Monday, September 29, 2014

Sam Sefton's Essay


Sam Sefton
Essay 1
9/29/14
History 205- slavery in the US

Physical and Emotional Trauma Resulting From the Commodification of Slaves

Stephanie Smallwood’s Saltwater Slavery and Peter Kolchin’s American Slavery, paint a picture of desperation, denial, and disturbance in the middle passage.  Desperation describes the feelings of the slaves, fighting to stay alive.  The captains, masters, and people of authority deny that they are doing anything wrong. Disturbance is the emotion the reader feels when placed into the lives of these slaves.  This new movement towards a world of slavery was not a singular event, but rather a series of events that left the victims of the movement with emotional and physical damage.  However, they knew their emotions and feelings were worthless because they were objects, not people.  The commodification movement was despicable, and left the slaves with incurable emotional and physical trauma. 
The victims of commodification understood they were no longer humans, and the emotional trauma of this event was constantly occurring.  They no longer had control of their own lives, but rather their lives were controlled for them.  Smallwood enlightens the reader, “Captives learned that when they reached the littoral, their exchangeability on the Atlantic market outweighed any social value they might have”.[1]  Masters saw the slaves as an item that could be exchanged for a more valuable item, whether that was another slave or a resource like gold.  Masters ripped the humanity away from the slaves.  Once the victims were aboard the slave ship, they were no longer their own person.  Smallwood describes the horrid nature of the ship, “The slave ship at sea reduced African captives to an existence so physically atomized as to silence all but the most elemental bodily articulation, so socially impoverished as to threaten annihilation of articulation of the self, the complete disintegration of personhood”.[2]  The question is begged- how can people treat others with such little respect?  The masters and captains don’t see the slaves as people.  In their eyes, the slaves exist primarily to be objects of monetary value, and nothing else. 
In addition to emotional trauma, there was an enormous amount of physical abuse and a general lack of care towards the conditions in which the slaves lived.  Kolchin challenges his reader to recognize the physical trauma, “Born in violence, slavery survived by the lash.  Beginning with the initial slave trade that tore Africans away from everything they knew and sent them in chains to a distant land to toil for strangers, every stage of master-slave relations depended either directly or indirectly on physical coercion”.[3]  Kolchin makes it apparent that the slaves were left with nothing when moving to America.  Their masters became a symbol of physical trauma.  This relationship must have been one of fear and distress.  The masters used shackles as a form of control over the slaves.  Smallwood depicts this harsh nature; “shackles were an important element in the arsenal of tools used to physically disable captives during their incarceration in coatal factories”.[4]  The idea was to provide a way to hold the slaves captive at the expense of their own pain and suffering.  Masters did not worry about the slaves pain or discomfort, only the fact that they were still alive so they could sell and trade them. 
Slaves were packed into the ships as tight as possible.  The idea was to transport as many slaves as possible on one ship without increasing the death rate.  Smallwood describes the situation, “Only when the human cargo was thought to be large enough to raise the probability of death and the attendant loss of property could the slave ship be deemed ‘full’”.[5]  Increasing the numbers was key to get more slaves to America, but death proposed problems. Finding the perfect balance was vital.  Smallwood continues, “Every new delivery of captives added to the effluvia of sweat, vomit, urine, and excrement that painted the decks where the captives lay; each new body required space where now none was to be had”.[6]  The allotted space for individuals was essentially the size of their body.  The space would inevitably decrease as more slaves were forced onto the ship.  Their holding space was also where they were to use the restroom, and many were bound to vomit from seasickness.  With the increasing number of slaves being crammed, this meant there was more people’s bodily fluids mixed.  Evidently, this was not an ideal situation, but the captains did not feel remorse.  Kolchin explains the voyages, “Successful voyages brought large profits, but the risks were also great: sea travel was hazardous under the best of circumstances, and on most ships between 5 and 20 percent of the slaves (and crew) died in transit”.[7]  It was very important to find the balance between bringing as many people as possible without a large death rate.  The large profits were necessary, but could only be obtained under perfect circumstances. 
The slaves were also at high risk for disease and infection.  Smallwood states, “with crowding came lack of sanitation, and the enslaved Africans found that none of the familiar habits of personal hygiene could be observed.  Thus, illness was nearly impossible to avoid in that setting”.[8]   The amount of people on the ship was proportional to the spread of disease.  Therefore, disease was another factor that needed to be considered for finding that ideal number of people for the ship.  If there were too many people disease could spread easily, causing a mass number of death.  The lack of private space on the ship was a contributing factor to the outbreak of disease.  Another factor that played into disease was immunity.  It is clear that “we know now that extraction from one’s native epidemiological environment leaves all long-distance migrants vulnerable to infectious diseases to which they have no natural or acquired immunity”.[9]  The slaves often caught illnesses during the voyage to America due to the fact that they were moving into a new environment.  Along with this, many slaves were from different regions, carrying different and sometimes terminal diseases.
The middle passage was a movement full of trauma and disaster.  Smallwood sums it up, “the violence exercised in the service of human commodification relied on a scientific empiricism always seeking to find the limits of human capacity for suffering, that point where material and social poverty threatened to consume entirely the lives it was meant to garner for sale in the Americas”.[10] The masters worked to keep the slaves alive.  They relied on the lives of the slaves for profit, and as long as they were alive they could impose as much pain as possible on them.  A high death rate made it impossible to obtain a large profit for each shipment of slaves.  Masters and captains had no remorse for the slaves.  It was evident that their humanity was ripped away from them, leaving them with nothing but feelings of despair.  They were ripped away from their families, cultures, and homes.  Most of the people on the ship with them didn’t even speak their language, so trying to communicate was nothing short of impossible.  This was most likely done as a way to avoid collaboration and resistance towards authority.  The commodification of slaves and the voyage to America left the victims with emotional and physical trauma that could not be cured.  This is evident through the treatment towards the slaves.

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