Slavery Essay

Words: 1096
Pages: 5

Hampton-Preston Mansion and Slavery

Slave as defined by the dictionary means that a slave is a person who is the property of and wholly subject to another; a bond servant. So why is it that every time you go and visit a historical place like the Hampton-Preston mansion in Columbia South Carolina, the Lowell Factory where the mill girls work in Massachusetts or the Old town of Williamsburg Virginia they only talk about the good things that happened at these place, like such things as who owned them, who worked them, how they were financed and what life was like for the owners. They never talk about the background information of the lower level people like the slaves or servants who helped take care and run these places behind the scenes.

It’s like history wants you to think that the white people were pleasant to their entire slave population and took care of them in a very loving way, when in reality we know the slaves were treated like dirt the majority of the time. The institutions that run these foundations now may feel if they inform you of not only the good things about these places but also the bad things like the way slave and the mill girls of Lowell were treated and handled they might lose revenue from tourist not wanting to visit these place because of the horrible things that actually took place at these historical sites. They try and mask over the truth with other interesting information to get you thinking and hopefully forget about the truth that actually happened on these sites. It’s not fair to assume that whites or Europeans were the only ones who helped lay the foundation of this great country of ours we call America, when in fact the African American population helped greatly in laying some of the groundwork of how us American of all races see this country from things like architecture, to farming to even music and the life style we choose to live on an everyday basis.
So in conclusion we must not take for granted the small things in life we have here in America because in all reality people long before us put blood, sweat and tears in helping laying the foundation of this country as we know it today. It wasn’t only the