Cdm dance competition smithfield nc

Background: Stanley M. Elkins, a famous historian who wrote Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (1959), argued that the harsh conditions of American slavery stripped slaves of their native African identities, prevented them from having strong social and family relationship, and reduced them to dependent child-like laborers who were emasculated and unable to think for themselves. However, recent historical scholarship has reexamined the lives of those born into slavery and has begun to focus on their religious, social, cultural and intellectual identities. Many historians now conclude that individuals born into slavery had the power to shape their own world and were not merely objects of oppression. Historians are now analyzing slavery with a more broadened perspective, looking at not just slave treatment, but the creation of slave societies as well. Yet, in doing so, some critics believe that society may lose sight of how oppressive and degrading American slavery really was. You will need to wrestle with these issues as you frame your response to the prompt.

Task: Using the following documents (referencing as many as you can), answer the following questions.

· In what ways were slaves denied their basic human rights and WHY? (Describe the ways in which slavery was dehumanizing and the reasons used by southern representatives and slaveholder to justify the institution.)

· In what ways did slaves forge their own culture and society?

Document 1

Document 2

Document 3

Source: Eighteenth-century painting (estimated 1785-1795), from the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Art Museum (VA)

Early African American Wedding Ceremony

Artist: John Rose, South Carolina plantation owner

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/31/SlaveDanceand_Music.jpg

Document 4

John Woolman, Quaker, in Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes (1754)

Suppose that our ancestors and we had been exposed to constant servitude in the more servile and inferior employments of life; that we had been destitute of the help of reading and good company; that amongst ourselves we had had few wise and pious instructors; that the religious amongst our superiors seldom took notice of us; that while others in ease had plentifully heaped up the fruit of our labour, we had received barely enough to relieve nature, and being wholly at the command of others had generally been treated as a contemptible, ignorant part of mankind. Should we, in that case, be less abject that they are now?

Quaker community at Germantown, Pennsylvania (c. 1750)

What thing on the world can be done worse towards us, then if men should rob or steal us away, and sell us for slaves to strange countries, separating husbands from their wives and children. Being now this is not done at that manner, we will be done at, therefore we contradict and are against this traffic of men’s bodies.

Document 5

Auction advertisement (1860)

Source: Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, New York, NY

Document 6

Gordon, also known as “Whipped Peter”, ca. 1863

Courtesy National Archives

Document 7

Instruments used in slavery: mask, collar, wrist irons, spiked cuffs

Courtesy Library of Congress

Document 8

Interview with former slave Charlie Barbour, age 86 (interviewed by Mary A. Hicks), Smithfield, North Carolina, May 20, 1937. From the WPA Slave Narrative Project.

I belonged ter Mr. Bob Lumsford hyar in Smithfield from de time of my birth. My mammy wuz named Candice an’ my pappy’s name wuz Seth. My brothers wuz Rufus, William, an’ George, an’ my sisters wuz Mary an’ Laura.

I ‘minds me of de days when I was a youngun’, I played marbles an’ hide an’ seek. Dar wuzn’t many games den, case nobody ain’t had no time fer ‘em. De grown folkses had dances an’ sometimes co’n shuckin’s, an’ de little niggers patted dere feets at de dances an’ dey he’p ter shuck de co’n.

On de night ‘fore de first day of Jinuary we had a dance what lasts all night. At nidnight when de New Year comes in marster makes a speech an’ we is happy dat he thanks us fer our year’s wuck an’ says dat we is good, smart slaves.

Marster wucked his niggers from daylight till dark, an’his thirteen grown slaves had ter ten’ ’bout three hundred acres o’ land. Course dey mostly planted co’n, peas an’ vege’ables.

I can ‘member, do’ I wuz small, dat de slaves wuz whupped fer disobeyin’ an’ I can think of seberal dat I got. I wuz doin’ housewuck at de time an’ one of de silber knives got misplaced. Dey ‘cused me of misplacin’ it on purpose, so I got de wust beatin’ dat I eber had. I quz beat den till de hide wuz busted hyar and dar.

