I Have a Few Questions

[Rob Wick]

As she was a slave, and had no say in what happened to her on a day-by-day basis, then yes, it was.

Best
Rob

[J. Beckert]

Quote:Surely we can agree that anyone who was a slave was mistreated, regardless of the level of violence which may or may not have been directed their way, can't we?

No, it wasn't, Rob. Where's the mistreatment or level of violence in being taken to Paris and being treated as Sally was? She bore him several children. If you have a point, I'm missing it. Not every slaveholder mistreated their slaves. To group all slaveholders into that category is wrong. While slavery itself is a dreadful thing, in those times, I think Sally fared better than she would under any other circumstances.

[Rob Wick]

My only point is that in any circumstance, slavery is wrong. There is absolutely no justification for such a system whatsoever, and the notion that somehow northern factory owners were just as bad as southern slaveholders is specious.

Treated fairly or poorly, a slave is still being mistreated by the simple act of being a slave.

Best
Rob

[J. Beckert]

I agree 100%, Rob, but to apply 21st. century morals to the 18th. or 19th. century standards just doesn't ring true. Not every slave was mistreated or subjected to violence. Slavery, no matter how much of a sin it was, was a way of life. Booth's statement that it was the greatest blessing that God ever bestowed on a favored nation actually rang true for some slaves, when you consider their alternatives. Not all - or even most - I'll give you that - but look at the Hemmings case. It's not a "one size fits all" by any means.

Spit out the granola, son.....that stuff messes up your thinkin'. (I'm kidding!)

[My Name Is Kate]

(11-21-2012 09:43 AM)Laurie Verge Wrote:  Wow, Kate, sounds like you're working on a thesis paper for college?

I am well past college age! The only books I have read on this forum's subject are "Alias Paine", and one other book, a long time ago when I may not even have been in my teens. It might have been "The Day Lincoln Was Shot". I remember very little about the latter book except that it described Lewis Paine as a "towering brute". That was exactly what I wanted at the time...a sort of "hit man" that I could sic on all the nasty people who were making my life miserable. I used to keep a sepia picture of him because it made me feel safer. I don't know what made me think of him again after 35 years or so, but when I did, I started reading another forum similar to this one, then I finally found this board a few weeks ago.

Anyway, I'm glad to hear that Lewis was actually a pretty decent guy and came from a good family. Then I started thinking about other things, like, what exactly were the Southerners fighting for, besides slavery? Whenever the Civil War is mentioned, I've always heard that the South was fighting for the right to keep their slaves, and the North was opposed to slavery and wanted to keep the Union together. It didn't seem to add up. So I did an internet search and found this article, which is pretty much the sum total of what I now know about what caused the Civil War.

http://www.ket.org/civilwar/causes.html

Looks like I have alot more reading to do to get in-depth answers to my questions. I will probably have more questions. Thanks for all the replies.

[Thomas Thorne]

If slavery was a superior labor system,why can we find so few if any free men who volunteered to become slaves in history?

The worst factory owner had to worry about his employees being lured away by other employers offering better terms of employment. Workers could move to other parts of the same country and migrate to other lands. The stunningly large overseas migration of European peoples in the 19th century is evidence of a mobility denied to slaves. No employer had the legal right to separate his free employees from their families. Free workers took advantage of the growing 19th century tendency to expand political rights such as suffrage to an ever larger population.

We are aware of the likes of George Fitzhugh who believed that slavery was a superior labor system to free market capitalism. Now Fitzhugh never ran for dogcatcher. His idea that 95% of the population ion had a natural and inalienable right to be slaves would not have endeared him to a mass White male electorate.

Can you imagine a bizarro world Confederate Presidential election where the only 2 candidates were George Fitzhugh and Abraham Lincoln? Lincoln would have won. I bet no one has done an alternate history with this concept.
Tom

[My Name Is Kate]

If both the North and the South agreed that the slaves (and black people in general) were not up to par, and did not want them integrated in any significant way into predominantly-white society, then it makes me wonder why the consciences of the Northern people were bothering them more than the Southerners' were. Or was abolition mainly just a political move on the part of the North against the South?

