Slavemasters often dehumanized enslaved people by having them do acts that were beyond just their normal slave duties. As punishments, they were treated as animals and were often punished as so.  Their work hours were long and tough. Any simple gesture that the slavemasters considered as disrespectful were punished. Slaves were often whipped, and put in collars. If they ever fought back, they risked being killed with no repercussions to the owners. Growing up, Douglass witnessed and experienced these dehumanizing experiences first hand. He was separated from his parents at an early age and was forced to work long and grueling jobs.  His situation however improved after he was sent to Baltimore to work for Hugh Auld. Although he was still a slave, being in the North meant that his treatment was better than when he was in the South. He was taught basic reading and writing by his master’s wife.  However, after his master died, he was sold to a professional slave breaker. He was treated harshly by the slave breaker, often getting whipped.  He was finally able to escape after getting to New York.

Today, although slavery is abolished, a question that is asked is did it really get abolished? Incarceration rates are sky-high in the United States.  African Americans are often the victims of police brutality and other racial profiling/ discrimination.  This has led me to believe slavery never really died, it just evolved. Slavery, a term we have learned of in school growing up,  is most commonly used to describe the time in American history when African Americans were taken from their homeland to America, where they were sold to white slave owners as labor workers, with the majority of these slaves being separated from their families. Like most people growing up in the American education system, we were taught that slavery started around 1501 with the Atlantic Slave Trade, and ended in 1865 after the conclusion of the Civil War when President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring that all slaves in rebel territory were free, and later outlawing slavery with the passing of the 13th amendment. Thus, most people today have the perception that slavery has been “dead” since 1865. Although African American enjoyed a brief moment of “freedom”  during the Reconstruction Era from the hard labor and brutality they faced as slaves, this was short lived as the white dominant society of America still had the social conscious of being superior to the African Americans, which was instilled after centuries of slavery, and unfortunately is still present today. The abolishment of slavery also left a big hole in the economy since all the free labor from slaves was gone, and so new loopholes were found in anti-slavery laws to send African Americans back into slavery. Additionally, in today’s world, human trafficking is a form of modern slavery that also existed pre-1918 in the forms of debt peonage and chain gangs. Although Slavery was outlawed in 1865, the idea of slavery never really died, rather it has simply evolved and taken on other forms in order to “adapt” to the adoption of anti-slavery laws and acts.