Booker T. Washington was born a slave, he was a rather fortunate slave to have been born just 6 or 7 years before the Emancipation Proclamation.  Slavery was a terrible system, it was not only bad for the slave, but Washington describes that it was also bad for the owner of the slave.  Washington had many arguments against the slave system.  I have listed a few them in the following paragraphs.

Before their freedom slaves old and young lived in poverty.  They didn’t have any of the comforting things that the white people had, not to mention there was a lack of family structure.  Washington described the house that he lived in as a young child, which seemed less like a house, but rather a shack.  It did not have glass in the windows, nor a real door.  There was no wood floor, just bare earth.  Because of those poor living conditions the slaves had the temptation to steal from their owners.

Before the freedom of the slaves, most slave owners did not know a trade.  The owners relied on the slaves to do all of the manual labor.  Because of this, when the slaves were freed some of the whites lived in poverty.

Another one of Washington’s arguments against slavery was that after their freedom, the ex-slaves lacked motivation to do effective work.  They spent their entire lives serving an owner who paid them nothing.  Due to the fact that they lacked the incentive to do good work , when they were freed into the real world some of the ex-slaves found only more poverty.

Booker T. Washington was a determined and hard working man.