Slavery is an absolute evil, but that evil bolstered the economics of the nation, especially the South.
Donald R. Wright, in African Americans in the Colonial Era: From African Origins Through the American Revolution, argues that most works on slavery focus "on the institution as it operated in the cotton South between about 1830 and 1860" (Wright 1). Wright points out that the evils of slavery were present almost from the beginning of the nation, and certainly long before the third decade of the 19th century. The evils of slavery extended for two hundred and fifty years, beginning with the arrival of the first slave in 1619. It continues today, indirectly, in the racial animosity in the nation.
Wright argues that slavery was even more evil and destructive than previously believed, and that its impact on the nation has been far more complex and long-lasting than portrayed in most historians' accounts. Wright is able to deal both with the sociological aspects, as well as the more personal and human areas of slavery, showing how slavery affected the nation racially as it evolved. Wright's book is enlightening because it alters the reader's traditional view of the experience of blacks in slavery and of the relationship between the colonial period of slavery and the evolution of the black experience in the two centuries since the end of that period. This traditional view sees black slavery as primarily existing in the South during a relatively brief period of time, sees blacks as homogeneous in experience and personal make-up, and sees the slavery period as generally irrelevant to the living patterns of blacks in the last years of the 20th century. Aside from the incalculable physical and mental suffering of human beings treated like animals--and worse--Wright shows how slaves (and, to some extent, their descendants as well) are seen as stereotypes--either victims or calculating tricksters intent on fooling the slaveholders. To...