In this thread, I ask about a book I heard about years ago, in which an enslaved man makes money for the man who enslaved him by bare-knuckle fighting other enslaved men (and being unbeatable).
Was this a thing in the Antebellum South in the US (or, really I suppose, at any point in human history)?
Tom Molineaux, a formerly enslaved prize fighter, claims he learned his craft fighting for his enslaver.
Although this historian claims there were no such fights, or at least very rare.
Weren’t most Roman gladiators slaves, and didn’t the people bet on them?
That article said that fights to the death were unknown.
Slaves were sometimes sent to fight for their owners; it just wasn’t to the death. Tom Molineaux was a Virginia slave who won his freedom—and, for his owner, $100,000—after winning a match against another slave. He went on to become the first black American to compete for the heavyweight championship when he fought the white champion Tom Cribb in England in 1810. (He lost.) According to Frederick Douglass, wrestling and boxing for sport, like festivals around holidays, were “among the most effective means in the hands of the slaveholder in keeping down the spirit of insurrection.”
Fights themselves were very common.
For that matter, fights to the death were quite rare in the gladiator era, too. A gladiator was way too valuable to waste in that way. It did happen occasionally, as well as the occasional accidental death in the arena, but it was far from the norm.
My fault, I had read that article when it first posted and didn’t reread it before posting.
(This is something that @Exapno_Mapcase quoted, not their words.)
I believe the fight preceded the introduction weight divisions, and that the fight was simply for the world championship of boxing.
j