Slavery and the Revolution
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Slavery and the Revolution
After going through chapter 6, the most exciting part of it was about the slaves and their owners and the process towards freedom and how that was achieved. Slavery and the revolution was the part of chapter six which was most appealing to me. First of all, when Americans complained about slaves being mistreated and denied basic human rights, Britain replied by stating that it was the Americans who had the slaves and not them. Therefore, it was up to Americans. In these states, it can be seen clearly that Britain had brought slavery for their areas colonized in the US, but they did not feel responsible for the other ill-treatment these black men were going through.
The other thing is that at the time of independence in the United States, the slaves were so many, especially in the south, that they totaled like 500,000 slaves. This was a significant number to maintain or give freedom, and therefore there had to be ways to prevent them from doing some things that the whites were doing. This was because even though the whites gave them freedom, it did not mean that they thought they were equal but instead, most whites believed that it was a decent thing to do. An eighteenth-century writer notes there are two extremes of happiness and misery, including freedom and slavery. Freedom is sweet and has responsibility, and slavery is full of misery.
However, one thing comes out clearly that the whites needed to thank the blacks who were their slaves since it was due to their efforts and work that the American whites managed to obtain freedom from Great Britain. The whites were also very well developed from the actions and works of these blacks, and therefore they needed to treat them better than the way they were treating them at that particular time.
As freedom continued to be talked about, there was a great desire on the side of the slaves to be free and to do their things without the supervision of the whites. This led to the petition for freedom which even the blacks defined freedom for themselves by stating that freedom is a universal right and that every human being needed to have it. From this definition, there came a need to have universal liberty. Several white people also championed this, who firmly believed that slavery was the wrong way to go. Therefore they tried to convince their counterparts that they had to declare freedom. In the United States, the first part of proclaiming freedom was the north. The south was adamant about doing this since they depended heavily on slaves for the cotton farms and other types of works and therefore after the civil war, they had to set slaves free.
Reference
Foner, E. (2013). Give Me Liberty! An American History: Seagull Fourth Edition (Vol. 1). WW Norton & Company.
