Roll, Jordan, Roll : The World The Slaves Made By Eugene Genovese

During the mid-1800s, it was challenging being a slave. Belonging to another human being instead of being free brought numerous hardships African Americans had to endure. It brought about unimaginable pain, frustration, disruption, and stress. In America, slavery was glorified, even though, families were separated and destroyed. Slavery made it tedious to have stability in families because of the effects it had on the African American people. After reading “How Affected African American Families” and “Narrative of Jenny Proctor,” slavery caused African American families to cope with separation, unfair marriage stipulations, horrible living condition, mistreatment and labor, and also the ending of slavery.

The slave narratives also gave Northerners a glimpse into the life of slave communities: the love between family members, the respect for elders, the bonds between friends. They described an enduring, truly African American culture, which was expressed through music, folktales, and religion. Then, as now, the narratives of ex-slaves provided the world with the closest look at the lives of enslaved African American men, women and children. (in incheiere)

Eugene Genovese argues that slaves used a strong sense of community as a defense against economic exploitation and dehumanization in his work “The Black Work Ethic”. Kenneth Stampp in his work, “A Troublesome Property”, said that slaves desired freedom, and exhibited many methods of resistance in response to their exploitation. Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman in “The Quality of Slave Labor and Racism” argued that the plantation system was an intricate system focused on management as a key role in expending slave labor, making it efficient and highly profitable. Although all four historians provided substantial evidence to backup their

Another prominent similarity in the works of Equiano and Douglass is the belief that separation from family is the worst consequence of slavery. Slaves experienced countless hardships, and unfortunately many were unable to go through them with their relatives. Equiano describes his experience of being separated from his family in Chapter II of his story. According to his account, “The next day proved a day of greater sorrow than I had yet experienced; for my sister and I were then separated, while we lay clasped in each other’s arms (29). Earlier, the Equiano siblings had been separated from their parents, which was overwhelming. However, separation from his sister left Olaudah in tears. Frederick Douglass experienced separation from his mother at a young age. He questions, “For what this separation is done, I do not know, unless it be to hinder the development of the . . . child. This is the inevitable result” (13). Douglass never met his mother as a result of the whites taking him away from her. Although slaves would probably work efficiently when accompanied by their family, the masters did not realize this, and consequently disconnected families. These eminent similarities in the works of Douglass and Equiano effectively portray the wicked

Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass both wrote narratives that detailed their lives as slaves in the antebellum era. Both of these former slaves managed to escape to the North and wanted to expose slavery for the evil thing it was. The accounts tell equally of depravity and ugliness though they are different views of the same rotten institution. Like most who managed to escape the shackles of slavery, these two authors share a common bond of tenacity and authenticity. Their voices are different—one is timid, quiet, and almost apologetic while the other one is loud, strong, and confident—but they are both authentic. They both also through out the course of their narratives explain their desires to be free from the horrible practice of slavery.

Coates’ allegory of the “Dreamers” and their detrimental impact on the lives of African Americans in the US is highlighted with this declaration: “But do not pin your struggle on their conversion. The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all” (151). Coates is essentially claiming that the people who refuse to live in reality are subsequently robbing those who do because they instill a sense of false hope and unrealistic expectations that make every injury inflicted upon the African American community hurt even more. By extension, Coates is affirming that living in the moment rather than always thinking about the future and how to make things better is the most authentic route to happiness. Much of the misery in life derives from people in power abusing the privileges society has granted them, and the exploitation of black people in American society has solidified the idea that civilization breeds barbarism in Coates’ mind. This is further supported by Coates’ assertion that, “The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine” (70). This image of black lives being chewed up and spit out by industrial America is visceral and jarring in that it shows a complete failure on the civilization’s part to protect and raise its citizens to a more prominent status and improve their lives. To Coates, the ideas of patriotism and “the Dream,” or

According to historian Eugene Genovese, what motivated southern slave-owners to embrace “a strange form of paternalism” toward their slaves? *** Do you agree with the authors that this paternalistic attitude had the effect of subverting the “racist underpinnings” of the slave society?

