The Underground Railway may been a tough journey and only allowed certain people to be able to make it, thousands of slaves escaped. For many slaves the hardest decision was their decision to escape. The conditions in which the slaves endured gave them the strength to finally escape. For most slaves, they believed that their lives in enslavement were worse then any conditions they would encounter in their effort to gain freedom (National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, 2004-2011). Once the decision was made to escape they made the commitment to walk hundreds of miles from South to North and for some all the way to Canada.
From the beginning to the end of the film you see slaves. In the opening scene slaves are in shackles being pulled behind horses that their owners are riding on. The film is accurate on the fact that slaves were sometimes transported from place to place this way. As well as their owners yelling at them for no reason and continuing to down them and call them niggers just because they are black. They never did anything to them, they were just slaves because they were a different skin color.
Douglass defines slavery as robbery in several parts of his Narrative. One way in which Frederick Douglass defines slavery as robbery in his Narrative is illustrated when he writes: “By far the larger part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs, and it is the wish of most masters within my knowledge to keep their slaves thus ignorant. I do not remember to have ever met a slave who could tell his birthday” (Douglas, 13). In doing so he shows that slaves are being robbed of the right of even knowing their dates of births and their ages thus connecting slavery with robbery. Another way by which Douglass illustrates that slavery can be defined as robbery was by how the slaves were treated with regards to the value of their lives, their dignity and their sense of justice.
It isn’t underground or a railroad. The reason it was called the Underground Railroad is because it had to be secretive and the people that knew about it used railroad terms as a code. The “railroad” of this system is the method the runaway black slaves took off from their masters and the plantation they worked on, and headed towards the free North. They would take back roads, go through swamps, forests, streams and lakes; avoiding vastly populated areas. The people taking these routes were the “packages” on the railroad.
Worthless pieces of flesh; being owned and being property; being abused; no freedom or personal rights, these all characterize one thing: a slave. Slavery in America lasted for an extremely long period of time from the 16th century all until 1863. It started just after the Europeans were settled. No one in our time today could truly understand what it is like to be a slave. So as Atticus Finch from “To Kill a Mocking Bird” would say, “let’s try to climb into one’s skin and walk around in it”.
A slaves life was one of reoccurring torture; they were deprived of the right to leave, to refuse work, or to demand compensation for the work they did. For most slaves their one dream was to become free, and, for the most part, the only way for that to happen was using The Underground Railroad. The Underground Railroad was a network of people who helped fugitive slaves escape and become free, which successfully moved hundreds of slaves to freedom. Knowledge of The Underground Railroad inspired slaves to write such songs as Follow the Drinking Gourd. Although for slave
The fear of slave rebellion distracted both the Southern slaveholder and the Northern invader. The Confederate government never used them as soldiers, but it did make them go into labor brigades to build fortifications, dig latrines, and haul supplies. As the war went on, Southern manpower shortages became more of a problem. Slaves quickly took advantage of the situation, slowing down their pace of labor and not following orders, The South imposed a Cotton embargo and many Southerners believed they could persuade European intervention in the war by refusing to grow or give
Why were the fugitive slave laws strengthened in the 1850’s and how did they differ from the past? In the 1850’s the upper south states were losing a lot of their slaves because an increasing amount of them continued to run away. States such as Maryland, Virginia, and Kentucky had this so called “frustrating issue.” Leading to the fugitive slave laws from the year 1793 to be strengthened. The laws of 1793 gave slave owners to go out and get their slaves that had ran away to other states. Escaped slaves had no rights, this included no right to a trial, no right to testify, and no guarantee of the legal requirement that a person brought before a court and not imprisoned illegally.
They ran away from their masters to become contrabands for the union. They also began laboring behind the scenes for the Northern armies. They went as far as to risk their own lives on the battle front. In fear of losing their slaves the masters became harder and moved their plantation on inland, but this only made the slaves run
Slavery in the United States was a form of slave labor which existed as a legal institution in North America for more than a century before the founding of the United States in 1776. From the 16th to the 19th centuries, millions of slaves were shipped to the Americas. These slaves were owned by white men and worked endless hours of hard labor without receiving any type of compensations. They were considered property and most were treated terribly and none of them had rights. This continued until the civil war erupted in which slavery was a reason the war was fought.