New audiobook release: An Historical Research Respecting the Opinions of the Founders of the Republic on Negroes

Librivox ^ | 8/4/23

[ProgressingAmerica]

If the contents of The 1619 Project are getting under your skin, here's a new audiobook for you.

Nothing else need be said, book speaks for itself.

An Historical Research Respecting the Opinions of the Founders of the Republic on Negroes as Slaves, as Citizens, and as Soldiers, by George Livermore

Book summary: Collects the speeches, writings, public statements and legislative acts of the Founding Fathers and Framers of the United States against slavery. (Summary by progressingamerica)

[Ultra Sonic 007]

Oh, and one more thing:

woodpusher #137: American-born Hutchinson was not the Governor in 1768.

ProgressingAmerica #138: The kicker is, you don't even deny that the king's creature Governor Hutchinson did the dirty deed!!! All you do is throw mud at the wall and hope your lies stick. They won't. I have too much information at my disposal. Go try your trickery with someone else.

It is a point of fact that Thomas Hutchinson was not the governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay in 1768; that would have been Francis Bernard. Hutchinson was lieutenant governor at the time, yet was forced into the role of acting governor as of 8-01-1769, when Bernard left for England. As such, Hutchinson dealt with the aftermath of the Townshend Acts (which, as far as I'm aware, had nothing to do with slavery or abolition), the subsequent protests, and the 1770 Boston Massacre, and everything that came as a result of that.

What "dirty deed" are you imagining that Hutchinson did in 1768? Because whatever it was, he certainly didn't do it as "Governor".

[woodpusher]

woodpusher: "John Marshall owned over 300 slaves. While Jefferson inherited, Marshall purchased.

BroJoeK claims the terms racist and racism have no definition anymore. Of course John Marshall was racist, as was any life-long slave owner. But that undercuts Brother Joe's contention that all Founders fought a lifelong battle for abolition of slavery."

Woodpusher, you reveal yourself as a true Democrat when you refuse to speak accurately of your opponents' opinions.

Only an idiot or a willful liar would claim a lifelong owner of hundreds of slaves spent his whole life working to abolish slavery.

Nobody can deny that the word "racist" has no meaning in today's degraded political discourse, beyond Democrats saying, in effect, "you disagree with me on something important and that makes you a racist", or fascist, or sexist, or homophobe or... whatever pops into their little minds today.

You are just like that woman who professed she did not know what a woman is.

Only an idiot would argue that no Founders were racist, while claiming they do not know what the word racist means.

In any political discourse, the lifelong ownership of hundreds of slaves to work their plantations is racist.

[woodpusher]

I am sorry you do not know what racism is, but I am sure you are on a lifelong crusade to stamp out whatever it is of which you profess no knowledge."

Seriously, woodpusher, what's wrong with you?

I have encountered either an idiot or a willful liar who professes not to know what racism is. You are just as phony as that woman who stated she did not know what a woman is.

woodpusher: "Your insane assertion that the Founders "restricted such imports again in the 1794 Slave Trade Act" will be shown to be another turd excreted from your imagination.

I will provide the entire Act from the Statutes at Large, with footnote."

And you will yet again post endless irrelevant facts to support your ridiculous argument that the 1794 Slave Trade Act was not intended to restrict the slave trade.

It takes a lot of chutzpah to claim the text of the Act is not relevant to what the Act states. It is a lot more relevant than what you excrete.

As expected, you could not repeat anything from the Act to support your lie that it restricted slave IMPORTS. You are a low down lying dog-faced pony soldier which the worst sort of liberal Democrat.

Your #81 stated:

And yet, and yet... they did restrict imports of slaves during the war and they restricted such imports again in the 1794 Slave Trade Act.

You are a slimeball beyond belief. You did not say slave trade, you explicitly said IMPORTS. The Act only applied to slave EXPORTS. To restrict imports prior to 1808 would have been unconstitutional because the Framers and the States unanimously adopted a Constitution that said so. I quoted the applicable provision to you.

As stated in the footnote to 1 Stat. 347,

The act of March 22, 1794, was intended to prohibit any citizen or resident of the United States from equipping vessels within the United States, carrying on trade or traffic in slaves to any foreign country. The Tryphernea, 1 Wash. C. C. R. 622.

