Are Slaves Really Products?

Many Scholars now use the term chattel slavery or also known as traditional slavery to refer to a type of slavery where a person belonged to another person. Slavery is a system that allows individuals to sell, buy, capture, and own other individuals as their own personal property. Slaves freedom to do what they wanted were taken from them, their control over their bodies were taken from them because they were considered a person’s “Property” to whoever owned them. They were forced to work and do as they are told or they would have to suffer severe and sometimes even fatal consequences and that impacted many types of relationships. ”Slavery is theft—theft of a life, theft of work, theft of any property or produce, theft even of the children a slave might have borne”(Kevin Bales, Understanding of Global Slavery). Slavery with all of its demeaning, oppressing of the black masses was a complicated force and a powerful presence when it came to numerous relationships. For example, masters and slaves, slaves and their families, masters wives and black women slaves, slaves and other slaves, and blacks and whites.

Scope: This paper will focus primarily on the profitability of slave labor and the role that slavery possessed on the South’s economic growth in the Antebellum time period It will refer to economic profitability of slavery as a system rather than an individual business discussing factors such as the prices of slave and cotton prices at the time, the labor output of the slaves, costs of maintaining the slaves, and the net reproduction rate of the slaves.

The European Industrial Revolution was a time for great progression in society and brought around new ways and means of trading and manufacturing goods. However, can the Industrial Revolution be the only source of prosperity in Europe (specifically Great Britain) when many companies, plantations and factories were where hundreds, if not thousands of slaves worked, often kidnapped and badly treated on the voyage from their home to be sold as goods.

Was slavery an economic engine for the Southern economy before the Civil War? Men like Senator and businessman James Henry Hammond would say yes immediately without a second thought. People like Hammond believed that slavery in these times were critical to the growth of the southern economy. They made points such as that agricultural sales were a main percentage of business in the south and with the large area of fertile land that slave ownership was a necessary evil. Along with those, the decades preceding the civil war, the north began to industrialize, which in turn created a large demand for cotton, which was heavily supported by slavery. Not only was slavery a supporting crutch for the immense cotton market, but also slave trade proved to be a highly profitable market of his own. Finally, from the perspective of a plantation owner as a business enterprise, owning slaves proved to be most effective by implementing business strategies, much like Henry James Hammond’s. Without slavery, small planters would have been unable to make a steadfast profit, leaving the cotton industry to rely on large plantation owners who would mainly invest their fortune in British luxurious imports, instead of diversifying and reinvesting in schooling or infrastructure. I personally believe that James Henry Hammond and others were correct, with exception to my ethical beliefs, that slavery was a key factor in the growth and preservation of

Perhaps one of the strongest elements of slavery is honor. Honor has had a wide range of impact in history, whether it was shaping major dynasties and hierarchies, deciding an individuals’ role in society, or family ties and marriages. This sense of worth, high esteem, or virtue was also manipulated by slave masters in order to control their slaves. “The slave could have no honor because of the origin of his status, the indignity and all-pervasiveness of his indebtedness, his absence of any independent social existence, but most of all because he was without power except through another” (p 6). This element is not just a physical force, such as coercive power, which one can heal and

Starting from a slave’s birth, this cruel process leads to a continuous cycle of abuse, neglect, and inhumane treatment. To some extent, slave holders succeed because they keep most slaves so concerned with survival that they have no time or energy to consider freedom. This is particularly true for plantation slaves where the conditions of slave life are the most difficult and challenging. However, slave holders fail to realize the damage they inadvertently inflict on themselves by upholding slavery and enforcing these austere laws and attitudes.

“I speak advisedly when I say this – that killing a slave, or any colored person, in Talbot County, Maryland, is not treated as a crime, either by the courts or the community.”(Chapter 4; Paragraph 3)The United States slave owners made slaves work for long hours in the heat, beat slaves, murdered them and did various inhumane things to African American men, women and even children and slave owners did not get punished or even a “stern talking to” for the inhumane things they did to African Americans. African Americans were considered animals. “We [the slaves] were all ranked together at the valuation. Men and women, old and young, married and single, were ranked with horses, sheep, and swine. Horses and men, cattle and women, pigs and children – all held the same rank in the scale of being and were all subjected to the same narrow examination, the same indelicate inspection. At this moment, I saw more clearly than ever the brutalizing effects of slavery upon both slave and slaveholder.”(Chapter 8; Paragraph

