Reaction to Patrick Henry’s “On slavery”

In “On Slavery” Henry addresses the issue of slavery and racism as it is manifested in contemporary America. He seems to feel that there is something profoundly wrong with the treatment of slaves at the hands of whites. He also has his own justifications for continuing the practice of slavery and suggestions to maybe ‘improve’ it.

Henry’s piece starts out with a strong denunciation of a “…practice so totally repugnant to the first impressions of right and wrong(211)”. He continues with the proclamation that slavery is unsuitable in the current times, as it is one of the ‘most enlightened ages’.

Especially resonating is Henry’s point that in a country where ‘the rights of humanity are defined and understood in a country..(211)’ such as they are in America, whose people are strongly moral and Christian, it would seem as if there would be no place in such a society for slavery.

After making these powerful points, Henry asks the rhetorical question if the reader would believe that he himself is a master of slaves? Well it seems a bit odd, but Henry continues that “I am drawn along by the general inconvenience of living here without them(211)”. He claims he cannot justify slavery. Simultaneously though, he does offer the reader the justification he is living with. It is no easy task to acknowledge that a practice, of choice, it must be specified, that resonates as being so wrong and misplaced in a society like his, doesn’t merit one changing one’s personal practices.

Henry is unable to change his practices as he has become to use to using slave labor to make his life easier. One can imagine how much it would have pained Henry to have his food cooked for him, his farmland harvested, his tea prepared just right everyday by those who he fully understood he had no right to hold the power of life and death over. This must have been no small burden for a man living in such civilized of times.

Henry concludes on an interesting point- he believes that the time will come when slavery will be abolished. He doesn’t see that as being something in the foreseeable future. Until that time, he argues, the least we can do is to tell the next generation of slave holders – the current slave holder’s own children in many cases- about its ills, in the hope that they are courageous and strong enough to fight its many temptations. Furthermore, he believes that slave owners could probably treat their slaves a little better, considering that they are being completely and utterly oppressed- and like he says- no justification exists for the continuance of this practice. One can only hope that Patrick Henry could sleep well at night after undressing the hypocrisy of his age in such a brutally honest fashion.