The Home of the Slave

Home of the Slave

Chelsie J. Bonner

ENG/301

Professor Ezekiel Jarvis

The Home of the Slave

In the United States of America, American ethnic literature is a nation combined of different heritage, cultures, and traditions. America’s diversity is represented immensely in American literature. The literature alone sheds light to the past, granted opportunities in today’s society, and predicts the thoughts and ideas of the future. The role of liberty and equality has a major effect on the African American culture. Liberty and equality can represent both a political and social standpoint; this can have been seen throughout African American literature. “Do liberty and equality often conflict, as is widely supposed? Must an egalitarian society cheat the liberty of its citizens? Or can the two virtues be reconciled, so that we can have all we should anyway want of each? If so, is this reconciliation a happy and perhaps temporary accident? Or are the two virtues tied together in some more conceptual way, so that compromising one necessarily violates the other? Dworkin, 2000).

Slavery for the African American culture inspired many literary works. When the United States was founded, African Americans were held in slavery, and were counted as only 3/5 of a white American in the Constitution, the nation's foundational legal document. Not all blacks were considered 3/5 of a person, only slaves. It was not the slave owners who did not want the slave to be considered a whole person; they wanted slaves to be considered people. The southern states would have greater representation in the House of Representatives; the greater the population, the more representatives a state would have. The northern states said, since slaves are not allowed to vote, the south should not be allowed to count them. Counting them as 3/5 was the compromise. This can be identified as one of the many struggles with equality that influenced American literature today.

Thee ability to operate in liberty, grants one the capacity to opportunities and equal rights. According to Mariam dictionary, "Liberty is the state in which people can act and speak freely, and equality is the state of being equal in rights and opportunities.” (Mariam-Webster, 2017). The Declaration of Independence was on adopted on July 4, 1776. It was created by a slave owner is slave holding country. Thomas Jefferson wrote, “all men and women were created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (Miller, 1991). Thomas Jefferson was not supporting the claims of freedom of the African American people when the declaration was drafted. The drafting committee habitually made difference of the white man compared to person of color. Jefferson along with his fellow workers agreed “African Americans could not claim the same rights as white people, and there was no need to qualify their words proclaiming universal liberty.” (Miller, 1991). After the final Declaration of Independence was established, Jefferson along with his delegates made the mistake of encouraging African Americans to hope the American War for Independence could become a war against slavery. (Miller, 1991). The African American people rallied against unqualified claims for natural rights; and human equality. “In response African Americans began to assert that such principles logically applied as much to them as to the white population. They forced white people to confront the contradiction between the new nation’s professed ideals and its reality.” (Miller, 1991).