Posted on 10/11/2007 2:41:12 PM PDT by Lorianne
Nelson Winbush is intent on defending the flag of his grandfather. It's just surprising which flag that is. ___
KISSIMMEE -- Nelson Winbush rotates a miniature flag holder he keeps on his mantel, imagining how the banners would appear in a Civil War battle.
The Stars and Bars, he explains, looked too much like the Union flag to prevent friendly fire. The Confederacy responded by fashioning the distinctive Southern Cross -- better known as the rebel flag.
Winbush, 78, is a retired assistant principal with a master's degree, a thoughtful man whose world view developed from listening to his grandfather's stories about serving the South in the "War Between the States."
His grandfather's casket was draped with a Confederate flag. His mother pounded out her Confederate heritage on a typewriter. He wears a rebel flag pinned to the collar of his polo shirt.
Winbush is also black.
"You've never seen nothing like me, have you?"
* * *
Winbush's nondescript white brick house near Kissimmee's quaint downtown is cluttered with the mess of a life spent hoarding history.
Under the glass of his coffee table lie family photos, all of smiling black people. On top sits Ebony magazine.
Winbush is retired and a widower who keeps a strict schedule of household chores, family visits and Confederate events. He often eats at Fat Boy's Barbecue, where his Sons of Confederate Veterans camp meets.
Winbush's words could come from the mouth of any white son of a Confederate veteran. They subscribe to a sort of religion about the war, a different version than mainstream America.
The tenets, repeated endlessly by loyalists:
The war was not about slavery. The South had the constitutional right to secede. Confederate soldiers were battling for their homes and their families. President Lincoln was a despot. Most importantly, the victors write the history.
But Winbush has a conceptual canyon to bridge: How can a black man defend a movement that sought to keep his people enslaved?
* * *
Winbush is one of at most a handful of black members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans in the country. He knows skeptics question his story and his sanity.
To win them over, he pulls out his grandfather's pension papers, reunion photos and obituary. He also gives speeches, mostly before white audiences.
Winbush believes the South seceded because the federal government taxed it disproportionately. It was a matter of states' rights, not slavery, which was going extinct as the United States became more industrialized, he says. He denies that President Lincoln freed the slaves, explaining that the Emancipation Proclamation affected only the Confederate states, which were no longer under his authority.
"It was an exercise in rhetoric, that's all," Winbush says.
His views run counter to many historical accounts. Rev. Nelson B. Rivers III, the field operations chief for the NAACP, called Winbush's arguments illogical. Rivers spoke with Winbush by telephone a few years ago, intrigued by his position. Rivers remembers him being loud and sincere, holding fast to his convictions.
"I was courteous and respectful and respectfully disagreed with him," Rivers said. "This is America. He has a right to believe what he wants to."
At one speech, Winbush stood in front of the square battle flag that draped his grandfather's coffin, retelling the stories he has told so many times that the words emerge in identical iterations.
At the end of his talk, he held the microphone to a stereo and played a song by the Rebelaires, with a sorrowful, bluesy rhythm: "You may not believe me, but things was just that way. Black is nothing other than a darker shade of rebel gray."
Once other Confederates recognize that his story is real, they love him. Opponents often attack white Confederates as ignorant or racist. Winbush is harder to dismiss. If nothing else, the naysayers are more willing to listen.
"It kinda wipes out the whole segregation and hate and racism issue," said Christopher Hall, 29, commander of Winbush's SCV camp. "Coming from him, that really can't be an argument."
* * *
Winbush's views were once more widespread, even in the land of theme parks and turnpikes.
Florida was the third state to secede. Its Civil War governor, John Milton, shot himself rather than rejoin the North, telling the Legislature, "Death would be preferable to reunion." Former Gov. Lawton Chiles defended the Confederate flag in 1996 when black lawmakers asked for its removal from the Capitol.
"You can't erase history," Chiles said at the time.
But now neo-Confederates are losing this second war of culture and memory.
Confederate flags are coming down, especially from the tops of Southern statehouses, including Florida's in 2001.
The agrarian Bible Belt has become the Sun Belt, full of northerners with few deep roots in the area. Identification with the South as a region has declined since the World War II era, which united the country with patriotism and the interstate system. Areas of South Florida, for instance, are known better as the sixth borough of New York than part of the Deep South.
High school teachers don't preach the righteousness of the South. And historians, for the most part, agree that the Civil War was about slavery, undermining the standard neo-Confederate argument.
But Confederate loyalists are digging in. Winbush considers the South his homeland. And his family history, because it's rarer than that of white Confederates, is in danger of extinction.
* * *
Slowly, in his deep, rough voice, Winbush tells the story of a young slave from a Tennessee plantation named Louis Napoleon Nelson, who went to war as a teenager with the sons of his master.
