Slavery

12 Pages 3121 Words

y hard for more than ten hours a day. The clothes were very dirty and with holes. Imagine if you have to wear the same shirt day after day for the long time. The masters did not care about slaves’ children; they did not distribute much clothes for them either. According to the slaves, it was their problem what to put on their children when it was cold outside (Feldstein 45). However, some slaves say there were some masters who gave some extra material for the children, but it was not sufficient any way. Others gave any additional clothes only for extra work (Feldstein 45). As for the slave owners’ seeing the slaves’ situation, one of the slaveholders reveals that he used to distribute new clothes once a year (Feldstein 45).
However, there were a lot of slave owners who saw the situation quite differently. One anonymous slave owner in his letter to Lord Brougham argues that “...as a slave, he would have at least the protection of one master interested in his welfare; as a freeman, almost beyond the pale of government protection, with no one to take care of him, of a despised and inferior race, a stranger in a land of strangers, how miserable would be his fate!”(Williams 41) The slave owners really believed that slavery was very beneficial for the slaves, and they clothed their slaves well.
According to the slaves, their dwellings were unimaginably poor huts that were not suited for living at all. Let us look at some descriptions of their huts to realize how terrible the conditions of the slaves were. One of the slaves remembers that the hut usually was “...one-room log cabin... without a partition and a total furnishing were generally a bed, a bench and a few cooking utilities” (Feldstein 42). Another former slave tells us that “...they erected with posts and crotches, with but little or no frame-work about them. They no stoves or chimneys; some of them something like a fireplace at the end...” (Mo...