When slavery was an issue in the Western world, everybody knew it was wrong. Something that most humans can comprehend is that owning another person is wrong. Yet, there was slavery for several hundred years in the United States, so people who could not or did not want to do something about it, came up with ways to rationalize and justify it. When slavery became illegal in the United States, the bigotry that arose out of slavery was so ingrained that it became vile racism that still survives today. Racism helped to destroy Reconstruction and led to Jim Crow, segregation and voter disenfranchisement. Racism also served to keep African Americans in a place of servitude for nearly another century after the end of Reconstruction. Some spoke out against the racism, such as W.E.B. DuBois. He saw hope for black people in American society, and believed that true equality may be achieved.
Many different ways to justify slavery were presented to those who opposed it. Since, the United States is a religious country, one popular and authoritative rationalization was that God ordained slavery. Those who championed this excuse would use verses from the Christian bible that talked about slaves being faithful to their masters and stories of Noah and his curse on his sons that left the descendants of one of them slaves to the descendants of another. Of course, many parts of the bible can be interpreted to favor whatever cause one wants to promote.
Another argument that was made to rationalize slavery was that slaves were inferior to their masters. This argument said that slaves were not quite fully human, so if they suffer under the oppression of slavery, it is like the oppression that animals feel when humans use them to plow their fields or pull their wagons. Some people who favored this argument thought slaves so inferior they deserved to be slaves. After all, they came from Africa in what Christian Europeans surely thought were heathen societies. Just being around white people, Europeans thought, elevated the slaves’ position. This myth was popular among those who perpetuated the Atlantic slave trade. Similar to the “slaves are inferior” argument is the one that says slavery is good for slaves because it gives them a way to have food, shelter, occupation and Western religion. This argument assumes that slaves were incapable of running their own lives successfully without help from white people. It often took the form of a less than genuine paternalistic interest by the slave owners in their slaves.
More rational, albeit just as misguided, arguments often cited economic reasons for the perpetuation of slavery. A popular economic justification for slavery still made today is that Africans themselves kept slaves and Africans sold the European traders the slaves that the Europeans brought across the Middle Passage to the Americas. For both Africans and Europeans, this is an economic argument. Joseph Inikori says, “African feudalism shared many common features with feudalism in medieval Europe. . . . During the formative period of feudalism in the European Dark Ages slaves were gradually transformed into serf.., while in Africa strong city states and empires destroyed tribal equality and produced a mass of dependent people who were serfs and not slaves” (Inikori 47). Serfs differ from slaves in that they usually sleep in their own home with their family and are not considered the property of the person for whom the work. Serfdom is probably a more correct term for what Europeans labeled the slavery in African communities. “It is hard to find true slaves in the societies affected by the trans-Saharan trade before the coming of the Europeans” (Inikori 60). The argument that says that Africans had slaves so it should have been condoned for Europeans to have them also is one made in the retrospect of many years. Europeans wanted slaves, and Africans went about acquiring slaves for them through wars and captivity of people from other tribes for economic reasons of their own.
Another economic argument said slavery would be too difficult to abolish. This turned out to be true in the case of the United States because it took a civil war with hundreds of thousands of dead Americans to end the practice. An aspect of this argument is that slaves are essential to some industries. For instance, if there had not been slaves to process the cotton from seed to market, it would not have been as lucrative as it turned out to be. Of course, free labor makes any industry more profitable. While it is true that slavery made the economy better for some, it did not make it better for those who did all the work and received none of the rewards. Their enslavement and the society-wide acceptance of slavery only caused heartache, pain and oppression for them.
When economies began to grow and industries such as cotton, sugar cane, rice and i
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