Although slaves demonstrated some agency through rebellion, slaves were dehumanized through the labor they performed and the ways they were forced to work. Slaves spent most of their time working, and, as former slave Harry McMillan stated in an interview, the conditions under which they were forced to work were horrendous; “Q: ‘How many hours a day did you work?’ A: ‘Under the old secsh times every morning till night- beginning at daylight and continuing till 5 or 6 at night’ Q: ‘But you stopped for your meals?’ A: ‘You have to get you victuals standing at your hoe; you cooked it overnight yourself or else an old woman was assigned to cook for all the hands, and she or your children brought the food to the field.’ ‘Q: You never sat down and …show more content…
The pain that came with this type of psychological oppression is explained in The World of the Southern Blacks; “The terrible anguish that usually accompanied the breakup of families through sale showed the depth of kinship feelings. Masters knew the first place to look for a fugitive was in the neighborhood of a family member who had been sold away. Indeed, many slaves tried to shape their own sales in order to be sold with family members or to the same neighborhood. These efforts were fraught with danger. As one ex-slave recalled, “The mistress asked her which she loved the best her mammy or her daddy, and she thought it would please her daddy to say that she loved him the best so she said ‘my daddy’ but she regretted it very much when she found this caused her to be sold along with her father the next day.” Because these slave families were so close, being separated brought a lot of agony onto the slaves. The masters not only knew how much slaves suffered when this happened, but they used it to their advantage in tracking down runaways. Slaves would try to be sold together as families so they were not far away from each other, however this was a dangerous endeavour. An ex slave explains how a master let a child choose which family member they would like to live with, and how this brought even more anguish to …show more content…
Former slave Lewis Clark describes this assault, “He got mad at the girls, because they complained to their mothers; but he didn’t like to punish em for that for fear it would make a talk. So he ordered ‘em to go out into the field to do work that was too hard for em. Six of em said they couldn’t do it; but the mother of the seventh, guessing what it was for, told her to go and do the best she could. The other six was every one of em tied up naked and flogged, for disobeying orders.” When a master was mad about something, he immediately resorted to assaulting his slaves. When he has no explainable reason to do this, he will come up with a reason for himself. In this case, he ordered his slaves to do something he knew they couldn’t, so when they said they couldn’t do it, he whipped them. The lives of slaves were defined by oppression like this. This abuse is not an occasional occurrence, and in the narrative of his live, former slave Frederick Douglass describes the physical abuse in his own life, “Master, however, was not a humane slaveholder. It required extraordinary barbarity on the part of an overseer to affect him. He was a cruel man, hardened by a long life of slaveholding. He would at times seem to take great pleasure in whipping a slave. I have often been awakened at the dawn of day by the most heart-rending shrieks of an own aunt of mine, whom he used to tie up to a
Sometimes the slaves wouldn't do good enough. If they didn’t do good they would get beat. Most slaves stayed and worked in terrible conditions. But some wanted to escape. They all knew that if they were caught, they would be beaten to death.
No one in today's community can even exaggerate enough or imagine the grief, anguish, torment and the horrible misery endured by African American male and female slaves. Numerous of the African American slaves went through this anguish and misery for their whole lives and their children were most of the time born into servitude until they became free. Women slavery was a little different from that of a man. The sexual abuse, carrying a child by the master, and child care obligations influenced how they directed and lived their lives. Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, shows the distinctive roles that female slaves endured and the battles that were brought upon from coping with sexual abuse.
"His mangled body sank out of sight, and blood and brains marked the water where he had stood." (Douglass, 67). Just one sentence can prove how brutal slave-owners, slaveholders, and overseers can be towards slaves. A use of violence to control slaves can be seen throughout the book, and Frederick is very against violence in all forms. He only uses it when it was necessary,like the fight with Mr. Covey.
