According to an essay published online on the Teaching American History website, on July 5, 1852 at the Rochester Ladies Antislavery Society, Frederick Douglass gave a speech in which he reminded the audience that the Fourth of July, during which the nation celebrated freedom and liberty, was not a day for celebration for slaves. The United States that Frederick Douglass knew was a nation of contradictions. There were people opposed to slavery, but the position of the United States government was that slaves were property rather than people. The speech given by Douglas was used reminded his audience that the notion of liberty has not extended to enslaved blacks across America (Douglass).
Slaves were considered to be an important component of the economic system in the United States. The cultivation of crops, including tobacco and cotton, required a tremendous amount of manual labor and the use of slave labor permitted wealthy landowners to maintain their standard of living. The anti-slavery movement in the United States campaigned for decades before succeeding in limiting the spread of slavery. It took a Civil War which threatened the existence of the Union before the United States government abolished slavery.
In hindsight, slavery flourished because the arguments people who opposed slavery fell on deaf ears. There was a powerful economic incentive for slavery to remain legal. In a transparent effort to shift blame from themselves, slaveholders used an age-old trick of blaming the victims. Proponents of slavery argued that the people enslaved were somehow less than human. To validate this assertion, slaveholders asserted that slaves had genetic defects which made them prone to violence and laziness. Blacks were also labeled as subhuman because they were considered to be inferior in intelligence, and promiscuous.
Another argument for permitting slavery was that blacks were better off as slaves. T...