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I had heard that there were laws in many states requiring a free person to leave or they were subject re-enslavement.... Also, I can promise you that civil rights and other basic rights were not a high priority.... However, I would be the first to agree that the institution was evil but many of the participants were simply a product of the times....

Pardon me if I don't wish for those times to return but I think I can easily say that there are most likely horror stories of the atrocities as well as wonderful stories about the discreet but close relationships that existed....

I think about a guy I went to school with in Muleshoe(God Rest his soul)... He was very protective and a staunch defender of the black woman who was his nanny....

And the civil war may have been avoidable but we are talking about more a clash of societies than anything else ....

Excellent point about how one could judge and perceive depending on when someone is born and the time period being discussed....

I have heard of those laws also but the contradict the fact that there are records of so many successful small business men who were black living in the South. I wonder which is the truth.

In my family, we had a black woman who came to work and live on the farm when she was 14 and stayed until she was 80. At the black church during her funeral I was asked to say something on her behalf. After I got finished, I don't think there was a dry eye in the church and I got a standing ovation.

I don't think anybody wants those times back. It was a bad system for everybody - worst obviously for the enslaved, but bad for the masters, for the hard-pressed middle class and artisans, and bad for the region as a whole.

One of my other gg grandfathers was an Englishman who moved here in the 1830s to Newark NJ and eventually migrated south, married one South Carolina girl and a second one when she died, and wound up in Alabama. We have a letter he wrote to his brother in New York City around 1850 or so, talking about business. He told his brother he had sold his farm and slaves because he foresaw the impossibility of continuing to make money farming with slaves. I don't have the letter in front of me, but basically you have a working class guy (he was a genuine London Cockney and originally a carriage maker) who could see in 1850 that the system was doomed. Admittedly, he was a very savvy man from a business standpoint -- went into banking and finance and was worth quite a tidy sum when he died in 1864 (unfortunately somehow none of that money ever came our way . . . :-D )

By the way, I've read his will, and it's fair to say that he was an "eccentric Englishman" - in other words a kook! He begins his will with a sort of Freethinker's creed: "As to the Disposal of my body, I feel no particular Interest - If I possess an immortal principle, the Disposition of It is beyond my control, nor do I hesitate in person to leave it to the direction of the great first cause and supporter of my existence whose leading Attributes I suppose to be benevolence wisdom and prudence." He creates a trust for virtuous unmarried women in Cherokee County AL, and disinherits various relations with glee. It's a funny will, as wills go.