Posted on 02/08/2016 2:36:19 PM PST by pgyanke
I am in a discussion with a secular humanist who wants to know why, if our Founding Fathers believed in the inalienable rights of man, they allowed slavery. Can anyone recommend a good, honest book on the subject to share with him?
Uh, no. It's as old as history.
Simple answer is they did not universally accept slavery, but the also knew if those who opposed it made abolition a requirement for the new nation the articles of confederation and later the constitution itself would never be ratified and the new nation would fracture and fall.
They made a political compromise, knowing full well that eventually the matter would need to be dealt with, and the issue was an ongoing source of contention and problems for the nation until it was finally abolished by th civil war.
The founders were great men, but they were still men and men of their times.
Classical Greece and Rome had economic systems built on slavery.
The period we now call the European Renaissance looked back at the classical age and thought that those old folks had good answers to just about everything.
The Age of Enlightenment (18th century) was a transition period in which some of the ancient ideas (such as slavery) were giving way to new ideas (such as individual liberty).
The Founding Fathers were caught between old ways and new ways, and they got just about everything right. Unfortunately, slavery was an old, established, classical idea which seemed (to some people) to make sense as an economic tool in the hot conditions of the American South. The work needed to be done, and paid labor was hard to find.
No one gets it right all the time. The English system of slavery was not abolished right at the start of the United States.
” Tahlequah—ironically, he looked totally white, which I guess is not that unusual. His family’s ancestors were with the part of the Cherokee Nation that broke away and supported the Union—the Nation itself was allied with the Confederacy, as I understand it.”
That’s me...if I get a nosebleed, my Indian blood is gone! lol Had my DNA done, and I have more African and Mexican in me than Cherokee....go figure! And LOTS of Irish. lol
My group were of the Ridge Party, stayed with the South because they were promised sovereignty of their own states and knew they couldn’t trust the Union. The South was as bad as the Union to use and lie to the Indians.
It’s all an amazing story. Amazing men. Rich, cultured, well educated.
This is a snip of what they dealt with after the war.
Stand and Sally Watie, finding their home and mill burned to the ground by Federals during the war, returned to financial ruin. Watie used the last of his resources in 1867 to help finance nephew Cornelius Boudinot in a joint venture of an Indian Territory tobacco factory. It was likely near this location that Saladin wrote to his father. Only another year would pass before Saladin was claimed by a sudden, unexplained illness at age twenty-one.
The Boudinot Tabacco Factory was located just inside Indian Territory near Siloam Springs, Arkansas and proved popular and lucrative to local businesses. Noticing the success of the enterprise and the temptation of revenue and reprisal, the government acted upon a law they had just imposed for a federal excise tax on tobacco and distilled spirits which did not exempt Indian Territory.
Watie refused to pay what he considered an illegitimate tax against a sovereign state and in violation of the treaty made only a year before which held Cherokee or other tribes were not subject such tax. Boudinot, having been involved in writing the language of the treaty, knew the congress and the government had acted outside the agreement.
Nevertheless, federal officers confiscated and closed the factory, seized the assets to pay the back tax and forced Watie into bankruptcy. Boudinot filed suit against the government, but typically the case was long delayed. This became a landmark decision, setting precedent that a law passed by Congress could supersede provisions of even a recent treaty.
It was said that excellent grades of tobacco had been produced at the Boudinot factory and merchants who had engaged in selling it were disappointed because of the loss of revenue from the product. The white growers in Missouri also took their objections to the government to restrain the Cherokees’ competition. Boudinot lost his case in federal court and filed before the U.S. Supreme Court. Fifteen years later, the United States Court of Claims was ordered to give Boudinot restitution for damages; too late for Watie to regain his loss. No such tobacco enterprise was attempted again in Indian Territory.
Stand Watie spent his final years leading his nation, farming and trying to restore his land and continue the education of their children. Somehow he managed to send them away to school to make up for the years of war halting their lessons. Son Solon, who often was called by his Cherokee name, Watica, wrote from school to his father. “I feel proud to think that I have a papa that take the last dollars he has to send me school.” Solon died of pneumonia while attending classes in Cane Hill, Arkansas in 1869.
Weeks before his death in 1871, Watie wrote to daughter Jacqueline from their home on the Grand River. “You can’t imagine how lonely I am up here at our old place without any of my dear children being with me. I would be so happy to have you here, but you must go to school.”
There may never have been a bullet molded that could kill the old General, as the legend said. Instead, in their attempt to break him, the powers who were in control of his destiny allowed him to grow poor and old and sick with his grief as his children fell around him.
Cornelius, who had been admitted to the bar in 1856 at age twenty one, went home to Arkansas after the tobacco factory was closed and resumed practice of the law. Eventually in Fort Smith, he was admitted to practice before the Supreme Court of the United States. He published several newspapers including ‘The Arkansian’, a weekly published at Fayetteville “in the interest of democracy”. He also maintained a ranch in the Cherokee Nation near his kin, while he spent much time in Washington D.C.
