Trial 1: Reax Post

After listening to both sides of the State v. Mann I would like to talk about the side of the state. I found this site interesting when listening to both sides. 

Some background on this case would be that there was a man named John Mann and he had gotten a fine for beating his slave Lydia for attempting to escape. He argued that she was his property meaning that it did not matter that he had been beating her. He went to court about this to waive the fine since he believed that since a slave is a property, she is not considered a human being. 

The trial showed whether it was assault and battery as well as attempted murder. The state argued that even though slaves were considered property it should still be considered assault and because of this it created the chain of events of what would happen to other slaves. Since he believed that it was self-defense there was no wrongdoing according to him. 

I found it interesting how they believed that since the slave was property, the slave did not deserve the right to be considered human. Another big thing within this case was the economic reasoning behind their argument if all the slaves had run away then there would have been no free labor, taking away their access to making cotton and growing crops in an easy way. 

I believe if it had been ruled differently there would be a chance of slavery having to end because of the ability for these slaves to walk out on the idea of doing free labor. This would economically ruin the South's system and ultimately create a course of change with action. 

In conclusion, State v. Man allowed slave owners to always have control and power over their slaves. This decision created an extremely difficult environment for slaves to have rights from not being abused and killed. Something that can be learned from this case is that slavery was a big dilemma back in 1830 and there were many ethical dilemmas that took place in this debate showing the difficulty of the case.