True Nature of Enslaved Population

No power; no freedom; no agency

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Episode 28

From: Kerry
Re: The True Nature of Slavery
To: Chance sent - Gmail 5:33 AM

Hi Chance—

Thanks for your help….and please say thanks to the other teachers who helped you yesterday. This is complicated stuff, and I need as much help as I can get.

I have been looking at other parts of the chapter: Testing the New Nation, 1820-1877. I don’t want to spend too much time on what the rest of the chapter says, but check out pg. 348. It says that the American ‘slave population’ was the only enslaved population in world history that grew by means of its own biological reproduction. The text says that the biology fact suggests that many historians consider the conditions under slavery in the United States was somehow less punitive than those in other ‘slave societies.’

It goes on to say that a distinctive and durable African-American culture managed to flourish under slavery, further suggesting that the ‘salve regime’ provided a positive “space” for African-American cultural development.

It says nothing about the master being the father of some of the enslaved children. I think that fact deserves at least a paragraph.

It does end by saying that slavery was a cancer in the heart of American democracy. It says slavery was a moral outrage that mocked the nation’s claim to be a model of social and political enlightenment.

It still seems to me that some sort of false equivalency exists in the text by suggesting that there was a strong African-American culture while it was also a cancer in democracy.

I am doubting that high school students will see the depth of the negative aspects of slavery when they are fed the message that, after all, American slavery was less punitive than it existed in other places.

I have so much more to say, but I must get to school. I have a big day ahead of me.

Kerry

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From: Chance
re: The True Nature of Slavery
To: Kerry sent - Gmail at 5:19 PM

Hi Kerry—

I did read that section. I agree with you.

Did you see the part on pg. 352 that describes how the plantation system shaped the lives of white southern women? The part about mistresses showing tender regard for the women who worked for them made me want to gag.

It states that no slave-holding woman believed in abolition, and that few protested when the husbands or children of their “slaves” were sold. It even states that one plantation mistress had a special affection for her “slave” Annica, but had noted in her diary that she had to whip Annica for insolence.

I put quotes around “slaves” because I refuse to refer to people who were held in bondage against their will by that word. They were people who were enslaved. I wish the publisher of this textbook shared my views about people and their humanity.

There is not one word in this section from the point of view of the humans who were considered property and were relegated to live in subhuman conditions in the slave quarters.

I have to go back to school for a meeting tonight so I don’t have any more time for this discussion……but I do want to talk to you about the part in the Varying Viewpoints section that offers the false equivalency of the benevolence of southern slaveholders and their need to ‘control and coax work out of their reluctant and often recalcitrant investments.’

Doesn’t that sound like blaming the victim to you?....or, at the very least, transferring responsibility to the people who had no power, freedom, or agency over their own lives.

Chance