Characters In Chains

Towards the end of the novel, Mrs. Lockton gets word that Isabel had been sending messages to the Rebels. Instead of handing it over to Mrs. Lockton, Isabel

Which is why the North wanted the South to unite with them for this revolution. However, in document five a man named George Fitzhugh a Southerner said in a book called Cannibals All! Or Slaves Without Masters “The Negro slaves of the South are the happiest and, in some sense, the freest people in the world.” The title alone is criticizing the factory conditions of the North and the text says that slaves are happy working under their conditions. Except there is a difference between feeling free and being free and no one understands that better than a man named Frederick Douglass who was a runaway slave said in document four “...To the American slave, is your 4th of July?...To, him your celebration is a sham.” He is saying that it is an injustice when a man in this country says everyone is free when in fact the slaves are not. Even the government got involved with slavery; in document eight it pictures a fight on the senate floor between Senator Sumner and Brooks who beat Sumner with his cane. There was also the Dred Scott case in document nine, where the supreme court viewed a black man as property rather than a person “...they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect...a negro of the african race was regarded by them as an

A particularly strong theme that runs through the entire novel is the unusual power that women play over the men in their lives. Rather than simply being passive to the impulses of men, Mildred takes charge of her life and decides which men she will be with and leaves those that she no longer has an affection for. Cain dives into more controversial territory by having Mildred use men for her own sexual satisfaction. Cain also moves women into the role of successful ‘breadwinners’ during a time where men generally held financial power further blurring traditional roles of gender.

“Free Black people still faced danger. Many appeared in court to ask for a Certificate of Freedom. The claimant had to prove that he/she was born free or had been previously freed. If the court was satisfied, it would

Blackmon provides many stories in his book about what the slaves to forced laborers went through and how they felt about the new so called “freedom” they gained. The Black Americans prior to the Emancipation Proclamation have never seen the slightest clue to what freedom could even feel like. “Some of the old slaves said they too weren’t sure what “freedom” really was”

Of all the couplets, this is the one that fits Isabel the best. She sees how almost all of the white people look at her with disdain, even though she was brought up like a normal girl, learning to read and have good posture. If only they would look past her coloring and see the real her instead of

Overall, America was truly not the “land of the free” between the 1600’s and 1865. Life on the plantation for slaves was not easy, for they were treated poorly. Slaves were given nothing else but what they needed to live and work. They lived in log cabins with no floor or waterproof ceilings. They were given winter and spring clothes and only got one pair of each a year.

The text also illustrates how difficult it was for slaves to become free. According to law, a slave needed to have papers indicating they were free. Essentially, this was the only way they could

Furthermore, activists argue that the slaves never agreed to become slaves, therefore they should not be slaves as that is not permitted through the guaranteed

 African Americans had a rough life during the revolution. Mary Postill is a prime example of the hardships that an African American slave had to go through. After she fled to Charleston, the military gave her a certificate of freedom. At the time, the military was controlled by the British. A loyalist who claimed freed blacks wrongly then took control of Mary and her family and made them his slaves so they could no longer be free. Gray brought Mary to court when she attempted to flee. She swore that she was free, but Gray, being that he was an esteemed white man, won the case. He then sold Mary and her family down the river for a hundred bushels of potatoes. This was her punishment for trying to escape him. The owners of slaves usually made their workers do the most tedious and tiresome work such as helping with the rice production. They were not well fed and they were not given enough supplies to make their own clothing. The slaves were also physically and mentally abused. Carol Berkin states in chapter 8 of

A law was made that allowed all slaves who fought in the war to be free after one year of fighting. The slave’s owner, of course, had to consent. Over the course of the revolution, the concept of a slave went from a lowly character to a person of worth – anybody fighting for the colonies was respected for standing up for the rights of the colonies.

An approximate of three thousand slaves escaped from their masters in 1781 when the British invaded Virginia (Blumrosen & Blumrosen, 2006). About five thousand and twenty thousand slaves in Georgia and South Carolina, respectively, were freed from bondage as a result of the American Revolution (Clifford, 2005). The Revolution’s natural rights philosophy inspired the freed blacks to request the state legislatures to get rid of slavery and Congress to terminate the slave trade (Waldstreicher, 2004). Many of the freed slaves moved to the North because they believed that living conditions were better in the North than in the South. Unfortunately, they experienced many problems in the North, such as lack of jobs, insufficient food, and lack of housing, which forced many of them to go back to the south to work on the cotton plantations for wages (Clifford, 2005). In the South, the freed slaves were assured of food and housing.

Slaves in the colonies during the revolution were faced with no real options and little liberty. The slaves’ lot in life varied greatly between individual experiences. Those slave owners who had only a few slaves generally treated their slaves better than those with large numbers of slaves. Even if they were treated well, the slaves had little in the way of freedom. They would be required to work throughout the day at the bidding of their masters and had no recourse to whatever punishment was given at their master’s hands. The slaves also had little hope of ever obtaining freedom for themselves and their children (Pavao, n.d.).

After fighting for freedom, the colonies started to realize the hypocrisy of slavery, and a

The contradictions between slavery and freedom are very apparent throughout history. America started out with the intentions of becoming separate