"Under Roman law as well as in the United States, slaves were deprived of legally recognized spouses or families and of genuine property ownership. As with most domestic animals, their lowly status was enforced by the threat of almost unlimited physical punishment. As Frederick Douglass put it, after describing the ways that the “slave breaker” Mr. Covey had “tamed” him: “I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute!” In an earlier essay on this subject, I have theorized that, given the repeated comparisons of slaves to domestic animals throughout history (and Aristotle wrote that the ox was “a poor man’s slave”), the initial enslavement and “bestialization” of prisoners of war may well have been modeled on the successful techniques of taming and domesticating wild animals. But some animals could never be domesticated, and even those slaves who at times felt themselves transformed, like Douglass, into “brutes” did not lose their essential humanity, a fact that repeatedly underscored the preeminent contradiction of “inhuman bondage.” Indeed, one of the central and inspiring truths of African American history, a truth dramatized by fugitives like Frederick Douglass, was the way slaves succeeded in asserting their humanity and reinventing their diverse cultures, despite being torn away from their natal African families and societies, despite being continuously humiliated, bought and sold, and often subjected to torture and the threat of death. Thus the word “inhuman,” in this book’s title, refers to the unconscionable and unsuccessful goal of bestializing (in the form of pets as well as beasts of burden) a class of human beings. This is not meant to deny, as much slave testimony indicates, that some slaves suffered recurrent psychological as well as physical damage."