What makes slavery immoral

The death of a slave, based on the circumstances, could be reimbursed by the state or local jurisdiction; meanwhile, the life of a free or freed black was worth nothing in a slave society. Most blacks hated slavery. They were generally treated better, and many of them were the offspring of their owners or someone else in the family. While the overwhelming majority of slaves wished they were free. Children were used to tell the mistress what the other slaves were saying back in the slave quarters.

Some of the children were given candy and other little treats when they revealed information against other enslaved. However, when the other slaves found out who betrayed them, those slaves were ostracized. In many cases, the adult enslaved would not say very much around their children because they knew how the children were used by their oppressors.

If the men or women complained, they could be punished or killed. Most blacks were not considered Americans, and in , the Supreme Court stated in the Dred Scott Decision that blacks were not American citizens.

Officially blacks became full American citizens after the 13 th , 14 th , and 15 th Amendments to the Constitution. Although abolitionists and the Underground Railroad helped turn some in the North away from slavery, these other events helped bring the nation to war:. It became a best seller but was banned in the Southern states. The book made more Northern people aware of the cruelty of slavery, and many of them looked negatively upon the South as a result. The South now thought that most of the people in the North were abolitionist, but this was not true.

The Anthony Burns Case in centered on a slave who had been hired out but escaped to Boston. He wrote a letter to his brother, still owned by their slaveowner, who received the letter. Two groups of abolitionists, one small black group and a larger white one, charged the jail in an attempt to free him. One deputy was killed, and two men who got inside the jail were beaten back. President Franklin Pierce ordered the Marines and some artillery to go to Boston and escort Burns back into slavery.

A large crowd watched as the Federal force took Burns back to the South. The most important issue here was the president of the United States used the United States Marines to bring back a fugitive slave. Think of the cost for bringing back one slave. How did that look to the North, when a slaveowner, backed by the U. Both pro- and anti-slavery groups flocked to the territories and actually fought each other from through the Civil War. This act definitely moved the United States toward Civil War, but Kansas became a free state in Colonel Robert E.

Lee would lead Marines to capture Brown, who was then tried and convicted by the State of Virginia. He was executed, but he became a martyr for the abolitionist cause and rightly predicted that the slavery question would be settled by bloodshed. The South was horrified: a slave rebellion was led by a Northern white man, using escaped slaves.

Every Southern state begin opening military schools, if they did not already have them. War was now imminent. Slavery is the overwhelming cause of the Civil War. Slavery was the economic system of the South. If you took it away, you took away the wealth of many of the planters. The only way plantations could survive was for slaves to work the property. I have seen wills of large plantation owners where the majority of their wealth was in the value of their slaves.

After the war, many of these owners could no longer afford their homes without their slaves. The North was not innocent, either. Some Northern states did not want any blacks, whether free or slave, to live within their borders. The North was just as racist as the South in this regard. Many white men and white immigrants did not want to compete with slave labor or free blacks, as that would bring down wages and take away some of their jobs.

Inside enslaved quarters at Ben Lomond Historic Site. A former slave woman told her granddaughter the story of a former slave, who got married after the war. One day she and husband talked about their old days in slavery. She told him about her baby boy sold away from her and about a distinctive scar on his arm.

Her husband had that same scar on his arm and when he discussed his story, they found out that they were mother and son. He soon left her because he could not stay married to his mother. That is a tragedy and they may not have been the only couple that had that problem. There were other stories in that book of families meeting and siblings not recognizing or knowing their kin. After the war, many slaves searched the South to try to connect with their families—some were successful, but most were not!

In this case, I would have the mother put herself in the position of the slave woman. Suppose her children were sold away from her, suppose her husband was put out of their cabin while a slaveowner stayed with her and, when her husband complained, he was severely whipped.

An excellent post, but from the standpoint of years after the Civil War. A better question by the woman would have been to express surprise why a system so economically profitable and with powerful Northern allies felt so threatened?

But the Unionists were fueled much more by anti-Southern animus than anti slavery indignation, at least during most of the war. It was, as Lincoln recognized it, a refutation of free labor and personal growth, the very ideals, in an admittedly imperfect way, the North was seeking to achieve.

That, and the enormous physical, human and emotional toll the war itself took. Incidents such as this always remind me that you and your colleagues are required to have a unique skill set which I, for one, lack — the ability to deal professionally with astonishingly ignorant questions. They were handled with a straight face and without a hint of sarcasm or exasperation. The incident you describe also supports my firm belief that we do an abysmal job of teaching US history in our educational system.