Did anyone ever think of asking the freed slaves if they wanted to remain in this country under Jim Crow laws, or would they rather be sent back to their countries of origin? And would their countries of origin have offered a better life for them, or worse, or would they have refused to take them back? I know it isn't fair to judge people from a different time period, by today's standards, but I'm having a problem understanding how anyone could have expected a good outcome from either retaining slavery, or abolishing it without granting equal rights and equal opportunity.

[Gene C]

(11-22-2012 03:26 AM)My Name Is Kate Wrote:  Did anyone ever think of asking the freed slaves if they wanted to remain in this country under Jim Crow laws, or would they rather be sent back to their countries of origin? And would their countries of origin have offered a better life for them, or worse, or would they have refused to take them back? I know it isn't fair to judge people from a different time period, by today's standards, but I'm having a problem understanding how anyone could have expected a good outcome from either retaining slavery, or abolishing it without granting equal rights and equal opportunity.

Lincoln was in favor of the government buying the slaves (cheaper than the cost of continuing the war) and then colonizing them to central america. It wasn't a well received idea. Many of the free (and slave) blacks considered this country to be their country too, and didn't want to leave.

[Bill Richter]

Kate, for your first question, read my intro to Historical Dictionary of the Old South. For what it is worth many prominent abolitionists did not support Reconstruction after the Civil War. Historian C. Vann Woodward once theorized that Reconstruction was designed by the North to make the South friendly to free black settlement and thus keep them out of the North, fearing freed blacks would flood north after 1865, as did escaped slaves before the war, looking for real freedom unless it were forced on the white South.

On your second question, many wanted to send the blacks back to Africa. The Am Colonization Society sent freed slaves to Liberia the capital of which remains to this day as Monrovia. Others wanted to sent freed blacks to Isle la Vache off Haiti, others to Panama (the place was named Lincolnonia by a cynical press), or to Far West Texas (there was another plan to give east Tex to Blacks, west Tex to Loyal Union whites and north Tex to the Rebs), or perhaps to Southern Fla. All these ideas failed because few blacks wanted to be sent away from their homes. Ben Butler allegedly said that if every ship owned in the US were used to send blacks to Africa or somewhere, the lines would keep coming because of the birth rate. Fred Douglass argued that blacks had earned the right to stay through their slave labor and by fighting for the N in the Civil War (about 200,000 did). In the end Douglass won the argument. The North wanted the white South to grant blacks equal rights and opportunity, not the North. Back to Woodward's thesis on what Reconstruction was to achieve--contrary to what most of us learned in school.

[Rick Smith]

(11-21-2012 10:49 PM)Rob Wick Wrote:  My only point is that in any circumstance, slavery is wrong. There is absolutely no justification for such a system whatsoever, and the notion that somehow northern factory owners were just as bad as southern slaveholders is specious.

Treated fairly or poorly, a slave is still being mistreated by the simple act of being a slave.

Best
Rob

My assumption is that your feelings are not limited only to the history of American slavery, but that you have the same abhorrence of all slavery throughout history, whether it be the Egyptians enslaving the Israelites, the Normans enslaving the Saxons or some African tribes which enslaved and sold their own and other African tribal peoples.

Rick

[Rob Wick]

Rick,

Slavery anywhere, in any form, at any time, is, was, and will forever remain wrong.

Best
Rob

[Mark MacKenzie]

I don't know how to put quotes here...

"Lincoln was in favor of the government buying the slaves (cheaper than the cost of continuing the war) and then colonizing them to central america. It wasn't a well received idea. "

Wasn't this an evolving process with Lincoln? Didn't he come to the conclusion that freed slaves should be given the right to vote, even before women were? So to say Lincoln was an advocate of colonization is true but only in a limited time period.