"They grew up together," Winbush says.
At first his grandfather cooked and looked out for the others, but later he saw action, fighting with a rifle under the command of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, a slave trader and plantation owner.
At Shiloh, a two-day battle in 1862 in which more than 23,000 American men were killed or wounded, the Confederate Army needed a chaplain. Louis Nelson couldn't read or write, but he had memorized the King James Bible.
He stayed on as chaplain for the next four campaigns, leading services for both Confederate and Union soldiers, before they headed back to the battlefield.
He also foraged for food. One time, he killed a mule, cut out a quarter and hauled it back to his comrades.
"When you don't have anything else, mule meat tastes pretty good," he would tell his grandson.
Some topics even the loquacious grandfather considered off limits. He wouldn't talk about the Union siege of Vicksburg, a bloody battle that captured an important Mississippi River port and effectively split the South.
After the war, he lived as a free man on the James Oldham plantation for 12 more years. Then he became a plasterer, traveling the South to work on houses.
Over the years, he went to 39 Confederate reunions, wearing a woolly gray uniform that Winbush still has.In photos, he stands next to two white men who accompanied him to soldiers' reunions until they were old men. Through the sepia gleams a dignity earned on the battlefield.
"When he came back, that was storytelling time," Winbush says.
His grandfather died in 1934 at the age of 88. The local paper ran an obituary that called him a "darky." Winbush is proud that his grandfather's death was marked at all.
* * *
Winbush grew up in the house his grandfather built in 1908, a two-story yellow structure with a wraparound porch in Ripley, Tenn. The Oldham plantation, where his grandfather was a slave, provided the wood in recognition of his loyalty to the family.
Winbush and his siblings lived in a family of educators. His grandmother and mother were teachers. He says he first went to school as a baby in a basket.
All three children went to college. Winbush studied biology in hopes of becoming a doctor but didn't have enough money for medical school. He switched to studying physical education.
Winbush moved to Florida in 1955, a year after the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown vs. Board of Education decision mandated school desegregation. Like many around the country, Osceola County schools remained segregated for several more years.
He didn't mind the divide because he felt both black and white students got a better education by not being able to use racial conflict as an excuse. When the superintendent, a friend of his, decided it was time to integrate in the late 1960s, Winbush agreed. The time had come, he thought, when people could accept the change.
Winbush thinks that people will get along if they know each other. He says he never suffered any blatant racism. The small Southern towns he lived in were familiar and accepting.
He remembers the "I Have A Dream" speech that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. He respects King but disagrees with his reverence for Lincoln.
Winbush wasn't moved by the speech. King was just speaking the truth, he says, but it didn't change the daily reality of blacks.
* * *
Winbush's convictions about the war lay dormant until 1991, when the NAACP began an all-out campaign against the Confederate flag, saying it was a symbol of hatred. It vowed to have it removed from public places by the end of the decade.
Winbush saw it differently, and he was retiring. He no longer worried about what some "Yankee boss" would think.
"I got fed up about all this politically correct mess," he says.
He joined the Sons and started speaking at their events. He twice appeared before the Virginia Legislature to dissuade them from taking down the flag. He collects clippings of newspaper stories written about his speeches. One shows him posing in front of a statute of Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Winbush acknowledges that misuse of the Confederate flag has made it a symbol of hate in some people's eyes. But he says the American flag is just as racist. Troops of color are sent to die disproportionately in American wars, he says, and the Stars and Stripes flew above slave ships.
Rivers, the NAACP official, said people like Winbush need to let go of their family history and admit that all people, even those now dead, are imperfect.
"Just because your grandfather was wrong does not mean you can't break the generational curse and not be wrong too," he says.
* * *
Winbush is the last direct link to his grandfather, someone who heard the stories firsthand and felt the passion.
He feels the legacy of Confederate soldiers like his grandfather won't survive unless the history is passed within families, from one generation to the next.
But it's not easy. Even Winbush's son, a Naval Academy graduate who works for IBM, once suggested Winbush donate his Confederate collection to a museum.
"This is the only way some people will find out what did happen," he said. "The history books leave it out."
Winbush knows he won't be around forever. He only hopes that someone will continue to tell the stories.
Times researchers Carolyn Edds and John Martin contributed to this report. Stephanie Garry can be reached at sgarry@sptimes.com.
Due to economic reasons, not the desire to simply own a slave. But again, it was legal, and the rank hypocrisy you and others exhibit is nauseating.
As for the 13th Amendment, that wasn't passed until after the original 7 had announced their secession, so your claim that "Congress had just passed the 13th Amendment which guaranteed slavery to exist forever" is not true.
