Posted on 01/08/2004 6:40:27 PM PST by stainlessbanner
If you will reread my posts, I've made the colonial, post-colonial and 19th century divides clear for those who take the trouble to read rather than blindly push their own agenda.
And if you will reread (or read for the first time) you will also see that I am and have always been adamant that slavery was an evil practice and a negative influence on ALL that participated in it. All I am saying is that (1) that includes ALL - including those New Englanders who began the American slave trade in the first place; and (2) all those who found themselves in that time and place were not irredeemably evil, and many made efforts to ameliorate the evil.
How you get from there to Lew Rockwell or the Lost Cause, maybe you better look in the mirror.
Think there's any money in that? ;-)
David Balfour in Stevenson's Kidnapped missed the same fate by a hair, but HIS problem was a Wicked Uncle.
But Wikipedia says "It was Oglethorpe's idea that British debtors should be sent to Georgia instead of imprisoned; however, no debtors were chosen to be settlers of Georgia." They got enough solvent volunteers, apparently.
Another myth exploded (I had always assumed it was true!)
BTW, When I studied Georgia History in 8th grade, it seemed like it was 90% Oglethorpe.
Washinton may have been "Father of our Country" but Oglethorpe, by God, was "Father of Georgia"!
In the upper South, such issues weren't enough to put secession through at first. It required the emotions sparked by Fort Sumter, the upsurge in sectional loyalty and the opposition to federal war measures to make secession win in those states. But even there, it's worth pondering the relationship between freedom and slavery, and not automatically to assume that what the Revolutionaries of 1861 meant by liberty was necessarily what we mean by that word today.
As for slavery and health care, doctors and hospitals weren't as common as today. People would have to rely more on traditional and herbal remedies, and when doctors came they could do much less than they can today. If a slave were seriously ill, a master might well summon a doctor, but it's not clear that slaves got better medical care than free people. More here.
Many slaveholders contrasted the lives of their slaves with the those of slum dwellers in New York, London, or various mill and factory towns. While lives in those places could be truly wretched, it's not clear why this was regarded as the best comparison: why not compare slave's lives with those of small farmers or craftsmen who might be poor, but independent and self-supporting? In any event, it's not automatically clear that slaves got better health care than poor free people could get from doctors or charity wards.
I think it was less Southern nationalism than state loyalty, but pro-slavery ideology certainly played a substantial part, at least among the leaders of the political class. I disagree re racial anxiety - that is more or less a Northern thing, as most of us in the South have grown up side by side with black people - something that definitely didn't happen up North. (When I happened to be in Muskegon Michigan for a week back in the 70s, the only black person I saw was a one-legged water skier in a touring show.)
The further the Irish came west, the more well off they were. The really dirt poor (shanty) Irish got off the boat in Boston because that was the closest and cheapest American port. Baltimore was another big entry point, and Savannah was next - then came New Orleans.
My maternal grandfather's grandfather married a lady who was the widow of an Irishman named Sherlock who got to Baltimore some time in the 1830s. He was a sailmaker in Baltimore but became the county constable when he moved to Augusta GA.
Sad, but true.
I am of the opinion that the men on both sides showed courage in plenty.
From Nat Turner to John Brown, there had been much fear that if White control slipped, the result would be murder or the destruction of civilization. The Democrats appealed to such racial fears in both the North and the South, and found plenty of adherents. Similar anxieties about Blacks taking over were still present in the 1950s and 1960s.
The other side of the coin is that White Southerners weren't afraid of Blacks as such, since they'd lived among them all their lives, so eventually after centuries, desegregation might be more successful and thoroughgoing in the South than in the North. That's because both races tended to live in the same neighborhoods, so residential segregation wasn't as much of an issue. But if we are talking about the past, we can't pass over its distinctive features.
And while Southern fears of Blacks as such were less, one can turn that around as well, and say that if Northerners had a slave class and a system of subjugation, they wouldn't have been so afraid of Blacks, either. When charges of hypocrisy come to dominate arguments, the charges can get tossed around forever without the argument or knowledge or agreement advancing. "You're not as good as you think" is something that depends more on how one thinks other people think about themselves than about actual circumstances.
In both the North and the South, some people ran ahead and drove events and passions toward conflict and others lagged behind. After the Civil War, many people accepted the "Robert E. Lee" view that most Confederate notables were sorrowing stoics with no enthusiasm for slavery, secession or war, who dutifully went with their states or at most, fought to defend their ideas of state's rights and liberty. But without passionate pro-slavery agitators, war would have been less likely.
If you look at DeBow's, the Charleston Mercury and other Lower South publications, you'll find much idealization of slavery and much enthusiasm for Southern nationhood. Probably only a minority thought that way, but it was an influential minority. You could draw a parallel between abolitionists in the North, and pro-slavery or Southern nationalist fire-eaters in the South. The importance of both groups outweighed their numbers, since they were able to drive the debate ever further from the mainstream. As the terms and limits of debate changed, moderates and centrists followed where the radicals led.
I just get tired of Northerners talking out of their hats about racial fears, when they will cross the street to avoid meeting a black person. The worse racist I ever knew was a Vermonter, I do wonder if he ever saw a black face in St. Albans.
So New Englanders began the American slave trade, eh?
It must have been as a result of all the demand for slaves to work on tobacco plantations in New England (lol).
And it was really New Englanders and not the Dutch VOC who first sailed into Jametown with their human cargo for trade in 1619, right?
Then they came back and wrote the laws that established slavery in the Virginia in the 1660s, is that it?
And I suppose it was New England who created the Royal African Company to ensure their monopoly on the slave trade in 1672, right?
Seriously, I hope you have more than a college student's term paper and a personal dislike for the north, to support such a specious assertion.
Originally, the slaves did not go to the Southern part of the mainland. The Triangle brought slaves to the Caribbean islands, where they were sold to labor in the cane fields. Cane sugar went to New England, where distilleries turned it into rum (New England rum at the time was considered the best in the world). The rum went back around to pay for the slaves. And so it went around - and around - and around.
Did you go to the websites I posted? In one case a Rhode Island college, in the other the Mass. Historical Society, acknowledge the predominant role of New England ships and traders in the Triangle Trade. This is pretty well known to anybody who studies history.
First, Britain did not stop trading slaves upon the entry of New England. There was no take over of the slave trade from Britain by New England. As I pointed out quite a while ago, the Brookes was an English vessel involved in African slave trade to the Americas from 1746 to 1802.
Secondly, New England did not pioneer the American slave trade, European trading companies did. To suggest otherwise (as you have twice), is either intellectually dishonest, or a pretty good indication you don't have a clue what you're talking about.
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