Slavery DBQ Essay

After the plantation revolution in the 1600s, slavery became a horrible institution driven by the mass production of goods by white slave-owners who were looking to succeed economically. Slaves were treated as disposable commodities and lived hard lives under the brutal hand of their slave-owners. By the 1800s, slavery was natural and very common in the south, and was justified because African Americans were seen as an inferior race who were uneducated and incapable of engaging in society. Since slaves had no political power, especially in the south, they could not fight for their freedom; most were uneducated, so they could not write their accounts down; and even when slaves successfully escaped north, they had a hard time communicating with

Douglass who grew up under the hand of many different Christian overseers and masters, shared that, “religious slaveholders [were] the worst.” When Douglass was abiding with Mr. Thomas Auld (Mr. Auld’s brother), He described him as a man, “incapable of managing his slaves either by force, fear, or fraud,” until his religious conversion. Mr. Thomas Auld was converted at a Methodist camp-meeting, and Douglass expressed, “I indulged in a faint hope that his conversion would lead him to emancipate his slaves, and that, if it did not do this, it would, at any rate, make him more kind and humane.” Douglass was let down in both respects, and he said, “If it had any effect on his character, it made him more cruel and hateful in all his ways… after his conversion, he found religious sanction and support for his slaveholding cruelty.” One of his master’s justifications involved reciting religious passages and quotes from the Bible while whipping his slaves. Mr. Thomas Auld, however, was not the worst religious slaveholder, in fact Douglass shares stories of Reverend Hopkins and Reverend Weeden only to prove the crudeness of Christian slaveholders. Douglass then goes on to tell of how some fellow slaves and himself began to familiarize themselves with Christianity, and how it angered their slaveholders, who, “would much rather see them

Douglass states, “I had very strangely supposed, while in slavery, that few of the comforts, and scarcely any of the luxuries, of life were enjoyed at the north, compared with what were enjoyed by the slaveholders of the south. I probably came to this conclusion from the fact that northern people owned no slaves.” Douglass was brainwashed with this idea since he grew up in a society where you labor for free, with all the reward returning to the slaveholders. His idea of, “in the absence of slaves, there could be no wealth,” was soon debunked by the cleanliness, beauty, and strongest proofs of wealth that he found in the north. The work proved better and more humane too, “There were no loud [sad] songs heard from those engaged in loading and unloading ships. I heard no deep oaths or horrid curses on the laborer. I saw no whipping of men; but all seemed to go smoothly on. Every man appeared to understand his work, and went at it with a sober, yet cheerful earnestness, which betoken… a sense of his own dignity as a man.” Douglass even goes on to profess that what he saw in the south, such as: dilapidated house, poverty stricken inmates, half-naked children, and barefooted women, did not appear in the north, providing the idea that the south was less wealthy because of the condition of the slaves that lived there. Douglass