Actually, if we only teach United States history without putting our social system in the world context we might create a false negative paradigm, and come to false conclusions. Slavery, particularly in the earlier years of the Republic, was hardly an exclusively American phenomenon.

England could eliminate its own system of slavery due to the growth of their own cotton mills as a source of wealth to replace sugar, as well as the relatively few freedmen residing in the home countries. And for a century, they had been aware that cotton rapidly depleted the existing soil. I personally find it hard to believe that such a question would be asked by any white person of a black one in this day and age in the USA.

The author seems to condemn the woman. Was this woman an American? I thought historians were supposed to take those things into consideration? But we also know that it was perfectly legal THEN. Thomas Jefferson could expound on that. If there is any reason to be disappointed with the question, perhaps any real outrage should be directed at our educational system? I think this goes beyond the educational system. That there was a teenaged child there and mom still asks such a harebrained question is simply appalling.

None of us were there. Talk to any NPS employee who deals with questions from the visiting public and you will hear things that are astonishingly stupid or callous. Since none of us were there, I see no reason not to accept his account as accurate. Nothing about his reflection on this suggests otherwise. Or if certain subjects are to be discussed, does that not apply?

Just like everybody from California and Florida and elsewhere is, right? But I digress. I will give the benefit of the doubt that she IS a citizen.

He did volunteer that she is white. He IS black, and an expert in his field. He says her teenage children were with her. Meg above made mention about them.

My point stands. People ask stupid or ignorant questions every day in these settings. My questions stand. He made it a point to speak about her skin color. You are free to do or believe as you wish about him or what he claims. They are NOT what I question. They are not being obtuse; they genuinely do not know. Like it or not, some adults have the same awareness of History as children. In the case of slavery, and its inherent evil, the answer should be easy for everyone.

And in the case of America, a War was fought that brought that evil practice to an end. My two bob. In I dare say there was even one white man in all of America that thought a black man was his equal. Certainly, there were very few in , but the war came anyway. Regardless of how history is taught, there will always be people who are generally ignorant of it. They could have the greatest teachers and learn nothing. I would like to respond to the many comments that I have received of this post.

The woman who made this comment made it to one of my white colleagues, but her voice and tone were loud because the Fredericksburg Battlefield Visitor Center was crowded. Her voice was heard by everyone standing close to her, in front of and behind the counter.

I was waiting on another visitor when I heard the question. Her children may or may not have been paying attention to her and I do not know why she asked the question. She may have asked the question because one of her children may have been working on a Civil War project or maybe it was because she was aware that slavery was the major cause of the Civil War.

Since she knew that information, I do not think her question was an ignorant one. I have heard and read far worse, since I have worked at this National Military Park. This family was going on the next guided tour of the Sunken Road and I was going to lead it. I chose to use her question as a teaching experience and spent an extra five to ten minutes to discuss slavery on the tour. I had recently conducted a History at Sunset program with our Chief Historian, John Hennessy, who is an expert on slavery.

Therefore, I discussed slavery using Fredericksburg as my Civil War example. I explained that local, state, and Federal laws protected slavery in Fredericksburg and in the southern states. I briefly explained slavery in Fredericksburg and contrasted it with the surrounding counties. I discussed the first Union occupation of Fredericksburg from April to August , when over 10, slaves escaped from the city and the surrounding counties — including a couple from the Richmond area.

I also touched on my favorite subject, as I told the group that many of those escaped men returned as soldiers in the 23rd United States Colored Troops and became the first African Americans to fight in directed combat against the Army of Northern Virginia.

In essence, I did not take her question as one of ignorance, but as one which need a legitimate response. As far as my background in interacting with white people, in most of my professional life, I have had jobs and two careers, where most of my colleagues were white.

I spent 35 years in the financial services industry, working my way up from a part-time teller to an Area Manager and Senior Vice President in Retail Banking. I have spent the last 14 years in the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park as a volunteer, an Interpretive Park Ranger, and a sales associate, in the bookstores.

So I have developed a lot of patience in interacting with people of all races and ethnic groups. So, when I am asked a question, I try to give an intelligent answer or as in this case, give the answer by giving the individual the information in an interpretive talk. I have seen visitors who ask questions to provoke arguments, make jokes about learning about the Civil War, and just because they were not taught or did not learn about the Civil War.

