One can only imagine the horrors of slavery. The lifestyles and rigors of this service to their masters can only be expressed by those who endured it firsthand. Living and working conditions of African slaves in the New World were less than desirable. Economic norms were to own, obtain, and use slaves for one’s own needs. Moral and just men stood in favor of slavery and all its horrid truths. I urge you to take the time to explore all the wicked and hideous conditions to which slaves resided.
Entering the New World in the seventeenth century was indeed a major adjustment. Men, women, and children willingly sailed across the Atlantic Ocean in search of this new promised land. European exploration told of many riches, land, and plentiful new opportunities. As we are all very aware; with new opportunity there are great risks are to follow. With heightened curiosities many wished to voyage to this new promised land. Unfortunately for many, the cost of the journey was more than they could afford. However, poverty, lack of jobs, and lack of opportunity in Europe yielded a yearning for the move to the New World.
King James granted travel, cheap land, headrights, and great wages as incentives to navigate to the New World. The discovery of the new land allowed the royal crown to offer the people the choice to voyage across the Atlantic. Those who were not wealthy enough to pay for their own excursion west were given the option to pay not in money, but with service. This three-month journey from Europe to the New World was traded for four to seven years of servitude. Upon the arrival, immigrants whom paid their way with service would immediately begin work as indentured servants.
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Indentured servants did not access their freedoms right away. Instead, in those four to seven years of service men, women, and children alike worked long and rigorous hours in tobacco fields. As an indentured servant it indeed meant that freedom was traded for work. During the time of servitude, the indentured would be expected to grow enough tobacco within their first year working that they would ‘pay back their price.’ However, this was no easy task. Sewing tobacco fields was harsh to say the least. Long days in the hot unforgiving sun. Tobacco planters did not treat indentured servants with respect, rather they treated the servants as property. Property they did not intend to keep therefore wasn’t cared for with love or respect.
Any small infraction during an indenture’s time of service would only extend their ‘contract.’ Women were not allowed to be married or birth children while contracted to serve as an indentured. However, if a woman would become pregnant, she would have to serve an additional two years of service as well as pay a fine. A planter’s power began to drive their need to harvest more tobacco. The planters demanded servants to labor all day. They required them to work to their furthest ability enduring uncompromising circumstances. Circumstances so harsh and unforgiving that indentured servants feared they may not live to see the end of their servitude. They feared death on a regular basis.
With indentured servants at hand, why did slavery become economically necessary in America? Answering this question would cause one to look at the reality of indentured servitude. For one thing, servants were only contracted to at most seven years of service. Under that contract, planters lost workers in less than a decade. Servants saw freedom on their horizon, therefore they did not work to their fullest potential. Also, indentured servants thought of themselves as freemen bound by terms for the temporary service.
With the land in need of cultivation and planters desperate to make a wonderful new life in the colonies, colonies began to depend on slaves. Slaves would never access freedom. Women slaves birthing children meant another slave, one that was free and cost not a penny. Slaves were not thought of as colonists who had rights, nor were protected by laws meaning masters could treat them as they wished.
With the desire to harvest their land planters turned into merciless masters to slaves. Ships overcrowded with captured slaves sailed across the Atlantic from Africa to America to sell slaves to plantation owners for high prices. The high price masters were willing to pay was for service that was perpetual. On both ends of the sale, economic flourishment developed. Ship captains and crews earned a profit off the sale of each slave. The slaves were captured in their own land, essentially for free. Bound and shackled to the ship in tight confines, barely fed, and hardly maintained or cared for slaves began infesting America. Upon the sale of every slave ship captains were rewarded immediately. Plantation owners benefited in that they paid the handsome price for a slave and received a slave that was scared into working in less than reasonable conditions.
Travelling on the ships that landed in the southern colonies, slaves were unaware of what destiny lied ahead for them. They had travelled three months tightly packed on a ship sailing to a destination unknown to the slaves. From the time that a slave was captured the fear they encountered did not ease. Slaves were ripped from their wives, sisters, mothers, children, parents, and loving friends. Many cried and begged to have their loves returned with failure. Most slaves never saw a familiar face again. Fear was engraved in their minds from the minute they saw this new man’s face. The captured Africans had never seen a man with such pale skin, angry eyes, or soft hair. They had never heard their language and could not understand why they were so heartless.
