This week, the topic for my class is indentured servitude and slavery. I know, fun stuff. Don't you wish you were in my class week after week? It is pretty depressing stuff and we will be looking at how slaves eventually replaced servants in the New World, simply because life expectancy got better. Pretty twisted, really. People began to live longer, so they decided to buy slaves who could never be free rather than servants who got unruly once their indentures were complete.
The thing that really got me thinking this week, however, was how the utopian ideals of the early colonies were very quickly dashed in favor of profits. Our nation was founded on a culture that was able to ignore the humanity of entire group of people in return for making money. If human beings are capable of enslavement , and brutal punishment to enforce that enslavement, then how is it possible to philosophically believe that humans beings are generally good? I really hope that things get brighter soon, although with slavery enforced for the majority of this time period, it will be hard to swallow the ideology of freedom and democracy during the American Revolution without seeing the shadow that this institution casts on our founding principles.
Now, I am off to get some sleep because I have been thinking too much about servants, slavery, and two small children.
2 comments:
Have you read the book, "Someone Knows Your Name." In Canada it is called "Book of Negroes." They changed the name to make it more acceptable to an American audience. The book is about the slave trade and will definitely make you question humanity. It is an amazing book (and I only get to read about one a year these days).
I have not read that book, but it sounds good (in the literary sense)! I will have to check it out but I may wait until I have had a break from the subject matter.
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