Question

how did they justify slavery back in the day
what play did slaves have in society
what derisive stereotypes of African Americans were they

Answer 1

1. Following are some of the arguments that are used to justify slavery:

• Slavery is good for slaves: slaves don’t have the ability to run their lives & hence it is better to have a system where their lives are run by others.
• Too difficult to abolish: this is considered as a reason by some cultures to tolerate slavery while trying to eradicate them is a more challenging task.
• They are good for certain industries: A number of past industries have depended on slave labor, and the employers claimed that abolishing slavery would be economically disastrous. This argument isn't an ethical one and isn't backed up by examples. There is also a strong counter-argument that the use of slave labor can force non-slave workers and businesses that don't use slavery out of business or into serious hardship.
• Useful form of punishment: some cultures use slavery as a punishment & there is only a small part that doesn’t justify slavery.
• Abolishing slavery can threaten the society: this point was popular at some point. But it is an argument that some society was ethically flawed & required reorganization. Since no modern society is based on slavery it has no application.
• Slavery is better than poverty: n circumstances of extreme poverty, living in slavery may be the least bad available option. While slavery may be the least bad option for an individual, this doesn't justify slavery, but indicates that action should be taken to provide other better options to individuals.

2. Black slaves played a major, though unwilling and generally unrewarded, role in laying the economic foundations of the United States—especially in the South. Blacks also played a leading role in the development of Southern speech, folklore, music, dancing, and food, blending the cultural traits of their African homelands with those of Europe. During the 17th and 18th centuries, African and African American (those born in the New World) slaves worked mainly on the tobacco, rice, and indigo plantations of the Southern seaboard. Eventually slavery became rooted in the South’s huge cotton and sugar plantations. Although Northern businessmen made great fortunes from the slave trade and from investments in Southern plantations, slavery was never widespread in the North.

African peoples were captured and transported to the Americas to work. Most European colonial economies in the Americas from the 16th through the 19th century were dependent on enslaved African labor for their survival. According to European colonial officials, the abundant land they had "discovered" in the Americas was useless without sufficient labor to exploit it. Slavery systems of labor exploitation were preferred, but neither European nor Native American sources proved adequate to the task.

3. From the colonial era through the American Revolution ideas about African Americans were used in various propaganda either for or against the slavery. Watson represents an historical event, while Liberty is indicative of abolitionist sentiments expressed in Philadelphia's post revolutionary intellectual community. Nevertheless, Jennings' painting represents African-Americans as passive, submissive beneficiaries of not only slavery's abolition, but knowledge, which liberty has graciously bestowed upon them.