Town Hall Meeting Reflection

In class, we had a town hall meeting where each person represented someone and shared that person's opinion on slavery, either for or against. Hearing the stories of those who were for slavery were the most interesting. Some of the opinions were so harsh and were not right. The first thing that I heard about was about how slaves were treated medically. There was one doctor who experimented on the slaves and did not use anything to help while they did their experiments.  Things like this showed how bad it was. 

One person said that slaves were okay because there were slaves in the Bible, which is completely wrong since slaves in the Bible were probably not treated the same. We should learn from history, not repeat it. Slavery then seemed to be so normalized that unless someone had a reason to be against it, everyone didn't seem to know how they would manage without it. 

We learned about Thomas Jefferson and how he thought a white man was more superior. There is so much wrong about that. He seemed to think that giving slaves jobs was doing those people good rather than bad as if there weren't other jobs out there. Without slavery, slaves would have been able to find a job to support their family since there would be spaces to be filled, but as a paid and fair employee. 

Andrew Jackson believed that white men couldn't do all of the labor so slaves were needed. Someone's skin color should not decide what job they have and how they are treated. He thought that slavery was more "cost effective" for others, which someone's life should be more valuable than having to be fair. He owned over 150 slaves and thought the economy would be bad without slavery. 

Even George Washington believed that slavery was good since he always had slaves. He believed that it was okay since slavery allowed his slaves to have food and housing and took off the pressure of having to find a job. He also believed that if slaves did all the work, the rest of the people were able to focus on other things like government.

All of the different arguments on why slavery would be good is all so wrong and I couldn't believe that people would outright say some of this stuff. It's crazy to me how much things has changed with time and that slavery was such an argument when it was clearly wrong.