Why is southern literature so obsessed with slavery and racial Essay

Why is southern literature so obsessed with slavery and racial difference Discuss in relation to three texts studied on the module. (Literature of the American - Essay Example Slavery was introduced into the United States by English settlers who first arrived in Virginia in 1619. It was estimated that the number of slaves {all of African descent} was 645,000 at that time. Slavery became legal in the United States. Slave owners were predominantly white, while a few American Indians and still fewer free black slaves were also known to own slaves. Even one of the country’s Presidents {Thomas Jefferson [1743 – 1826]} kept slaves in his household (Wikipedia.org). The people living in the Southern states practiced slavery much more than those in the Northern states of the United States. In 1860, by which time the original black slave population had grown to 4 million, the United States census found 95% of them lived in the Southern states comprising 33% of Southern population, as compared to forming just 1% of Northern population. By that time the Southern states had grown immensely wealthy due to flourishing plantations run with very cheap black slave labour. Slaves were also widely used as household servants (Wikipedia.org). Southerners were guilty of meting out harsh and inhumane treatment to black slaves. Slaves were widely ill-treated; slave supervisors were empowered to whip and extract maximum labour from them, slave hunters were employed to catch runaway slaves and punish them brutally, slave families were cruelly torn apart when members were sold off to distant new slave owners, female slaves were openly used by their owners for sexual gratification, children born of slave women {whether fathered by male slaves or their white owners} automatically inherited the mantle of slavery from their mothers. The entire series of racial discriminatory practices was authorised by Slave Codes that empowered and protected perpetrators of such practices (Wikipedia.org), and supported by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 that declared that helping runaway slaves in any way was considered a crime (Stowe 75). The