Slavery: The History Of Mary Princes Memoir, By Mary Prince

Slavery was one of the most tragic memories known for in the black race. Slavery is the process at which an African American is purchased by a Caucasian who is used for exhausting labor work such as picking cotton, or tending to house work and being restricted from freedom. All of the slaves were used and abused physically, mentally, and emotionally. In some cases abuse was the death of many of those slaves. The slaves were classified as the lowest of the low and were banned from learning, reading, and writing. Not all slaves’ lives ended at those abusive plantations. Two former slaves whose lives turned out a success was Harriet Jacobs and Fredrick Douglass.

Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women and Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Starting from a slave’s birth, this cruel process leads to a continuous cycle of abuse, neglect, and inhumane treatment. To some extent, slave holders succeed because they keep most slaves so concerned with survival that they have no time or energy to consider freedom. This is particularly true for plantation slaves where the conditions of slave life are the most difficult and challenging. However, slave holders fail to realize the damage they inadvertently inflict on themselves by upholding slavery and enforcing these austere laws and attitudes.

In the slave narrative The History of Mary Prince, harsh treatment and brutal beatings from Prince's depraved slave mistresses occur almost regularly to Mary Prince and her slave companions. Prince narrates the whole story from her perspective and gives elaborate detail as to what a slave has to endure. Although all of Prince's owners are men, Prince focuses on the brutal beatings that the women pressed upon her. Mary Prince depicts the slave-master's wives as evil, twisted women who just beat Mary for no particular reason. Prince uses the advantage of showing these women as evil to gain the sympathy and compassion from her audience, an audience who would primarily be white, Christian women. Not only does the audience see the harsh reality

is striving to convince Europeans that slavery is a heinous act and people should not be blinded by misconceptions or the inability to humanize an ethnicity other than their own. She alludes to this when she says, “Oh, the horrors of slavery! How the thought of it pains my heart! But the truth ought to be told of it; and what my eyes have seen I think it is my duty to relate; for few people in England know what slavery is” (Prince 11). Here, Prince uses an imagery to express her sentiment; she also uses words such as “ought” and “duty” to demonstrate the course of action she is taking by writing the memoir. Moreover, she does not completely discredit all Europeans or slave owners. Prince makes sure the audience understands a majority of Europeans do not

The History of Mary Prince was a seminal work of the nineteenth century, which today remains an important historical device. Mary Prince’s story is not unique, but the circumstances and context surrounding her novel are. Defying contemporary standards and beliefs, The History of Mary Prince demonstrates the atrocities of slavery, but also a distinctive and deliberate political message. The History of Mary Prince is not only important for its demonstration of human suffering and the legal history it documents, but it also offers insight into the British abolition movement. Twofold, it remains an important text through both its straightforward portrayal of facts and experience as well as its underlying careful manipulation of political and moral themes. The History of Mary Prince served as an influential abolitionist piece of writing, but furthermore can incite multiple layers of interpretation and analysis of the abolition movement.

Throughout Mary Prince 's narrative, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, it is clearly evident that the brutal treatment from Prince 's mistresses, which she inflicts upon her slaves, is a common occurrence. Through her perspective, she tells the readers about the harsh treatment she receives from both her masters and mistresses. By doing so, she achieves sympathy from the readers, who could possibly be of the middle-class demographic. In Prince 's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she chronicles her life as a slave in order to demonstrate the inhumane treatment by the slave

The abuse that was inflicted upon African American slaves can be considered cruel, dehumanizing, intimidating, and scarring. These slaves were considered more property than human and were brutally, sometimes excessively punished for varying reasons. Not only were the slaves well marked with varying scars across their bodies, but they were also mentally altered, or psychologically damaged, by this unusual system of punishment and life. The psychological effects of torture on these slaves, although completely different from the physical ones, were also very traumatizing.

