Walter Johnson Soul By Soul

Words: 1185
Pages: 5

There were many stories that had people convinced that not only were slaves treated with decency, but they were even treated with esteem and praise, but these stories portray the picture too tame compared to the real severity of this terrible trade. The South thought it was a necessity to have slaves for “the sake of the economy”, a poor argument. Slavery stripped the rights of the human person, that is, their freedom, dignity and humanity, all for the sake of the South’s never ending greed. In the South, the slaves held in captivity were worked to the bone. Not to mention, while they worked, their buyers would sometimes even beat and whip them, simply just to remind them that escape is not an option. Was it not touturus enough that the slaves …show more content…
“Of the two thirds of a million interstate sales made by the traders in the decades before the Civil War, twenty-five percent involved the destruction of a first marriage and fifty percent destroyed a nuclear family—many of these separating children under the age of thirteen from their parents. Nearly all of them involved the dissolution of a previously existing community. And those are only the interstate sales.” Soul by Soul, Walter Johnson, page one. What an absolutely heartbreaking scene as children are dragged away from their parents as the parents can only watch this unfold right before their eyes. So brutal were the conditions of slavery that people like Harriet Tubman risked their own lives to save other slaves from bondage. Having been born into slavery in 1821, in Maryland, Tubman knew very well of the horrors of slavery. As a young girl, she had to take care of babies and walk through freezing water to empty out muskrat traps. Once she grew older, the tasks she was given became much harder. Then, when she grew into a woman, she married John Tubman in 1843, but was sold to another slave owner in 1949 and was going to be separated from