We little ones had some time ter go swimmin’ an’ we did; we also fished, an’ at night we hunted de possum an’ de coon sometimes. Ole Uncle Jeems had some houn’s what would run possums or coons an’ he uster take we boys ‘long wid him.

I ‘members onct de houn’s struck a trail an’ dey tree de coon. Uncle Jeems sen’s Joe, who wuz bigger den I wuz, up de tree ter ketch de coon an’ he warns him dat coons am fightin’ fellers. Joe doan pay much mind he am so happy ter git der chanct ter ketch de coon, but when he ketched dat coon he couldn’t turn loose, an’ from de way he holler yo’ would s’pose dat he ain’t neber wanted ter ketch a coon. When Joe Barbour wuz buried hyar las’ winter dem coon marks wuz still strong on his arms an’ han’s an’ dar wuz de long scar on his face.

I ‘members onct a Yankee ‘oman from New York looks at him an’ nigh ’bout faints. ‘I reckon’, says she, ‘dat dat am what de cruel slave owner or driver done ter him’.…

Yes ‘um, I reckon I wuz glad ter git free, case I knows den dat I won’t wake up some mornin’ ter fin’ dat my mammy or some ob de rest of my family am done sold. I left de day I hyard ’bout de surrender an’ I fared right good too, do’ I knows dem what ain’t farin’ so well.

I ain’t neber learn ter read an’ write an’ I knows now dat I neber will. I can’t eben write a letter ter Raleigh ’bout my old man’s pension.

I ‘members de days when mammy wored a blue hankerchief ’round her haid an’ cooked in de great house. She’d sometimes sneak me a cookie or a cobbler an’ fruits. She had her own little gyardin an’ a few chickens an’ we w’oud ov been happy ‘cept dat we wuz skeered o’ bein’ sold.

I’se glad dat slavery am ober, case now de nigger has got a chanct ter live an’ larn wid de whites. Dey won’t neber be as good as de whites but dey can larn ter live an’ enjoy life more.

Source: http://www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/nchist-antebellum/5321#comment-2020

Document 9

Swing Low, Sweet Chariot (Slave Spiritual) Lyrics


Swing low, sweet chariot


Coming for to carry me home


Swing low, sweet chariot


Coming for to carry me home



I looked over Jordan,

and what did I see


Coming for to carry me home


A band of angels coming after me


Coming for to carry me home



Swing low, sweet chariot


Coming for to carry me home


Swing low, sweet chariot


Coming for to carry me home



If you get there before I do


Coming for to carry me home


Tell all my friends I'm coming, too


Coming for to carry me home



Swing low, sweet chariot


Coming for to carry me home


Swing low, sweet chariot


Coming for to carry me home



I'm sometimes up and sometimes down


Coming for to carry me home


But still my soul feels heavenly bound


Coming for to carry me home



Swing low, sweet chariot


Coming for to carry me home


Swing low, sweet chariot


Coming for to carry me home


The brightest day that I can say


Coming for to carry me home


When Jesus washed my sins away


Coming for to carry me home


Swing low, sweet chariot


Coming for to carry me home


Swing low, sweet chariot


Coming for to carry me home



If I get there before you do


Coming for to carry me home


I'll cut a hole and pull you through


Coming for to carry me home

Document 10

$10 Reward. RUNAWAY from the subscriber on the 31st December last, negro man JIM, by trade a black smith, belonging to the Davis Estate. Said fellow has a wife at Sam'l[Samuel] Sutton's in Perquimans County, and it is supposed he is lurking in that neighbourhood; he is well known in this and Perquimans County, and a description of him is deemed unnecessary. I will give the above reward and pay all reasonable expenses, to any one who will deliver the said fellow to me or confine him in jail so that I get him.

RICHARD BEASLEY.