(3) When first reading these narratives one would often assume, by what history tells us, that slave owners were cruel, hated men who often beat slaves severely if they committed even the slightest infraction. While this depiction does stand true for some slave owners, I was surprised to find that most of the former slaves interviewed in the “Slave Narratives” often held their masters in high regards, referring to them as kind and good. Former slave Harriett Gresham even goes as far to say that her master, Mr. Bellinger was “exceptionally kind”. Many slaves in the narratives described their masters as good to his slaves and never whipping them unless it was absolutely necessary. However, when the former slaves spoke of the “paterollers”, white men who roamed the roads in search of runaway slaves often beating them and returning them to their owners, they were described as being very cruel to slaves showing no sympathy to any slave found running away from a

Free and slave labor is different each other based on their characteristic of profitability in many different places. Slave labor gains more revenue from tasks that require less basic skill and flexibility in the production process. For example, if the landlord use slave labor to cultivate fresh land, it is more profitable instead of using free labour to cultivate desolated land. Moreover, the use of slave labor is based on a strict economic situation. Slavery made supplies free labors were not achieved, and the cultivation of crops such as cotton, sugar, and tobacco was possible to achieve by slave labour in the New World because the European population of the 19th century was limited. Free labor has not achieved the supply needed for large farms in the new land and they suited better for small-scale production of crops requiring professional skills which is an absolute fact that using slave labors are more advantageous to do the mass production. Therefore, slave labor was much better to stable because it was easier to control over ensuring proper production of crops (Eltis, 2000).

Slaves that are owned could, depending on whom their masters are, have a decidedly better life than others that are like them. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it is noted that southern slave masters were often much more cruel

How did slavery continue to exist despite its inhumane practices? Many of these owners employed the ideas of dehumanizing slaves and religion in order to perpetuate their actions. Dehumanization demoted the societal status of slaves, therefore deeming blacks inferior to their white counterparts. Moreover, although directly opposing religious principles of kindness and avoidance of sin, plantation owners used Christianity as a mechanism to mask their inhumanity and encourage their cruelty toward slaves. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass develops themes of dehumanization and religion, which helps readers understand the techniques slave owners utilized to alleviate their guilt, condone malice toward slaves, and preserve supremacy over colored people in Southern society.

“To subjugate another is to subjugate yourself.” So wrote Elbert Hubbard, distinguished American writer and philosopher, on the topic of slavery, and Frederick Douglass would agree. Slavery is an institution built on the domination and bloody brutalization of human beings, among the tools of which is the dehumanization of its subjects to the mental state of beasts through frequent whipping, demoralization, starvation and psychological pressure. But as masters exercise their abominable power over their slaves, they themselves become as brutal as those they seek to control, further spreading the pestilence of slavery.

Johnson shows, for example, that whites looked to the slave market to buy enslaved bodies out of which to construct themselves. Some whites bought slaves to fulfill their fantasies of "prerogatives of whiteness and mastery"; others imagined their purchases as rescues of slaves from the slave market and the realization of a "paternalist fantasy]," and still others sought slaves to project through them the appearance of gentility and reputation. In short, Southern whites ventured to the slave market, not merely to buy enslaved bodies to labor in their fields and homes, but to fulfill fantasies rooted in the ideals of antebellum Southern

One of the arguments used when discussing the validity of the slave trade was how the slaves were treated. While many believed that trading slaves was cruel, Postlethwayt, an economist, believed that the slaves were actually better off in the hands of their British owners because they were treated better since keeping them was essential for the owners’ plantations to develop (Perry 30). Moreover, he affirmed, that because the slaves’ original captors were unenlightened and often mistreated them, now being in a sophisticated Catholic society is certainly an improvement, especially since now their sellers had to keep them better so that the slaves could be sold. Newton, an English clergy man, spoke of the cruelty that was embedded in the way

For being this quality of animal the dog apologized and eloquently expressed regret, but he continued stealthily to follow the child” (Crane). The dog began to feel as poorly of himself and the little boy treated him, and he began to believe the insults the little boy was repeating. Throughout their lives, slaves, and even ex-slaves were abused and picked on and many started to believe they really were less than the people who owned