Analysis
Chapter XVIII provides perhaps Northup’s most heartbreaking examples of the awful moral toll that slavery exacts from all involved. Every story he tells here is an example of things that are lost to the corrupting power of the slave trade: freedom of thought and speech, basic human dignity, the value of life, truth, moral integrity, and a father’s legacy. All of these are sacrificed on the greedy altar of the slave system.
For example, Platt innocently comments about his potential sale to a new owner and is punished for so-called disloyalty—as though whipping him should make him love his master more. Abram, elderly and losing his mental faculties, is stripped of human dignity and actually stabbed for making a minor mistake. His very life has zero value to a master who views black people as livestock. That same master discards Patsey’s truth in order to believe an evil lie birthed in his own sexually predatory behavior. Worse yet, Epps forces Platt to sacrifice his moral integrity and become the brutal torturer of his friend Patsey, making him complicit in the slave master’s evil. Finally, the legacy of the father and moral future of the son are lost, as is seen sadly in the imitative example of young Master Epps, who delights in beating old Abram just as his father would flog a mule.
