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Slave Trade Research Paper

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Devour their curdled blood, gobble up their molten flesh, and ravish their females’ ebony bodies; what else have masters to do when the slaves’ toil brings them all that they need and more. Bundled up under the decks, inhaling a loathsome stench, Equiano feels “so sick and low” that he becomes unable to eat and wishes for death, his last friend, but only to get tortured further (Equiano 65). This represents an average slave’s life when being transported from his native land to the colonizers’ country to work in fields, mills, and factories. Slave trade, the cruelest evil of colonization, has resulted in the deprivation of African people of their kith and kin, their freedom and dignity, and their right to a decent life. On the other hand, their …show more content…

Once they reach there they are sold off by merchants for toiling in plantations, factories, and fields while their ladies worked in households. On the other hand, the masters enjoyed their life. For example, in the southern planter William Byrd’s diary, he record his daily life that enjoying reading the Bible or Homer’s Odyssey, or playing billiards, and winning or losing stakes. The laws of the land favored the master in everything while inflicting injustice on slaves. (Byrd 41-42) In The African Slave Trade, Equiano describes the horrifying experience of a slave during his journey from Africa, where they remain tied or “chained down to the decks” so that he does not leap out into the sea and escape (Equiano 66). On the other hand, the Virginia Statutes in theory dictates that slaves should be provided “competent diet, clothing, and lodging,” but in practice the masters ignore it and followed the rules that served their interests (Virginia’s 40). Similarly, while the slaves worked hard and took care of the whole affairs of the masters, the latter lived in affluence, ate chicken for dinner, rode on horseback, and beat the slave for “beating his wife,” and whipped his wife for being his whore (Byrd 42). Thus, all the three articles portray the life of slaves in the early American history, when they have had to suffer for making their master

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