History Of Mary Prince Summary

The horrors and inhumanity displayed from slavery is painful when reading actual testimony from a slave in the book titled The History of Mary Prince by Mary Prince. Her book makes the reader wonder whether a master views slaves as humans. However, when reflecting back to the overall history of slavery, it can be understood that slaves were never considered as human beings. During the period between the dawn of the Roman Empire and the end of the American Civil War, slavery was an efficient and traditional — if not cruel — method to produce goods at low prices. The book provides the reader with many examples where slaves are actively abused by their masters, even to the point of death for some slaves. This is because slaves were punished for any reason their owners could find. The reader can discover that the masters considered slaves as nothing but property forced to do their bidding. There are many ways that Mary Prince expresses to the reader how people who owned slaves did not recognize them as people. The first example presented to the reader is when Mr. Williams sold “Mary and her sisters to raise money for his wedding” (5). This displays that, in the system of slavery, masters do not even remotely consider the inhumanity of selling another person. It can be learned that both …show more content…
This account makes the reader relate it to the work of Harriet Beerch Stowe 's Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which had produced a significant effect towards the hatred of the peculiar institution known as slavery. The book explains how slave owners did not view slaves as soul carrying people. Instead, they regarded slaves to be property that they owned. The reader can witness that actually the slave owners were not human, as they had inflicted pain and sorrow to people forced into a system of bondage to carry out labor