The Brutal Truth About Slavery Nobody Wants to Hear

Where would you have stood on slavery in the 19th Century?

This essay examines the moral blindspots that allowed slavery, human zoos, and the legal denial of personhood to persist for centuries — and argues that the same psychological mechanisms underpin our treatment of nonhuman animals today. It invites readers to confront the uncomfortable continuity between past injustices and present norms.

This website edition includes light framing and internal links to help readers explore related essays on personhood, justice, and the ethics of speciesism. The main text remains as originally published.

"We passed a woman tied by the neck to a tree and dead, the people of the country explained that she had been unable to keep up with the other slaves in a gang, and her master had determined that she should not become anyone’s property if she recovered."

The above excerpt and image are taken from the journals of 19th-century missionary David Livingstone. As shocking as such disregard for human life is today, Livingstone’s account of his travels in Africa makes it clear that such scenes were far from unique.

Just a week later, he came across a similar situation:

"We passed a slave woman shot or stabbed through the body and lying on the path: a group of men stood about a hundred yards off on one side, and another of the women on the other side, looking on; they said an Arab who passed early that morning had done it in anger at losing the price he had given for her, because she was unable to walk any longer."

Livingstone’s Journals and the Reality of Slavery

These brutal accounts of slavery in the 19th century expose a systemic oppression rooted in cultural prejudice. They bring home just how completely human beings were treated as nothing more than commodities, goods and chattels. Not only were these slaves denied human rights, the very idea would have been seen as laughable. They were not even seen as human.

It seems almost incomprehensible today, but this was ‘normal’ for thousands of years.

Western Philosophy and the Ethics of Oppression

Even Aristotle, one of the founders of Western philosophy and famous for his ethics, thought slaves were born to be slaves. He believed that without their ‘masters’, slaves would be incapable of running their own lives and that their natural purpose was to be ‘living tools’ to be used and exploited, much as horses, oxen and dogs are today.

This historical injustice reveals a deep moral blindspot in Western philosophy.

Dred Scott and the Legal Denial of Personhood

Anyone familiar with the case of Dred Scott four years before the American Civil War will have come across this mindset. Scott was a slave whose master had travelled with the U.S. military. During these travels, Scott was taken to Illinois (a free state) and then Wisconsin (a free territory) where he married.

After returning to Missouri (a slave state) Scott was considered property once again, along with his new wife Harriet, who also became one of the master’s chattels. After Scott’s master died, with the help of anti-slavery lawyers, Dred and Harriet Scott filed lawsuits in Missouri on the grounds that their residence in a free state and a free territory had released them from the bonds of slavery.

The Supreme Court, however, dismissed the case on the grounds that African Americans could not be considered ‘citizens’ of the United States as they were not even considered ‘people’. Essentially, the court was saying what societies had said for thousands of years — that it’s an illusion to believe slaves have any experience worthy of moral consideration.

The Dred Scott case remains a chilling example of how legal systems enshrined slavery and denied personhood.

Human Zoos and the Legacy of Speciesism

Even after slavery was officially abolished, ‘human zoos’ were still a thing across Europe and North America until well into the 20th Century. Ota Benga, an African pygmy, lived in captivity at the Bronx Zoo in 1906 and eventually committed suicide at 32 years old.

Various ‘ethnological expositions’ featured individuals, family groups or even whole villages of Kanaks or Africans. Hundreds of visitors would gather around the enclosures to watch the ‘savages’ perform war dances or religious rituals for their colonial masters.

The photograph below shows an enclosure at the Exposition Universelle of 1905 in Liège, part of a recreated ‘Senegalese village’. Visitors were encouraged to throw coins into the water, for which the Senegalese ‘exhibits’ had to dive.

Even as recently as 1958, at the Brussels World’s Fair, a ‘Negro Village’ exhibit featured a young African child behind a fence over which visitors would lean to throw food, in much the same way they throw food for monkeys or kangaroos at present-day zoos.

Human zoos and ethnological expositions perpetuated both racist and speciesist ideologies well into the 20th century.

