[jsuati #244] What a typical defense of the slavers tyranny by pointing to injustices elsewhere. At present, unfortunately for your defensive tack, we are talking about the South so that defense is inrrelevent. An aberration in the North in no way justifies a standard practice in the South and those laws were changed in the former as time went on.
Gee, and I thought you would see that it sounded just like a subsequently famous Supreme Court decision.
Your assertion was that other conditions were totally different from the South citing that laws in the South made teaching Blacks to read a crime. You compared the South to conditions elsewhere. As such was your argument, you opened the door to additional comparisons. Your whining about such comparisons will not stop them, but will only underscore that you can not meet them.
What a typical defense to declare that every non-Sourthern act was an "aberration."
Canterbury, CONNECTICUT; Canaan, NEW HAMPSHIRE; Zanesville, OHIO.
Here is another "abberation":
When John Randolph died in 1833, his slaves were emancipated by will and lands were purchased for them in Ohio. These freed Blacks were then driven from the farms provided for them by their former Southern owner.
SOURCE: Joanne Pope MELISH, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and "Race" in New England, 1780-1860, 1998, p. 190-92.
Explicit strategies to remove people of color physically from communities, states, and nation were already well under way by 1800 and entered a new and more intense phase around 1820. One of the most effective means of achieving this end was the examination and "warning-out" of transients, an old practice aimed generally at eliminating impoverished and otherwise undesirable strangers who might become a public expense if allowed to remain in a given town. Strangers were defined as people who had not qualified for "legal settlement" in the town where they were living, by either birth; residence of indenture; ownership of real estate of a certain value or the generating of rents or other income of a certain value; payment of taxes for five years within ten years' residence; or successful completion of one year of residence without having been warned out.43 Persons of color, along with unmarried mothers and elderly persons, had always been disproportionately represented among people examined as transients, but after 1780 the legal settlement requirement clearly began to be used explicitly to maintain control of local black communities. In one of the few quantitative studies of this issue, Ruth Wallis Herndon has shown that in Rhode Island, though only 5 percent of transients were designated as people of color in the 1750s, that number had grown to 22 percent in the 1790s and 50 percent by 1800. She points out that the increase was due to greater precision in recordkeeping and a greater representation of people of color in the transient population -- both consequences of a heightened attention to "race."Transient examinations provided the legal ammunition to achieve what abolition could not -- removal -- and were an effective means of reducing the numbers of people of color residing in a given New England town. Charges of "disorderly behavior" were also grounds for warning out and hence instruments of potential removal wielded by town councils. The ever more frequent appearance of people of color "with no legal settlement," "likely to become chargeable," and "behaving riotously" reinforced the growing public conception of them as a naturally dependent and disorderly group of permanently estranged aliens, leading in turn to further examinations and warnings-out.
The records of the Town Council of Providence, Rhode Island, provide a particularly rich source of information on one town's campaign for removal. After 1785 the council frequenuy conducted what can only be termed periodic roundups of people of color who were "likely to become chargeable" and who, if found to lack a legal setdement, could be warned out of Providence. Akhough whites too were examined, whole meetings would frequenuy be devoted to the examination of people clearly identified as persons of color. The records reveal that dieir construction as "strangers" was true only in the sense of whites' estrangement from any comprehension of their reality. Of sixty-five examinations between 1782 and 1800 of people who can clearly be identified as persons of color and whose lengdi of residence in Providence is clearly discernible, 37 percent had lived in Providence for five years or more, and 26 percent for ten years or more (interim warnings-out not having been enforced, presumably). Median length of stay in die city was three years. These people were not strangers.
Nor were they "likely to become chargeable"; even diose who did hardly represented a disproportionate drain on die public treasury. In die early 1820s, at one peak of antiblack sentiment in Providence, die reports of die Overseer of die Poor demonstrate that people of color received an extremely small proportion of die town's financial support for die indigent. In 1823 and 1824, for example, 16 of 154 cases and 9 of 157 cases, respectively, involved persons of color. The average amount of support received by whites was $33.33 in 1823 and $44.84 in 1824; by people of color, $11.24 and $11.93, respectively.46 Again, die menace was imagined.
After 1820, efforts to remove residents of color were augmented by strategies to discourage the immigration of new ones, and anti-immigration statutes were debated in nearly every state.
Ward Hill Lamon, The Life of Abraham Lincoln, p. 206
Illinois enacted a "black code" that would have been a disgrace to a Slave State, and was simply an infamy in a free one. It borrowed the provisions of the most revolting laws known among men, for exiling, selling, beating, bedevilling, and torturing negroes, whether bond or free.
In 1848, Illinois adopted a new constitution. Article 14 of the new constitution read:
The General Assembly shall at its first session under the amended constitution pass such laws as will effectually prohibit free person of color from immigrating to and settling in this state, and to effectually prevent the owners of slaves from bringing them into this state, for the purpose of setting them free.
In February 1853, the Illinois legislature made it a crime for a Black to settle in Illinois. If he could not pay the fine, the was then subject to sale by the sheriff for a term of service.
In his July 6, 1852 eulogy to Henry Clay, Lincoln referred to the Declaration of Independence as "the white man's charter of freedom."
"an increasing number of men, who, for the sake of perpetuating slavery, are beginning to assail and to ridicule the white-man's charter of freedom -- the declaration that 'all men are created free and equal'"
On October 16, 1854, Lincoln again referred to the Declaration of Independence as the "the white man's charter of freedom."
In our greedy chase to make profit of the negro, let us beware, lest we "cancel and tear to pieces'' even the white man's charter of freedom.
The U.S. Supreme Court made "separate but [inherently un]equal", i.e. segregation, the law of the land in 1896. See Plessy v. Ferguson.
CIVIL RIGHTS CASES, 109 U.S. 3 (1883) struck down (8-1) Federal laws which prohibited discrimination on account of race.
There were thousands of free colored people in this country before the abolition of slavery, enjoying all the essential rights of life, liberty, and property the same as white citizens; yet no one, at that time, thought that it was any invasion of their personal status as freemen because they were not admitted to all the privileges enjoyed by white citizens, or because they were subjected to discriminations in the enjoyment of accommodations in inns, public conveyances, and places of amusement. Mere discriminations on account of race or color were not regarded as badges of slavery. If, since that time, the enjoyment of equal rights in all these respects has become established by constitutional enactment, it is not by force of the thirteenth amendment, (which merely abolishes slavery,) but by force of the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments.On the whole, we are of opinion that no countenance of authority for the passage of the law in question can be found in either the thirteenth or fourteenth amendment of the constitution; and no other ground of authority for its passage being suggested, it must necessarily be declared void, at least so far as its operation in the several states is concerned.
Justice Harlan, alone in his dissent, wrote:
The supreme law of the land has decreed that no authority shall be exercised in this country upon the basis of discrimination, in respect of civil rights, against freemen and citizens because of their race, color, or previous condition of servitude. To that decree -- for the due enforcement of which, by appropriate legislation, congress has been invested with express power -- every one must bow, whatever may have been, or whatever now are, his individual views as to the wisdom or policy, either of the recent changes in the fundamental law, or of the legislation which has been enacted to give them effect.For the reasons stated I feel constrained to withhold my assent to the opinion of the court.
The individual cases which SCOTUS combined for consideration under the "Civil Rights Cases" arose from Kansas, California, Missouri, New York, and Tennessee.
[jsuati] those laws were changed in the former as time went on
New York, 1863, strange fruit hanging from a tree.
