Whipping and flagellation were accepted practice in those days. Washington probably had his white troops, in the Revolutionary War, whipped. Children, working in factories, would be paddled for messing up, the adults would be beat. Cororal punishment was viewed as “par for the course” throughout society. The idea that these sorts of things were reserved for slaves, in those days, is 20th century Hollywood creation.
I suspect that it’s pretty likely that slaves were not all beaten regularly (nor soldiers, nor factory workers). More likely there were a few problem cases who accounted for 99% of all punishment events, in any case where the owner, factory manager, etc. wasn’t just an asshole. I think it’s unlikely that Washington would have risen through the ranks and been held in such high regard in the military if he hadn’t meted out punishment fairly (in the eyes of his men). So while he may have been more strict than many, that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t a reasonable strictness, nor that his wrath fell where it wasn’t deserved.
Non-abused, perfectly normal children run away from home. Adults try to pick up and leave their spouse, without warning. Pointing out that some number of slaves, among over a hundred, sought to flee their circumstances is not really all that remarkable. Just because people try to escape a situation they are bound to does not necessarily mean that the situation was all that onerous.
Some husbands are abusive towards their spouse. Some women marry men who are thieves and bullies. Without knowledge of who the slaves were that were sent to the West Indies, it’s entirely conceivable that these were bad people who were doing bad things. You will see today that we take husbands from their wives and put them into jail, if their crimes deserve it. It breaks up their family, but that’s (theoretically) worth the cost of having those individuals free among the general populace, doing bad things.
This is all not to say that Washington was or had to have been a fair and kindly slave master. Possibly he was horrible to his slaves and indiscriminate in his cruelty. That seems unlikely for someone who freed all of his slaves on his death bed, but certainly I have no good evidence either way.
But a lot of the view that all slaves in all households were abused and tortured by their masters is almost certainly false. The view that slaves were mostly dissatisfied with their lives is probably false. To your average slave, that would just be the life that the world gave them, and they’d live it without thinking too much about other ways of life. For most punishment meted, most of the slaves probably would have understood why it was happening to whoever it was happening, and probably thought it was justified, just as we think it’s justified to send people to jail for several years.
There certainly were slave owners who abused their slaves for no good reason, and others who took advantage of their position (particularly with the lady slaves). And those cases probably served as good cases for abolishing slavery. But there were also probably factory managers who beat on all of their workers indiscriminately, and there are probably bosses in all sorts of industries right up until modern day who take advantage of their position with the ladies beneath them. We didn’t shut down the military, factories, and business in order to end these injustices. We worked on stamping out corporal punishment in our society, giving more voice to those at the bottom, and started sending bad eggs to jail regardless of their position in society. But before that happened, it’s likely that free slaves would have encountered much the same harshness of punishment in the free world as they had when enslaved, and just as often arbitrary as it had been before as well.
Upon reading this, I couldn’t help thinking of that Twilight Zone: The Movie segment “Time Out”–the one in which Vic Morrow keeps finding himself transformed into one of the people about which he believes ugly and insupportable things: a Jewish man in occupied France; an African American in the 1940s South; a Vietnamese man during the US-Vietnam War.
I also can’t help wishing that you could experience what you so blithely opine about.
I am experiencing it. My life is a horrible and awful thing from the vantage point of someone living in the 30th century.
More importantly, you can go tour the world and sit with people living in horrible conditions, in the modern world. Slavery, in the American variant, may not exist in the world of today, but there are still classes of people in some countries who are reviled by the general populace, living in squalid conditions, uneducated, riddled with dysentery, etc. And if you talked to them, they would largely feel like this was just life and mostly they’d be enjoying it.
It may be sad that this is the case, but it’s how the human mind works. If you’ve never known or expected differently, we adapt to that situation and go about it in a fairly unremarkable way. Only the outsider can really look in and say, “Woah, this is crap. You need to change this.”
It’s probably possible to come up with some hypothetical version of reality in which George Washington treated his slaves fine.
It’s far more likely that he didn’t – that he whipped slaves (or had them whipped) for disobeying; that he sent brutal slave-hunters after runaway slaves; that he broke up families; that he ignored rape and other brutalities (if he didn’t take part himself); and that he was aware of or took part in other monstrosities.
