Slaves Were Made, Not Born: Literature and Chattel Slavery
This paper argues that enslaved people in the United States were made into chattel slaves through force, institutional perversion, and systemic dehumanization — not born into a natural or destined condition of servitude. Drawing on Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Wilson's Our Nig, and Frances Harper's Iola Leroy, the paper examines themes of intellectual resistance, physical defiance, sexual violence, intraracial complicity, and the moral distortions of slavery. Together, these literary sources demonstrate that the condition of slavery was constructed, imposed, and — crucially — capable of being undone.
- Introduction: The Constructed Nature of Slavery: Slavery as an imposed, not innate, condition
- Douglass's Intellect and Resistance as Evidence of Humanity: Douglass's learning and defiance prove full humanity
- Intraracial Complicity and the Psychology of Preferentialism: Hughes episode illustrates slavery's psychological distortions
- Freedom and the Abolitionist Spirit: Abolitionist passion confirms slavery was not destiny
- Sexual Violence and the Dehumanization of Enslaved Women: Jacobs's narrative exposes rape and loss of selfhood
- Slavery's Distortion of Family and Social Norms: Wilson and Harper reveal family destruction under slavery
- Conclusion: Slavery as a Made Condition: Emancipation proves slavery was constructed, not natural
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper constructs a clear, sustained thesis — that slavery was made, not born — and returns to it consistently across multiple literary sources, preventing the argument from fragmenting into unrelated textual summaries.
- It uses direct quotation strategically, selecting passages that do real argumentative work (e.g., Douglass resisting Covey, Jacobs rationalizing sexual compliance) rather than quoting for atmosphere alone.
- The paper broadens its scope logically, moving from first-person resistance (Douglass) to systemic psychological effects (Hughes's complicity) to structural violence (sexual exploitation, indentured servitude), building a cumulative case across sources.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates comparative textual analysis in service of a historical-philosophical argument. Rather than treating each literary work in isolation, it cross-references slave narratives to reinforce a single claim from multiple angles — intellectual capacity, physical will, social psychology, and moral philosophy. This technique, anchoring literary close-reading to an overarching thesis, is a strong model for humanities research papers at the undergraduate level.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens by situating chattel slavery historically and introducing its central claim. It then develops evidence section by section: Douglass's literacy and physical resistance establish individual humanity; the Hughes episode introduces institutional psychology; the abolitionist newspaper passage confirms that freedom was a natural aspiration; Jacobs and Wilson add gender and childhood dimensions; and Harper's Iola Leroy addresses the social perversions of mixed-race offspring under slavery. The conclusion synthesizes these threads and anchors them in the Emancipation Proclamation as the definitive proof that slavery was a made — and unmakeable — condition.
Introduction: The Constructed Nature of Slavery
The sense of proprietorship held by slave traders, owners, and other propagators of chattel slavery in the United States until the middle of the 19th century would be absurdly laughable — were it not steeped in a legacy of perversion, anguish, tragedy, and perniciousness. The notion that one had the right to actually own another person — whose sole existence would be to serve the owner in any way the owner deemed appropriate — has been disproved as largely imaginary, and not something based on any sense of right or morality, numerous times, both during the tenure of slavery in the United States and well afterward. A casual examination of the wording of the Declaration of Independence confirms this fact (McAuliffe, 2010, p. 78), although it should be noted that at the time of the document's composition, African and West Indian slaves were largely regarded as three-fifths of a man for the purposes of taxation and representation.
However, those distinctions have largely faded with the passing of chattel slavery in this country. The conception that someone could be born solely for the purpose of being a slave is highly inaccurate, and can be demonstrated in a number of ways — not the least of which is the historical fact that when African rulers sold a number of slaves to European slave traders in the 15th and 16th centuries (Baraka, 1991, p. 21), those people were already free. It was only the dogged insolence of European and American slave traders and owners that persisted in making those of African and West Indian descent into chattel slaves in this country, as a body of literature and historical sources readily proves.
Some of the most powerful examples of this fact may be gleaned from literature, particularly when such literature is founded upon a historical basis that combines a non-fictional approach with a narrative in which slaves are depicted as full human beings — a perspective that was widely unpopular in certain regions of the United States for the first century both before and after its founding. It may be asserted that slave narratives, which illustrated the actual person and character of someone repeatedly dehumanized to be made into another's property, were among the contributing factors that led to the eventual abolition of slavery in the United States (Bland, 2001, p. 11). Of the first-hand chronicles of slavery, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave is certainly among the most eminent. The first reason for this eminence is the eloquence of Douglass's writing — which in and of itself serves as a defense of the notion that one is not born a slave, but is rather made into one — while other contributing factors include the narrative's brutal rendering of the perverse behavior of slave owners and traders, as well as its depictions of the genuine humanity that each and every slave undeniably possessed.
When attempting to demonstrate that slaves were made into human property and were not born that way, it becomes necessary to define and outline the logic behind this argument, as well as any proofs offered to support it. To do so, one can compare the sentiment, intellect, and overall humanity of slaves to that of their owners, and examine whether there are any qualities in the latter that are lacking in the former, and vice versa.
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