The Slaves' And The Slave Owner's Views Of Slavery

12 Pages 3121 Words

The Slaves’ and the Slave owners’ Views of Slavery
The slavery in the United States is no doubt a shameful history of our country. White people transferred the slaves living in Africa to the New Land and treated them as their property, not as human beings. The living and working conditions of slaves and their food were extremely poor. Those were inhuman conditions in which the slaves had to survive. Endless executions of the slaves made the situation even worse. Slavery was a period of time when one race treated the other race as animals, things, property, but not as people. Unfortunately, not everyone saw the situation as it was in reality at that time.
As we can see from many different sources available today, the points of view of slaves and slave owners on slavery were the opposite of each other. That can be seen in various slaves’ and slave owners’ descriptions of slavery. Slaves described their dwellings, food, clothes, labor, and the terrible treatment of slaves by their masters. On the other hand, slave owners described the relationships between slaves and their masters in a very positive way. They argued that slavery is very beneficial for the slaves and the slaves are very happy to live 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 ver...