[woodpusher]

So Vermont was even more of a fake country than the Confederacy.

One can believe your buillcrap or the linked, cited, and quoted unanimous Opinion of the United States Supreme Court in Vermont v. New Hampshire, 289 U.S. 593 (1933). They clearly opined that Vermont was admitted as a free, sovereign, and independent state with self-appointed borders.

A territory is admitted as a territory because it is not yet a state. It becomes a state upon admission. The enabling act will call it a territory, for example Nevada.

Enabling Act for Nevada—March 21, 1864. (13 Stat. 30)

An Act to enable the People of Nevada to form a Constitution and State Government,

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the inhabitants of that portion of the Territory of Nevada...."

An Act for the admission of the State of Vermont into this Union. (1 Stat. 191)

The State of Vermont having petitioned the Congress to be admitted a member of the United States,

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, that on the fourth day of March, one thousand seven hundred and ninety-one, the said State, by the name and style of "the State of Vermont," shall be received and admitted into this Union, as a new and entire member of the United States of America.

Approved: February 18, 1791.

The Act for Nevada takes up three pages setting the conditions for being recognized as a state. The text of the Act for Vermont takes up five lines because they were already a State, and had a Stat constitution and government since 1777. The coined their own money ad had their own postal service.

Do your fellow inmates also have the authority to strike down Supreme Court opinions, or are you the only one?

Do your brainfarts congressionally enacted laws?

[woodpusher]

Yes. I'm sick of your lying, distortions, and hate America left wing BS.

The abolitionist movement in Massachusetts could have gotten its job done in 1768. Instead, the empire set them back by 15 years.

15 years. You have nothing to say that can change the fact. Say 1620 all you want. 15 years, that's what England cost us. Had England gotten out of the way, had England stopped stonewalling, Massachusetts would've been free-soil state #1 when the United States was born in 1776, and they would've been that way for 8 stinking years already.

You have nothing to say that can change the fact. That's just in the one state, when we consider how the empire forced slavery on the United States.

15 years. One state alone.

I grow weary of your ignorance of what you are talking about. You know so little history you should research some history before attempting to share your ignorance.

Nothing in British or American law required citizens of the State of Massachusetts, or any other State, to own slaves. Massachusetts outlawed slavery in 1780.

In the Mum Bett case, Bett won her case for freedom in the County Court of Common Pleas in Great Barrington on August 22, 1781. The prevailing argument was that the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 had outlawed slavery in the state. That case was not appealed to the Massachusetts Supreme Court. Dozens of cases followed before the Quock Case was taken up to the state Supreme Court.

Slaves were considered both property and persons. They had the right to sue in court in Massachusetts. In the Quock Case, the Massachusetts Supreme Court found that the 1780 constitution had, indeed, prohibited slavery. That was 1783.

Massachusetts is the only state to have zero slaves enumerated on the 1790 federal census.

No Evil Empire stopped the STATE of Massachusetts from outlawing slavery.

The voluntary act of the STATE of Massachusetts in ratifying the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution voluntarily subjected itself to the Fugitive Slave Clause.

U.S. Const., Art IV, §2, Cl. 3:

No person held to service or labor 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 labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.

Articles of Confederation, Art. IV. Massachusetts voluntarily ratified the Articles on July 9, 1778.

The better to secure and perpetuate mutual friendship and intercourse among the people of the different States in this Union, the free inhabitants of each of these States, paupers, vagabonds, and fugitives from justice excepted, shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of free citizens in the several States; and the people of each State shall free ingress and regress to and from any other State, and shall enjoy therein all the privileges of trade and commerce, subject to the same duties, impositions, and restrictions as the inhabitants thereof respectively, provided that such restrictions shall not extend so far as to prevent the removal of property imported into any State, to any other State, of which the owner is an inhabitant; provided also that no imposition, duties or restriction shall be laid by any State, on the property of the United States, or either of them. If any person guilty of, or charged with, treason, felony, or other high misdemeanor in any State, shall flee from justice, and be found in any of the United States, he shall, upon demand of the Governor or executive power of the State from which he fled, be delivered up and removed to the State having jurisdiction of his offense. Full faith and credit shall be given in each of these States to the records, acts, and judicial proceedings of the courts and magistrates of every other State.

