During class today we watched videos presentations done by our fellow classmates about the topics that also correlated to our debate. In the presentations, they mainly talked about slavery not only in America but also in the United Kingdom.
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| John Calhoun |
The first video that we watched talked about a guy named John Calhoun; he was a man who was very much pro slavery, the thing that he said that holds the most animosity in today's light is the quote he said which was, "Slavery was a positive good." while most people in that time weren't exactly disagreeing with the words that he said they didn't explicitly say that it was good, more that it was a necessity that had been the norm for many years.
The Antebellum slave was another topic that a video was presented on, this was telling us that many families faced devastating issues even greater than being a slave; while being a slave was already as bad as it could get, the people who auctioned for the slaves sometimes either didn't want the whole family or just broke them up because they couldn't afford that many slaves. At that time slaves were around $180,000; so just being one slave was a crazy ask buying a whole family would be not only expensive but sometimes just not an economically sound decision.
In the next video he talked about how while some slaves tried and successfully ran away from their masters it was dangerous for many reasons; the biggest one however was the bounty hunters, their whole job was exactly as it sounds they hunted runaway slaves for the reward that they'd be given when they caught them. So not only were slaves dealing with crazy hard conditions in the wilderness, they also had to deal with hunters. These videos showed us the hidden truths that aren't always talked about when we think about the problems with slavery that we had at a time.
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