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Emancipation: January 1, 1863
Townhall.com ^ | January 1, 2012 | Ken Blackwell

Posted on 01/01/2013 6:56:33 AM PST by Kaslin

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To: central_va

There were a number of slave owners that were black. Free men of color, even where they were not permitted to own slaves directly, were able to own stock certificates. They formed companies, and their companies purchased slaves, often their wifes and children. After being purchased, such slaves were able to work for wages, pay off their debt to the company, and be free.

North Carolina had permitted free men of color to vote, and after 1835, changed the rules to forbid free men of color from voting. The slave power was all about changing the rules to assure the ascendency of the slave power.

Again, it doesn’t make any difference what the slaves thought about the war. They were the object, not the subject. What makes a difference is what the people who started the war thought. Pretend confederate vice president Alexander Stephens said in his infamous “cornerstone speech”

“Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.”

You will note no exeption there for those who served with Bedford Forrest. After the war was over, the former confederates proceeded to murder and terrorize. Worse yet they propagandized so that the murder and terror would continue to the next generation.

If you think Whites are naturally superior, I invite you to try out for the NBA.


61 posted on 01/03/2013 1:25:58 PM PST by donmeaker (Blunderbuss: A short weapon, ... now superceded in civilized countries by more advanced weaponry.)
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To: Sherman Logan

Personal liberty laws were passed in northern states in response to slave catchers pretending authority, providing false testimony, and forging documents, and under cover of that pretended authority, kidnapping free blacks from northern states.

Personal liberty laws forced the slave catcher to submit his evidencs to the state officials, and to give black residents of a free state the protection of the law. Since state officials often spotted the slave catchers’ forgeries, spotted inconsitencies in their testimony, and held that others testimony was more reliable, the slave power felt that the laws of civil procedure in free states (which is what personal liberty laws were) infringed on their rights to run the other states.

They were overrulled by the Taney court, in the following way: slave catchers could not demand state officials support in kidnapping alleged runaway slaves, but they could demand support from federal marshals. That issue had been settled long before the rebellion.

Dred Scott also ruled in favor of the slave power: Even when a man was not a runaway, and was brought to a free state, he still, held Taney, had no cause or standing to imagine that the laws of a free state held sway over anyone the slave power wanted to keep from freedom.

And still the slave power complained.


62 posted on 01/03/2013 1:36:45 PM PST by donmeaker (Blunderbuss: A short weapon, ... now superceded in civilized countries by more advanced weaponry.)
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To: donmeaker
No person held to service or labour in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labour, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labour may be due.

I agree with you about the morality of the situation, but the Constitution says the only thing that is of concern is the law in the state where he is held to be a slave.

Not everything in the Constitution was moral.

63 posted on 01/03/2013 2:00:10 PM PST by Sherman Logan
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To: Sherman Logan

The personal liberty laws permitted the law to determine if claims were valid, or invalid, or if the person so claimed had even escaped.

To do otherwise was to have a ‘guilty until proved innocent’ standard for free states, but not for slave states, something the constitution never claimed or asserted.


64 posted on 01/03/2013 6:01:15 PM PST by donmeaker (Blunderbuss: A short weapon, ... now superceded in civilized countries by more advanced weaponry.)
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To: Sherman Logan

I figure, per Taney’s interpretation of the constitution, any abolitionist could show up at at slave plantation, and assert that any slave owed him service in his free state.

If that occurred, there was no way that the claim could be denied right? No state court in a slave state could stand in the way of a claim of service, right? That would be unconstitutional, and the slave states were all about the constitution.

Right?


65 posted on 01/03/2013 9:16:07 PM PST by donmeaker (Blunderbuss: A short weapon, ... now superceded in civilized countries by more advanced weaponry.)
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To: Sherman Logan

Again, the capital that constituted slave workers was not lost. The ownership of the capital was lost. The banks would have had to loan the money to the black agricultural worker, or to a corporation that had an employment contract with him.

That a bank didn’t want to make a loan didn’t mean that they couldn’t have.


66 posted on 01/05/2013 7:43:05 PM PST by donmeaker (Blunderbuss: A short weapon, ... now superceded in civilized countries by more advanced weaponry.)
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To: central_va

The easiest form of slave revolt was the most common. They left their homes for Yankee lines.