“The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South” by John W. Blassingame is the first book about slavery written by a historian in the viewpoint of slaves rather than slave owners. This book analyzes the experience of slaves in the South during misjudgement and confusion. Blassingame targets the different aspects that have influenced the slaves life and the way they lived it. Blassingame writes this book to encounter you in feeling the pain of the slaves but also how they had their own traditions and culture while enslaved.

In this debate, the discussion will surround whether or not slavery destroyed the Black family. A family is a social unit living together and people descended from a common ancestor. The debate focuses on Wilma A. Dunaway who posits that slavery did destroy the Black family, and her opponent, Eugene D. Genovese, who says that slavery did not destroy the Black family. By analyzing Dunway, Genovese, and a host of other writers I have gather my own ideas for one side to agree with.

Continuing with the theme of family values, Douglass shifts to the basic family unit. Their master separated Douglass and his mother when he was an infant, for what reason he “does not know” (Douglass 2). No one gave Douglass an explanation because this situation was customary on plantations. Douglass wanted to horrify his Northern white readers by informing them that slaveholders regularly split slave families for no apparent reason. This obviously would upset Northerners because the family unit was the foundation for their close-knit communities. Multiple generations and extended families lived together or near each other. It was unimaginable to the readers that a society existed that took children away from their mothers without reason. Northerners would think of anyone who was part of such a society as a heartless monster (Quarles ix).

In the book titled The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South, author John Blassingame’s theme, focused on the history of African slave experience throughout the American South. After much research, the author said in the preface that most historians focused more on the planter instead of the slave. He also pointed out that most of the research on slaves by previous historians was based on stereotypes, and do not tell the real history of slave life and a slave’s inner self. Most of these historians, who focused on antebellum southern history, left out the African-American slave experience on purpose. Through much gathering of research, Blassingame hoped to correct this injustice to the history of African-American slaves, and show how slavery affected slaves, but also American life, culture, and thought.

Although Douglass and Jacobs' experiences support the "personal as political', their narratives further explore the residual effects of slavery: 1) to prohibit the identity of male and female slave, and 2) to marginalize the slave's presence in society.

During the 1840s, America saw increasingly attractive settlements forming between the North and the South. The government tried to keep the industrial north and the agricultural south happy, but eventually the issue of slavery became too big to handle, no matter how many treaties or compromises were formed. Slavery was a huge issue that unraveled throughout many years of American history and was one of the biggest contributors leading up to the Civil War (notes, Fall 2015). Many books have been written over the years about slavery and the brutality of the life that many people endured. In “A Slave No More”, David Blight tells the story about two men, John M. Washington (1838-1918) and Wallace Turnage (1846-1916), struggling during American slavery. Their escape to freedom happened during America’s bloodiest war among many political conflicts, which had been splitting the country apart for many decades. As Blight (2007) describes, “Throughout the Civil War, in thousands of different circumstances, under changing policies and redefinitions of their status, and in the face of social chaos…four million slaves helped to decide what time it would be in American History” (p. 5). Whether it was freedom from a master or overseer, freedom from living as both property and the object of another person’s will, or even freedom to make their own decisions and control their own life, slaves wanted a sense of independence. According to Blight (2007), “The war and the presence of Union armies

Slavery had an immense impact on African American families, as the familial dynamic of the African American family was in many ways responsible for the stereotypes surrounding black families in the present moment. Not only were families the sole property of their slave owner, but there were laws restricting their rights and privileges. However, despite the fact that the African American slave family existed in a perpetually tumultuous state, there were cohesive slave families, but they faced many struggles and challenges. In particular, black women were faced with incredible hardships with regard to sustaining the familial structure. This paper explores aspects of the African American family structure during slavery, considering the effect that slavery had on black women. The legacy of slavery in the present moment is also considered, in addition to whether slavery continues to exist.

Prior to the publication of any slave narrative, African Americans had been represented by early historians’ interpretations of their race, culture, and situation along with contemporary authors’ fictionalized depictions. Their persona was often “characterized as infantile, incompetent, and...incapable of achievement” (Hunter-Willis 11) while the actions of slaveholders were justified with the arguments that slavery would maintain a cheap labor force and a guarantee that their suffering did not differ to the toils of the rest of the “struggling world” (Hunter-Willis 12). The emergence of the slave narratives created a new voice that discredited all former allegations of inferiority and produced a new perception of resilience and ingenuity.