Cartwright's one-Sided Thoughts on Slavery

The first hand accounts giving in the readings of Brent and Cartwright both provided great insight on how life was like during times of slavery. Brent’s story provided an in-depth personal account on how it was for a slave girl to grow up. Brent life story took all sides of slavery into account. She considered factors like the effects that slavery was having on everyone whether they were white, black, female, or male. Cartwright provided details of his life in his writing, and he gave his account of how bad of an institution he thought slavery was. Cartwright greatly opposed slavery, but he did not really consider himself to be an abolitionist because he believes that their views on slavery were somewhat one-sided. He believed that the abolitionist felt so strongly that they distanced themselves from slave holders and destroyed any chances for either parties to sit down and discuss the issues. What Cartwright did not realize was that his arguments about slavery were also one sided because he was just representing the white male who did not own slaves, and also did not know much about slave conditions. Cartwright was mainly representing the outside world looking in at slavery. Cartwright realized that slavery was a bad thing, but because he was not a slave himself or a slave holder he could not give an informative account of slavery. So though Cartwright strongly opposed slavery, he did not fully understand the evils and the effects of slavery as Brent did.

One way that Cartwright did not understand the effects of slavery was that his only concerns over slavery revolved around the ill effects that slavery had on the whites. It did not seem as if he was really concerned about how slaves were being treated by their slave masters, though he did see slavery as a moral evil. To Cartwright, slavery was a moral evil because he believed that it made whites slave holders lazy. He felt that since slave holders had their slaves doing all of the housework, then they believed having to do so themselves would be like lowering their status. In other words the rich slave holders had lost the value of work to the point that if they had to do so themselves would be like lowing themselves to the same level as slaves. This view can partly be found in the reason why he wanted to move out of Kentucky, “Second, I could raise my children to work where work was not thought a degradation.” (Cartwright, 19). Cartwright wanted for whites to still have great work values instilled because he came from a family that had to work for everything that they had. In Cartwright’s opinion living off of the fruits of the labors of others may have helped on a financial level, but personally it took away from the experience of achieving those good things on your own.

Brent on the other had seemed to not only be concerned about the effects that slavery would have on blacks, but she also seemed to be concerned about the effect it was having on the whites. Brent believed that for blacks having to live to serve someone else was a very degrading experience. I believe that she strongly felt that being able to live meant that you were in control of all of your actions, and you should only have to cater to the needs of yourself or your family. Because she was a slave she was not allowed to do so, and this was a very depressing thing. Being a slave took away from being able to successfully raise your family together, because at some point either you or someone else in your family would be put on the auctioning block. This point is strongly felt when she described the auctioning process that occurs on New Year’s Day, “But to the slave mother New Year’s day comes laden with peculiar sorrows. She sits on her cold cabin floor, watching the children who may all be torn from her the next morning” (Brent, 14). Brent felt that living a life as a pauper in a country like Ireland or being a rehabilitated felon would both be better than living life as a slave simply because they had their freedom.

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