Underground Railroad

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e with their masters.
Let us now consider both these points of views in details. First of all, let us look at the slaves’ description of the cloth they wore. The clothes supply was as minimum as possible and the quality of the clothes was very bad. Here is how one of the slaves describes it. “Our dress was of tow cloth; for the children nothing but a shirt; for the older ones a pair of pantaloons or a gown in addition, according to the sex. ... In winter, a round jacket or overcoat, a wool hat once in two or three years, for the males, and a pair of coarse shoes once a year”(Lester 65). This scanty list of items was the only things available to the slaves. Certainly, it was not enough for the people who worked very hard for more than ten hours a day. The clothes were very dirty and with holes all over the place pretty soon. 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). This testimony by the slave owner actually testifies the slaves’ descriptions of the slavery that makes us believe to the slaves even more. 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 [a black person] would have at least the protection of one master interested in his welfare; as a freeman, almost beyond the pale of government protec...