Myles Darby
Professor McKinney
October 13th, 2014
Discussion Paper #2
The major themes of the material from Major Problems in African-American History,Slavery’s Constitution, and Major Problems in African-American History are the rebuilding of the African American community and culture, how slavery shaped the American economy, and the role Christianity played in the lives of the slaves, and how it affected them.
African American Voices is particularly interesting because it is one of the first accounts we have read where a slave is describing how slavery has impacted his life, and the cruel reality it entails. It is also interesting how he describes slaves as being “rendered incapable of shewing [their] obedience to Almighty God”, because of the circumstances they are in. Masters attempted to “throw” their religion(Christianity), onto the slaves, and also tried to justify slavery from texts in the Bible. How are they to believe in a God, if this is what he has done to them, and is also what their slave masters are attempting to teach them? Why would anyone want to learn the religion practiced by their masters? Mintz asks these profound questions without giving any answers, which allows the reader to deeply ponder them, and puts us in the mind of a slave, even if it is for a couple of seconds. He is showing the huge amount of paradox not only the masters have, but also the society as a whole. “How can the master be said to Beare me Burden when he Beares me down with the Have chanes of slavery and operson against my will”. How are they expected to believe and trust in this religion, when the teachers of it are those who “unjustly dragged [them] by the cruel hand of power from [their] dearest friends and sum of [them] stolen from the bosoms of [their] tender parents and from a populous pleasant and plentiful country and brought hither to be made slaves for life in a Christian land”. Because they have been taken away from everything and everyone they love, he feels as though they are “deprived of every thing that hath a tendency to make life even more tolerable”. To make matters even worse, their “children are also taken from [them] by force and sent many miles away “, and will probably never see them again. Not only did slaves not want to convert to Christianity, they wanted to be as far away from it as possible. He asks the great question of “how can [they] fulfill [their] parte of duty to him whilst in this situation”, which “ironically”, nobody has the answer for.
Is it by chance that the word slavery is not mentioned in the constitution? I believe this is not a coincidence because the idea of slavery is all throughout the constitution, even if the actual word is never mentioned. Ironically, out of the eighty-four clauses, “six are directly concerned with slaves and their owners”, “while five others had implications for slavery that were considered and debated by the delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention and the citizens of the states during ratification”. The Constitution refers to slaves as “other persons”, but it is extremely obvious they are referring to slaves because they identify all other types of people. The three-fifths clause was one of the first extremely monumental differences that slavery had a great impact on. Instead of being counted as a whole person, slaves were counted as three-fifths of a person, which would “count toward a state’s number of congressmen, and would count towards how much in taxes a state would have to pay when the Congress passed a direct tax”. Because of this, the states who had more slaves were more powerful, and were able to put more representatives in the house. One of the most profound and thought provoking statements from Slavery’s Constitution is that “taxation with representation and slavery were joined at the hip”. Some slaveowners and people in power were not blind to the fact that the institution of slavery was extremely wrong, but the influence and money it brought were too much to abolish it. They wanted the best of both worlds. Slaveowners “wanted the wealth and power that slavery and its governance brought without the moral responsibility that… they also knew came with slavery”. It is very interesting that “President Washington decided that slavery was wrong yet felt bound by the Constitution to do nothing about it captures the main effects that the Constitution had on slavery and American politics”. This perfectly describes the relationship slavery had dealing with the American economy and society as a whole. Everyone knew slavery was morally wrong, but if even our first President, one of our founding fathers was not willing to do anything about it, then why should anyone else be concerned about it? If he was able to go against the grain, step out of the norm, relinquish his own slaves during his lifetime, one has to question how this would have switched American history.
How does a race of people somehow resurrect, or in some cases, create an entirely new culture, once everything has been taken from them? Their home was taken, food, religion, and even their family members. On top of all of this being taken, they were forced to move thousands of miles away to a land they had no idea about, and would spend the rest of their lives there. According to Holt and Brown, “all living cultures are influenced by social and historical developments; change and adaption is part of their nature”. They believe that Africans were bound to create a culture, since they are made to adapt. However, it was not as easy as they made it sound. Africans felt that they had to create a new culture out of “the necessity for change and adaptation” and it “was especially pertinent for the ethnically diverse African population in America”. In addition to the slaves being taken away from their homes, they were also thrown into a mixed population of numerous amounts of different tribes.Presumably, each group of people had a different set of cultures, which proved to be a problem in itself. If they were able to bring their culture across the ocean, how would all the different cultures mesh together. Would one certain culture prevail over another? Two things most of the slaves agreed on was the fact that they had to create “a language that made slaves intelligible to each other as well as to their masters, and the need to fashion a religion that made the harsh new world of slavery intelligible to themselves”. Because of this agreement, “change and continuity were but two sides of the same coin”.
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