How Ironic

The essential questions for the lesson on the different causes of the civil war were: how did slavery become economically entrenched in American society by the early 19^th century, how does a system of slavery based on race affect human dignity, and what human characteristics does such a system tend to ignore. During the lesson we understood the economic importance of slavery by looking at modules that explored the growth of cotton and slavery in the South from the 1790s right up until the Civil War began in the 1860s. After that we explored the morality, or lack thereof, within slavery. First under this title, we looked at three perspectives of slavery, Frederick Douglass’, George Fitzhugh’s, and John Brown’s. After that, as a preparatory activity, we compared slavery in Futa Jallon, Africa to the slavery in Natchez, Mississippi. We explored the systems in these places specifically because of the story of one man, Abdul Rahman. Abdul Rahman was a prince in Futa Jallon prior to being captured and shipped off into slavery in Natchez. I know all this from the PBS documentary we watched after comparing the two cities called Prince among Slaves.

Slavery became a seemingly necessary part of the American economy because of the invention of the cotton gin. Prior to this invention, the permanent bondage of fellow humans was thought to be soon dying out. So what was this machine that is powerful enough to start the war with the greatest number of American casualties on record? The cotton gin was a machine that removed the seeds from raw cotton far more efficient than the current methods. This new machine, invented in 1792, made slavery more profitable, and unfortunately, more desirable. An article we read in class entitled, Cotton is King: Slavery is Entrenched in American Society, had the statistic, "During the first decade of the nineteenth century, the number of slaves in the United States rose by 33 percent; during the following decade, the slave population grew another 29 percent." Comparing the dates, with the cotton gin’s invention in 1792, and the slavery boom in the first decade of the 1800s, it is clear that the cotton gin is the instigator. The module we looked at showed the steady growth of the cotton industry and number of slaves in the United States from 1790, before the cotton gin, to 1860, the dawn of the Civil War. Here, it says that by 1860 the cotton industry was now responsible for 57% of the country’s national export revenue, and slavery had now spread to each of the southern states. There were three-million-nine-hundred-fifty-four thousand American slaves in 1860. This number is over three million more than the number of slaves in America before the invention of the cotton gin; in 1790 there were six-hundred-ninety-thousand slaves. The United States’ government could not eradicate slavery without suffering from a major hit to their export revenue, and thus, slavery became entrenched. 

Slavery is a difficult topic to fully understand because it is wrong in such a vast number of ways. One way slavery does wrong is the negative affect on human dignity. First, there is a major decline in the slave’s dignity. This is best shown in the case of Abdul Rahman. As captured in the PBS documentary, A Prince among Slaves, Rahman was born a Prince in Futa Jallon; then he gets captured and brought to Natchez, Mississippi. Once there, he is sold and rudely introduced to the cruel American form of slavery. When he tells his new master he is a prince and does not belong here, Colonel Thomas Foster does not take him seriously, and “Prince” becomes Rahman’s permanent nickname. Once you become a slave, you lose any dignity possessed before; in Abdul Rahman’s case, there is a serious decline. Now, the former prince had to do and act on someone else’s wishes and not his own. When dealing with the issue of race, American slavery makes it clear that it believes one race better than another. With white people owning black people, it is evident that the creators of this system thought whites as superior to blacks. (This is all baloney, putting this much stock in skin pigment.) If the white slave owners believed in this illusion, it might bolster their dignity. However, anyone, including the slaves themselves that could see otherwise saw that these men owning other men where really incredibly undignified. 

American slavery manages to ignore several human characteristics. In the case of Abdul Rahman, the specific ignored characteristics were his impressive prior status and his education. In his later life he surprised a newspaper publisher by reading a book written in Arabic out loud. In the broder scheme of things, slavery ignores important things like a human’s capability of free thought and action, the person’s feelings, and the individual right to liberty and justice that we as Americans harp on about so much. In a Fourth of July speech written and given by Fredrick Douglass, entitled “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” he talks about how incredibly stupid it is for Americans in 1852 to be celebrating their independence and freedom when so much of the population is chained. He writes, “To him [the American slave], your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless…” I believe most Americans could not see the incredible irony in their actions. They did not realize that by loving their liberty and justice so dearly they were mocking the enslaved part of the country. It was right of Fredrick Douglass to call them out on it, and put them in their place. By showing them the fault in their actions, they can better understand that the people they have been enslaving for so long are humans too, humans that long for and desire liberty and justice possibly more than the Patriots in the Revolutionary War. 

Photography 

A Prince Among Slaves, movie cover, http://bridgingcultures.neh.gov/muslimjourneys/archive/files/9365719379b2bebf8a528610cac5a207.jpg, accessed February 23, 2015