I have had thousands of Civil War conversations in my life. Many of them occur because many of our schools do not teach American History or Civics government , I was lucky because I was taught those subjects in elementary, junior high, and senior high schools. I learned a significant amount of information about the antebellum period and Civil War because it was my favorite time period in American history. I have learned a great deal more in my time with the National Park Service.

Since I have been at this park, I have learned that all school systems are not the same in teaching Civil War history and so many Americans, young and old, do not know much about the Civil War. I feel that it is my job to try to educate them, when they go on my tours or ask me questions. I have heard and seen many comments from Americans that show there are a lot of Americans, who are still saying the same things that were said over years ago. There are still people who do not believe slavery was a cause of the war.

In fact, there was an Asian American woman, who was visiting Chancellorsville with a group of Germans. It was after closing, as I was leaving, I was in my park ranger uniform, they asked me some questions about the Civil War. I talked to them about the war for about 30 minutes and at the end, the Asian American woman said that she did not believe that slavery was a cause of the war. I referred her to several sources of Civil War history, plus I informed her that she could read the southern states secession documents.

She just walked away and said she just did not believe it. I had just spent my own time, giving her group a short history of the Civil War and the Germans thanked me, but she walked away in disgust. I find that there are many foreigners who know more about our Civil War, than Americans know. Whether that Asian American woman even ventured to look at the documents or read any books about the war, I cannot say. However, I think that she was more ignorant about the war than the white woman who asked the question, what was so wrong with slavery and why did it cause the Civil War.

They also must take a course and pass an end-of-year test in American History. I have taught both. What was so wrong with slavery? Well what was so wrong with Slavery? What was so good about it? And can you answer them truthfully without being emotionally or racially biased?

Why did it Slavery cause the Civil War? What other issues were prevalent or equally as central to dividing the United States? The South left the Union because the tide had turned against that peculiar institution as the United States expanded. Rather than work within the system, the South decided to leave a Union that the FF intended to be perpetual.

In , the South wrote that they were leaving the Union because of slavery. Some people fail to get the word; others choose not to believe it. In the end, the effort to dispense Truth must be continued, one person at a time.

Blacks went from being enslaved by other African Blacks in Brutish Tribal Warfare to having reliable food, shelter, medical treatment and constructive work. Guess what? Blacks today still live on the Democrat hand-out plantation as hapless, witless creatures needing someone to take care of them. In fact, compared to Africa, it was Paradise. It is indeed available, Pat.

People like John who enjoy displaying their ignorance, bigotry, and hatred are shackled to a unique form of latter-day slavery. And yet Whites were and are no less equally enslaved. You might be enslaved yourself. Now how could that be? What do you labor for and for whom?

Whites were able to move and offer their services…. When you dehumanize an entire race, then it is easy to treat them in a bad way. Ho, ho, ho… and the punchline of this emotional dramatisation — the photo of the author at the end. Overall, the experience of the average slave would have compared favourably with the alternative — 19th century darkest Africa.

Democracies are designed to resolve issues like this without resort to mass expulsions, coup attempts, or the demand that those who disagree with us leave the country. Steward T. Henderson, the author, is not in clownface, but perhaps ATD finds his photo laughable for other reasons. I would prefer not to know what they are. My mother never manifested any form of prejudice in all my years of growing up and she taught us accordingly. She was of the WW2 generation and ahead of her time in many ways.

And as far as group politics is concerned, I could care less. Was ATD responding solely to my comments, perhaps? We are still living with the after effects of the Civil War. Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person. Article 3, Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms Article 4, Universal Declaration of Human Rights. History of slavery The puzzle of slavery People often think that slavery was always good for the slave owners in that it provided them with a pool of cheap labour.

While this was sometimes true, slavery also brought a number of problems for canny business-people: Capital is required up-front to buy the slaves Recruitment costs can be high if slaves run away or die and must be replaced Supervision and guarding costs are high Slaves are often un-productive, either deliberately or because of poor conditions So slave labour was not always an obvious choice; its particular value came when labour was hard to get, and war or traders were offering slaves at a price that made sense.

Slavery was a very common practice Slavery may be wrong but it's occurred almost everywhere and from ancient times: Religious texts in Judaism, Islam and Christianity all recognise slaves. The Mayans and Aztecs kept slaves in the Americas. The Sumerians and Babylonians kept slaves in the Near East. The Egyptians kept huge numbers of slaves, including the Jews, Europeans and Ethiopians. The Greeks and Romans kept slaves as soldiers, servants, labourers and even civil servants.