The master also calls such inquiries “evidence of a restless spirit”, which proves his intention of keeping the slaves dormant. Family is the other element which is robbed from slaves. Douglass shows how detached he was from his mother: “Never having enjoyed, to any considerable extent, her soothing presence, her tender and watchful care, I received the tidings of her death with much the same emotions I should have probably felt at the death of a stranger”(18). Douglass describes his mother’s hypothetical “soothing presence” and “tender and watchful care” in order to highlight the opposite reality. The fact that Douglass felt nothing from the death of his mother proves that the slave masters successfully incapacitated the slaves emotionally, thereby turning them into machines that would withstand abuses.
1. One way slave owners would dehumanize their slaves was by not telling them their birthdays. Douglass was never told when his birthday was, but he would see the white kids celebrating their birthdays. Understandably, Douglass felt disconcerted about not knowing when his birthday was because it made him feel unimportant and dehumanized. Another way slave owners dehumanized slaves was through physical acts of aggression.
Douglass uses paradox to demonstrate that slavery degragrates the slaverholder. When Douglass under Mr. Sever’s care he described that: “He was less cruel, less profane… He whipped, but seemed to take no pleasure in it. ”(Douglass 24). Most slaveholders are characterized to be cruel and inhuman because of the whipping and the way they treated the slaves.
Slavery was a long, slow process of dulling. Slaves had the constant fear of physical violence, the threat of losing the ones they love, and endured a life of always being treated as subhuman. One way that slavery dulled those in its grip was the constant fear of physical violence. Their masters could hurt or kill them at any moment and there’s nothing they could do. Dana explains how whippings were
He had a slaveholder who was always “cursing, raving, cutting, and slashing among the slaves of the field, in the most frightful manner” (29). Although he was rarely beat, he constantly have to go without food and be in the cold. There was also Mr. Covey, who was a notorious “slave breaker” who gave Douglass “ a very severe whipping,
Slavery denied basic human rights for people. People need basic rights. But slaves did not have them. For example, parents had no control over their kids future (Doc. 1). The master could sell the kid and the parents could not do a thing about it as slaves (Doc. 1).
The masters’ relations was not only between the slave and their owner, but it was also between the slave and the masters’ family members. William remembers many horrible
First off, you were treated like trash; by being either separated from your family or traded off to slave owner after slave owner. A slave would be punished for many things. Any form of resist or attempting to run away would result in some kind of punishment to break the slave’s will. Slaves would get in trouble for talking too much, disobeying, and not working hard enough. Slave owners had many punishments for slave it rarely depends how serious the crimes were.
On New Year’s Day, each slave is being put up for sale again, unless their owner wants to keep them for another year. This holiday is meant for celebration but for a slave, it is a day they dread. One mother went up to the auction block with her seven children, expecting only some to be taken from her, but, “I saw a mother lead seven children to the auction block. She knew that some of them would be taken from her; but they took all.” This portrays how each slave does not have a say in where they go or who they stay with.
Another very common method of resistance was to run away. Once slaves had been hunted down, they would have to face the miserable punishment. In some case, if their owner didn’t capture them, their owner would public the runaway advertisement on newspaper with reward. In the film, the slave owner captured the slaves who tried to runaway; the way he used to punish his slaves was forcing other slaves to whip those runaways hardly.
Slaves cost between $400 and $2000 in today’s terms from about $12,000 to $60,000. The price of a slave was determined through age, physical ability, and skill. That means that owners had a large majority of their capital invested into their slaves. What then would it profit an owner to treat his people in such harsh ways? A man that was whipped required time to heal which meant a lack in his productivity and money out of the owner’s pocket.
Similarly, Stowe makes use of the subject family and language to highlight the destruction of slavery by mentioning how Harris was separated from his mother. One may assume that going through life without a mother or the lack thereof a close female relative has a significant impact on a person's behavior because there is an absence of nurturing and protection that society expects women to perform. Therefore, describing the reaction of his mother once they were not sold together depicts the harsh reality of slavery and tap into audience’s emotions to understand that experience. The text states, “I saw my mother put up at sheriff’s sale, with her seven children… they were sold… one by one… she came and kneeled down before old Mas’r, and begged