Wilentz Reflection

After reading Hannah jones’s views and ideas about slavery on her article on “The 1619 Project”, I can now understand the views of slavery and how it relates to Hannah Jones. I was able to see and understand the main points of this article. It was inevitable that slavery would be abolished. His points was clear where he explained how the conflict between slavery and the abolitionists were. He explains the struggles and hard time that all the people went through to make America. During the moral Revolution people were managing to have full power over society. That was the beginning of slavery. He explained how slavery ended in a crazy situation between the abolitionist and anti-abolitionist.  Since the beginning of slavery white Americans treated not just African Americans poorly it was also Hispanics and other races that was treated poorly. Also explained in the text that a lot of people were against slavery and how they had a huge fight to make things calm down.  The main difference between Hannah Jones story and Wilentz is that Hannah Jones wrote about what African Americans went through when they were mistreated and how they deserve equality like everyone else. Wilentz, the author “Relentless Slavery and the Relentless Unforeseen,” believes that abolishing slavery was inevitable due to the western revolution that was taking place. Essentially, the fight for education and social status as well as human rights became America’s top priority. Wilentz may point was that no one expected it to come as bad as it did when the idea was first brought up. Even though during those hard times people were still being mistreated. Abolishing slavery was really important because at that there was still free labor going on, so, slavery needed to be abolished. There are cheap labor nowadays, but at least people are getting paid some money instead of being a slave. Slavery needed to be abolished. The fight to end slavery was not planned. It just came as a need to the people and it had to be done at that point because African Americans were being mistreated. At that point people thought that it is time that their voice needs to be heard. In the text Wilentz states that, ““Because the ideals that propelled the American Revolution shared crucial origins with the ideals that propelled antislavery, it can be tempting to treat slavery as a terrible appendage to American history, an important but also doomed institution at the nation’s founding”. In my perspective it was really impossible to imagine myself in those days where people were slaves and being mistreated by their owners. It’s like people are working for nothing. Nowadays, we work because we want to make money to take care of our family. But in my opinion, during the slavery days people were following orders to stay alive because if not they would face death. For example: Once the Belgian Congo was the main colony for rubber production. King Leopold II was the leader of Belgium at that time. When someone failed to finish their task or refused to do their task, they would face death. The Belgian Congo had more deaths than the Holocaust. 15 million people died in Congo. Imagining myself in a slavery type environment is just impossible.