Treatment of Slaves in America.
20
was most often meted out in response to disobedience or perceived infractions, but masters or overseers sometimes abused slaves to assert dominance. Slave masters
even beat pregnant women, devising ways to do it without harming the baby. Slave masters would dig a hole big enough for the womans stomach to lay in and proceed
with the lashings. In addition, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese in Schneider 2007:90 says, “Mistresses whipped slave women with whom they might have shared beds, whose
children they might have delivered or who might have delivered theirs, whose children they might have suckled and who frequently suckled theirs.”
The mistreatment of slaves frequently included rape and the sexual abuse of women. Some slaves died while trying to resist sexual attacks. Others sustained
psychological and physical trauma. The sexual abuse of slaves was partially rooted in the patriarchal nature of contemporary Southern culture and its view of women of
any race as property. After 1662, when Virginia adopted the legal doctrine partus sequitur ventrem, sexual relations between white men and black women were
regulated by classifying children of slave mothers as slaves regardless of their fathers race or status.
Jenny Hill in Schneider 2007:85 explains the bitterness of such treatment when she was separated from her husband and child to be enslaved:
How well I remember how I would sit in my room with the little ones on my lap and the tears would roll down my
cheeks as I would ponder the right and wrong of bringing them into the world. What was I bringing them into the
world for? To be slaves and go from morning to night. They couldn’t be educated and maybe they couldn’t even
live with their families. They would just be slaves. All that time I wasn’t even living with my husband. He belonged
to another man. He had to stay on his farm and I on mine. That wasn’t living—that was slavery.
21
Particularly in the Upper South, a population developed of mixed-race mulatto offspring of such unions, although white Southern society claimed to abhor
miscegenation and punished sexual relations between white women and black men as damaging to racial purity.
This treatments and punishment towards slaves show how worst slave is viewed by white people: they consider the slave as a subject, not a human being as
they are. Schneider 2007:91 says, “The punishments inflicted on slaves testify to the worst side of human nature. Slave owners inflicted not only commonplace
beatings with lashes designed to hurt but also horrifyingly inventive tortures. They were often tinged with perverted sexuality and sadism. For proof of their excesses
historians do not need the writings of abolitionists, who focused on them with a kind of sick fascination. The testimony of former slaves, the diaries of southern women,
southern newspapers, and publicrecords teem with accounts of these unspeakable cruelties.”
22
CHAPTER III METHOD OF RESEARCH
In doing this analysis, library research is conducted to collect the data.
Library research is an activity in collecting the data by visiting the library, collecting the source data that is related to the object of research, learning and quoting the data
from books, documents, and internet as well. In other word, this research does not do a research in a field. Its scope is broader than just a field.
There are 4 characteristics of this research according to Zed 2004:4: 1.
The researcher deals directly to the text; 2.
Library or reference data is ready-made; 3.
Library or reference data generally is a secondary source; 4.
Library or reference data is not limited by space and time. The method that is applied in analyzing the data is qualitative research.
Bogdan and Taylor in Kaelan 2005:5 said that qualitative research is a research procedure that produces descriptive data such as words, notes that related to the
meaning, value and definition. This researchdoes not emphasize on the quantum or amount, so it more emphasizes on quality in terms of natural because it involves
understanding, concepts, values and characteristics inherent to the object of other research. In other words, this research does not do any calculation in the process.
23