From Dr. Sowell.
A very readable and remarkable new book that has just been published — “Bury the Chains” by Adam Hochschild — traces the history of the world’s first anti-slavery movement, which began with a meeting of 12 “deeply religious” men in London in 1787.The dozen men who formed the world’s first anti-slavery movement saw their task as getting their fellow Englishmen to think about slavery — about the brutal facts and about the moral implications of those facts.
Even more remarkable, Britain took it upon itself, as the leading naval power of the world, to police the ban on slave trading against other nations. Intercepting and boarding other countries’ ships on the high seas to look for slaves, the British became and remained for more than a century the world’s policeman when it came to stopping the slave trade.
This is my final post on this subject and I will read no more of your responses.
Have a nice day. And brush up on your history while you're at it.
This is exactly why I'm hammering on this. This is why I collaborated to create an audiobook on this. The progressives and their historians have successfully erased this part of history. I'm being excoriated about an event that happened in 1787 in Britain, meanwhile I posted about events in 1771 and 1767 and being told I need to "read my history".
In what world does 1771 happen after 1787???
This is the issue we face. The progressives have removed even our own ability to effectively defend our own country against the lies that progressives tell. It was progressive historians who did this, they are the ones writing the books and omitting this. This is how progressives win, they rig the game in their favor and change all the rules and they've been doing it for a very long time.
We must correct the damage done to the history books.
This documentary may interest you.
Tim Barton: Documents on Forgotten History Dispel the Lies About the American Story
The posted article references the colonies in 1761, 1767, 1769, 1771.
You reference Britain in 1787.
Which dates come first? Which party started what?
The Brits did precede the Americans in ending chattel slavery, but at the same time used the peoples of their colonies in India and Africa much as slaves.
We had even more religious men who sought that ban years earlier, but were overruled by the British.
Hochschild graduated from Harvard in 1963 with a BA in History and Literature. As a college student, he spent a summer working on an anti-government newspaper in South Africa and subsequently worked briefly as a civil rights worker in Mississippi during 1964. Both were politically pivotal experiences about which he would eventually write in his books Half the Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son and Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels. He later was part of the movement against the Vietnam War, and, after several years as a daily newspaper reporter, worked as a writer and editor for the left-wing Ramparts magazine. In the mid-1970s, he was a co-founder of Mother Jones.[3] Much of his writing has been about issues of human rights and social justice.
A longtime lecturer at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, Hochschild has also been a Fulbright Lecturer in India, Regents’ Lecturer at the University of California, Santa Cruz and Writer-in-Residence at the Department of History, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
That the colonists, black and white, born here, are free born British subjects, and entitled to all the essential civil rights of such, is a truth not only manifest from the provincial charters, from the principles of the common law, and acts of parliament; but from the British constitution which was reestablished at the revolution, with a professed design to secure the liberties of all the subjects to all generations...Asking for a friend.
You might not read it, but I will post it.
I like Thomas Sowell a lot. He is not a historian, and while seldom wrong in fact, is often a little off in broader interpretation.
I would suggest “Freedom National” by James Oakes, a great historian who did a wonderful bio of Lincoln. His history of the AMERICAN antislavery movement is fantastic, showing that they latched onto the CONSTITUTIONAL remedy, which was the term “unfree PERSONS” as opposed to slaves and that chattel slavery was never mentioned in the constitution. The difference between persons & property was at the root of ALL slavery debates.
The Brits had a far, far easier job eliminating slavery. The # of planters in the West Indies was tiny compared to the American South; the islands were a thousands of miles away; there were NO blacks in England-—which was a major stumbling block to emancipation here. “What is to be done with the Negro?” is the most commonly asked question of antebellum times by abolitionists, and none of them had a good answer.
Arguments for return to Africa went nowhere, especially among free blacks here. Figuring out the social solution was every bit as important as figuring out the political solution-—but not in England.