They did that in droves, enough to provide numerous regiments of soldiers to the US Army.

I figure they were bright enough to revolt against slavery in the way that gave them the best chance of success.

That makes them smarter than the average Confederate.


67 posted on 01/05/2013 7:47:23 PM PST by donmeaker (Blunderbuss: A short weapon, ... now superceded in civilized countries by more advanced weaponry.)
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To: Sherman Logan

McElmoyle v. Cohen, 38 U.S. (13 Pet.) 312 (1839) established that a states laws of civil procedure had to be followed when an agent came from out of state with a court order.

That case a South Carolina court order was held to be subject to a Georgia civil procedure that enacted a statue of limitations, and so could not be enforced in Georgia.

With that precedent in hand, northern states enacted the personal liberty laws that subjected slave catchers to rules of civil procedure in states that didn’t allow property in human beings.

It was a key fact on the ground when Taney wrote his opinion permitting slave catchers to work with federal marshals but not requiring that state courts and officials work with slave catchers.


68 posted on 01/05/2013 7:53:43 PM PST by donmeaker (Blunderbuss: A short weapon, ... now superceded in civilized countries by more advanced weaponry.)
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To: donmeaker
Again, the capital that constituted slave workers was not lost. The ownership of the capital was lost. The banks would have had to loan the money to the black agricultural worker, or to a corporation that had an employment contract with him.

Disagree. The capital represented by the slaves disappeared when they were freed, or to put it another way, demonetized.

They no longer represented money, since they could not, for example, be used as collateral for a loan.

If in 1860 a planter owned 100 slaves with average value of $750, he could easily borrow $75,000 using the slaves as collateral. If he defaulted on the loan, the lenders could attach the slaves to get their money back.

In 1865 not one of those slaves would have been able to borrow $750 from the same lender using himself as collateral, since if he defaulted on the loan the lender could not seize and sell him as collateral.

So while the labor of the freedman still had a monetary value, that value could no longer be converted to capital and thus had no capital value. The $3B of capital represented by the slaves disappeared during the war and its immediate aftermath. That had an enormous financial impact on the areas where slaveholding had been most prominent.

Not being a student of economics, I'm probably expressing this idea poorly and without using the correct language, but I'm pretty sure I have the basic idea down properly.

69 posted on 01/05/2013 8:53:52 PM PST by Sherman Logan
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To: donmeaker

In 1793 Congress passed a Fugitive Slave Act requiring a state to return escaped slaves, as the Constitution required.

In the case you reference, and others, the Court held that rules of civil procedure in the receiving state had to be followed, which in the states with personal liberty laws made the return difficult or impossible. This mightily pissed off the South, which claimed, correctly, that this was a violation of the spirit if not the letter of the Constitution.

To circumvent this, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, as part of the Compromise of 1850 that overturned the Missouri Compromise and set the country on course toward war. It is interesting that this FSA was a considerable expansion of federal power intended to limit states’ rights, which rather clashes with the southern revisionist notion that the south always fought for states’ rights and the north to expand federal power.

The FSA of 1850 made the return of slaves a federal responsibility, bypassing the state courts, so the personal liberty laws as such became more or less irrelevant.

Northern resistance to the return of fugitive slaves continued in the form of jury nullification, with juries refusing to convict those who committed crimes in resisting federal authorities trying to return slaves. This paralleled southern juries refusing to convict those who smuggled slaves from Africa into the country..


70 posted on 01/05/2013 9:09:35 PM PST by Sherman Logan
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To: Sherman Logan

I think it was the use of force that was monetized. Corporations required willing workers, but willing workers enabled higher productivity. It did take a while for people to realize that.

I wonder how black owned corporations were able get capital before the war to buy slaves (to set them free), but corporations were unable to borrow money after the war?

Part of it may be that with the government borrowing money to finance the war, interest rates were higher.

Some part of it may have been KKK activity, that threatened anyone who did business with freedmen.


71 posted on 01/05/2013 11:17:40 PM PST by donmeaker (Blunderbuss: A short weapon, ... now superceded in civilized countries by more advanced weaponry.)
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To: donmeaker
I have never seen any evidence of black-owned corporation borrowing money from banks to buy their families out of slavery. May have happened, but I doubt it.

My understanding is that most of the "black-owned slaves" were family members bought by free blacks who were not then allowed to free them because of restrictive state laws on emancipation.

