Slavery: Right Or Wrong

6 Pages 1480 Words

Slavery: Right or Wrong?
Alexis de Tocqueville once said, "Oppression has, at one stroke, deprived the descendants of the Africans of almost all the privileges of humanity. The Negro of the United States has lost all remembrance of his country; the language which his forefathers spoke is never heard around him; he abjured their religion and forgot their customs when he ceased to belong to Africa, without acquiring any European privileges. But he remains halfway between the two communities; sold by the one, repulsed by the other; finding not a spot in the universe to call by the name of the country, except the faint image of a home which the shelter of his master's roof affords" (Conlin 363). This paper will focus on how the difficult happenings of a slaves life has made them hate and fear slavery, but desire freedom. It will also include the steps that slaves and abolitionists made towards achieving their steps for freedom and what society did to try to keep them as slaves.
It is an intriguing fact that we can trace back slavery as long as the human race had existed. The earliest form of slavery was known as the Mosaic Institutions (Blake 2). This ancient mosaic institution helped keep captive the Hebrews in Egypt. The Bible says, "Look," he said to his people, "the Israelites have become much too numerous for us . . . So they put slave masters over them to oppress them with forced labor . . . They made their lives bitter with hard labor in brick and mortar and with all kinds of work in the fields; in all their hard labor the Egyptians used them ruthlessly" (Exodus 1:9, 11, 14). The Lord said, "I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering" (Exodus 3:7). Slavery kept its head a float through the mercenarii of the Romans and continued on through the nineteenth century into the Americans. Today, in the twenty-first century, sl...