women had no say over what went on in their lives a majority of the time.

Read More
704 Words | 3 Pages

Have you ever wondered how life was for the slaves in the South? Slaves in the South suffered through many consequences. For example, they suffered through many whippings with cow skin if they didn't obey their master, they also got separated from their family mostly the fathers, so, they can be sold to a very mean slave owner. Even if they were living a miserable life on the farms, they had their own culture and they managed to even get married in the farmland or where they worked. Not only did the slaves live on the farm.

Read More
1768 Words | 8 Pages

Slaves were views as property and in the Southern States property could not enter into a contract, and marriage is a well known contract. The fact that they could not legally marry meant that a permanent family could not be guaranteed under the American Slave life. Enslave black couples used old African traditions to unite the families. One of the most well known acts of pledging their love for one another was “Jumping the Broom”. (Braddy 1)

Read More

More about Sargry: The Slave Family

Related Topics

Open Document