ipl-logo

Sargry: The Slave Family

1372 Words6 Pages

Family is a place to fall back to for comfort, a place to always fit in, and a place to build memories, but for slaves families were supposed to be those things and they were not. The hardship of watching family members being sold away takes away the happy memories. Children growing up in slavery takes away the comfort of home because they were going to face the harsh reality of slave hood. Slaves never got the solid structure of a family because they could be broken with a blink of an eye. Therefore, while given the opportunity to marry and form families as comfort for the slaves it provided insurance to slave masters, and they proved to be the biggest heartbreaks for slaves themselves. In the beginnings of American Slavery there was no legal …show more content…

Marriages in slavery however were delicate and could be gone with one bill of sale. The pain of being sold apart from loved ones is described in several letters between husbands and wives. In 1840, Sargry Brown wrote a letter in distress to her husband who lived away from her. Sargry was nearly sending her good bye to her husband since she was going to be up for sale. Sargry writes, “If you don’t come down here this Sunday, perhaps you won’t see me anymore. Give my love to them all, and tell them all that perhaps I shan’t see you any more…I wish to see you all, but I expect I never shall see you all-never no more”. Situations like Sargry Brown and her husband were not uncommon. The fact that she had the potential to never see her family again would have been anguishing. The anguish of being sold apart from the family could have been prevented if slaves did not create the family units the slave masters encouraged for their own sake. Another marriage in the depths of being sold away was in 1852 the Perkins. Maria Perkins is writing a letter to her husband Richard explaining to him that the kids and her were being sold. In a desperate attempt Maria asks, “I want you to tell Dr. Hamelton or your master if either will buy me they can attend to it…if I should be sold I don’t know what will become of them [children] I don’t …show more content…

The origins of slave families becoming allowed on plantations could be stemmed back to the livestock species the slave masters considered them being. The marriage is at the heart of a family and when they were torn apart and shipped to different plantations miles and miles away. The marriage expands into children. When children are thought of as bundles of joy that bring all kinds of happiness into the world, however for children brought into slavery it brought more pain into the family unit as they knew everything would be downhill from the child from their birth, they could get separated from their family and they would watch all the horror associated with slavery. Overall slaves were supposedly more docile when families could form, but the misery caused by all the associated risks of raising a family in

Show More
Related

  • Samuel Hall's Father Was Kidnapped From Slavery

    243 Words  | 1 Pages

    The wife’s masters owned the children of the marriage Samuel’s first master, Alex Hall, tried to keep slave families together. What prompted Samuel’s sale to Tennessee? The master Alex Hall died and the slaves were sold to different people

    Read More

  • Book Review Of Midnight Rising Tony Horwitz

    910 Words  | 4 Pages

    “I felt for a number of years, Brown later wrote in a letter to a young abolitionist, a steady strong desire: to

    Read More

  • Eli Whitney's Effects On Slavery

    784 Words  | 4 Pages

    Plantation owners would and could easily sell husbands from wives, parents from children, and brothers from sisters (12). A women named Mary Armstrong, who experienced slavery said this about her owner and the separating for families "so mean he never would sell the man and woman and (children) to the same one. He'd sell the man here and the woman there and if (there were children) he'd sell them someplace else

    Read More

  • How Did The Europeans Contribute To The Economy Of The American's

    655 Words  | 3 Pages

    Plantation owners loved having indentured servants because it really helped them save every bit of money they could. Indentured servants did suffer a lot especially with their working schedules but, with the laws that were later passed in Virginia throughout the years and any few freedoms black had were taken away making them feel hopeless at times because of the racial diversity in the America’s at the time. Servants were being optimistic at the time, they were hoping the laws being passed would not affect their rewards for all the hard work they had endeavored throughout the four to seven year long contracts. There was many uncertainty especially with how society would treat them because of their skin color. With all these new laws being passed, most plantation owners feared for their land, indentured servants were not needed as much anymore, plantation owners turned to slavery were they had more power of the individuals and were guaranteed no profit

    Read More

  • Slavery In Colonial Virginia Essay

    517 Words  | 3 Pages

    During this time period, blacks had many different statuses. Some were slaves forever, some were like indentured servants. They were allowed to actually own property, get married and after they served their time they were freed. Slaves were at the bottom of the social order but the individuals above them were not much better. The white people that were poor did not have as many hardships because they always thought at least they were not slaves, even though they were towards the bottom of the social structure.

