Justifications of Slavery in America

According to the film “Americas Journey Through Slavery,” slavery was the most conspicuous contradiction to liberty in the United States. Even Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner himself, believed in the injustice of slavery. He warned of the day that slaves would “rise from the dust.” In order to reconcile this disparity in his beliefs he wrote about the inferiority of Africans. It is interesting to the look at the lengths that supporters of slavery went to to justify what they were doing. I think if slavery had not been so incredibly economically beneficial it would not have lasted. When people saw the economic benefits of free labor, they would not willingly give up the money and gains that went along with it, even if in another situation they would not have sanctioned the enslavement of a group of people. To make slavery acceptable people had to have their own excuses and justifications of why slavery was justifiable and necessary.

One of the most popular methods of desensitizing oneself to slavery was to consider slaves to be property rather than people. In class we talked about the commodification of slaves, or when they began to be considered “commodities,” instead of human. In Soul By Soul Walter Johnson talks about “slave making” which is a method that slave traders employed to make their slaves look more appealing to possible buyers. They would strip slaves of their identities and turn them into prices. Looking at slaves in this way made it a lot easier for people to turn a blind eye to the injustice of slavery. If people see slaves in the same way that they see cattle or objects, it makes it possible for them to ignore the fact that slaves were actually people with families and feelings.

Another argument that slavery supporters used to justify the institution of slavery was that Africans are inferior beings. They were called morally reprobate, and said to be no better than animals. They need to be controlled and kept in check, in order to avoid terrible consequences of having these beasts running around freely. This was one of the reasons that people that were proslavery were so against the education of blacks. Not only would it show that Africans were just as capable as whites to learn to read and write, an educated slave was a dangerous slave in the eyes of a slaveholder. If slaves could read and write they could write about their experience as a victim of slavery to invoke empathy, which could make people more reluctant to support slavery.

Making slaves into humans was one of the tactics that antislavery advocates used to try and illuminate the moral injustice of slavery. Moral reform was an important idea that abolitionists were using to try and end slavery. Although ultimately this would not work because there were so many other aspects to both the antislavery and proslavery arguments, like the political and economic implications of the end of slavery. Purely the idea that slavery was “morally wrong,” was not enough to lead to a change.