American Slavery

The different narratives of all those slaves expands the knowledge of American slavery because they are personal experiences those people share with the world, and tell them things that they didn’t know before. Those slaves narrate new things one has not seen elsewhere. It shows how slaves were brutally treated, discriminated, forced to work hard at a young age, illiterate, etc.

In the narrative of Charity Anderson, she describes how she remembers “seeing slaves torn up by dogs and whipped unmercifully.” Slaves that didn’t obey or do poorly in their chores would be beaten and/or fed to dogs as punishment. The whippings would be so hard that most slaves would be left cruelly deformed.

Other slaves were purchased by their masters like objects in a store, as it happened to Walter Calloway. By the time Walter was ten years old, he was forced to do a grown man’s work. Most slave children are forced to work in arduous chores of the fields and outdoors from a young age, and if they did not do as asked, they would be punished just like adult slaves.

Emma Crocket learned to read a bit of printing after the emancipation, but she never learned how to read handwriting. Slaveholders weren’t allowed to educate a slave because society feared that as soon as slaves learned enough, they’d rebel against them, for most of what held them prisoners to slavery was ignorance. If a slaveholder was caught educating a slave, they’d be persecuted by the law and arrested.

Tempe H. Durham describes how female slaves and their white mistresses spun, wove, and dyed cloth on the plantation, along with more women work. Back then, neither slave nor white women were counted with importance, and they were left to do woman work. However, since female slaves were even lower than the regular women, they would be discriminated and forced to do men’s work and arduous work equally.

Clayton Holbert mentions how slaves had to wave their own clothes, butcher their own meat, and make their own maple sugar. Slaves weren’t given shoes, and small children wore the same clothes regardless of the gender. Slaveholders wouldn’t facilitate the slaves’ necessities at all.

Some slaves would be freed, but then they would unfortunately be recaptured by slave dealers and sold back into slavery. Other slaves would be made to join the Union Army during the Civil War, as Holbert’s father, brother, and uncle did.

Some slaveholders would be nice at times, like Joseph Holmes’ mistress, who did not allow her slaves to be mistreated. She raised slaves for the market, so she considered it poor business to mistreat them. It was probably nothing but convenience, but at least she gave her slaves a break.

Ben Horry talks about the poor diet slaves had. They were not fed constantly, and when they were, they were given bad food in really small quantities. He also shows how white people didn’t allow any ‘inappropriate behavior’ in slaves by talking about the punishment his father received for intemperate drinking.

Other slaves were left with absolutely nothing after slavery’s end, like Fountain Hughes and his family. He tells the reader how he and his brother had to sneak into a white family’s livery at night in order to leave the cold. He also mentions how slaves were sold at auctions like objects.