Understanding Slavery

I wish this were true!!! But I have many relatives that prove it false. They have pulled and continued to pull a straight Democratic ticket even against their own personal convictions.

I had a cousin once tell me that the news media was lying about Clinton's and Gore's support for abortion.

Virtually in the same breath, I have heard them condemn n_g_ers getting gov't help and anyone who would vote Republican. They lament the loss of logging jobs but refuse to consider the fact that liberal Democrats in cahoots with environmental whackos are the cause.

In short, I disagree with you. The traditionalist southern Democrats that continued to vote for the Antebellum party even after 1930 are major contributors to Federal expansion/abuse of power.

 

I know what you mean, , I have posted the following link several times in similar threads.
No one ever read or responded to it before and I don't really expect them to now. But this is a link to the actual formal secession statements of several Southern states as well as several formal speeches by Southern leaders at the time.

http://www.bessel.org/slavecw.htm

The rare individual who will actually read and contemplate these statements will find that the South thought slavery was a very core reason for the war.

Karen ( a PROUD descendant of three Civil War soldiers from the North, one of whom died in battle when he was 26 years old )

 

But, Scott J, they are voting party not philosophy. And that in itself is a throwback to the War of Northern Aggression waged by Republicans.

Also, the South has become a Republican stronghold. Look at Texas. It has reversed parties since I was kid growing up and there was hardly any Republican representation in the State legislature.

But, the Republican Party has become a big government party now, too. It is no longer the party of the political philosophy of Goldwater and Reagan.

 

But if the North had respected the sovereignty of the individual States, slavery would not have been an issue for seceding and then the North invading the CSA. As I said, slavery as an issue was a symptom of the problem over States' rights. The South intended to keep the institution of slavery going, no one is arguing that they weren't. It's just that it shouldn't have been a reason for the North(whose attitudes were/are just as racist as in the South) to trample on States' rights.

If the North had respected the State sovereignty(which I know is a foreign concept to modern Americans), the South would not have seceded and 600,000 lives would not have been lost to enforce the Republicans' notion of big government in the 1860's.

God save the South!

 

Hey, Ken. Aesop's fox called. He wants his sour grapes back.

 

I have a friend who was raised in a drug culture. His parents used. The grandparent that he knew used. He even used until he was saved. Now, he has separated himself from that drug culture. Does his family still use? Yep. Is he aware of his history? Yep. Does he buy into that history - absolutely not. He has no need of it anymore.

We really can separate ourselves from things that have happened in our ancestry, but only by standing against what has previously happened. I am quite aware that KKK blood runs through my veins. However, I openly and unabashedly stand up for the equality of all people and speak out against racism. In doing so, I am indeed separating myself from my historical reality.

Welcome to the post-modern world.

 

Evidently no one read my post, so I will post it again.

quote:
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The war came indirectly because of slavery, because the south did not like the hostile attitude of Lincoln and other Republicans towards slavery.
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FINALLY!!! Some middle ground. I am sure willing to admit that the so-called "straw that broke the camels back" leading to the war was the issue of slavery. BUT, through the 1840's and '50's, the U.S. was increasingly changing from an agricultural country to an industrial country. The southern folk felt as if they were being left behind and didn't want for the rest of the country to be ahead in the industrial "race". To hang on to the agricultural side of America was the highest priority for southern farmers.

With increased manufacturing, industry, and most importantly, machinery in the north, the southern economy was beginning to crumble. Once the talk began about freeing slaves, the south saw the final blow to her way of life. Slaves are the ones who built roads, bridges, and most importantly, picked the cotton.(Obviously, almost all white people also did these things.) If the slaves were freed, the southern economy would come crashing down. Now, same as we do today, most people back then wanted to have a good economy. No wonder they were against freeing the slaves.

Now, I am not for slavery. But, I would like to propose that if the issue had not become such a sticking point, that the emancipation would have gone better. I believe that if the south had been allowed to keep slaves for the time, just like other northern states, she could have phased it out much easier. I believe that a different kind of "reconstruction" of the southern economy could have taken place and run much more smoothly. And the brightest point of all, I don't believe there would have been as much animosity from southerners towards blacks and northerners in the following 100 years.

Just like the "bussing" program of the 1960's, the southerners saw outsiders forcing them to do something that they were not yet ready to do.

Of course, we all know that had the civil war not been fought slavery still would have ended. Maybe 10-15 years later, but it would not have cost as many lives.

So, I will admit that ONE of the causes of the war was slavery. I hope everyone else can see that slavery was not the only issue and it was not only in the south. The issue of slavery was just the final act of a feared centralized government.

One more thing. I think my analogy could also be said about events of the present.

The 10 Commandments are removed from schools by the feds. Prayer is removed from schools by the feds. Now the 10 Commandments are removed from a state Supreme Court building by the feds. Eventually, this camel's back is going to break too.

God Bless. Bro. James - a southerner who wants others to understand

 

So do you openly and loudly reject that culture that caused the enslavement of an entire people? Do you reject that heritage that forced the black community to live as sub-standard humans both before and after the Civil War?