To say that the North did not want black people integrated again is not true. We tend to speculate how people felt beyond actually proof. The proof is the legislation. Slavery was not legal in the North. Not legal.

I am ignorant of the story about Thomas Jefferson's slave mentioned above. You said she bore him children. Nathan Bedford Forrest had a black slave with whom he had sexual relations. My instinct tells me it was not consensual. Imagine the number of times rape and other abhorrent atrocities were committed against slaves.

Of course, there were many very good people who owned slaves. History of the slaves of the Belle Meade Mansion in Nashville is documented in few of the only written letters from slaves known to exist. A female slave lovingly writes to her owner who is imprisoned up North.

There are a great many atrocities documented in the South. Legal atrocities. And we're not talking polite Richmond south. Memphis, Atlanta, Natchez, Vicksburg. Nashville, Columbia, Pulaski. The south was in a fix. Their entire wealth, down heah, was based on the exploitation of forced labor. The remarkable antebellum wealth was doomed without slavery. So much so that it was worth fighting for.

Elizabeth Keckley's book is a good read about the reality of slavery. Her mother was so ashamed that she told Elizabeth that her father was one man, when on her death bed she revealed her father was actually the white owner forced upon her. Forced. Yet, Elizabeth bought her freedom only because she was allowed to; she could have been denied.

There is no argument anywhere that slavery was anything more than an inhuman atrocity.

Hows that for a first post?

Greetings and Happy Holidays!

[Gene C]

(11-22-2012 12:16 PM)Mark MacKenzie Wrote:  ...

"Lincoln was in favor of the government buying the slaves (cheaper than the cost of continuing the war) and then colonizing them to central america. It wasn't a well received idea. "

Wasn't this an evolving process with Lincoln? Didn't he come to the conclusion that freed slaves should be given the right to vote, even before women were? So to say Lincoln was an advocate of colonization is true but only in a limited time period....

Hows that for a first post?

Greetings and Happy Holidays!

Like many social problems, what to do is easy compared with how to do it and dealing with the consequesnces once it's done. Lincoln showed he was willing to accept different ideas on dealing with the "how" and was willing to be flexable and compromise. You're right, it was an evolving position
A good first post and welcome.

[L Verge]

Good first post, Mark. Please read the several books on Sally Hemmings, mistress to Jefferson after he became a widower -- and half-sister to his deceased wife.

Now, I don't think that there is a person on this forum that condones the peculiar institution of slavery, and surely everyone recognizes the system existed from very early civilizations on. The postings to Kate's questions here certainly show that, to this day, no one can satisfactorily explain the detriments that slavery had on America and other parts of the world.

First, I believe that I have been told that William Penn was a slave holder and that Lincoln's Pennsylvania ancestors held slaves. Of course, we know that William Henry Seward was raised in a slave holding family.

There's just one thing that no one has addressed and that is the slave TRADE that was conducted by Northern exploiters for the first 200 years or so. Where is the bleeding-heart rationale in that? And why has no one mentioned the fact that slavery existed in the North well into the 1800s? The climate and soil conditions in the North may not have been conducive to large scale farming, but the factories and ports of the North needed laborers.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't many of the early colonists come from the crowded cities of England and Europe with skills that the North could use? Some of them may have come as indentured servants; but when their indenture was served, the factory owners and others felt the need to import slaves to fill the void in their work force, and slavery in the North became more prevalent.

During the American Revolution, I believe that the British promised freedom to slaves who would escape to serve their forces. I think this was done to disrupt the economic supplies that were fueling the 1776 Rebels. Many of the slaves who heard the promise headed North, and that increased the black slave population there into the 1800s. Northeners had their Moonlight and Magnolia tales also:

"The slaves in Massachusetts were treated with almost parental kindness. They were incorporated into the family, and each puritan household being a sort of religious structure, the relative duties of master and servant were clearly defined. No doubt the severest and longest task fell to the slave, but in the household of the farmer or artisan, the master and the mistress shared it, and when it was finished, the white and the black, like the feudal chief and his household servant, sat down to the same table, and shared the same viands." [Reminiscence by Catharine Sedgwick (1789-1867) of Stockbridge, Mass.]

