Willie Lynch Papers

Willie Lynch Papers

            The Willie Lynch Papers include a speech given by Willie Lynch as he briefed a group of slave owners in Virginia along the James River. The Willie Lynch papers and his speech include a number of bits of advice to the slave owners on how to ensure complete subjugation of slaves in the territory. Willie Lynch was a British slave owner who had visited the American colonies to help them resolve the issue they had with the slaves. As he makes his way along the plantations, he notices slaves who have been hung due to cases of insubordination. However, he argues hanging and killing slaves is not a proper way to treat them because they are an essential commodity for labor provision in the area. Therefore, he comes up with a speech and a variety of ways to help the slave owners curb the growing rebellion of the slaves as well as help them achieve total control and subjugation of the slaves.

For starters, he advises the slave owners to make the slave distrust each other. He advises them to pit the old generation against the young, men against women, light skin against dark skins, and so on. By doing this, Lynch ensures that creating distrust among the slaves will destroy any chance of them becoming united and establishing any form of resistance against the slave masters. Second, he advises the slave owners to break the spirit of the slaves by embarrassing and humiliating them in front of other slaves. He advises the slave masters to whip the slaves or strip the slaves or dehumanize them in front of

their children, wives, and other men. He believes that this method will ensure their spirits will be broken, and they will not offer any form of resistance. Lastly, he advises the slave masters not to allow the slaves to learn their language or become educated. He argues that if they learn the masters’ language, they will become aware of the secrets of the slave masters, and this will lead to their rebellion.

Willie Lynch’s methods of ensuring that the slaves became loyal and subordinate to their slave masters were effective because they ensured that slavery in the southern states lasted for about two hundred years. By humiliating the slaves through whipping, the slaves offered little rebellion towards the slave masters. By breaking the spirits of the mothers, children were born into slavery, and thus, slavery lasted several generations before it was finally abolished in the mid-eighteenth century.  In addition to this, the slave masters denied the slaves a chance to become educated to have total control of their ability to become aware of their constitutional rights. Being uneducated made the slaves become ignorant of their enslaved condition such that they hated each other. For example, house slaves were hated by the field slaves who believed the house slaves were more privileged than them. Thus, by creating distrust among them, the slaves continued their enslaved servitude for several centuries.