How Could Slavery Happen?

      Today, if you were to ask someone about slavery, the response would almost always be negative. Something like, "I don't understand how people could do that," or, "It was so wrong of people to do that to another person." But what we don't realize is that the reason that slavery was allowed to happen is because there are several psychological components that play a part in that kind of situation. In history class this week, we read about two well-known studies on the psychology of people that can help us better understand why this happened. We also connected the growth of production of cloth to the worsening of slavery. 

       The experiment that is of more help when learning about slavery is Stanford Prison Experiment. This experiment was conducted to see just how far a person with total power would go. In the experiment, a group of students was randomly divided into "prisoners" and "prison guards". They were placed in a makeshift prison and told to act as if this were a real situation. At first, none of the students really took it seriously, but after a very short period of time, the "guards" began to get violent. Once the violence began taking place, things only went down hill. The "guards" became overly violent and some of the "prisoners" became so mentally unstable that they had to be removed from the experiment and reminded that it wasn't real. The experiment had to be ended early, because things became too serious. 

      What this experiment shows us is that when a person has total power over something/someone - such as a slave owner would have over his slaves - they usually become violent. The "guards" in the experiment knew that the "prisoners" were people going in, but obviously lost sight of that fact over the course of the experiment. Slaves weren't even seen as people to begin with, so it is easy to see how someone could be okay with treating someone they way slave owners treated slaves. 

       

      When the cotton economy started growing, slavery only got worse. When the inventions such as the cotton jenny, spinning wheel, et cetera came about, it sped up the cleaning, spinning, and weaving of cotton. This meant that cotton needed to be picked faster, and because there was no "magic invention" to pick cotton faster - or incentive to make one - the only solution to the problem was to make the "hands" (as slaves were called) pick faster. New inventions were created to brutally punish slaves and make them work faster, and new people were hired to use those new tools. The slave owners did not have a problem with it, because 1) they didn't see the slaves as people, 2) they were not the ones who had to punish the "hands", and 3) if they were getting more cotton in order to pay their bills or make money, who really cares how it's done?