Chapter 4

After reading the first hand accounts of slavery in class and then going back to the history book’s version of slavery, it really made me think about how differently people thought. In tonight’s reading there was mention that some slave owners feared their slaves. They worried that their slaves would overpower them and that is the main reason why the slave owners didn’t really care about the state of the slave’s health. The slave owners only wanted the slaves to be healthy enough to work but not healthy enough to try and fight back. The slave owners beat their slaves because they want to strike fear into the slaves because if they knew they were stronger than their owners, they could easily take them down.

On the other hand the slaves feared their owners. They feared that if they didn’t do their job then they wouldn’t be properly fed; their family wouldn’t have a place to stay. The slaves feared that they could be beaten to death, and after reading what happen to the slaves I realized that they did have a reason to fear for their lives, but the slave owners didn’t really have a legitimate reason to fear their slaves. In one part of the reading the authors wrote about how the slaves did try to revolt, and in their little fight they killed 20 white people and they destroyed a lot of land. I understand that the slave owners feared this day but they quickly put this revolt down, and instead of just punishing the slaves they made those slaves into a lesson. The military would cut off a head of a slave, they would hang the bodies of the dead slaves, they would torture and torment slaves that they assume would start a revolt, all to teach a lesson to other slaves. The slaves really had a reason to fear their owners, but why did their owners fear them?