Summary Of Slavery By Olaudah Equiano

Slavery is a key component in American history. Slavery ruined the lives of essentially millions of innocent African Americans. Numerous stories have been told about slavery from the beatings the slaves would take to how each slave lived their own daily life. However, one specific narrative by Olaudah Equiano gives phenomenal insight into how his own life was affected by slavery and his story was one of the most influential in the antislavery movement. In this paper I am going to write about how Equiano’s narrative gave insight into the “empire of slavery” as well as pointing out specific points of Equiano’s story and evaluating them to see what kind of impact they had on slavery.
First off Equiano’s stories gave off a clear picture of …show more content…
Equiano mentions plenty of the negatives of slavery throughout his story which included slavery treatment and he also touched on slave rebellions. However, perhaps the biggest take away from his argument was when he introduced an argument about the of freedom to Britain's attention. Equiano directly stated “I hope to have the satisfaction of seeing the renovation of liberty and justice, resting on the British government.” By saying this he is saying to the British who were among on the countries with the most settlers in North America that slavery is only harming the world. Equiano goes on to say, the liberty and justice the colonies were supposed to be built upon are essentially nothing but a myth. Slavery violates both liberty and justice as part of liberty is freedom and holding innocent people and forcing labor upon them violates liberty. The so called justice that was supposed to be another defining feature of the Americas is nothing but an empty word when it came to slavery as slave owners would beat their slaves regularly and there were plenty of deaths related to the beatings owners gave to their slaves. Equiano did an outstanding job of presenting his argument and presented many valid points if slavery took place in a more modern era, there is no doubt that two key terms of the United States would have to be revisited. As liberty and justice meant nothing during slavery and Equiano’s argument assured that