[woodpusher]

[ProgressingAmerica #135] Massachusetts' legislature was considering abolition as early as 1768 IIRC until it got vetoed by their royal creature Hutchinson.

[Woodpusher #137] And your memory appears to serve you serves you ill. American-born Hutchinson was not the Governor in 1768.

[ProgressingAmerica #138] The kicker is, you don't even deny that the king's creature Governor Hutchinson did the dirty deed!!!

To clarify, you do not remember correctly. Hutchison was not Governor in 1768 and did not do the dirty deed as you claim to recall. You are simply uninformed or misinformed.

In any case, the alleged dirty deed of 1768, which Hutchinson did not do, would not have been a dirty deed but the act of a British Colonial Governor, appointed to his position to carry out the Royal will, doing his duty.

You try to remember,
Your brain's in a blender,
Like Jello!

[BroJoeK]

Jeffersondem: "You are correct, Lord Dunmore did not use the word “revolts” in his proclamation.
Dunmore also did not use the word “slave” in his proclamation.
This will give you even more latitude to claim Jefferson did not know what he (Jefferson) was talking about; and you can claim you have no idea what Dunmore was talking about."

It sounds to me like you agree that if Jefferson intended "domestic insurrections" to mean slave revolts, then he was lying, but if he meant "domestic loyalist insurrections", then he was telling the truth.

Would you further agree that the ambiguities here are enough to cast doubt on your claims that the Revolutiony War was "all about" protecting American slavery against British abolitionism?

[BroJoeK]

Ultra Sonic: "But again, as has been reiterated over and over: any claim that the British forced the Founders to do anything following the conclusion of the Revolution doesn't pass the smell test."

ProgressingAmerica: "The Founders left society as they found it."

I think it's valid to argue that our Founders left in place the economics, laws and social structures they inherited from Britain.
Indeed, their original purpose was to simply to restore their "rights as Englishmen".
Among the institutions they inherited from British laws, and left in place, was slavery.

But this entire discussion, least we lose sight of it, is over the question: did our Founders feel the same about slavery as, for example, 1860 era Democrat Fire Eaters?

The answer is clearly "no", beginning with the fact that, almost to a man, our Founders considered slavery morally wrong and needing gradual, peaceful abolition.
They also acted to restrict or abolish slavery whenever and wherever they could.
This contrasts sharply with insane 1860 era Democrat Fire Eaters who believed slavery was a good thing and should be expanded whenever and wherever possible.
And that any new legal restrictions on slavery were justification enough to declare secession and even war against the United States.

[BroJoeK]

woodpusher: "NO, you sub-cretinous creature.
As every fifth-grader knows, there were NO STATES in 1768."

Especially for someone like yourself, woodpusher, who struggles and often fails to keep your remarks within the bounds of truthfulness, you should not begin your comments with a gratuitous, meaningless insult.

As for your perfectly valid distinction between a "colony" or "province" or "state", it's all well and good, but makes no difference to the point being proposed, indeed, it supports the point made by ProgressingAmerica, namely, that the Brits imposed slavery on their American colonies and refused to accept laws abolishing it, in Massachusetts, for example.

[BroJoeK]

Ultra Sonic 007: "Just because the Founders didn't engage on a total revolt against all institutions — razing down the colonial government in favor of total social upheaval, French Revolution style — does not therefore mean your statement "the Founders left society as they found it" is true.
'Leaving society as they found it' would mean no American Revolution whatsoever, and remaining loyal subjects of the British Crown."

Clearly, no American in 1776 wanted the kind of political and social revolution the French suffered beginning in 1789.
What they wanted, originally, were simply their "rights as Englishmen", to include such matters as "no taxation without representation".
Our Founders did not originally intend to overthrow the Old Order, they simply wanted to be fully represented in it.

When that proved impossible, they sought independence and self-government, still without overturning the basic economics, laws and culture they had inherited as Englishmen.

By 1776, slavery was already an issue among some Americans -- the example of Massachusetts in 1768 has been cited, we could also cite Pennsylvania's 1775 Abolition Society and Vermont's 1777 constitution.

