“dominion of the master had to be absolute…but that absoluteness made the master something other than human as well”
I certainly agree with Colin Dayan when he stated this quote in Égalite for All. Considering how slave owners were allowed to treat their slaves, the power which they had over them turned them into monsters. Slave owners weren’t given many restrictions in terms of how they could treat their slaves. There is no denying that in many cases slaves were treated like animals or worse. In Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, we can really see some of the horrors slaves would encounter first hand. “I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it. By far the larger part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs, and it is the wish of most masters within my knowledge to keep their slaves thus ignorant” [1]. Here, Douglass directly compares the treatment of the slaves to the treatment of horses, stating that slaves knew as little about themselves as horses did, because slave masters wanted to keep their slaves as unaware of their lives as possible. Later in the reading Douglass also shares that he isn’t even too sure of who his own father is, and rarely is able to see her mother because if she makes the journey to see him she’ll be whipped. When his mother passed, he was not even able to see her while she was sick, dead or being buried which is cruel. The Dred Scott decision further showed the absolute control masters had over their slaves when Dred Scott, a slave who had lived in a free state and then returned to his original residence in Missouri was still kept as a slave despite his masters death. “It is too clear for dispute, that the enslaves African race were not intended to be included, and formed no part of the the people who framed and adopted this declaration…” (345). This further shows how slave masters had achieved such absolute power of their slaves, when they were even able to exclude them from the rights given by the Declaration of Independence which even stated that “all men are created equal”. Yet despite the fact it cleared mentions all men, slaves were still excluded under the claim that they didn’t contribute to its creation.
