Slaveholders
Consider the slaveholders and overseers described by Douglass in the first two chapters of his Narrative. Can we call these people "evil"? Explain your response.
Please respond by 10 pm Tuesday night.
Please respond by 10 pm Tuesday night.
posted by Kristin L at 8:18 AM
10 Comments:
The slave holders are evil. They find joy in whipping the slaves and making them bleed for hours. They show no remorse when the slaves yell and scream and when they plead for mercy. The overseer, Mr. Plummer, was the meanest one of them all. He would always carry a whip and a heavy cudgel. The man would cut and slash the slaves’ heads so bad the Master of the farm would scold him. The harmful side of these people are always present and there. The pleasant, nice, side never appears and therefore, they seem to be evil. Exceptions exist with every thing and there is also an exception to the slave holders and overseers. Mr. Hopkins was the only overseer that took no pleasure in whipping the slaves.
I don't believe that the slaveholders are evil, because it is their way of life. Society has imprinted in their brains that it is okay to whip them. It is not there fault that this view has been imprinted in them. In this time period slaves were not seen as people they were seen as posessions. I think it is wrong and completely unethical, however it is not the slaveholders fault, it is societies. We cannot blame these people and call them evil, for something they didn't realize was wrong
I don't think that we can call all slave holders evil, because even though some of the slave holders enjoyed torturing their slaves, they didn't all enjoy it so. I also think that some slave holders didn't think that they were doing wrong, because that was what they had been tought to think since they were children. Also, it was socially acceptable to do things like that to slaves, and to own slaves.
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Yes, I do think that the slave owners that beat and whip the slaves are evil. Although I do not believe that the ones who treated them nicely and not evil. Even though back then you were bought up to treat black people poorly. I do not think I would have been able to whip a black person. I think I would relize that they were normal humans who acted the same as white people. So, I do think that the slave owners who whipped and beat there slaves were evil.
Yes, I strongly believe that we can call slaveholders "evil". They really go out of place to put these slaves into misery, and they do it just to make them work harder? I don't understand what whipping somebody is going to accomplish. There is just no purpose for them to do that, and therefore, I believe that it is an evil work.
I believe that the slaveholders in this book are indeed evil. No matter the time period, their actions are uncalled for. For example when the young woman did not fulfill her masters orders her master found an excessive amount of plessure in whipping her until her blood ran off her body onto the floor. Another example on a less severe level would be not providing small children with clothes even in the winter. No one deserves to go through that especially young children. Altogether their actions were completely out of hand and very evil.
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I believe that the slaveholders were evil. They enjoyed beating the crap out of the slaves whether it was with a whip or a club. They have no conscience. They whip their slaves for their entertainment. However, Mr.Hopkins showed a little compassion, like a parent to a child.
Some people are saying that the slave holders are not evil because society made them the way they are. Yet, who is society? They are! Pointless argument.
Still, I don't know. Obviously (or at least, hopefully) the slave holders did not think of themselves as evil. So what did they think? How did they justify their actions? Looking only at Frederick Douglass's opinion is foolish to the extreme. We are only seeing one side of the argument, and it is the side we usually agree with in contemporary society. Thus, we gain little. Instead, we should be reading a slaveholders' diary AND Frederick Douglass, THEN making our decisions based on all the evidence laid before us.
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