The Romans captured slaves from what are now Britain, France and Germany. The Ottomans and Egyptians kept slaves and used slave armies. In Africa there were a number of societies and kingdoms which kept slaves before there was any regular commercial contact with Europeans, including the Asanti, the Kings of Bonny and Dahomey. In Imperial Russia in the first half of the 19th century one third of the population were serfs, who, like slaves in the Americas, had the status of chattels and could be bought and sold.

Find out more Buddhism and slavery Christianity and slavery Islam and slavery Top. See also. Religion and Ethics home Religions. Ultimately the most divisive political issue was whether slavery should be allowed in new territories. By , a substantial majority of northerners supported the policy of the new Republican Party, to exclude slavery totally from all territories. The election of Republican Abraham Lincoln in prompted the secession of seven southern states even before he took office, and his refusal to recognize the legitimacy of their Confederacy led four more states to secede.

The resulting Civil War eventually produced a decision by Lincoln to issue his Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves in the Confederacy.

The freedom of other slaves—including those held in the Union states of Kentucky and Delaware—was not insured until passage of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution in These are complex developments, but they will be covered in more or less straightforward chronological fashion in any good U.

Taking these arguments in reverse order: While contemporary critics of slavery believed that it was, indeed, economically backward, it is important for your students to understand that slavery was a quite profitable economic system for slave owners, and that it was, in narrow, technical terms, quite efficient in the production of valuable commodities. Furthermore, the slave states—especially the cotton states—were flourishing economically in the s.

Whatever the long-term prospects for slave labor, there is no reason whatsoever to think that slavery was in danger of economic collapse on the eve of the Civil War. As for a conflict between slave and free labor societies, challenge your students to explain just why such a conflict was inevitable.

Cotton, for example, provided profits not only for southerners, but also for northern merchants who sold the cotton the most valuable commodity in U. Or, ask why farmers in Illinois and Ohio—mainly agricultural states—should have any economic reason to oppose slavery in Kentucky or Mississippi.

If they bring up the issue of tariffs, a source of real disagreement at times, point out that conflict over tariffs had almost disappeared by the s, just when sectional disputes intensified.

The argument based on moral progress raises different sorts of questions. Students, for example, may believe that the main historical problem is to decide why slavery, a self-evidently immoral system, existed at all, rather than why it was ended. Here, the challenge is to get them to understand that the existence of antislavery , not slavery, is the greater historical problem. New World slavery is no historical anomaly.

Slavery is one of the most widespread institutions in human history, familiar to the Hebrews of the Old Testament, central in ancient Greece and Rome, and accepted without controversy by early Christians.

To be sure, slaves in all systems have resisted their own enslavement in a variety of ways, but it was not until the middle of the eighteenth century that a broad spectrum of intellectual and religious leaders began to argue that slavery itself, and as a system, was wrong, and should be abolished. Suppose that, years from now, the eating of meat has been completely banned and the killing of animals for meat is seen as a heinous crime.

Would that give future historians the right to look back on us, in the twenty-first century, as hopelessly evil and immoral people? The goal is to get students to see that even some of their most powerful moral perceptions may be time-bound, that moral perception itself can undergo historical change. Thinking about it this way may also help them to understand what the abolitionists were up against as they campaigned against this powerful and profitable institution, and why they were seen, as they so often were, as mere cranks and troublemakers.

For the U. Discussion of this point may open the way to a consideration of the benefits and costs of radical vs. Give your students a few pages of the exchanges on slavery and race from the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates of There is a physical difference between the two, which in my judgment will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality, and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity, that there must be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong, having the superior position.

This will present students with yet another important question—why did Lincoln eventually issue an Emancipation Proclamation, and why did the Civil War end slavery in the United States?

Here the actions of southern slaves, on the one hand, and the contingencies of war, on the other, proved crucial. Long before the Emancipation Proclamation was issued in the preliminary proclamation in September , tens of thousands of slaves had run away to Union lines, presenting both a practical problem and a potential opportunity.

After more than a year of war, northern armies had suffered severe defeats and northern manpower was becoming difficult to tap. Emancipation was a war measure, designed to cripple the southern states economically and militarily and to open the way to recruitment of black soldiers.