It’s almost incomprehensible to many of us that this was just two years before the ‘Swinging Sixties’ and we wonder how such things could possibly have been acceptable, let alone popular. We like to think that if we were alive at that time, we would have been vehemently against such exploitation and oppression. We convince ourselves we would have been outspoken opponents of such unjust and unethical practices, or at the very least that we would have refused to support them.

We tell ourselves that we would never have kept slaves, or condoned those who did. But there’s a famous quote by Sea Shepherd founder Captain Paul Watson that cuts right through this self-delusion:

"If you want to know where you would have stood on slavery before the Civil War, don’t look at where you stand on slavery today. Look at where you stand on animal rights."

This ethical comparison between slavery and speciesism forces us to confront our own moral blindspots.

How do you treat those who society says have no rights? What is your attitude to those who are considered so low as to be beyond our sphere of moral consideration?

When your peers, your community and the very law of the land tell you that those they are exploiting and oppressing are not even people, what do you say? When those who speak out face derision, contempt, ostracisation and even violence, would you stand up for what’s right?

Animal Rights and the Moral Continuity of Slavery

The attitude of today’s society toward nonhuman animals is in so many ways exactly the same attitude that society used to have toward human slaves. They are ‘other’, they are ‘less than’ and to view them equally worthy of moral consideration is preposterous.

At this point, I anticipate many readers will be feeling a surge of anger against what I am saying. How dare I compare African Americans to dogs or horses?! How dare I compare human beings to animals?!

But those who can set aside their assumptions and prejudice long enough to take an objective view will see that this was exactly the same attitude that white society had towards Africans, Asians, or Native Americans. Other races were different — they looked different, they didn’t speak our language, they behaved differently, they wore funny clothes… they weren’t people!

“How dare you compare Negros to White Americans!”

At one time, to assert that slaves should be given equal consideration would have been met with complete incredulity: “What are you talking about? That’s crazy! They’re not people!”

In the 1830s in the United States, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, a White journalist, was dragged through the streets of Boston and almost murdered by a lynch mob, merely for asserting the moral equality of Black Americans and White Americans. He only lived because he was arrested and thrown in jail “for his own safety”.

Today, lawyers bringing lawsuits for recognition of the personhood of nonhuman animals are meeting the same kind of illogical prejudice that Dred Scott and his lawyers faced back in 1857. Other animals are still seen as property — as ‘things’ with no rights.

Even our closest relatives, chimpanzees, with whom we share 99.8% of our DNA, are denied personhood and viewed by the law as mere property.

They are treated as commodities, locked in prisons, forced to perform, bought, sold and experimented on. Why? Because they look different to us. They behave differently. They don’t speak our language (although they can converse with their ‘masters’ using American Sign Language).

The vast majority of modern society still believes that discriminating against someone because they are a different species to yourself is not only justified but is so normal as to not even warrant question.

Never mind that the beings in question might be more intelligent than a five-year-old human child. Never mind that they might be at least as sensitive to pain and suffering as we are, if not more so. Never mind that they want to live every bit as much as we do, or that they fear death just as we do. Never mind that they have lives and families, wants and desires, even rituals, which are every bit as important to them as ours are to us.

In most people’s minds, the fact that they’re not human gives us all the justification we need to imprison them, enslave them, kill them and exploit them in pretty much any way we choose. They are denied personhood. They are commodities.

To suggest that other animals deserve equal consideration is met with derision, contempt, ostracisation and even violence. Those who stand up for the rights of nonhuman people are imprisoned. They lose their friends, they lose their careers. Some of them lose their lives.

The brutal truth is that slavery never ended. From zoos to farms, current animal exploitation reflects the same systemic oppression once used to justify human slavery.

In zoos and circuses and laboratories, in the streets, on the farms and even in our own homes, we still treat our slaves just as we have always done. Sometimes we treat them with kindness. Sometimes we beat them. Sometimes we even kill them.

And our justification is the same as it’s always been: “They’re not people!”

So, before you consider where you would have stood on slavery in the 19th Century, consider where you stand on animal rights today. The answer might shock you.

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Further Reading

"They're Not People"

The Forgotten Holocaust - Human Rights, Animal Rights and Oppression

Other Animals Are People, Too