Human slavery is the ultimate application of market-based capitalism, in which everything has its price, including human beings. That it existed from the dawn of history to less than one hundred fifty years ago in this country is a sad testimony to the severely limited moral capacity of the human race. Like wars, including the current one in Iraq, it persisted as long as it did because of lies, fear, ignorance, enforced conformity, and the very human trait of shying away from the unpleasant, especially when moments of conscience reveal oneself to be a coward in passively supporting such an evil by remaining silent. It is only when one experiences the devastation wrought by these social pathologies personally, or oneÆs sympathetic response is aroused by reading personal accounts of those caught in the maelstrom that the possibility grows for collective political action to put an end to such widely accepted evils.
Slavery no longer exists in the United States due in no small part to the writings of Phillis Wheatley, Harriet Jacobs, Fredrick Douglass, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. The first was a literary pioneer, being the first slave to be published, who denounced the institution obliquely by stressing the common humanity of blacks and whites. The next two were slaves who wrote groundbreaking accounts of the cruelty of their captivity. The latter woman û the only white person in the group - wrote Uncle TomÆs Cabin, which ôimmediately broke all sales records of the day: selling half-a-million copies by 1857ö (www.uwm.edu:1) and was perhaps the most important literary impetus to the popularisation of the Abolishionist movement, and therefore an indirect contributing cause of the Civil War.
Slavery dehumanised its victims in every way imaginable. Slaves were subjected to arbitrary violence, including murder, beatings, and rape. They had no freedom or legal status and could not leave their masters. They were kept for the most pa<...