Arguing Against Slavery Using Douglass Essay

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rightly named: he was a cruel man. I have seen him whip a woman, causing the blood to run half an hour at the time; and this, too, in the midst of her crying children, pleading for their mother's release. He seemed to take pleasure in manifesting his fiendish barbarity," (Chapter 2). The shocking cruelty Frederick Douglass describes in his autobiography constitutes one of the first and most thorough slave narratives. Douglass and other former slaves revealed to readers the real face of slavery rather than the propaganda that allowed the institution to metastasize for centuries. Given the fact that slavery by definition entails treating people worse than animals while using psychological and physical torture and also denying them the right to extricate themselves from the situation let alone take part in the societies in which they live, there can be no possible justification for the practice. In fact, it is impossible to argue logically that slavery had any benefit at all to society. Slavery destroyed lives, undermined the credibility of the Constitution and core values of the United States, and hindered -- not promoted -- economic growth.

Slavery crushes the human spirit of both slaveholder and slave. Crushed spirits are bad for the economy and even worse for quality of life. A crushed spirit cannot take joy in what he or she does, cannot contribute to society, and cannot reach his or her highest human potential. Douglass frequently describes in detail the ways slaves' spirits were crushed. "Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears," (Douglass, Chapter 2). Anyone who hears slaves' songs and believes them to be an expression of contentedness is sorely wrong. Slaveholders might have claimed that they treated their slaves humanely, but it is categorically impossible to humanely treat a slave -- the person is trapped.

Douglass's narrative is filled with despair that testifies to the immorality of the institution. In Chapter 7 he even admits his suicidal thoughts as he realized that he might be in chains his entire life. "I was now about twelve years old, and the thought of being a slave for life began to bear heavily upon my heart," (Douglass, Chapter 7). A person who is beaten in body and beaten down in the mind and soul is not going to be a good citizen, a good worker, or someone who contributes to the betterment of their family and community. That person will only do what it takes to avoid getting beaten, which is not the way to cultivate a positive workforce or a generative economy. Slaves are denied the right of participating in government and therefore cannot contribute their minds or their energy to the democratic process, which is the foundation of American political and social life. Slavery is therefore bad for democracy and bad for the economy.

Even slaveholders suffer from being a part of this cruel, unjust, and inhumane system. Referring to one of his owners in Baltimore, Douglass states, "slavery proved as injurious to her as it did to me," (Chapter 7). The woman in question, Mrs. Hughes, was someone who was otherwise a kind person and Douglass recognized that, but under the influence of slavery her entire disposition transformed. Slavery turned "the tender heart" into "stone, and the lamblike disposition gave way to one of tiger-like fierceness," (Chapter 7). Thus, even from a slaveholder perspective, the institution is harmful, disgusting, and fraudulent in every way as it brings out the worst in human beings including hypocrisy, aggression, bigotry, irrationality, and violence. All of Douglass's slave owners have been brainwashed to believe that the institution is just and even necessary, but it is not. The economy of the early United States might have been built on slavery, but that economy might have been ten times greater if slaves had been liberated and allowed to start businesses, own lands, and contribute to the gross national product. Slaveholders who believe that their businesses depended on slave labor would have been better off liberating their slaves and soliciting their input into how to improve crop yields, promote worker productivity and worker satisfaction, or how to better market their wares. Instead, slaveholders systematically neglected to value the intellectual input of their slaves, going so far as to actively prevent them from learning how to read or write.

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Douglass had to lie and sneak in order to teach himself how to read.

One of the main reasons why slavery hinders progress is its abject cruelty, which does not correspond to the values of liberty, justice, and freedom upon which the nation was founded. Slavery is barbaric and backwards, an institution that completely goes against every ideal, vision, and value of the United States. This is why Douglass describes the system as a "fraud," (Chapter 10). The law protected slaveholders, allowing them to commit crimes against slaves that would never have been permitted otherwise. A criminal justice system that does not provide equal protection under the law is naturally illegitimate because it favors some groups of people over others. Slavery allows laws to be arbitrarily enforced. Because slavery in the United States was a hundred percent based on race, the result was a legacy of racism that continues until this day and will be difficult to purge entirely from the American consciousness. The institution of slavery essentially destroyed the country's integrity. Denying an entire ethnic group the rights and privileges guaranteed by the Constitution abnegates the very foundation of that Constitution.

As Douglass points out, most slaveholders and most proponents of slavery claimed to be Christian. Yet slavery and Christianity are incompatible, as Douglass points out. Just as slavery corrupts the integrity of the American Constitution and the foundation of its laws, slavery also denigrates Christianity and therefore all communities that claim to be Christian. "I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land," (Douglass, Appendix). No person can claim that slavery is ethical, given the fact that slavery employs methods like whipping, beating, and even killing slaves.

Douglass's experience in Baltimore shows how slavery is potentially devastating for both social progress and economic prosperity. In Baltimore, Douglass learned how to read and write and learns why "education and slavery were incompatible with each other," (Chapter 7). Education teaches learners to think freely, critically, and creatively -- which is essentially the opposite of what slavery teaches. Slavery teaches the enslaved to hate life, to hate the slaveholder, and to kill any innate sense of hope or vision. Douglass also states that "going to live at Baltimore laid the foundation, and opened the gateway, to all my subsequent prosperity," (Chapter 5). Here, the author clearly claims that his prosperity (like that of other freed African-Americans) depended on being free. If all slaves had been willingly freed, each and every African-American would have expanded their minds, contributing to the academic and intellectual growth of the country. Slavery is incompatible with intellectual, moral, or psychological growth. As Douglass puts it, "to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason," (Chapter 10). Likewise, freed slaves would have been able to participate in civic life as public officials, become entrepreneurs, scientists, inventors, or doctors. Instead, their lives were wasted because of shortsighted and abjectly cruel, greedy slaveholders and those who supported them for whatever reason.

Because slavery prevents people from living up to their potential, the institution stifles economic growth. Slaves cannot contribute to the economy because not only are they unable to start businesses, but they have no purchasing power. A business that builds itself on slave labor is unsustainable because new leaders are not being developed from the workforce. Those types of businesses will naturally stagnate, and the slaves will inevitably revolt. The United States was one of the last bastions of slavery, and slaves in America like Douglass were already realizing that in Europe slavery had already stopped. It was only a matter of time before the slave owners would have to come up with a new business model. Slaves are broken spirits who cannot promote the economic growth of their communities or their country. "I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died," (Douglass, Chapter 10).

Slavery achieves no positive goal for anyone, including the slaveholder. Free labor does provide the illusion of quick profits, and indeed the American South did boast large and prosperous plantation owners who capitalized on a business model that depended on slavery. However, slavery came to undermine.....

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