The American Dream
How did the Founding Fathers handle, ignore or sweep aside the issue of slavery in their quest for freedom and liberty?Kenneth M. Stampp's The Peculiar Institution; Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South offers an unbiased look into the atypical form of labor implemented in the Deep South, while Clinton Rossiter's; The First American Revolution gives a "wide eyed" glimpse mainly on religion, economic, and social plateaus experienced by the of the colonists until the Revolution and skims slightly over the social issue of slavery of this time frame. Slavery in the South defined the very meaning of economic and social bases of the Revolutionary era. The quest of how the South was able to maintain economic stablility and reach socially balanced plateaus is was what defined the lives of many people. The South's economic base was highly dependent on the use of slaves, as it was almost their complete labor force.In The Peculiar Institution, Stampp explains every facet of slavery from a dispassionate and impartial point of view. He explains the economic advantages that the southern farmers had by using this system of labor. In addition to explaining the southern farmers standpoint, Kenneth Stamp also shows
Most of these slaves were caught and killed. It was an unfair and unkempt set of rules. This system did have a few problems, often after ten or twenty years of saving the slave's owner would die and his contract for freedom would no longer be valid. " (Berkin, 398) This was because there was no clear code or law stating the punishment for a runaway slave, or the punishment for killing a slave. Slaves were given essentially no rights and the respective punishments for white and slave murderers was very reflective the peculiar institution and the ante-bellum south. It had hot weather with long growing seasons, quality soil, and navigable rivers. Punishment was essentially non-existent for a white man who murdered or raped a slave. Rossiter does not concern his readers too much with slavery. The most famous was the use of whipping and other forms of punishment given to slaves who did not complete their jobs successfully. They used fear as the most popular method was using fear. This proved to be a successful method and involved the slave making a very small amount of money for extra work that he did for the landowner. These large landholdings are the root of where slavery originated. "Legally all white men were authorized to seize runaways; some of them, tempted by the rewards masters were willing to pay, made a profession of it. " (Stampp, 153) "Nor was a runaway necessarily beyond his master's grasp if he managed to reach a free state. the struggles of the slaves themselves, struggles from their bondage, their escapes, and how they lived their lives.
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Acceptance Essays
