Town Hall Meeting Reaction

Interesting People I Learned About (Pro Slavery)

The town hall meeting shined light upon a lot of interesting people in the pre civil war era that I had not heard of before. Among the pro slavery speakers, there we're many that stood out to me. To support an institution like slavery you'd have to have some pretty rigid and specific ideas to justify it, and this was the case for many of the pro slavery speakers. Many of them shared common characteristics, they were mostly white supremacists, they were mostly wealthy people, and of course all of them were white. There were a few that stood out to me quite well, such as Preston Brooks, a congressman who hit another congressman over the head with a cane during a debate about slavery. It really goes to show how divided the country was at the time. The most unique of the pro slavery speakers was Abraham Lincoln. Obviously today we know Lincoln was the one who would free the slaves, but before that his view on slavery was that of indifference. This was the most unique argument to me because of how apathetic it was, while the other pro slavery arguments were fiercely in support of slavery, Lincoln's argument didn't believe in the issue that strongly and was more concerned with keep it in place only to impede further division in the country. The last pro slavery speaker who really stood out to me was Jefferson Davis. He was the first and only president of the confederacy and what stood out about him was that he believed in treated his slaves "well." I put well in quotes because you can only treat a slave so well, forcing someone to do intense physical labor against their will and without compensation will never be treating them well, but Davis treated his slaves less bad than other brutal slave owners. He made an effort to avoid corporal punishment and treat his slaves with respect and like "humans." (Again enslaving someone isn't treating them like a human but I digress) I found it really interesting that someone with such deep ties to the confederacy was so relatively courteous to his slaves.

Interesting People I Learned About (Anti Slavery)

The pool of anti slavery speakers was much more diverse than that of the pro slavery group. Each person's reasoning for being against slavery was different and they came from different backgrounds and taken different paths in life. The first set of the anti slavery speakers that stood out to me where the former slaves. Nat Turner, Henry Highland Garnet, Sojourner Truth and of course Frederick Douglass are a few examples. I find the perspective of these people to be the most interesting and ultimately the most important. I couldn't imagine what it was like to be a slave, and these people actually lived through it. It's inspiring what these people were able to do despite such a serious setback in life. Frederick Douglass was able to teach himself how to read and become an extremely prominent figure despite many years of his life being wasted to slavery. Unfortunately I know that with every one of these success stories, there was a million other slaves who weren't so fortunate. I wonder what brilliant minds or ideas we lost to the people who could've had them being enslaved. Another anti slavery speaker I found really interesting was the Grimke sisters. What stood out to me is that unlike other abolitionists, the Grimke sisters were actually born into a slave owning family, and they were able to see how horrible it was first hand. I'd imagine many others in the situation would go along with slavery because their parent would ingrain it in their head that it was okay, which is what makes the Grimke sisters' story even more powerful, that they were able to break past that. 

Image used: https://images-cdn.bridgemanimages.com/api/1.0/image/600wm.XXX.20806620.7055475/2657623.jpg