More land losses were the rule rather than the exception during the ‘reconstruction’ years after the war.
CHAPTER 16 - Beginning Again
The South rebuilds after the Civil War
“A Disease in the Public Mind” by Thomas Fleming.
The British emancipated Irish Catholics in 1825, and Blacks in 1831.
But they retained their slave empire in India for another century.
It has to do with where the power House of Representatives, apportioned by population, resides. The Southern states wanted to count both whites and black slaves as one for the purposes of apportioning representatives for the House. The Northern States were opposed because it would have given the Southern states more representatives than they deserved. Ergo, the 3/5 clause in the Constitution. Whites would be counted 1 or one, but black slaves only counted for 3/5 of a person and that meant fewer Representatives for a particular Southern state. Both North and South delegates approved this arrangement in order to get the Constitution ratified. Ask ex-slave, abolitionist, and orator Frederick Douglass. He figured it out and wrote about it. He thought it was a splendid idea to compromise on because the South would not have given up slavery.
interesting, there are unalienable rights vs. inalienable rights.
http://www.gemworld.com/USA-Unalienable.htm
At that time indentured service was needed by both buyers and sellers and very common.
I hope this helps, I don’t have a lot of time to think it through.
There were 13 colonies which separated themselves from England. Half had slavery. The war to succeed from England was not over slaves, but rather over taxation and representation. The issue of slaves, which distasteful, was further hindered by the fact that indentured servants were essentially slaves who in return for passage to America owed 3-7 years in return for voyages. Slavery was a legal part of the very fabric of the founding of the colonies, and this is the legacy from Spain, The Netherlands, France, Portugal and England in the expansion into the New World. America essentially inherited Slavery from the Old World. It took Americans 85 years to outlaw slavery, and another 80-years to enact equal rights for voting and women.
Bump!
Inalienable rights: Rights which are not capable of being surrendered or transferred without the consent of the one possessing such rights. Morrison v. State, Mo. App., 252 S.W.2d 97, 101.
You can surrender, sell or transfer inalienable rights if you consent either actually or constructively. Inalienable rights are not inherent in man and can be alienated by government. Persons have inalienable rights. Most state constitutions recognize only inalienable rights.
http://www.gemworld.com/USA-Unalienable.htm
The Bible also does not treat slavery as the "unmitigated crime to end all crimes" as does secular humanism. There are regulations in the Bible governing the administration of slavery. There are no regulations governing the administration of murder, theft, false witness, adultery, rape or homosexuality.
Start with discussing indentured servitude with your friend. Then do a detailed comparison with the terms and conditions of enlistment in the combat arms of the US military during wartime. Then for draftees during war.
Compare that with slavery.
Tariffs are collected on items imported into the United States, not on products produced in the United States and then exported. There was no US tariff on cotton.
Slavery started sometime after one group of humans fought another and ended up with some captives who they did not want to adopt.
TO #44. Herbert Aptheker was the theoretician of the Communist Party USA for many decades. I challenged him once in 1965 at Temple University and wiped the auditorium’s floor with his ass over the issue of “self determination for the Hungarian people” and their 1956 revolt.
His daughter is Bettina Aptheker, a leader of the Marxist-takenover Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, UC in the mid-1960’s. She is affectionally known by her nickname, “Bettina Batcrapper”.
In 1966, hundreds of communist, Marxist, socialist and non-red professors turned out to honor Aptheker on his birthday and for his research on the Negro/slavery issue. A complete list of these “sponsors/endorsers” can be found at www.keywiki.org, search under “Herbert Aptheker”.
It originally appeared as an exhibit in “Extent of Subversion in Campus Disorders - Part 1, Testimony of Ernesto ???”, 1969, Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, Sen. Judiciary Committee.
There was a professor at Howard University, I believe his last name was Adams, who did a lot of good first-hand research on the extent of the slave trade between Africa/Europe and the U.S, using original shipping manifests and other related records preserved in the British, Portuguese and Spanish archives and museums, among other places.
He might be worth looking at.
Google “walter williams on slavery”. You’ll find some very good analysis and opinion.
There will be no answer because there will be no asking. Nanobiotech will render abortion obsolete. Doctors will either deploy nanotech to capture every egg, or destroy every fertilized ovum in the first 24 hours; that is, only for those women who do not choose to have their ovaries removed and replaced with HRT replicators, while their eggs are frozen for re-implantation and impregnation down the road.
The abortion craze of the late 20th and early 21st Century will be as well-remembered as we now regard Ghana's fertility dolls from 200 years ago...
Thank you, everyone. I appreciate the help.
Ping
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