The Civil War Of The United States

Soldiers of the American Civil War were overwhelmed by a time where weaponry and technological developments were thriving. This brutal war changed the soldiers, both mentally and physically, and continued to have an impact throughout their entire lives. There were not only many deaths during the war, but also prior to the war as many soldiers took their own life. They would experience disturbing thoughts and events in their mind that could not be explained until they became known as mental illnesses. The exploration of psychological disorders following the Civil War improved medical diagnostic tools and the way patients were treated which transformed the treatment of mental illness by creating new ways of discovering illnesses, treating patients, and developing the foundation for the future of psychology throughout America.

In the village of Hampton there was a man who goes by the name of Benjamin F. Butler who had in his words, “a large number of Negros, many of them are composed in a great measure of women and children who had fled thither within my lines for protection, who had escaped from marauding Rebels who had been gathering up able-bodied blacks to aid them in construction their batteries on the James and York rivers... (Doc A)” This may prove to us that Ben was a slave owner in Virginia possibly before the Civil War and during the Civil War. Ben had some questions on his mind about his slaves, “First, what shall be done with them? Second, what is their state and condition? Upon these questions I desire the instruction of the department. (Doc A)” He had many other questions about his slaves and how the way he was treating them, “... Are these men, women, and children slaves? Are they free? Is their condition that of men, women, and children, or of property, or is it a mixed relation? What has been the effect of rebellion and a state of war on their status? (Doc A)” Ben had his moments on his questions about the slaves and the events that are going on, but he had something to say to his questions in his head, “When I adopted the theory of treating the able-bodied Negro fit to work in the trenches as property liable to be used in aid of rebellion, and so contraband of war, that condition of things was

In his article, “The Blessings of Slavery,” George Fitzhugh brings about an argument against the abolitionist movement. In his writings, he speculates on the feelings of a black man under slavery, something that he will never feel or understand without personally going through it.He asserts that slavery is truly good for both white and black men. Along with the idea that black men are inherently lazier, he claims that racism is actually placed on the backs of the white man. These claims are false and rooted in a purposeful misunderstanding of the true nature of slavery.

The American Civil War, also known as the Civil War, lasted from 1861 to 1865. The war was to determine the survival of the union, or independence for the confederate states. Some would argue that slavery was the principle cause of the war. After much research, I believe the war started because of the misunderstandings, and conflicts between the North and South. Slavery, however, was one of the main purposes. The North and South had economic and social differences causing many disagreements. They argued about state and federal rights, expansion of slave states, the Abolition Movement, and the election of Abraham Lincoln.

In the 1850’s a Louisiana scientist declared that he found a disease called drapetomania. This “disease” supposedly made slaves to run away from their masters. In 1851, Dr. Samuel A. Cartwright published a report entitled, “Report on The Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of The Negro Race” in a reputable surgical journal. As I mentioned before, that report claimed that black ran away from their master due to a disease. He also stated that slavery was a therapeutic necessity for the blacks. He categorized a runaway slave as a mania mad or a crazy person. In order to prove his point, Dr. Cartwright pointed out what the Bible “said” about slavery. According to him, a healthy slave will never have the necessity to escape from his master. In addition, he mentioned in his article that this disease was the result of masters who treated slaves as a white person by treating them as equal. He even proposed a cure for this runaway salve disease. He said that in order to cure this disease the removal of both big toes was required to make it impossible for the slaves to run.

As slavery became a more divisive subject in American politics, justification was required for both sides to advance their interests. Much of the research by whites into the nature of black people in this time led to what is now known as scientific racism. With “discoveries” from both sides of the debate around slavery changing the way white people viewed blacks, both Thomas Jefferson and Johan von Herder present their case using nature, among other aspects to either reinforce or alter the view of slavery and black people in general.

Within the deep south, it is about the right of the slaveholders, that blacks are different compared to a white man, those being; blacks being built differently from a white man. . Samuel A. Cartwright had written a report about the differences between blacks and whites, called the, “Report on Diseases of and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race”. In this he explains that not only is a black person’s skin differently, but it also goes down into, “the membranes, the muscles, the tendons and in all the fluids and secretions.” (p. 158). A belief that black people are composed differently from any white person, with this, makes it

This tolerant attitude led to a wide range of “race classification.” According to how much “white” a slave had, their value in the eyes of society increased. Slaves could be black, octaroon or mulatto to name a few. Thus this led to a classification based on one’s degree of white blood. In the United States no such classes existed. If a slave was born to a black mother, that slave was black. In essence, Latin America judged based upon the degree of “blackness” while the South saw only two races, black or white. Outward appearance, the color of the father or anything else deviated the classification in the United States. It has been said, half-facetiously, that Southerners are color blind, in the sense that individuals, despite their racial composition, are considered to be either white or black, while Latin Americans recognized degrees of blackness and whiteness.