"Yet the petitions for freedom from New England and Mid-Atlantic blacks, and the numbers in which they ran off from their masters to the British during the Revolution, suggest rather a different picture.

"Early-19th century New Englanders had real motives for forgetting their slave history; or, if they recalled it at all, for characterizing it as a brief period of mild servitude. This was partly a Puritan effort to absolve New England's ancestors of their guilt. The cleansing of history had a racist motive as well, denying blacks -- slave or free -- a legitimate place in New England history. But most importantly, the deliberate creation of a "mythology of a free New England" was a crucial event in the history of sectional conflict in America. The North, and New England in particular, sought to demonize the South through its institution of slavery; they did this in part by burying their own histories as slave-owners and slave-importers. At the same time, behind the potent rhetoric of Daniel Webster and others, they enshrined New England values as the essential ones of the Revolution, and the new nation. In so doing, they characterized Southern interests as purely sectional and selfish. In the rhetorical battle, New England backed the South right out of the American mainstream.

"The attempt to force blame for all America's ills onto the South led the Northern leadership to extreme twists of logic. Abolitionist leaders in New England noted the "degraded" condition of the local black communities. Yet the common abolitionist explanation of this had nothing to do with northerners, black or white. Instead, they blamed it on the continuance of slavery in the South. 'The toleration of slavery in the South,' Garrison editorialized, 'is the chief cause of the unfortunate situation of free colored persons in the North.'"

I am quoting here from a website that I encountered a few months ago. It is run by a Pennsylvania historian and author by the name of Douglas Harper. I have found it very interesting. Check out http://www.slavenorth.com. And, make sure you read the sections on "Denying the Past" and "Northern Profits from Slavery." Mr. Harper began his studies of the institution of slavery in the North when he increasingly found that all the blame was being placed on the South and not on the North. BTW, he was educated in the North.

How many of you know that New Jersey was the last Northern state to abolish slavery? They did so in 1804, but via gradual emancipation so that it did not fully end until 1865. New York still had slaves in 1824. New Hampshire passed a law to make slaves citizens of the state in 1857, but the law never fully took effect until the state's ratification of the 13th Amendment in July of 1865. In the years after the Revolution, the State of Rhode Island controlled anywhere from 60% to 90% of the slave trade to America. New Hampshire had a slave system that was very similar to those in the South. And, I could go on - and probably will at some point.

Kate - what I hope I am showing here is that everyone in American history (including the British, the Dutch, the Spanish, and the Portugese, who first brought enslaved Africans to the colonies) has to share in the blame for the Civil War. It is easy to be pious and above-the-fray today about the rights, wrongs, guilty parties, etc. that existed in America from the 1600s until 1865 and beyond. Hopefully, if we go back to teaching in-depth American history, we will still be pondering those same questions a hundred years from now, but with a reformed perspective. I think we can all agree that society in general - both North and South and European - had a hand in it. Spare me the modern finger pointing. I spent too many years trying to teach 8th and 9th graders to look at both sides of an issue.

P.S. - IMO, we can also look at the failures of Northern-led Reconstructionists and subsequent Jim Crow laws to see how our modern society has developed into the "give me generation" of liberal entitlements that discourages free enterprise.

[My Name Is Kate]

I hope I didn't come off as being "pious and above-the-fray."

Slavery was just the most obvious form of racism. There is plenty of blame to spread around for it, including to those African tribes that sold their own people into slavery (from what I understand). Racism is still here today, but in a more disguised and twisted form, and it's not just white people who are racist, by any means.