Humble+Thoughts+on+Slavery

- House Slave Mary Brown's Perspective

My name is Mary Brown and I am a slave who belongs to a cotton plantation owner in Missouri. Since I am one of the several house slaves, I live in the attic of the owner’s huge house, separate from my parents who work as field slaves and live in their grim quarter. Although my living conditions are far better than those of most field slaves, I am fully on task every day from early in the morning till very late at night. I shouldn’t really complain because it is nothing compared to what my poor parents are burdened with. They have to get up an hour before daylight to the horn blow, and rush to the working field to labor among the hoe-gangs. Even when they return to their quarter from hard day’s work all exhausted, there are things they must do like feeding the livestock, cutting the woods, packing, kindling a fire, and preparing for the next day’s meals, and so on. At least, I have privileges to learn how to read and write, and a chance to go to church on Sunday with my master and mistress. For the past two years, my mind has been preoccupied with the slave issue. The whole country divided by the North free states and the South Slave states has been disputing intensely over the balance in power in the Congress. So what they did was admitting Maine as a free state and our Missouri as a slave state in order to maintain the balance in the Congress. I know the economy of the South depends a lot on slave labor. With such skyrocketing amount of cotton exports, it is the fact that the plantation owners just can’t give up their slaves. They can own them as a property and knowing that the slaves are the source of their profits, why should they give up their rights? I think the Congress is missing the point. They are only concerned about who gets the power and not about how slavery is wrong and how it offends the basic moral principles of the Declaration of Independence. As a matter of fact, back in 1819, when the Representative James Tallmadge of New York stood up with an idea of forbidding further slavery and allowing freedom for the children of the slaves when they reach the age of 25 years in Missouri, I thought we the slaves were finally going to live as human-beings and not as beasts. I can still hear him saying “as their representative, I will proclaim their hatred to slavery in every shape”, over and over in my head. But it was only a dream, a dream that couldn’t be realized. Out of frustration, I complained the Lord: How could a material wealth be more important than a person’s well-being? Another issue that caused disputes was the part in the new Missouri Constitution (1820) that prohibited the free blacks and mulattoes from coming into the state. It was absurd how this issue was resolved with another compromise in the congress: “the Missouri constitution should never be construed to authorize the passage of any law impairing the privileges and immunities of any U.S. citizen”. Since WHEN the slaves were considered the U.S. citizens? What privileges and immunities were they referring to? As it wished, Missouri was eventually admitted to the Union as a slave state on August 10, this year, and I wonder for how much longer we have to suffer the toil and injustice in this land of justice. I can no longer bear the thoughts of those abused slaves whipped by their overseers for not working fast enough, those run-away slaves working with chains and manacles as punishment, and those pregnant slaves doing the same amount of hard work as the men…

 http://www.kshs.org/cool3/graphics/tintypelg.jpg http://library.thinkquest.org/CR0215086/dailylife.htm http://www.slaveryinamerica.org/history/hs_es_cotton.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missouri_Compromise http://www.sonofthesouth.net/slavery/missouri-compromise.htm http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/history/A0833427.html