If you’re American you may think that we are a great nation with righteousness and good intention from the start of history. From when we were born, we learned in school about the great achievements of our founding fathers and how they founded America on the ideal of freedom for all men and having such liberties not present in other countries. What we don’t know is how American society today was at one point built on slavery. This is not a fact we are blind to as a young person, but rather mentioned and not really spoken about until later. This is not blindness but rather ignorance of the fact that slavery was inhumane but was a widely accepted concept. Although slavery is mentioned in younger education, it is often shrouded by other historical significance such as our founding fathers or our American ideals of freedom, liberty, and justice for all. In the end, it’s all a huge contradiction. Our so revered Founding Fathers, in fact, owned estates which contained many slaves. The slaves did not have freedom, liberty, and justice for all. What my question is, is that why were these slaves not considered human compared to other races and what excluded them from these rights as an American.
In an a fairly recent article, I read about a father and son human slavery operation. This article particularly interested me as in today’s society, slavery is looked down upon and has been abolished for centuries, yet some people are able to get away with this. I was so confused, but after reading this article I found out the simple answer: blackmail. In the case of the article, Agustin Menendez and his son, Ever Menendez, were supplying workers to tomato farms in Florida. Although it sounds like a legal practice, these workers were actually unpaid and threatened by Agustin to work for them. The reason these workers did not alert the authorities was that they were illegal immigrants from Mexico. Agustin threatened the workers that if they did not do as he bid he would call homeland security and deport them. The fear of deportation prompted these migrant workers to do the bidding of Agustin. Essentially, the migrant workers had no choice. It was work or be deported. This theme is common in modern day slavery as the idea of exploiting one’s citizenship in order to gain labor. Going back to the 1800’s slave owners thought that the slaves were inferior to them being subhuman, this can correlate to the modern day society in which citizenship is an important thing. Being a citizen grants rights a non citizen may not have. When these migrant workers come, they are considered to be “subhuman” to society as they essentially are not even part of it at all. Similar to how the workers were threatened of deportation, slaves were threatened with beatings in order to work. A possible answer to my question of why slaves back then did not have any rights, was that they were not even considered a part of society. A contradiction this is as slavery was a major part of Southern society. Slavery fueled all the South’s exports and essentially was the breadwinner for the South.
The justification for slavery was that the slaves were not considered humans but rather “savages” or “feral” animals. But what rather interested me to this fact was looking at a slave manifest of slave owner, Col. H.K. Hugan. The slaves had names. Names are a human characteristic. What was peculiar about these names was that these names could have belonged to a white person too. The name, William, was the name of two slaves that Col. Hugan owned. What is interesting is that William was also the name of 3 English kings. The confusing part to me is that why, a slave, a feral and savage subhuman, shares a noble name with many members of royalty. You don’t name your animals William as animals already have designated and distinct animal names for them. The overarching idea here is: it doesn’t matter what names these slaves had, but it was the fact that they had names common among anyone else, regardless of race had. This is what makes these slave owners recognize that these slaves were still indeed human. Yet why did they still consider these slaves inhuman, I realized this answer was simple. The answer is always greed. When you tell a lie enough times you start to believe it. The “lie” was that these slave owners considered these slaves inhuman so that they could exploit the free labor in order to thrive off it. They masked the guilt of exploiting a fellow man by justifying the fact that they were not even men in the first place. By doing this, people were able to dehumanize a slave making it much more easier to treat them as if they were actual animals imported from Africa.
In a more personal account, I read in about a Cambodian man who had no other choice but to go into slavery. Reading his account showed me how even the best of us can be lured. In this account, Vannak Prum, a Cambodian man, was lured into slavery when he had no other choice. With the birth of his child, Prum could not pay his hospital bills and therefore set off to find work. When no work was found available, a suspicious man offered him a job at the border of Thailand. Initially, Prum declined the offer due to how suspicious it was but was then later forced to accept it when he could not find any other work to do. This of course, was not a job opportunity but rather forced labor in which he ended up working on a fishing boat where he was tortured and beat by the captain. Eventually, Prum was able to escape. However when alarming the local police, he was then sold into slavery again on a palm oil plantation. Finally Prum was able to escape and tell his story. What was significant about Prum telling his story was that it showed how he was lured into slavery. Prum’s financial situation was his Achilles heel. Prum could not find work, so in desperation he accepted a sketchy job which resulted in his enslavement. How Prum was lured into slavery helps highlight a trend that the most susceptible victims to modern day slavery are mostly low-income people. How this relates to my question is how in pursuit of slaves, slave captors will target out susceptible targets to provide. Not only as they are easy targets, they are considered to be minorities in which people tend to look down on in society. The fact that being in a lower social class, results in people seeing less importance in these types of people, this correlates to American slavery as Southerners saw their slaves as the lowest rung of social class in America. What these slave owners think is that these people aren’t beneficial to society at all which in turn justifies their reasoning for enslaving a fellow human.
In Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Frederick Douglass, provides an autobiography of his experience with slavery and working under multiple masters. Under all these masters, each master had his own personality but most notably, the level of kindness each master exercised. During the 6th chapter of the book, Douglass is introduced to his new master, Mrs. Auld, a “woman of the kindest heart and finest feelings”. During this time with his new master, she starts to teach him how to read. However, these lessons are cut short when her husband, Mr. Auld, instructs her that “it was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave [how] to read”. This part was the most interesting part of the book in my opinion as it showed society’s influence on the people living under its social guidelines. In this particular case, Mrs. Auld treats Douglass as if he was a freeman, educating him, feeding him sufficient amounts of food, and treating him as an actual human being. However, as Mrs. Auld conforms more to society, she starts treating Douglass as if he was another slave. Douglass directly states this saying: “She had bread for the hungry, clothes for the naked, and comfort for every mourner that came within her reach. Slavery soon proved its ability to divest her of these heavenly qualities… She finally became even more violent in her opposition than her husband himself.”. In response to my question, society is one of the answers. In today’s society, we view slavery as immoral and a violation of basic human rights, however, during the society of the 1800’s, slavery was the norm. It was normal to own slaves and mistreat them. Mrs. Auld wasn’t conforming to society at first by educating and comforting her slaves. It was until her husband exposes her to the real nature of society in which she conforms in order to not displease her husband. This correlates to the fact that the torture and cruelty displayed towards the slaves by their masters was not considered cruelty or torture at the time. Rather it was such a normal occurrence that was labeled as “discipline” or beatings were considered to give the slave motivation to work harder. In the end, society’s view on what were right and wrong justified to the people of that era in which slavery was a norm and society should continue that way.
What made these slave owners treat their slaves as if they were not human is a combination of both ignorance and greed. These slave owners were ignorant in the way that society made them ignorant. Society’s norm masked the suffering of these slaves behind a mask that these circumstances were normal and that these slaves could be considered as farm animals who work mindlessly. The ones aware that the slaves are suffering simply choose to ignore the suffering of the slaves by the fact that they are making a large amount of money for this. In general, being part of a society is supposed to benefit those who are part of it, however slaves are part of society but are harmed by it. Instead society highlights all the outcast as minorities who are not worth as much as the average citizen, therefore making them less human resulting in the justification of exploiting them for free labor and cruelty towards another human being. This is the origin of slavery itself. African’s were thought as feral animals based on the fact that they did not have an industrial revolution and therefore lived life in an older way making them prone to the white men as animals who could be used for profit. What denied these slaves basic human rights in the end, was that to society and for the benefit of profit, they were not even considered human in the first place.
Diary of a Photographer 