Cruelty of Slavery

Slavery was abolished with the 13th amendment of the US constitution. Prior to that, back people went through very harsh things, things that some white people wanted to forget, since it's so shameful. It took individuals such as Frederick Douglass who wrote about his experiences as a slave to keep recorded in history of what really happened during the time of slavery. Back in the time of slaves, there were laws created by US law makers that made slavery legal. When finally slavery was overcome, the problem of segregation came into place, giving black people another obstacle on the road of total freedom. Frederick Douglas wrote about his childhood as a slave, he mentioned the inhuman conditions that he lived in as a child, “The allowance of slave children was given to their mothers, or the old women having the care of them. The children unable to work in the field had neither shoes, stockings, jackets, nor trousers, given to them; their clothing consisted of two coarse linen shirts per year. When these failed them, they went naked until the next allowance year.” (Douglass 926). In today’s society, one cannot even imagine a child (black, white, asian, latino or whatever culture the child may come from) living under this extreme and cruel conditions. If it did, severe punishment would be given to the person in charge of them. However, children who lived as slaves, many times never learned to read and write or lived to see their offspring liberated from the chains of slavery. Douglass detailed descriptions of events that marked his life and made him become the man he became are full of cruelty especially from the slaves' master: “ if one slave refused to be corrected, and escaped with his life, the others slaves would soon copy the example; the result of which would be, the freedom of the slaves, and the enslavement of the whites” (Douglass 933). Such actions, as killing a slave and given the explanation above was somewhat common back then, and we would have never known of it if it wasn’t for brave men as Frederick Douglas.