American Slavery was not the Vast Evil it is Portrayed as

My opponent critiques using Wikipedia as a source which is intellectually lazy. Sure anyone can edit a Wiki, but Wikipedia cites and sources all of their claims with links and references to other scholarly works. In the next round, I will go back and present the scholarly sources, books and/or "more credible" websites to verify every single claim that I've cited with Wikipedia (which I've linked to for convenience). This will entirely negate Pro's point about source credibility so we can move on. However it's not enough to say "Wikipedia isn't accurate." Pro must specify which of my claims that he's actually challenging, or else we can chalk this up to an irrelevant red herring. For if Wikipedia's claims are true, what's the point? Speaking of fallacies, Pro lists a handful of fallacies but in no way whatsoever explains how I've (allegedly) used them. For instance he mentions ad hominem (attacking a person and not an argument). Clearly I have never attacked or criticized my opponent, so he's just name dropping fallacies for no reason. This proves nothing. The audience should completely disregard this list unless Pro explains how I've specifically used fallacious reasoning (which arguments of mine are fallacious) in which case I'll point out how he is wrong. Until then, this list is useless. Pro writes, "I would say the right to life was better cared for the slave than the free black in America." A freed slave might have a shorter life expectancy, but the right to life has nothing to do with life expectancy at all. It has to do with your right to remain free from the aggression of other people. Slaves were *constantly* aggressed against by other people, so their right to life was not respected at all -- nor was their right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Slaves were considered property and thus the rights extended to other Americans did not apply to them. In fact, millions of people died and had their lives taken as they crossed the "Middle Passage" on their way to slavery before they even got there [1]. Thus it's nonsensical for Pro to say that slaves had their "right to life" respected because they lived longer under slavery. That's a non-sequitur. The killing of slaves was almost never considered murder [2]. In his next point, Pro admits that slavery was completely evil and essentially loses himself the debate. He writes, "Yes evils happened. However they happen if slavery is around or not." Ladies and gentlemen, this is a contention in my favor. I don't have to argue that "evil wouldn't exist without slavery." I simply have to prove that slavery was really evil - just as evil as it's portrayed, in fact. So by acknowledging that slavery was savagely abhorrent, Pro concedes. Even if it were true that evil things in this world would still occur, i.e. rape and murder, that does NOT negate the fact that all of those things happening under slavery weren't just as evil! Moreover, slavery was a legal institution that was specifically derived to oppress and aggress against people over generations. Pro said some families have domestic violence and we don't write off all families as a result. That's true, but family units aren't legally set up in such a way where the abuser in the family has FULL AUTHORITY to abuse others and is given legal protections under the law which allows continuous and perpetual, violent abuse. My opponent repeats that since the abuse "didn't happen that often" it's somehow not as outrageous. It happened far too often and in the next round I will present quotes and first-hand testimonials from slaves and other witnesses as promised. Pro says slaves had laws to protect them but I've already addressed that in previous rounds; Pro should respond to those points about the masters rarely being punished for mistreating their slaves. Pro says that "the assumption of rape is false" which is nonsense. He presents an Amazon link which shows us the title of a book. Of course from this Amazon page, we cannot read a single claim that is made in the book (let alone verify the claim) so it's very interesting that my opponent would critique my Wikipedia sources when they had claims you could actually read and look up. Pro's source here does not. Rape was frequent between master-slave; consider the court case of Celia the 19 year old slave who was put on trial for murdering her master -- someone that raped her repeatedly [3]. Many slave women were raped [4]. Like I said last round, male slaves were also raped [5]. Free (or white) women could charge their perpetrators with rape, but slave women had no legal recourse; their bodies legally belonged to their owners [6]. Pro writes, "Slavery was beneficial to the slave in that his slavery while in Africa [source of slaves in America] was in every way worse off than servitude in America. This was universal belief at the time from Americans, Europeans