We can also cite (hopefully to jeffersondem's consternation), Thomas Jefferson's deleted item from the 1776 Declaration of Independence, wherein Jefferson clearly accuses the Brits of wrongfully imposing slavery on Americans.

Virtually every Founder understood, or at least claimed to understand, that slavery was morally wrong and should be eventually abolished.
The issues then were when and how to begin doing that, not whether it should be done.

[BroJoeK]

woodpusher: "Only an idiot or a willful liar would claim a lifelong owner of hundreds of slaves spent his whole life working to abolish slavery."

And yet, that's not what I said, and you could have accurately described my argument, but chose not to, typical of your Democrat mind-set.

woodpusher: "You are just like that woman who professed she did not know what a woman is.
Only an idiot would argue that no Founders were racist, while claiming they do not know what the word racist means."

I notice with great curiosity that you, woodpusher, have not yet provided us with a definition of the word, "racist", all the while you've howled at the sky that everyone, everywhere and every-time are all racists.

Perhaps now you'd like to take a moment to accurately define the word "racist" and explain how that applies to our Founders in, say, 1776 or 1787, as they were dealing with matters relating to slavery or abolition?

[BroJoeK]

woodpusher: "As expected, you could not repeat anything from the Act to support your lie that it restricted slave IMPORTS.
You are a low down lying dog-faced pony soldier which the worst sort of liberal Democrat."

The 1794 Slave Trade Act, signed by Pres. Washington,

"The Slave Trade Act of 1794 was a law passed by the United States Congress that prohibited the building or outfitting of ships in U.S. ports for the international slave trade...
...In short, the Act limited the international slave trade to foreign ships, and foreign ships using United States' ports had to agree not to export from U.S. ports.[3][4]"

So, the act was aimed primarily at exports but its effects also restricted imports by US owned ships.
I agree it wasn't much, not like the 1808 law abolishing slave imports, but it was a start, signed by Pres. Washington.

[BroJoeK]

woodpusher: "One can believe your buillcrap or the linked, cited, and quoted unanimous Opinion of the United States Supreme Court in Vermont v. New Hampshire, 289 U.S. 593 (1933).
They clearly opined that Vermont was admitted as a free, sovereign, and independent state with self-appointed borders."

That Vermont was considered a state in 1791, like Massachusetts or New York, is one thing, not here disputed, and not needing a SCOTUS decision to verify, so far as I can tell.

But your words like, "free, sovereign and independent" are not found in any of the documentation you've posted here.
Nor is the term "Republic of Vermont" ever mentioned legally.

That means the so-called "Republic of Vermont", was never equivalent to, for example, the actual Republic of Texas.
Nor was Vermont ever formally recognized as a country, unlike Texas which signed treaties and exchanged ambassadors, Vermont did none of those things.

Such independence as Vermont did achieve came from agreements by Massachusetts, Connecticut and New York, for purposes of admitting Vermont as a state.

By normal standards of what makes a legitimate country, Vermont never was.
In that, the so-called "Republic of Vermont" was more similar to the Confederacy than it was to, for example, the Republic of Texas.

[ProgressingAmerica]

I'm pretty well done feeding the troll with you.

You took a paragraph that was about the Constitutional Convention and used it for - not the Constitutional Convention by lifting out one single sentence for whatever your ill-gotten purposes. All you're doing is trolling.

We have a phone-book sized volume detailing page and letter exactly what happened at the Constitutional Convention.

It was not social engineering. It was only for setting up a government and nothing more.

[ProgressingAmerica]

No.

Governor Bernard also did the same thing.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/43285055

https://americansystemnow.com/guess-who-insisted-on-slavery-in-colonial-america/

https://www.masshist.org/database/viewer.php?item_id=585&img_step=1&mode=transcript#page1

This is what I mean about your steep anti-Americanism. You could simply go look these things up.

You absolutely do not want to go look these things up. That is because you hate America and you are loyal to a foreign power. You will never, under any circumstances, pursue any action which might lead to a smidge, just a smidge, of a benefit of the doubt for the U.S. under the guise that the U.S. might have actually gotten it right. But you have benefit of the doubt by the gallon for anybody else. You have benefit of the doubt by the truck load, for everybody else.