What parts of your Southern heritage are you actually proud of?

 

Which northern states had slaves? Where is your documentation that the north was allowed to keep slaves?

 

I am aware that the North had this problem but I think they have largely gotten past it after their protests against forced bussing subsided.

 

EMANCIPATION in the NORTH

The American Revolution was the death knell of Northern slavery. The rhetoric of the rebels, based on the Enlightenment doctrine of "natural rights," immediately ran into the hypocrisy of a slave-owning people crying out for freedom. "To contend for liberty and to deny that blessing to others," John Jay wrote, "involves an inconsistency not to be excused." Nathaniel Niles put it succinctly: "For shame, let us either cease to enslave our fellow-men, or else let us cease to complain of those that would enslave us." James Otis found another thread in the argument when he wrote, "It is a clear truth that those who every day barter away other mens liberty, will soon care little for their own." ["The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved"]

Britain had a large financial stake in the slave trade, so New England resistance to slave importation in the years leading up to the Revolution could express anti-Crown sentiment. As so often happened, morality and economic self-interest flowed the same way, so it is difficult to discern them. It was probably not a coincidence that Massachusetts, where resistance to British authority was greatest, was also the hotbed of agitation against the slave trade. Dr. Jeremy Belknap of Boston recalled that few in the colony had spoken publicly against slavery "till we began to feel the weight of oppression from 'our mother country.' "

There was a religious component to the move toward emancipation in the North. Quakers came later to abolition than many people realize. Not until 1758 did Philadelphia Yearly Meeting condemn not only the slave trade, but slavery itself. Still, the Society of Friends was the most visible of the anti-slavery sects, though somewhat marginalized during the Revolution because many had been Loyalists. They brought varying degrees of pressure to bear in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island. Presbyterians in Pennsylvania and Methodists in the Chesapeake region also preached against slavery.

But the heaviest blow was dealt by the war itself, which was waged for five years all across the North. Both sides competed for the slaves, and whichever side he joined, a slave was likely to end up free. The British offer of liberty to escaped slaves drew in thousands of them. "By the invasion of this state, and the possession the enemy obtained of this city, and neighborhood," George Bryan of Philadelphia wrote in 1779, "[a] great part of the slaves hereabouts, were enticed away by the British army." The large slave populations of Philadelphia and New York were permanently reduced. When the British and the American Loyalists pulled out of New York at the end of the war, some 3,000 blacks left with them. "The number of runaways rose so sharply after 1775 that there can be no doubt that the machinery of control no longer functioned effectively."[1]

The Northern colonies, too, began to offer their slaves manumission or freedom in exchange for military service. Usually this came with some reimbursement to the owner (in 1782 in New York, 500 acres to a master for every slave who enlisted for three years with the master's consent). In the American Revolution, some 5,000 blacks, mostly from the North, fought on the American side. But likely many more went over to the British. The black population of Massachusetts declined in actual numbers during the Revolutionary years, and its ratio to the white population fell from 1:45 in 1763 to 1:80 in 1784. In Rhode Island, the black-to-white ratio had been 1:14 in 1749; in 1783 it was 1:22. In the 15 years after 1771, the white population of New York grew by about 50 percent, but the black population fell by 5 percent.

The result of this convergence of forces was that, between 1777 and 1804, the Northern colonies and states, one by one, set their slaves free. There was a good deal of anti-slavery rhetoric in the early days of the Revolution in the form of petitions and non-binding resolutions. In the North, a few of the former colonies even barred the importing of slaves. But only Vermont, where slavery was practically non-existent, went so far as to ban it outright in 1777. The war came first, most of the Northern leaders decided, and anything that could upset the struggle ought to be, in the words of the New Hampshire legislature in 1780 putting off a petition for freedom from the state's slaves, "postponed till a more convenient opportunity."

Northern slaves, more often than those of the colonial South or other parts of the Americas, had filled skilled positions, working as artisans, especially in the cities. They appear as bakers, tailors, weavers, goldsmiths, and woodcut illustrators. Such status allowed them a certain power to negotiate with their masters, and win certain protections. It also earned them the jealousy of white workers, who petitioned relentlessly against slave competition in Boston from 1660, New York from 1686, and Philadelphia from 1707. But with the end of slavery, the white workers who had sought these jobs for generations soon swept them clean of black incumbents. The freed slaves were excluded from the occupations that would have allowed them to make something of their freedom.