Washington did a lot of good things too. People are complicated, especially back then. But it’s not reasonable to try and fabricate some sort of intricate scenario in which Washington didn’t mistreat his slaves. There were plenty of people at the time who strongly opposed slavery, and plenty of people at the time who didn’t take part in any way in the brutalization of slaves. That Washington (and Jefferson) and others didn’t reflects poorly on them, even though it doesn’t wipe out their positive accomplishments.
In my experience interacting with people in these sorts of environments, they’re most definitely not “enjoying it”. They might find happiness in some small moments, but overall their lives are filled with difficulty, pain, and suffering.
Unless you are quite literally a piece of property, living in a society set up to return you (that property) to your owner and to punish any action that might have the effect of lessening your owner’s rights over you…then you are not experiencing it.
And, no, we don’t need any tortured analogies about romance, here (if you were thinking of offering one). Reflections on the relative merits of living in other centuries are likewise irrelevant.
None of this effectively supports your (apparent) claim that ‘American slavery wasn’t so bad.’ As has been remarked in the thread before, the fact that humans can make the best of their situation is not, logically, any variety of defense of that situation.
Aside from that, I’m amazed at the degree of confidence you seem to have in your ability to read the minds of others—from blacks in nineteenth century America to dysentery-riddled outcasts of today…all “mostly” “enjoying” life, according to you. You certainly have demonstrated an astonishing range of time-traveling telepathy.
I did not deny that he whipped slaves or broke up families. My point was that the monstrosities of the day were not restricted to slaves. That’s how “social order” was often accomplished in those days, slave or not. It was a brutal and savage time.
You can’t see the whole picture at once. You have to pick a lens and view through that. Since every lens gives an incomplete picture, you need as many different views as possible.
I don’t know if it’ll help explain my viewpoint any better, but another example would be female scientist. It is course impossible to understand the life of Marie Curie without knowing the impact of being a woman in her chosen field. But its also impossible to understand her life without looking at her as a scientist. For that matter, it’s impossible to understand her life without the views of Polish scientist living in France or agnostic scientist or widowed scientist.
Her good scientific work did not depend on her being a woman–could not, since scientific truth is not dependent on these things. So there is a story there about her work, and trying to shoehorn in a story about being a woman would be a distraction at best (at worst, it could turn into a suggestion that female science is somehow different than male science). There is another story about the factors that affected the shape of her life, and indeed being a woman was a major factor there.
A long, comprehensive biographical work has some chance at taking each of these views, although they are still contaminated with the biases of the author. But shorter works, whether a kids book or otherwise, have no hope at all. This is fine as long as there is a breadth of material available and the instructors are intellectually honest.
All that said, I am now speaking “theoretically” here. Given Freudian Slit’s observations, it does seem that this particular book is off the mark, but that better examples do exist.
The fact that Hercules left his daughter in slavery to seek freedom suggests that leaving was a better choice than staying. If this was just the life he was used to, he might have chosen to stay with his family. (Though I think I can anticipate the answer to that question…)
Also, isn’t your statement disputed by works such as The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and 12 Years a Slave, as well as Sojourner Truth’s speeches?
I did not say it wasn’t bad. I explicitly pointed out the ways that it was bad and agreed that they are bad. You may want to re-read what I wrote and not assume that I’m an apologist.
It was a brutal and savage time, and Washington was more brutal and savage then many others, like Benjamin Franklin, who recognized the brutality and savagery of slavery. That reflects poorly on Washington.
While your sentiment is completely understandable, let’s not hijack a CS thread with personal comments. There seems to be a Pit thread now that’s better suited.
This wasn’t a coloring book, was it? A regular trade picture book.
The editor is an African American woman who has written a number of books herself about African American history. I highly doubt the book – which practically nobody read – is what it’s been made out to be on social media.
LHoD is right; Octavian Nothing is one of the best children’s books of the last 20 years.
I doubt the Birthday Cake book was going to win a bunch of awards but it’s important to remember that NOBODY HAS READ IT. They are lambasting the book they IMAGINE it to be based on outrage-driven media.