Slavery's Entrenchment and Morality in Early American Society

Slavery’s entrenchment in American society by the the early 19th century began when cotton became such an important crop in America, and comprised more than half of the U.S.’s total export revenue.  According to the University of Oregon’s “Mapping History” modules that we analyzed during class, with the cotton industry booming by the 1860’s, the worth of cotton increased to 191,800,000 dollars in total.  Given the very high worth of cotton and its importance in American agriculture, more of it was needed to be produced, resulting in more slaves being needed, to harvest more cotton to be manufactured.  The increase in the number of slaves in the U.S. at the time as the cotton industry continued to grow, led to there being about 3,954,000 slaves living in the U.S. on the eve of the Civil War.  With so much of the population made up of slaves, it made slavery continue to stay in the states because they could not simply force millions of people to leave their homes and abandon the industries they made successful.  

A system of slavery based on race affects human dignity because of the implication and assumption by this system that one race is superior over the other.  Enslaved Africans were told so many times over and over again both verbally and via the actions of their white masters, that their lives were worthless, that everyone was replaceable, and that they were born inferior to whites, that they eventually began to believe that.  This acceptance of oppression and horrific treatment because that was all they had ever known, led to slavery becoming so longstanding; most of the slaves did not know any other way of life, and simply went along with it because it was what they were conditioned to believe was normal.

A system of slavery based off of race ignores basic human dignity and liberty.  It objectifies human beings, and makes people feel superior or inferior to others simply based on their race and heritage, something that should never define how people treat you.  It also made people ignorant and unsympathetic, one example being George Fitzhugh’s Cannibals All!, saying, “The Negro slaves of the South are the happiest, and, in some sense, the freest people in the world.”  Views like this were preposterous and ignorant, brought about by white people who were never affected negatively by race-based slavery, and did not understand the horrible hardships both physically and emotionally, that the African slaves were put through every day of their lives.