African’s not only feared the men they were newly acquainted with but also, they were fearful of the conditions that they saw during the voyage. According to a former slave, Olaudah Equiano there were many sufferings slaves encountered from the moment of their capture. Equiano tells of the circumstances that he endured from the stench, sorrow, and brutal conditions all had witnessed. He states that the Africans feared they might be eaten by these obscure white men. He himself was left with a feeling dismay, concerned he would never see his home again.
While on the ship, slaves were often crying. Certainly, they were crying to express their fears, anxieties, and pains. Physically shacked to one another. Their arms and legs clasped together with cuffs. With no space in-between one another, the rocking and relentless waters caused their unclothed bodies to rub together. This rubbing caused chaffing, open wounds wept with ooze and infection and the caused an intense amount of pain. The weeping ulcerated wounds reeked a god-awful stench. The slaves were compacted in the bottom of the ship left to breathe in the terrible smells and the unclean air.
This stink in the air made the slaves sick. Many were so sick they refused to eat. This refusal to eat would be cause for beatings, or as Equiano referred to it ‘floggings.’ Slaves were subject to sickening and horrible truths. Truths so awful that they wished to be dead as opposed to rocking on this ship to a destination still unknown. For brief moments, if there were severely ill, slaves would be brought to the top deck to get fresh air and treatment from surgeons on deck. These surgeons were ordered by the ship’s captain to administer care for the sick and weak Africans. Surgeons were responsible for Africans being sold to masters upon landing in America.
If a slave was too ill, no one would want to buy them causing the ship to lose out on monetary gain. Many slaves would be so ill that they would be leaking illness from their anuses and unable to keep in their bowels contained for them to be sold to white plantation owners. This being so, surgeons on the slave ship, like Alexander Falconbridge were ordered to plug the anus of leaking slaves just before they were to exit the ship. Slaves would be granted permissions to sit when they were removed from the ships, when they sat long enough without their anus plugged-up they would leak onto the chair and a buyer would not want that slave. By plugging the slaves when they sit, they would not leak almost guaranteeing their sale.
Imagine being so sick that your wounds wept, your ears flinched at the cries of pain all around you, and your anus leaked foul sickness. Try to conceptualize the fear of being shackled, stripped from all those you loved, and flogged for yearning your freedoms. Envision the pain of men, women, and children being deprived of their freedoms solely based on the color of their skin and the native country of their origin. As unfathomable as it may seem, some just and moral men defended slavery.
These men who were lawyers, governors, leaders, and considered intellects of their time shared the opinion that slavery was justifiable. John Sarfin, a landowner and judge in Massachusetts, spoke in favor of slavery. Sarfin made claims that the slaves were heathens needing the conversion only the white men could supply. These slaves needed to be converted and saved, in Sarfin’s eyes the only way to ensure they were not heathens at death is that they would be preached the true word of God during their enslavement. Despite the Bible preaching to love one another as you love yourself, Sarfin indicated that a man who paid his own money or had a slave born in his own house, could rule over them in any manner they pleased. These men who had money and land held enough power to control the lives of all he ‘owned.’ To believers in slavery that prestigious man would always make the lawful and just choice in their treatments of slaves. No matter if beaten, abused, shackled, secluded, flogged, or killed the masters that owned these poor slaves was equitable in his decisions.
I fear that my own opinion blinds me from the true answer as to why moral men could justify the abuse and use of slaves. Unintentionally I can see that some of defenses that men like Sarfin used to stand behind slavery do not hold any truth. Repeatedly the claim is made that if you love your neighbor the way you love yourself there is no possibility to treat any person so cruelly. There is no need to remove family members from each other. There is no reason to justify the unjust and horrid treatment of slaves. There is absolutely no reason to watch others suffer at your hands. It is remarkable to me that there were men so blinded by greed that they would harm other humans.
The devastating truths that were lived by many Africans in the colonial south were so heinous. The utterly wicked pains and circumstances encountered over the centuries were avoidable. Despite the economic turnover and need to use slaves it is still something that is unreasonable. Horrific scenes witnessed by all men during the voyage to America as well as the unforgiving treatment once slaves were sold to masters should have been more than enough to end slavery long before it began. Capturing and torturing slaves is not any one man’s right. There was moral and educated men that stood for slavery and believed that they owned that right to treat others so horribly. Slaves are the only ones who know the extent of the pain, sorrows, and hurtfulness of their bondage.
Works Cited
- The American Promise A Concise History: to 1877. Bedford/St Martins, 2016.
- Sources: Falconbridge, Equiano, Sarfin
