What I read was that as slavery was dying, releasing slaves out on their own promised certain death for many. Choices of release or stay were given by some slave owners who opposed slavery but who were loyal to their own slaves’ lives. It was a messy time and situation.
No American should have owned slaves in the first place. When they were released, they should have been sent back to their homelands with payment for their work, IMO. Leaving them in the US only caused more misery for them. Up to this day, many are miserable living in the US.
Dying....They were multiplying so fast that they stopped importing them....especially in Virginia.
President Grant want to annex the island of Santo Domingo and make it a refuge for American blacks, but of course that never happened. I wonder if too many whites still wanted their labor, and that is why more was not done to give them the option to get away from white society and settle on the Western frontier.
I agree, only without paying them.
“When they were released, they should have been sent back to their homelands with payment for their work, IMO. Leaving them in the US only caused more misery for them. Up to this day, many are miserable living in the US.”
Up to this day? As if slavery ended a couple decades ago? Nobody today is responsible for what happened before they were born. Slavery is in the past. The civil rights charlatans make a good living off of it. Blacks are free to dream, work, succeed, and enjoy the fruits of thier labor like everyone else. And there are many successful blacks in every profession and vocation.
There will always be miserable, unhappy malcontents who just want free crap - no matter their color. Welfare helped create an entire class of them.
Up to this day, many are miserable living in the US.....Do they make their own misery, perhaps?
Most modern Americans do not understand this. And this ignorance wont change because most people dont read anymore, schools dont teach history anymore, and especially because this “hipocracy” narrative advances the commie left agenda.
But glad to see somebody here knows the truth and is teaching that to others.
It is like the movie depictions of slave owners savagely beating all their slaves. Yes, many did, but others did not. Many treated their slaves like a pet owner might today. Most people dont beat their pets and reward their pets for desired behavior and get attached to them.
My apologies to all and especially black Freepers if that sounds like I am degrading or dehumaniizing the slaves or excusing the slave owners. Enslavement is the second greatest evil that can be done, behind only genocide. Slavery is evil and it was a Faustian bargain to coddle the slave owners, but without that there would have been no America.
I simply mean that not all slaves were so abused as portrayed by modern movies and the NSM. Many older movies show a bonding between some owners and slaves, and that generation had grandfathers who were slave owners. They would know.
That would have been a logistical nightmare, finding safe and humane passage for what, 5-6 million men, women, and children.
I think the better solution would have been to “simply” cede the states of Alabama and Mississippi to the freedmen and allow them to set up (with our help) there own sovereign nation.
Most of the former slaves were already there and I don’t think there would have been a whole lot of sympathy for the white land owners that would have been dispossessed.....losing a brutal war has consequences.
“No American should have owned slaves in the first place.”
That is easy to say today. For perspective, 6% of the slaves brought to the New World were brought to the US. Far more were brought to the Caribbean, likewise to Brazil. Europeans seem to have gotten the idea of owning black slaves from the Muslim Arabs, who likely acquitted more black slaves over the centuries. Slavery is still practiced in Northern Sudan and a bill was recently introduced to legalize slavery in Saudi Arabia.
“When they were released, they should have been sent back to their homelands with payment for their work, IMO.”
African Americans were re-settled in Liberia. Their flag looks familiar, red, white, and blue with one star and stripes.
“Leaving them in the US only caused more misery for them. Up to this day, many are miserable living in the US.”
Well, I think they have a say in the matter. I know there was at least one book written by an African American after he went to Africa. His message was an emphatic preference for America.
I do think African Americans have had a troubled history (as has everyone). Aside from slavery, minimum wage laws were first enacted to keep southern black construction workers from competing with unionized whites in the north. To this day, minimum wage laws hit black teenagers the hardest. If you never get your first job, well ...
Our government school system regularly fails to serve black students. There are many excuses given for this. One is lack of discipline. But a school system that cannot provide tough love when required is a failed school system.
I have read of slaves who were offered freedom on the condition they would emigrate to Liberia but turned it down--going to Liberia was a scary prospect. Better the devil you know...
Some came here in the 1600s. Release came many generations later, in the latter part of the 1800s. What homeland? They wouldn't even know which homeland, much less the language, the food or the customs.