I'm really unclear how "corporations" are supposed to fit into this picture. My understanding is that in the first half of the 19th century corporations were few and far between. With no general enabling laws, setting one up usually required a special act of the state legislature, which in southern states doesn't seem very likely for blacks wanting to free slaves. Most business was carried on by sole propietorships or partenerships, not corporations.

The whole issue of whether slavery made sense economically is usually misstated.

Regardless of what some have stated, slavery was wildly profitable for planters. In a good year they made enormous amounts of money. (In bad years, they blamed their troubles on northerners.)

The costs of slavery, and they were enormous, were born by the society as a whole. In essence, slavery was a way of privatizing the profits and socializing the costs of the institution.

72 posted on 01/05/2013 11:34:45 PM PST by Sherman Logan
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To: Sherman Logan

But there were corporations owned by free blacks, for the purpose of purchasing slaves. There was a court case that affirmed that free blacks, through not permitted to own slaves were allowed to own shares of the corporation.

Curious time.


73 posted on 01/06/2013 6:58:15 AM PST by donmeaker (Blunderbuss: A short weapon, ... now superceded in civilized countries by more advanced weaponry.)
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To: donmeaker
They left their homes for Yankee lines.<

Runaway slaves in CSA territory were rare during the war unless the union line was right upon them.

74 posted on 01/06/2013 7:23:00 AM PST by central_va ( I won't be reconstructed and I do not give a damn.)
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To: central_va

Unless....

Grant’s first campaign pretty much cleared out Tennessee. Tennessee produced most of the pretended confederacy’s pork. The rest of the war rebel soldiers were short on protein.

In response to that, the confederate pseudo government recommended that poultry be grown locally, that enabled extended US Army campaigns that lived off local food, such as Grant at Vickburg and Sherman across Georgia.

The pretended confederacy was incompetent except where it did the wrong thing on purpose. If they had gone to war to prove the incompetence of the slave power, they couldn’t have done a better job.


75 posted on 01/06/2013 12:33:45 PM PST by donmeaker (Blunderbuss: A short weapon, ... now superceded in civilized countries by more advanced weaponry.)
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To: donmeaker
The pretended confederacy was incompetent except where it did the wrong thing on purpose.

The "Pretend" Confederacy managed to somehow kill off 300,000 blue thugs in four years. Do you think this guy thought the Confederacy was "pretend"?


76 posted on 01/07/2013 4:44:13 AM PST by central_va ( I won't be reconstructed and I do not give a damn.)
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To: central_va

The pretend confederacy refused to keep track of its losses. The losses were too high. The confederacy burned many of its cities as they withdrew (Richmond, Atlanta, Savanah).

Most Union casualties were from disease. That gives you an idea of how effective the confederate armed forces were.

They had no legal justification, and to pretend that the ability to kill grants legal justification is to grant sovereignity to every robber, thug, or gangster.

That is what the pretended confederacy was: Robbers, thugs and gangsters- and a fair number deluded by the criminals at the top.


77 posted on 01/07/2013 3:30:32 PM PST by donmeaker (Blunderbuss: A short weapon, ... now superceded in civilized countries by more advanced weaponry.)
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To: donmeaker

And the Union was a ragtag gang of cutthroats, backstabbers, murderers, rapists, and thugs. Those who were not press-ganged into service were little more than mercenaries who were mostly paid in booty stolen from the areas they razed. The only “equality” that they cared about was that as they raped and pillaged their way across the South they killed blacks and whites equally.

Revisionist history has tried its best to portray the Union armies as honorable and of a high moral caliber. BS! They were and are war criminals, the entire bunch of them.


78 posted on 01/07/2013 3:49:46 PM PST by Have Ruck - Will Travel (Hmm, I wonder what would happen if I...)
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To: Have Ruck - Will Travel

Yea, and the rebs buggered baby baboons. Jeeze - that was insightful.


79 posted on 01/07/2013 8:35:34 PM PST by rockrr (Everything is different now...)
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To: Have Ruck - Will Travel

Says the guy whose heroes lost to them.


80 posted on 01/07/2013 8:37:43 PM PST by donmeaker (Blunderbuss: A short weapon, ... now superceded in civilized countries by more advanced weaponry.)
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