    Read More

  • Summary Of Water From The Rock

    1906 Words  | 8 Pages

    By 1863 slave homes became 2 parents households with very strong family

    Read More

  • Slavery: Differences Between The North And The South

    336 Words  | 2 Pages

    The treatment of slaves between the North and the South was drastically different. Slaves in the North typically lived in the same house as their master and worked by themselves, or in small groups (pg. 94). Slaves in the South tended to live in large plantations in which they were housed in plantation outbuildings (pg. 104). The difference between the North and the South in housing and working environment had a direct effect on the integration of African Americans into their new American society. When they were housed in the North with their masters and had limited exposure to other slaves, they tended to adopt the ways of their masters.

    Read More

  • Slavery During The Antebellum Period

    1036 Words  | 5 Pages

    Freedom is the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint. The foundation of America is freedom. Freedom from Britain. However, the freedom is limited to white males who own property. When colonists started to immigrate to America, they wanted to escape from under the rule of Britain.

    Read More

  • Is America A Land Of Opportunity Essay

    821 Words  | 4 Pages

    With slaves came the opportunity to work. With more hands that were not paid plantation owners only had more to gain as this went on through several states. Several slaves were sent in abundance to the West Indies to speed up the process of collecting sugar cane. This was extremely hard work for the slaves and only pushed the separation bar further apart. Along with Native Americans and slave women had no say over what went on in their lives a majority of the time.

    Read More

  • Essay On Slavery In The South

    704 Words  | 3 Pages

    Before they were sold to other slave owners, they had a free life with their family. To support this explanation, on page 433, there is a quote that is talking about a male slave who got separated from his family. It

    Read More

  • Victimization In My Bondage And My Freedom By Frederick Douglas

    958 Words  | 4 Pages

    Douglass states “the practice of separating children from their mother, and hiring the latter out at distances too great to admit of their meeting, except at long intervals, is a marked feature of the cruelty and barbarity of the slave system” (Douglass, 24). In other words, the children that were being separated from their family by the system, was not worth being with their family. Slave owners thought that they are not worth being human themselves. Meaning, they are more like animals and cargo instead of a human being. The slaves were stripped from their identity.

    Read More

  • Effects Of Slavery On African American Family

    1768 Words  | 8 Pages

    Slaves were views as property and in the Southern States property could not enter into a contract, and marriage is a well known contract. The fact that they could not legally marry meant that a permanent family could not be guaranteed under the American Slave life. Enslave black couples used old African traditions to unite the families. One of the most well known acts of pledging their love for one another was “Jumping the Broom”. (Braddy 1)

    Read More

  • Frederick Douglass Dehumanization

    1647 Words  | 7 Pages

    In the 1800’s slavery was a major issue in the United States which was dealt with on a daily basis in the South. The “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass” Fedrick Douglass himself expresses the differences in the lives of black people in the North and in the South. The South was known to have some of the wealthiest white people in the states, that wealth and power they had was due to the many slaves they had working in their plantations. In the other hand, the North had black people getting paid for their labor, their black people were free. They were treated like human beings and even though they might still encounter problems with some of the whites these problems where nothing compared to the retched life blacks had in the South.

    Read More

  • What The Black Man Wants Analysis

    487 Words  | 2 Pages

    The letter shows the loyalty that African Americans gave to their owners, despite all of the suffering they put them through. The letter showed that Anderson was intelligent and that he was no longer property of Colonial Anderson, but a man replying to another man. Never before could a slave write to their owner in such a way. Mr. Anderson states that “surely there will be a day of reckoning” for what he experienced in slavery. Anderson expresses that he, like the rest of the freed American slaves, would never turn back and never give up their freedom.

    Read More

  • Frederick Douglass Letter To My Master Essay

    410 Words  | 2 Pages

    “Letter to My Master, Thomas Auld” explores Frederick Douglass’ view of slavery and Thomas Auld, his former slave master, in a smart and emotionally charged letter originally written in 1848 and published in the abolitionist newspaper North Star. Throughout the letter, Douglass uses his own experience as a slave to drive his views, often using sarcasm and a dark recognition of his trials to drive his own view of slavery; that slavery should be abolished and that it is inhumane and cruel. Douglass’ decision to publish this paper in the North Star allowed him to bring to light his experiences to push other readers of the newspaper towards an abolitionist stand point by bringing his first-hand accounts of slavery forward and explaining, at times

    Read More

More about Sargry: The Slave Family

Open Document