slave resistance Essay Example For Students

slave resistance Essay May 2, 2002Resistance to Slavery and Race OppressionSlavery in the early eighteenth century was horrible for African Americans. Men were being killed, women were being raped and children were being sold. To avoid the unjust treatment of slavery, slaves did the unthinkable. Some ran away, others killed their masters, and women even killed their own children. What were they trying to accomplish by this? Resistance. In the modern reinterpretation of slavery, considerable attention has been devoted to the subject of slave resistance. Earlier observers argued that such slave characteristics as clumsiness, slovenliness, listleness, destructiveness, and inability to learn indicated racial inferiority. Recent studies of slavery attribute these observed characteristics to the slaves, defiant determination to resist slaverys worst manifestations and to make the institution as livable as possible. Slaves recognized that they could take day-to-day action on an individual or small group basis, en gaging in what historians has termed personal or communal foot dragging. Such resistance successfully thwarted the masters attempt to gain total control over their lives. The extent and success of this day-to-day resistance depended upon the support of a strong and close-knit slave community. Despite white societys belief that slaves were nothing more than laborers, they were in fact part of an elaborate and well defined social structure that gave them identity and sustained them in their silent protest. In slave quarters, slaves expressed themselves with relative freedom from white interference. Religion provided a similar support. By attending their own church, whether openly or in secret, slaves fashioned a Christianity that emphasized salvation for all peoples, slaves included, and promised rewards in the afterlife. In church, blacks assumed leadership roles and openly expressed feelings they usually suppress. Masters tried to use religion negatively to teach slaves obedience and duty; slaves used it positively as an affirmation of their self worth and as a promise of future. Their community provided slaves with the chance to be among their own people, to express themselves, to develop their own culture, and to have control over some portions of their own lives. These opportunities were limited and varied greatly, but the ability to be fathers or mothers, to worship in their own church, to take part in a communal holiday celebration, to use gathered gossip against the master all helped to give bondsmen the strength and will to resist the dehumanizing aspects of their ensl avement. Specific forms of slave resistance varied as much as masters and slaves differed in their personalities and situations. The absence of a single slave personality was, in fact, one of the frustrating facts of life for masters. Just when they thought they knew their slaves, the slaves responded in unexpected ways. How could the same individual be a compliant hard worker one day, a slow moving worker the next, a fugitive the third? Many masters found such unpredictable behavior puzzling and troubling. Slaves tried to work at their own pace, resisting speedups, trying, as much as they could to avoid being overworked. Some of the techniques they used were to feign illness or pregnancy, break or misplace tools, mistreat horses and mules, and fake ignorance so they would not have to learn any sophisticated tasks they wished to avoid. When the master or overseer was not looking, slaves might hide among the rows of cotton plants and then load their bags with rocks or sand or wet cotton to camouflage their malingering. If an overseer tried to correct them too harshly, they might become clumsy and destroy crops rather than tend to them. Masters and overseers thought this kind of slave activity exasperating, and some masters responded by planting inferior crop strains, purchasing less efficient but more durable tools, and, in general, lowering agricultural expectations. When such activity failed to ameliorate a condition slaves found oppressive, they might run away. Some proslavery theoris ts saw this tendency toward flight yet another African mental disease, calling it drapetomania. Unless slaves lived near free terriortory, or near a city where they could mix into an urban free black population, they knew that permanent escape was unlikely. Bondsman were more likely to run off for a few days, perhaps to nearby woods, and risk punishment when they return. Other slaves joined in the pursuit and conspired to feed and hide a fugitive until they could pass word that it was safe to return. Only rarely, did a large group of slaves attempt a mass escape or try to establish and maintain an extended independent existence. On numerous occasions, however, groups of runaway slaves either attacked white slave patrollers or tried to bribe them. Beauty and the Beast Anorexia EssayWhen all else failed, slaves still had other means of resistance. Plantations often had conjurers, slaves with supposed supernatural powers. Particularly aggrieved slaves would appeal to the conjurer for a spell to punish an offending white. Because many whites also feared conjurers, these slaves held unusual power within their community. Their position told the slaves that not all whites were superior to all blacks. The conjurer was the only black person regularly able to frighten the normally dominant masters. Sometimes circumstances became so oppressive that slaves received little satisfaction from their usual means of resistance. Then, in their despaired, they turned on an oppressing white, or, in further despair, turned on themselves. Slaves sometimes assaulted whites or murdered them, using guns, knives, clubs, and poison. Murder by poisoning was apparently so prevalent that, as early as 1748. Virginia passed a law prohibiting slaves from ha ndling medicines. Slaves also mutilated themselves to avoid work, punishment, or sale. They cut off fingers, hands, toes, or feet, and disfigured other body parts of their bodies to make themselves less valuable slave property. Some slaves committed suicide to escape enslavement. There is even some evidence of parents murdering their children to keep them from having to live lives as chattels. Some newly captured slaves from Africa believed that death would cause them or their children to return home, a belief that provided additional incentive for suicide and infanticide. The resistance slaves offered to their enslavement were rarely open or violent confrontation. Rather, it was constant, steady pressure. The main goal of resistance was survival to insure the most decent life possible within an intrinsically indecent institution. Slaves rarely were able to overcome the masters ultimate control over them, but they were able to prevent such control from becoming total. Slave resistance, flowing out of the slaves Afro-American culture, allowed an enslaved people to nurture the spark of freedom until it could burst into flame during the civil war