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Gregorio Chavez

Mr. WilliamsonPage

AP U.S History

December 5, 2019

Slavery Without Submission,Emancipation Without Freedom

The institution of slavery has prevailed throughout the history of the United States,

conquering and enslaving the inferior race due to religious,economic,and impirial reasons. For

nearly a century, the U.S government supported slavery for one primary reason: it seemed like

an extremely easy,beneficial,and practical source of labor. The U.S. relied on business, and

slaves provided free labor that allowed the Southern states to supply huge amounts of cotton and

different crops while not going into debt. Slavery was often justified by the slave owners. The

justification of slavery was morraly egregious and it makes it clear that the slaveowner’s

morality and judgement was askew. Zinn begins his chapter on the civil war by reiterating a

statement he expressed earlier within the book: the motives for slavery weren't racial, however

economic. Americans developed racism mostly as a justification for the brutal enslavement of

African individuals.

It’s probablyunlikely for anyone living in America nowadays to understand slavery in its

absolute esence. Slave owners were cruel with their property. Just by buying slaves, they

separated apart black families; then, slave owners forced their slaves to work exhausting jobs

from sunrise to sunset. Several slave owners recognized that they required needed to plan
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“ingenious punishments” to frighten their slaves into submission. In addition, some estimates

recommend that, on average, half of all slaves were whipped each year. However, some slaves

found ways in which to fight back; in 1831, freedom fighter Nat Turner gathered about seventy

slaves and killed a minimum of 55 white men, women, and kids. As a result, slave homeowners

lived in constant concern of slave rebellions, and they tried to stop rebellions by gruelling the

slaves with additional punishment. Some slaves found ways in which to escape from their

plantations. Alternatively, slaves rebelled just by not operating in full physical capacity. At

several plantations, poor whites (many of them Irish immigrants) worked alongside black slaves.

Slave owners recognizing the danger of rebellion and implemented laws to separate whites from

blacks. Slave owners conjointly used faith to regulate slaves, citing Biblical passages to justify

slavery and enlisting some slaves to priech to alternative slaves. Some slaves bravely rose up

against their masters and fought for his or her freedom, horrifying Southern slave owners into

taking additional forceful measures to safeguard their own power. One amongst the foremost

vital measures that slave owners took was to divide underlings on racial lines: Caucasian laborers

weren’t allowed to accompany slaves, maybe for concern that they’d develop alliances against

the slave house owners. during this method, slave owners’ policies echoed the laws instituted by

colonial elites within the 1600s and 1700s. The goal was to form poor whites a check on black

slaves, instead of an ally to black slaves.

It’s often argued that slavery destroyed the black family. In fact, black slaves adapted to

their changing situation by developing new family relationships. Some historians of slavery have

argued that slaves practiced a complex kinship system, whereby all adults looked after all

children, and older children looked after younger children. With the help of this “family,” many
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slaves found ways to hang on to their dignity as human beings. Slaves turned to storytelling,

music, song, and

humor for comfort and resistance. Zinn describes the various ways that slaves found of

resisting slavery. Even if, by and large, slaves did not succeed in fighting off their tyrannical

masters and winning their freedom, they were “victorious” in the important sense that they didn’t

give up their dignity as human beings, and they found ways to use art, family, and friendship to

achieve “brief flashes” of freedom. In 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, whereby

northern states were required to return fugitive slaves who had made their way north to their

masters down south. Zinn interprets the Fugitive Slave Act as confirmation that “the shame of

slavery was not just the South’s”: the entire country was complicit.

History textbooks often overemphasize the contributions of white abolitionists like

William Lloyd Garrison, whereas Zinn wants to suggest that black abolitionists were far more

committed to the cause than most of their white allies. Abolitionism was, in many ways, a heroic,

noble cause. However, as Sojourner Truth’s life makes painfully clear, it wasn’t without its share

of racism and sexism.In the years leading up to the Civil War, John Brown led a raid on a

military arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in an effort to arm slaves. His plan failed, and he was

arrested. However, it has been argued that Brown’s “failure” brought attention to the abolitionist

issue and convinced the country that, as Brown said, “the crimes of this guilty land will never be

purged away but with blood.” Brown was executed with the full approval of the federal

government—the same federal government that enforced the Fugitive Slave Act, tolerated

slavery, and ruled that black slaves were property, not people.John Brown was a truly radical

figure: someone who refused to use peaceful, institutional means to solve the problems of
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slavery. Instead, Brown believed that violence and physical force were necessary to end slavery

in America. Meanwhile, the federal government continued to tolerate and perpetuate slavery by

cooperating with Southern slave owners, enforcing racist policies, and generally preserving a

status quo in which millions of human beings were treated like property.

Although this chapter has mostly been about the discrimination and racism that black

people faced in the second half of the 19th century, Zinn ends the chapter by making a broader

point. Black persecution, while horrible, was not unique in the 19th century,poor white people

were also, in a sense, “enslaved” to capitalist elites. Zinn’s point emphasizes one of the major

themes of his book: the commonalities between the different persecuted people of the United

States.