Slavery In America Essay

Slavery in the USA

Slavery became a very debated issue in the nineteenth century America. For hundreds of years, white ethnic groups were enslaving black people, based on their notion that black people were inferior. The discourse in that era had been such, that white people led themselves into believing that by treating black slaves as they did, they were doing them a favour, resulting from their belief that this was the best that the black people could accomplish in life. This dominant perception made any sort of dialogue and conflict resolution even more difficult. The concept of Slavery had also divided most of the United States at this time. Southern economy was very intertwined with slavery so any effort towards its abolishment from

These runaway documents which were written usually in bold script and sometimes illustration, shed the light on the fact that slaves had no identity of their own, most of them were given the surnames of their masters and their birth names were taken away, they reveal the “worth” of the enslaved individual when one looks at the reward price that was issued in exchange for their information and return. Runaway slaves with better skills had a bigger reward on them, with the most common reward being ten dollars for all the others. Reward amount also increased if it was assumed that the slave has left the county and was more difficult to be found. Female slaves had much less reward amount on them as compared to men. The slave runaways proved beneficial as they gave the details like the slaves’ ethnicity, their age and the area from where they escaped . A slave runaway advertisement in Raleigh Register and North Carolina Weekly Advertiser in July 1824, posted by John Cobb revealed how his thirty-five years old, African born slave named Dimbo was indistinguishable from a native born because of being in America for a long time and thus could also be posing as a free black man . Some of these documents also mentioned their addictions and food habits. Many of these texts also included the owners’ description of the slave’s morals and their way of