Considering New York, historian Edgar McManus writes, "Upper-class whites were motivated by idealism, and their attitude toward the Negro was philanthropic and paternalistic. Members of the upper class supported Negro charities and schools much more generously than they supported organizations assisting poor whites." This idealism, however, "had no counterpart in the lower classes, among whom could be found neither sympathy for the Negro nor understanding of his problems. From its inception, slavery had been detrimental to the working class. On the one hand, the slave system excluded whites from jobs pre-empted by slaves; on the other, it often degraded them socially to the level of the slaves with whom they had to work and compete in earning a livelihood. Many whites prefered chauvinistic idleness to employment which had come to be identified with slavery. ... Whites of the working class hated slavery as an institution, but they also feared the free Negro as an economic competitor. They supported emancipation not to raise the Negro to a better life but to destroy a system which gave him a fixed place in the economy."[2]

"Emancipation in some ways strengthened the tyranny of race by imposing on blacks new forms of subordination that better served the economic interests of the whites," writes McManus, the historian of Northern slavery. "The historical reality of race relations in the Americas is that whites have never altered their institutions primarily for the benefit of blacks."[3]

Northern prejudice, and the inability of those states to assimilate their former slaves, certainly discouraged efforts toward freeing the slaves in the South. Having inadvertently freed the slaves in the state, the Massachusetts legislature voted to bar interracial marriages and expell all blacks who were not citizens. Boston authorities took action against 240 of them in 1800, most natives of Rhode Island, New York, Philadelphia, and the West Indies. White Philadelphians were rioting against blacks from 1805, driving them from the Fourth of July celebrations on Independence Square. Within a decade, the burning of black churches in the city had begun.

A Virginia judge, observing the North in 1795, wrote, "If in Massachusetts, where the numbers are comparatively very small, this prejudice be discernable, how much stronger may it be imagined in this country ...?"[4]

McManus finds that "abolitionists of the 1780's belonged to the business elite which thirty years before had reaped handsome profits from the slave trade. The precipitous decline of the trade after 1770 apparently sharpened the moral sensibilities of those who had formerly profited. ... The leaders of the abolition movement were honorable men who sincerely regarded slavery as a great moral wrong. But it is also true that they embraced antislavery at a time when it entailed no economic hardship for their class."

Benjamin Rush and the Rev. Francis Allison were among Pennsylvania's prominent, outspoken abolitionists who owned slaves during most of their public careers. In 1785, Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and 30 other New Yorkers formed the Society for Manumission of Slaves. Hamilton, as chair of the Ways and Means Committee, reported a resolution that members begin the work by freeing their own slaves. The resolution failed. Prominent critics of slavery who had difficulty freeing their own slaves sent mixed signals to the South. "n the manner northern state governments dealt with the abolition of slavery, the South witnessed the central difficulty besetting the revolutionary generation -- how to put into practice beliefs that could be implemented only at personal cost."[5]

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1. McManus, Edgar J., Black Bondage in the North, Syracuse Univ. Press, 1973, p.154.
2. McManus, A History of Negro Slavery in New York, Syracuse Univ. Press, 1966, p.182-3.
3. McManus, op. cit., p.197.
4. Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1961, p.15.
5. Gary B. Nash, Race and Revolution, Madison House, 1990, p.31.

--www.etymonline.com/cw/northabol1.htm

God save the South!

 

EMANCIPATION in the NORTH</font>[/QUOTE]I am quite aware of the existence of slavery in the North in and before the 18th c. James intimates that the North had slaves up to and past the Civil War.

 

I think the point is that the Yankees were no less and are no less racist than are Southerners. The Yankees did not invade the South to end slavery. As has been shown in timelines, it was quite a while after the CSA was formed before the North decided that slavery needed to end, and even then it was in hopes that the slaves would rebel and help defeat the CSA.

Further, ask yourself, if the CSA had ended slavery at the same time the CSA was formed, would the Yankees have said, "Okay, go ahead and leave"? You know they wouldn't have.

But the Confederate Constitution did end trading in slaves from foreign countries -

Section IX.

The importation of negroes of the African race from any foreign country other than the slaveholding States or Territories of the United States of America, is hereby forbidden; and Congress is required to pass such laws as shall effectually prevent the same.

Congress shall also have power to prohibit the introduction of slaves from any State not a member of, or Territory not belonging to, this Confederacy.

The USA Constitution didn't even do that at that point in time.

 

KenH,

Your information about the Confederate government ending the importation of slaves is incorrect. The importing of slaves was ended by an act of Congress in 1808. So the mention of it in the Confederate laws is just to insure that it did not resume.

 

&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;But I will. I state unequivocally that I wish the CSA was still in existence today. Slavery would have been done away with long, long ago. In fact, the CSA Constitution outlawed the importation of any more slaves and the first veto that President Davis exercised was on a bill that he felt violated the spirit of that prohibition.&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;

You don't know that slavery would have died a natural death. The slave owners were powerful enough to drag their whole region into a war and such a powerful financial interest could have maintained slavery indefinitely, it seems to me. Also, the U.S. Congress outlawed the importation of slaves in 1808 so Jefferson Davis, in putting the prohibition into his constitution was doing something that was painless, as the slave trade was already dead.

 

&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;So do you openly and loudly reject that culture that caused the enslavement of an entire people? Do you reject that heritage that forced the black community to live as sub-standard humans both before and after the Civil War? &lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;&lt;

KenH, you danced around the above question in a previous post. Now maybe you can give a direct answer?