In the article, “The Mulatto Advantage”, the author discusses the belief that light-skinned African-American slaves were treated better than dark-skinned Afri-can-American slaves in the antebellum Lower South. The proof that the author has that lighter-skinned african-americans were treated better is that they had a height ad-vantage over the dark-skinned, which leads to the conclusion that they were feed a lot better than the dark-skinned.

The Black Body Throughout time, minorities have always been at the bottom on the hierarchy pyramid. They continue to be degraded and seen as the filth of the world, despite their fight to break free from that image. The African American race in itself is known to have a conflicting battle with the said “superior” race in the history of America. Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents of the Life of a Slave Girl and Ida B. Wells’s Light of Truth explain the idea that the black body has no say in how they are perceived.

Samuel Morton measured the features and the capacity of human skulls; he concluded that there were five “races” or species and blacks had the smallest brain capacity. To support his argument he suggested that God must have’ intervened at the time of the flood to reshape mankind.” (Farrow p. 186) Josiah Nott published an article supporting an 1840 census and declared, “Slaves lived longer” and was less prone to lunacy than free northern blacks. (Farrow et al. p. 186-187) The most damaging research produced by Morton, Agassiz and Nott were their theories that declared “Caucasians and Negros” as different species and defined blacks as subhuman species. (p.186) Agassiz and Nott further warned against the mixing of races, claiming the purity of white race could be contaminated by the black race. “These influential scientists not only helped justify slavery, they helped solidify the myth of black inferiority” (Farrow, et al. p. xxviii)

What is most intriguing about Rush’s observations is that he argues that black skin, a defining characteristic of the slave, is not the result of biological difference but rather the result of the skin disease leprosy. This is both integral and problematic for the de-escalation of negative stereotypes of development of human rights for slaves. It argues that there is not a biological hierarchy between white people and black people and even goes as far to say that “that all the claims of superiority of the whites over the blacks, on account of their color, are founded alike in ignorance and inhumanity. If the color of the Negroes be the effect of a disease, instead of inviting us to tyrannize over them, it should entitle them to a double portion of our humanity, for disease all over the world has always been the signal for immediate and universal compassion” (Rush 295). While this statement carries a positive sentiment and bold political stance, it undermines the report given by Rush just three pages earlier when he said, “The leprosy induces a morbid

In 1861, a horrific war began. Nobody had any idea that this war would become the deadliest war in American history. It wasn’t a regular war, it was a civil war opposing the Union in the North and the Confederate States in the South.. The Civil War cost many people’s lives on the battlefield and beyond. In addition it cost an extreme amount of money for the nation which possibly could have been avoided if the war had turned to happen a little differently.

Abstractly, an unnatural doctrine utilized to reinstate supremacy and power has become one of mankind’s biggest anomalies. Slavery, defined as the practice of ownership of a people or persons, has proclaimed itself to be a prevalent institution in the history of the Americas, considering its duration spanned over centuries. The manipulation and application of race was used to categorize mankind into levels of humanity based on different pigmentations of the skin, with the level of humanity decreasing as the darkness of the skin increased. This simplistic theory was used as pseudoscientific evidence to subdue the African population of the Americas to bondage. And, although this type of slavery is thought to be bygone in the western hemisphere, it is still pervasive in one of its most historical forms: the subjugation of the black population to supreme white society − perhaps not physically, but mentally. Thought by many to be a physical institution, slavery has proved to be much more than that; for if slavery was merely physical, the African population in the Americas would have been able to restore itself economically, socially, culturally, intellectually, etc. within a generation of abolition. Rather, modern society, has suspended much of its capabilities to a culture centuries old with the intention of establishing longevity in white supremacy.

For centuries, scientific discourses in the West sought to show that humanity was divided into a number of biologically distinct “races” and, simultaneously, that some racial groups were superior to others. Scientists and physicians presented certain people – either groups or individuals – as icons of embodied racial difference in order to justify White political power and Western colonialism. (“Social Stratification and the Body: Gender, Race, and Class”).