slavery was wrong?

Question

because it was

Answer 1

It's a difficult concept to understand with thousands of years of history.

So I'll give a comparison. About 800 years ago if you owned a farm, you owned the land outright, a nobleman could just take it with all your stock and he didn't have to pay you a thing. Furthermore, if you resisted you would have been put in jail for stealing.

In the American declaration and in the Constitution it has the phrase "we hold these things to be self-evident" which means that they believed that people had what they called "inalienable rights" or rights that no person, no court, or no government can take away from you.

I won't deal with ancient slavery, that would take too long even though it was wrong too. But in ancient times a slave could buy his or her freedom, in modern times once a slave always a slave.

In American slavery, slavery had been outlawed in Europe before the discovery of America. But in the America, people needed a lot of workers to clear and work the land and quickly. They also didn't have money to pay them anything.

As slavery went along, masters would have intercourse with their femal slaves and they would have their own sons and daughters to be proclaimed slaves and they sold their own sons and daughters. It shows that they had stopped believing that people had "inalienable rights" the idea America was founded upon.

When South and North America slaves were captured and sold in Africa, they were taken to America and sold as property they were no longer people.

As time went by people published books and pamphlets on how slaves were treated. Being considered property they were treated very inhumanly.

It comes down as you said what is right and wrong and slavery is wrong. A slave is not a person and don't forget people hadn't forgotten the loss of rights they had experienced in Europe, for example a Protestant in England when the pilgrims came couldn't vote, hold a government job or own agricultural land. Only member of the Church of England could (Anglicanism).

If one group of people can be made into slaves, then there is nothing preventing someone making you or me a slave. We do not have "inalienable rights that are self evident." We could be made into property just as easily as Africans were and be subjegated to the same kind of inhumane treatment they were. Once slavery starts it is hard to stop.

Over the years since the fall of the Roman empire, ordinary people fought consistantly against the rulers and the ruling class first to get rid of slavery and they gained their freedom.

Then they had to fight to be able to own their land and then they had to fight to make sure that a nobleman couldn't take it away.

Even in the 1700s after hundreds of years of battling to get be more justly treated, even then they were not equals with others of their own race in their own country. A time came when ordinary people could own land and had limited rights to keep it. Under certain circumstances a nobleman or a rich man still could take it, but it was harder. But even in the 1700s a nobleman could make a free man work on his estate for a period of time. In a "Tale of two Cities" by Charles Dickens, a French nobleman wants the beautiful wife of a commoner. But he couldn't take her under the law because she was married. So he drafted his husband to stand in the swamps "to quiet the frogs" so as not to disturb his sleep. He died of disease from standing in the cold swamp water all night. The nobleman then took his wife -- an unmarried woman whose parents were not alive had no rights.

Later on during the French Revolution, this woman is the Madam Dufarge who knitted and watched as the aristocracy were executed by guillotined.

Europes history is one long fight for common people to get one small right after another, the first to get rid of slavery or cerfdom after the collapse of the Roman Empire. The commoners and the middle class had to scratch and claw to get fair treatment in a million things that we take for granted today.

When South and North America was discovered and common people and the middle class left Europe in droves to find freedom which they still didn't have.

When slavery was introduced into the Americas, both the commoners and middle class remembered or were told what life was like in Europe -- remember the Civil War happened only 80 years after America became independent.

So slavery threatened their rights. If an African could turned into a non person, then they could too, they knew it could and would happen because they had just escaped it and they had freedom for less than a century.

This is why common people and the middle class had such a vicerous attitude against slavery, they had just gained being equal and having freedom and the introduction of slavery meant that if an African american could be a slave, then their rights would be attacked too. They had literally over a thousand years of history fighting to believe what they want, fighting to own a Bible, not to have their land confiscated, taken into forced labor, for common people who came to America, they came to escape only to see it re-established again. They knew that if an African could be made into a non-person, they could be too.

In the Civil War, there were counties in every Southern state where plantations did not exist and people had their own farms, these counties refused to send soldiers or as one put it "give one horse shoe nail." to the CSA army. The state of West Virginia became a state because it was settled by small farmers who had owned their own land for only 100 years or so and so the seperated from Virginia and became a seperate state.

Kentucky, a slave state, sat out the war because they knew that they would have their own civil war within the state if they joined the Southern cause.

So basically you are right when you say "it is wrong." It isn't because of a logical reason that anyone can point too except for one. History had left a long scar on common people and the middle class and that scar ran deep and still hurt. If Africans could be turned into non persons, then so could they. They knew this from personal experience.

Today 300 years later it is still true. Just read the news, remember that under Communism the first thing people lost, commoners and aristocracy alike, was their land. History still repeats itself.

Answer 2

In my opinion, slavery was not wrong. Key word: WAS. Of course in today's standards it is wrong, and I am completely ashamed that our country was involved in it. But at the time, every world power allowed slavery.

The biggest mistake our country made was not ending slavery sooner, and their handling of it when it was abolished. I don't see how anyone thought that the Freedmen would easily assimilate into our culture, but it seems as if the gov't believed it would happen this way. They made little help available for them and allowed discrimination (Jim Crow Laws) and allowed the ridiculous regulations on voting registration, making it all but impossible for freed slaves to vote.

In short, slavery was terrible in hindsight, but at the time may have been necessary.

Answer 3

Slavery was not only wrong but it was inhuman and barbarious in nature.How can any civilised and cultured society ever dream of one person being subservient to another human being and subjected to physical torture and mental agony ?.
Abraham Lincon's Famous quotations are quoted below:-
"As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy".
"The institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy".
"I believe the declaration that "all men are created equal" is the great fundamental principle upon which our free institutions rest; that ***** slavery is violative of that principle".

Answer 4

What's interesting about this..is if you had asked the question... why shouldn't corporations be able to seek out the very cheapest labor no matter what the human cost ? You'd have seen the exact same folks go wild talking about "Free Market-isms" ... wage slavery is wrong too folks.. in Norway the Minimum wage is about 18.00 an hour They rank as the happiest and healthiest place on earth... I wonder why ?

Answer 5

Slavery was a terrible thing. For one thing it seperated families. Even small children were separated from their moms. Beleive it or not there is still slavery going on today.

See ya!

Answer 6

To our modern way of thinking slavery was and is wrong.

We have a habit of judging history out of context by our own modern ways of thinking. - those involved in the slave trade would not have held the same moral and ethical stance as we do now.

Answer 7

Of course it was and still is wrong. It is the worst form of abuse ever practised.

Answer 8

Really?
How so?
You don't think we should each own one?

Answer 9

yes it was, is taht your question?

Answer 10

OK