freedom and slavery essay

freedom and slavery essay

The Importance of Freedom and the Evils of Slavery

1. Introduction

The moral indictment of a system of slavery is that it is an exploitation of the labor of one class by another. It is to the advantage of the master class and the disadvantage of the subject class. It is a system in which the relation of reward to merit is distorted. The welfare definition of economics, with its emphasis on the distinction between economic welfare and welfare in general, is simply that economics is the study of means to the end of welfare.

The idea of economic freedom may be imperfectly developed, it may be perverted by peculiar and situated interest, but the importance in human life of the exercise of choice in economic acts is so great that the removal of constraint and the increase of effective alternatives involve a gain to the strength of a society and an important criterion of success in economic progress.

The subjection of man to the production of an unduly large share of wealth for economic ends, conducted under regimentation, involves a restriction of freedom similar to the subjection of man to production under slavery. Reflecting on this basic analogy between one type of economic society that included serfdom, and a society where “free labor” employed for wages was predominant, we perceive that the degree to which a people has had command over goods, a control of its economic destiny, has always been an important consideration in judging that society. This grows out of the distinction between economic development conducted within a society and a process imposed upon a society from without; an autonomous development and an externally conditioned change.

2. Historical Background

Slavery was first introduced to America in 1619, when it was still a colony of the British Empire. The colony was Jamestown, Virginia and tobacco was the cash crop. It was a status symbol to have servants in England and the same would hold true for colonial America. At the onset of Jamestown, there were no slaves. White indentured servants were considered at the bottom rung of society, but they were relatively expensive if only for the fact it was hard to keep them alive. These servants were drawn, albeit in some cases forcibly, from the bottom rung of British society. Lordly planters discovered the Indian slave to be problematic and expensive and given the morality concerns found in the pestilent treatise, realized that they could solve the labor problem by importing blacks from the West Indies who were then flesh and blood chattel. The groundwork was laid for plantation owners to obtain black slave labor from Dutch traders. At first, many of these blacks were freed after a fixed term of indenture, but the institution of lifetime servitude for blacks and the codification of hereditary lifelong slavery would come into effect as a result of these freedmen demanding their rights as indentured whites.

The institution of slavery in America is one of the most ignorantly distorted and misrepresented periods in our history. Of the many myths is the notion that the American Indians gave the white government much trouble and were difficult to enslave. In fact, the Indian had been a slave in the Americas before the first black person had ever set foot on the continent. In the Carolinas, the economy was based on the Indian slave trade. It was profitable because the Carolina elite had easy access to the Indian tribes. However, the importation of Indian slaves posed a problem, as they died in large numbers and could easily escape. This is the reason that there are so few American Indians in the US today. In New Mexico and the Florida’s, slavery was not a viable option because the climate and disease inoculated the region from permanent European settlement that could have necessitated a large slave labor force.

3. The Inherent Rights of All Individuals

Finally, it is evident that men are the work of one omnipotent and infinitely wise Creator, so it follows that the products of His hands are designed to be as he intended and made them to be, and although this last part may imply some sort of hierarchy for future chapters to address, is sufficient proof that men should not exercise authority over one another in pointless manners and rob each other of the aforementioned liberties. Therefore, to say that some men have descended from apes or that there are black people with white slaves and vice versa, none of this can in any way prove a natural inequality between men.

Locke then goes on to prove his second thesis – that men are naturally equal. Because each man is in the same freedom from subjection as another and has authority over his own life and healthy preservation, drawing no superiority or inferiority holds true. This power to act and continue acting in the way one chooses also extends to a man’s dominion over others and the things which he has appropriated, and is the very nature of the power we call liberty.

The declaration of man’s natural freedom and equality has wrongfully been accused of being taken out of context. He begins with the statement that men are free by nature and become slaves of others against their will – simply because people have been enslaved does not mean that everyone is not naturally free. To say that freedom is taking the ability to act on something and go anywhere is inane; these are simply the means to an end, and because a slave is forced to begin and end these actions at the say of his master, it does not follow that he never acts of his own volition. Hence man’s natural state is to be free to do as he wishes without harm, and this natural liberty is to be free from subjection and a lack of constraints acting from internal compulsion.

4. The Devastating Effects of Slavery

This was the beginning in the Western Hemisphere of an agrarian organization in many essentials identical with that of the historic states of antiquity, but based on an industrial technique so primitive as to involve a vast and prolonged squandering of the resources of a virgin continent. Whether in the North American colonies at any time prior to the Revolutionary War or in the West Indies or South America, the economic life of the plantation was a remote and stunted offshoot of the economic life of the mother country. The planter, his family, and an army of retainers or slaves formed a highly self-sufficient aristocratic group consuming the product of the land and little else. The artisan and the merchant were few and ordinarily content to secure from the import trade some simple manufactured article in permanent exchange for food and light clothing. There were marked exceptions to the rule, and there was also some slow progress toward a more diversified economy, especially in the middle colonies and on the periphery of the plantation belts; but the net result was a relation of colonial economic dependence on the home country and a retardation of the free growth of capitalist economy. The North American section of the plantation system became, in the course of the nineteenth century, thoroughly opposed to the development of industrialization and far from unconnected with the South in the nature of its rural economy. But in the antebellum period, the contrast between North and South was already marked, and the postbellum course of one region was, in large measure, a history of failure to escape from the influence of its own earlier class structure.

What is principally an economic problem of vast consequence has been given a moral twist, which has served to intensify its destructive effects both North and South. The extreme defender of the institution claims special moral virtue for himself and judges the utilitarian by his success in proving absolute chattelhood congenial or profitable. The extreme opponent holds that the Negro, and only the Negro, is the sole possible victim of slavery; that white men will not work long as slaves or at all; and that slavery is the source of all the problems and deficiencies of the Negro race. Both alike overlook or misconceive the chief social and economic problem of slavery—the problem of maintaining civilization where certain classes of manual workers are employed to the exclusion of all others. That such a problem would exist might indeed have been predicted of any form of society recently emerged from barbarism; in the highly stratified urban communities of the ancient world where war prisoners and others in some status of dependency served as artisans or domestics, there was always a danger that the free working class could be almost or quite eliminated. But the problem took on unprecedented form and importance in modern times mainly because of the plantation system of the New World—a system specially adapted to the exploitation of colonies.

5. Conclusion: Embracing Freedom for a Better Future

Slavery is an act of making a person(s) your property; there is no freedom in that. It has been proven that the effects of slavery in any society that has used it have been detrimental. The violent seizure of people to make them slaves occurs throughout history. Kidnapping and the use of threat often force people into slavery. If you take a look at what is occurring throughout the world today, even though their country had a set path for their future, war has forced numerous countries to change their ways in order to try to fend off conquerors to both maintain their rights and sovereignty.

Not even though we have made small rhetorical decisions to show how freedom will always be the best choice and how slavery will always bring us in the wrong direction. Overall, to have a successful future, we need to look to the past and understand that the predecessor method (slavery) is not the correct path to follow. It had been a long and difficult process to expose the detrimental effects of slavery using the evidence that historical experiences of slavery by various peoples and current practices have common elements and similar effects. Through an understanding of this evidence, clear reasoning, and an assured tone, the essay has shown that freedom is a better way of living.