"What Right Can A Man Have To

             "What Right Can A Man Have To Compel His Neighbor To Toil Without Reward,
             And Leave The Same Hopeless Inheritance To His Children, In Order
             That He May Live In Luxury And Indolence?"
             From the landing of Christopher Columbus until today, this nation has struggled to become a realm of idealism. We have fought mightily along the way, and for a period of time during the start we nearly didn't find the right path at all. Slavery was viewed differently by all involved. It was justified by the Southern slaveowners and despised by the oppressed African Americans. It held back the development of the South by self-inflicted oppression of the poor whites and was the most shameful period of American history.
             Somehow, Southern slaveowners managed to persuade both themselves and Northerners for many years that slavery was not the vile institution that the slaves purported it to be. In fact, a slaveowner said that the slave, "is happier here than on the shores of his own degraded, savage, and most unhappy country" (Shi and Mayer 530). Further to justify slavery, according to one slave owner, the slave is, "scarcely acquainted with the word care. He never suffers from unwholesome food. No fear of want disturbs his slumbers. Hunger and cold are strangers to him; and in sickness or age he knows that he has a protector and a friend able and willing to shield him from suffering"(529).
             In sharp disparity to these very words are the descriptions of Frederick Law Olmsted's Review of a First-Rate Cotton Plantation (1860). Here the slaves were allowed to start work at around 6am (except during picking season, when they would be out before daylight) and end when the light was such that they could no longer see to work. They broke just long enough to eat and then returned to work. The work was regulated with a whip, "which he often cracked at them" (516). These slaves were given 'a peck o...

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