Antebellum Rights for Blacks essays

Antebellum Rights for Blacks essays The antebellum period is generally considered the time between 1820 and the beginning of the war in 1865. Slavery was an integral component of the culture in the United States at that time. Abolitionists abounded in the North while the trade' continued to flourish in the south. Three documents from that era present the social as well as legal perspective The first is an article by a prominent doctor, Dr. Samuel Cartwright, entitled, Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race. It was his purpose to validate the ownership of slaves as a means of providing shelter and industry to a race handicapped to such a degree that they could not prosper on their own. The second document is the opinion of Justice Taney in the Dred Scott versus Sanford case of 1857. Here, it is legally determined blacks of the pre-Civil War era do not have the rights of an American citizen. The third document is a speech presented to the United States Senate on March 4, 1858 by James Henry Hammond wherein he argues that the black race are slaves through natural law. All of these documents were written in the belief that slavery was a legitimate social institution based on the inferiority of the black race. The Southern plantation system was socially and economically dependent on slave labor to continue. The chattel slave was owned and had absolutely no rights, including the right to life, that was not controlled by the owner. The plantation owners did not consider slave labor to be 'free' inasmuch as the care and upkeep of the slaves was their responsibility. In the 1840's a physician, Samuel Cartwright, created a psychiatric diagnosis called "drapetomania" that was specific to slaves - most notably found among freed slaves. The disorder was characterized by "a partial insensibility of the skin, and so great a hebetude of the intellectual faculties, as to be like a person half as...