“For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.”- Nelson Mandela. The quote is describing how freedom is not only being out of chains but to be able to be in society with respect from all. Freedom can also mean a lot of different things depending on the person. For example to a teenager freedom could mean them getting out from under their parents supervision or parental control. But, freedom to an adult that works everyday of the week, their freedom can be, not have to work on the weekends, which gives them their freedom to do anything they want to do. In the slave narrative Incidents of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs about her life as a slave, freedom means Linda (aka Harriet Jacobs) being free from slavery, being away from Dr. Flint, and to have her family free with her. She tries to achieve her freedom in many different ways. She confesses to Mrs. Flint about the advances Dr. Flint makes towards her, she falls in with a free black man, and gets pregnant by Mr. Sands. She uses these to achieve her freedom from Dr. Flint’s advances. She also achieves her freedom by running away to her grandmother’s attic, and running away to the North. Linda also achieves her freedom when Dr. Flint had died and when Mrs. Bruce being her savior.

In this passage in her autobiography, Prince also attacks the view that the slaves lack empathy for those effected by the brutality and the punishments that must endure: “All the slaves said that death was a good thing for poor Hetty; but [Prince] cried very much for her death. The manner of it filled me with horror. [She] could not bear to think about it; yet it was always present in [her] mind for many a day” (16). With the inclusion of this quote, Prince expresses to her readers that she and her fellow slaves showed sympathy for their fellow slaves and the conditions that whites placed them in. While readers could misconstrue the idea that the slaves thought that death was better for Hetty, the readers can interpret that as their only view of how Hetty could get relief and peace from her pain. Prince also shows readers that she was personally affected by what she witnessed as she was often reminded of the horrors that Hetty had to endure. She wants her readers to understand that slaves did not act unfeelingly and brutishly like whites often painted them, for they show concern for the plight that Hetty must

While living with the Captain and his wife, Mary faced a lot of physical abuse.

This paper discusses the experiences of African American Women under slavery during the Slave Trade, their exploitation, the secrecy, the variety of tasks and positions of slave women, slave and ex-slave narratives, and significant contributions to history. Also, this paper presents the hardships African American women faced and the challenges they overcame to become equal with men in today’s society. Slavery was a destructive experience for African Americans especially women. Black women suffered doubly during the slave era.

“Oh the horrors of slavery!--How the thought of it pains my heart! But the truth ought to be told of it; and what my eyes have seen I think it is my duty to relate; for few people in England know what slavery is. I have been a slave--I have felt what a slave feels, and I know what a slave knows; and I would have all the good people in England to know it too, that they may break our chains, and set us free.”(Prince, 269) This quote is grabbed from Mary Prince’s narrative and it is just her accepting the fact that she was a slave, and that she was filled with sadness, and her objective to inform others of the horror of slavery. These people were fortunate enough to find an escape from the violent world of slavery, and left an influential remark in history through their braveness. Standing up for what you believe is morally correct is not alway the easiest tasks, but they managed to do it and escape from their sufferings and get away from it. They experienced treatments that no human being should be allowed to go through, they were treated like animals. This is not right, hopefully we have forever learned from past mistakes because no one in the world deserves to go through these hardships. No one should be fighting to be free because a human being is born free, and should remain that way

“He told me that I was made for his use, made to obey his command in every thing; that I was nothing but a slave, whose will must and should surrender to his…” The treatment of slaves varied in their personal experiences as well as in the experiences of others they knew, but Harriet Jacobs phenomenally described the dynamics of the relationship between many female slaves and their superiors with these words from her personal narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). Before slavery was outlawed it was not uncommon for young female slaves to be sexually abused and exploited by their masters. Although many people know about the cruelty of the sexual assaults that made too many young girls victims of rape in the Antebellum South, most people are unaware of the complexity of the issue and how many different ways these women were abused.

Slavery is a stain in the history of the United States that will always be particularly remembered for the cruelty it exhibited. Up until 1865 slaves were imported in shiploads and treated as if they were merely cattle. On the farms slaves were given no mercy and had to work long, arduous days for nothing. Additionally they were often subject to cruel overseers who would beat and whip them on a regular basis. As brutal and destructive as the institution of slavery was, slaves were not defenseless victims. Through their families, and religion, as well as more direct forms of resistance, Africans-Americans resisted the debilitating effects of slavery and created a vital culture supportive of human dignity.