and slaves themselves." Once again Pro defeats his own argument. He's arguing that slavery in Africa was really evil, and thus, slavery in America somehow couldn't be evil...? Obviously that makes no sense. I'm sure slavery in Africa was really disgusting just as slavery in America was really disgusting. Even if African slaves had it worse -- which is a claim that Pro has not proven anyway, but it doesn't matter -- does not change or negate the fact that slavery in America was evil. It's also ridiculous to suggest that because slaves might have preferred American slavery to African slavery, that somehow American slavery wasn't evil. That's like saying if I had to choose dying between different types of cancer. Some forms of cancer might be worse, but that doesn't mean that dying from cancer in general doesn't suck regardless of the type of cancer. My position in this debate is not to prove that American slavery was worse than African slavery. It's to prove that American slavery was in fact really evil and I have. Pro says that most of his quotes came from former slaves and not whites. I will scrutinize his sources further in the last round when I have more time. I will also provide quotes from slaves in first-hand testimonials as promised. The argument that more slaves would have ran away if they didn't like it has been thoroughly debunked. "Runaway slaves and indentured servants were a persistent problem... As early as 1643, the General Assembly passed laws that established penalties for runaway slaves and servants, regulated their movement, identified multiple offenders (by branding them or cutting their hair), and provided rewards for their capture... In 1705 a sweeping new law allowed planters to discipline slaves to death or, in some cases, to kill runaways without penalty. Robert King Carter sought and received permission to dismember his runaways. Beginning in 1736, landowners advertised in the Virginia Gazette for their runaways; they describe more than 3,500 fugitives from 1736 until 1783. These advertisements affirmed a lingering desire for freedom on the part of slaves" [8].Pro concludes by repeating that black slaves were allegedly grinning and smiling around the plantations. Please extend my argument from the last round which Pro has dropped. Even if slaves did not suffer 24/7 does not negate the fact that they had few rights, legal protections and were subservient because of that fact and because slave owners were essentially allowed to do whatever they wanted to keep them in line. I asked Pro if white slave owners raped and mutilated their other friends (since he claimed the masters were "friends" with the slaves). He said, "No. That is why rape and mutilation was exceedingly rare." Even if rape was rare (which isn't true) it still proves that white masters did NOT view their slaves as "friends." Pro completely dropped the fact that slaves were routinely beaten, whipped and otherwise abused to keep them in line. The point here is that slaves weren't seen as friends and family but inferior subjects with little to no rights, as evidenced by law, whose main purpose was providing labor for little to no cost against their will. My opponent claims that slavery didn't destroy families. Slave families were often shattered by auction block (let alone the slaves that were transported from Africa). It's true the plantation owners had an incentive to allow slave families, but let's not forget that white slave owners were allowed to rape female slaves that had husbands and the husbands couldn't do anything about it. "Slaves were allowed to have families, but the owners ultimately had control on what the families did with their lives. Mothers and their young were often separated. Ebenezer Davies observed many horrors, 'She had at her breast an infant boy three months old. The slaver did not want the child on any terms. The master sold the mother, and retained the child'" [9]. Female slaves were sometimes forced into perpetual pregnancy/childbirth to ensure the masters had a continuous cycle of slaves they didn't have to keep paying for. Final Round = Quotes and Conclusion [1] Mancke, Elizabeth and Shammas, Carole. The Creation of the British Atlantic World, 2005, pp. 30–31.[2] http://www.pbs.org...[3] http://law2.umkc.edu...[4] Getman, Karen A. "Sexual Control in the Slaveholding South: The Implementation and Maintenance of a Racial Caste System," Harvard Women's and Law Journal, 7, (1984), 132.[5] Foster, Thomas (2011). "The Sexual Abuse of Black Men under American Slavery." Journal of the History of Sexuality 20 (3): 445–464 [p. 459].[6] Block, Sharon. "Lines of Color, Sex, and Service: Sexual Coercion in the Early Republic," Women's America, p 129-131.[7] http://www.npr.org...[8] http://www.encyclopediavirginia.org...[9] Ebenezer Davies, American scenes and Christian slavery; a recent tour of four thousand miles in the United States (London: J. Snow, 1849).