Historical Contridictions in Slavery - 1494 Words

The history of American Slavery has been recounted by many scholars, taking into account different perspectives. During the 1850’s an abolitionist movement began, gaining momentum to pass anti-slavery legislation. Slave owners concerned about the growing movement, decided to take the matter into their own hands and fight for their property rights. Now as historians look back and analyse slavery, many different ideologies are constituted. While the depiction of philosophy in history is a way to analyzing meanings of historical events, without it, it would be only times and dates, hence popular historians such as Howard Zinn, Paul Johnson, and Stanley Elkins twist historical events in slavery to promote their ideologies. Within Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, slavery is used as a provocateur, to persuade and create an assumption that the U.S government did not care about equal rights for black people. In the chapter titled Slavery without Submission, Emancipation without Freedom, Zinn immediately uses the cruelty of the slaves, to prove capitalism does not provide equality, stating â€Å"There was no slavery in history, even that of the Israelites in Egypt, worse than the slavery of the black man in America†, because profit was more important to southern plantation owners than the conditions (Zinn 163). Slavery in the south was terrible, however Zinn concludes that the reputation of America as a whole is tainted, which cannot be presumed because the system