Chowan Co. Jun. 3th, 1830. tf 2

Source: http://libcdm1.uncg.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/RAS/id/2026/rec/4

Document 11

Virginia slave laws:

1627: Christian baptism may not alter conditions of servitude. 1669: The death of a slave during punishment shall not be accounted felony. 1691: Interracial sexual conduct shall be prohibited.

Document 12

"The Universal Law of Slavery," by George Fitzhugh

He the Negro is but a grown up child, and must be governed as a child, not as a lunatic or criminal. The master occupies toward him the place of parent or guardian. We shall not dwell on this view, for no one will differ with us who thinks as we do of the negro's capacity, and we might argue till dooms-day in vain, with those who have a high opinion of the negro's moral and intellectual capacity.

Secondly. The negro is improvident; will not lay up in summer for the wants of winter; will not accumulate in youth for the exigencies of age. He would become an insufferable burden to society. Society has the right to prevent this, and can only do so by subjecting him to domestic slavery. In the last place, the negro race is inferior to the white race, and living in their midst, they would be far outstripped or outwitted in the chaos of free competition. Gradual but certain extermination would be their fate. We presume the maddest abolitionist does not think the negro's providence of habits and money-making capacity at all to compare to those of the whites. This defect of character would alone justify enslaving him, if he is to remain here. In Africa or the West Indies, he would become idolatrous, savage and cannibal, or be devoured by savages and cannibals. At the North he would freeze or starve.

We would remind those who deprecate and sympathize with negro slavery, that his slavery here relieves him from a far more cruel slavery in Africa, or from idolatry and cannibalism, and every brutal vice and crime that can disgrace humanity; and that it christianizes, protects, supports and civilizes him; that it governs him far better than free laborers at the North are governed. There, wife-murder has become a mere holiday pastime; and where so many wives are murdered, almost all must be brutally treated. Nay, more; men who kill their wives or treat them brutally, must be ready for all kinds of crime, and the calendar of crime at the North proves the inference to be correct. Negroes never kill their wives. If it be objected that legally they have no wives, then we reply, that in an experience of more than forty years, we never yet heard of a negro man killing a negro woman. Our negroes are not only better off as to physical comfort than free laborers, but their moral condition is better.

The negro slaves of the South are the happiest, and, in some sense, the freest people in the world. The children and the aged and infirm work not at all, and yet have all the comforts and necessaries of life provided for them. They enjoy liberty, because they are oppressed neither by care nor labor. The women do little hard work, and are protected from the despotism of their husbands by their masters. The negro men and stout boys work, on the average, in good weather, not more than nine hours a day. The balance of their time is spent in perfect abandon. Besides' they have their Sabbaths and holidays. White men, with so much of license and liberty, would die of ennui; but negroes luxuriate in corporeal and mental repose. With their faces upturned to the sun, they can sleep at any hour; and quiet sleep is the greatest of human enjoyments. "Blessed be the man who invented sleep." 'Tis happiness in itself--and results from contentment with the present, and confident assurance of the future.

A common charge preferred against slavery is, that it induces idleness with the masters. The trouble, care and labor, of providing for wife, children and slaves, and of properly governing and administering the whole affairs of the farm, is usually borne on small estates by the master. On larger ones, he is aided by an overseer or manager. If they do their duty, their time is fully occupied. If they do not, the estate goes to ruin. The mistress, on Southern farms, is usually more busily, usefully and benevolently occupied than any one on the farm. She unites in her person, the offices of wife, mother, mistress, housekeeper, and sister of charity. And she fulfills all these offices admirably well. The rich men, in free society, may, if they please, lounge about town, visit clubs, attend the theatre, and have no other trouble than that of collecting rents, interest and dividends of stock. In a well constituted slave society, there should be no idlers. But we cannot divine how the capitalists in free society are to put to work. The master labors for the slave, they exchange industrial value. But the capitalist, living on his income, gives nothing to his subjects. He lives by mere exploitations.

Source: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h3141t.html