You choose not, you choose not to give any benefit of the doubt whatever to the U.S. That's not what you are here for. You are in bed with the New York Times.

[ProgressingAmerica]

Hey, just a fair warning, this user is big time trolling the forum to stir the pot and cause fighting amongst the users here.

I wanted to show you just how terribly and out of context this was done. You quoted in the first part:

Ultra Sonic: "But again, as has been reiterated over and over: any claim that the British forced the Founders to do anything following the conclusion of the Revolution doesn't pass the smell test."

ProgressingAmerica: "The Founders left society as they found it."

And here is that actual paragraph and the paragraph before it from where that ridiculous lift was made: (https://freerepublic.com/focus/chat/4172958/posts?page=135#135)

Yes, they did. It is abundantly clear to any fifth grader who would set about, much less grown adults like us that when reading Madison's notes at the Constitutional Convention, the framers only set out to do one thing. They framed a government. Nothing more, nothing less. That's it. It was just a discussion and framing of a government.

What did not happen at the Convention? They didn't remold society using the coercive police power of government. The Founders left society as they found it. They didn't throw people into gulags for wrong think, or force them onto naval vessels via impressment like the empire did.

You see just how bad this is? This user might claim that somehow I edited it - I can't edit post 135, none of us to my knowledge can edit. That's what it says in the original. Now you can do what you want, but I just wanted to throw it out there, please consider to stop feeding this troll. That sentence is clearly and unmistakably about what was going on in the Constitutional Convention and a comparison of what was not going on in the Convention, an event which is very well documented by Madison himself. And we also don't have Founder-built gulags anywhere on Google Maps either.

There's no doubt this user is trolling. Just trying to reduce some of the heat around here. It's been done on purpose. We are being goaded into wasting time, this is not a real/reasonable discussion in the aggregate with this user. Often times users like this keep poking people and then they will go call in a moderator and get you banned. That is common troll behavior.

[Ultra Sonic 007]

You took a paragraph that was about the Constitutional Convention and used it for - not the Constitutional Convention by lifting out one single sentence for whatever your ill-gotten purposes. All you're doing is trolling.

It's called precision.

A successful revolution is not "leaving society as it is" by any stretch of the imagination, and no one will take you seriously if you maintain such.

Saying the Founders were not keen on social engineering, on the other hand, is certainly more accurate.

The question that naturally follows, however, is this: do you believe that the abolition of slavery within the American continent would have counted as "social engineering" in the sense you give it? Given all of the digital ink you've spilled on trying to highlight the abolitionist fervor of the Founders, most looking from the outside in would find it odd that it wasn't outlawed outright when they were, as you said, forming the government.

(Some might consider quite logically that they preferred keeping all of the newly-independent colonies united on the outset, given the tensions with foreign powers both in Europe and the Indian tribes still extant, even if meant granting concessions to the colonies which weren't so keen on giving up their slaves. But that would run counter to the whole "abolition uber alles" thing you're insisting on, wouldn't it? You might have to concede that all of the Founders weren't of one mind on the matter of slavery or race relations, because what in the world would happen if we had to actually have nuance with our messy history?)

[Ultra Sonic 007]

How is it trolling to tell you to tighten up on your loose rhetoric?

And even then, your added context doesn't quite help either: the Founders had gathered at the Constitutional Convention precisely because the Articles of Confederation - the document underlying the existing governmental framework after the Revolution - was insufficient to promote or govern the society they wanted.

You apparently have a different definition of "leaving society as it is"; as far as I'm concerned, overthrowing the colonial government, and then chucking out the governmental framework all 13 colonies had agreed upon less than 10 years after ratification in favor of a new one, is certainly not "leaving society as it is", insofar as it's a difference by degrees.

[ProgressingAmerica]

I don’t know what your agenda is. I know I’m out. Due to heavy trolling, this discussion thread is lost.

[Ultra Sonic 007]

I don’t know what your agenda is. 

Accuracy.

I know I’m out. Due to heavy trolling, this discussion thread is lost.

That's a shame; this thread has been rather illuminating.

May the Peace of Christ be with you.