I stated that CONGRESS had passed the Amendment, which it did. Two states had ratified it. If you'll check you copy of the Constitution Article V states, [t]he Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution.' Imagine that, a yankee congress, almost devoid of Southern representation, submitted and PASSED an amendment guaranteeing PERMANENT slavery.
And what you conveniently forget is that the 13th Amendment as passed did not address the major Southern bone of contention. The 13th amendment protected slavery where it existed but did not guarantee it's expansion into the territories.
Since you seem to have forgotten, the US Supreme Court (that august body that you seem to revere] held that the territories were open to blacks - free or slave - and that Lincoln's white dream would not be realized. Did the thought of sharing the continent with blacks, ie. being amlagamated, been cause enough for him to provoke a war?
The new confederate constitution not only guaranteed slavery throughout the length and breadth of the confederacy but also guaranteed that it would be in any territories the confederacy chose to acquire and that slavery would continue so long as the confederate states existed.
The Confederate Constitution Article I§9 limited expansion of slavery to the existing union states and territories only [The importation of negroes of the African race from any foreign country other than the slaveholding States or Territories of the United States of America, is hereby forbidden; and Congress is required to pass such laws as shall effectually prevent the same.]' Not to any other territory acquired.
Additionally, the Confederate Constitution granted the Confederate Congress the power to 'prohibit the introduction of slaves from any State not a member of, or Territory not belonging to, this Confederacy.' If they so chose, their Congress could refuse to allow any new slaves from the areas noted above. The Confederate Constitution did prohibit the Confederate Congress from interfering in slavery, but did not prohibit any state from ending the practice.
So rather than choose the half a loaf offered by the 13th Amendment, it is not surprising that the chose to remain with the far stronger protections afforded slavery by their new constitution.
Bwahahahahahaha! Under Lincoln and in the federal union, had they chose to remain/rejoin, the states would have had legalized slavery, with the territories open, and Congress unable to interfere. The Confederate Congress COULD interfere with future expansion while the federal Congress could not. The Confederate power was more restrictive than that which would have existed in Lincoln's utopia. Of course, Lincoln again, was the one advocating that slavery would keep it 'forever worthy of the saving.'
And yet you hold up your Southron leaders as saints in spite of the fact that not a single one of them ever uttered or took a position on slavery or blacks as open as Lincoln did.
Lincoln did advocate colonization, which many Yankees and Southerners also supported. Lincoln never supported immediate emancipation, the same position held by many yankees and Southerners. Lincoln was for the continuance of slavery where it existed , a position held by many yankees and Southerners. Lincoln DID strive for a lily-white west, free from the presence of blacks, a position mainly shared by yankees. So yes, if that's an 'open' viewpoint, I agree that Southerners did NOT share his white-separatist viewpoint.
Not a single Southern leader believed steps should be taken to end slavery. Not a single one thought slavery was in the way out.
Gee wally, forgot about those advocating colonization? I guess in your Bizarro world that continues slavery? But let's cut to the chase regarding the end of the institution - it ended in the North, not for any moral reason, but for economic ones. It was much more profitable for yankees to employ disposable labor, rather than to provide food, clothing, shelter, medicines etc. As long as yankees could make billions trading in human flesh they continued the practice. James Spence, author of "The American Republic: Resurrection Through Dissolution", printed by the Northern British Review, Feb 1862 stated, 'free Negroes are treated like lepers in the North.' In contrast, Southern whites and blacks shared food from the same table, worked beside each other, raised families etc. British abolitionist author James Silk Buckingham wrote:
[T]he prejudice of color is not nearly so strong in the South as in the North. It is not at all uncommon to see the black slaves of both sexes, shake hands with white people when they meet, and interchange friendly personal inquiries; but at the North I do not remember to have witnessed this once; and neither in Boston, New York, or Philadelphia would white persons generally like to be seen shaking hands and talking familiarly with blacks on the streets.
James Silk Buckingham, The Slave States, London: Fisher, Son & Co. (1842), p. 112
Not a single one every said that any black, free or slave, had any rights that a white man was bound to respect
From your saint:
I am not in favor of negro citizenship. ... If the State of Illinois had that power [to make a negro a citizen] I should be opposed to the exercise of it.
Most blacks used by the confederate army were slaves and unpaid.
Slaves that could have escaped and joined the Union army, but just had to much fun shooting yankees and defending their homeland. The free blacks that did serve state or CSA units were paid equal wages.
Absolutely false. The Louisiana constitution as written denied sufferage to all blacks. What Lincoln said was that he deplored that and believed that sufferage should be extended to at least some.
Lincoln wrote the new governor of Louisiana,
'Now you are about to have a Convention which, among other things, will probably define the elective franchise. I barely suggest for your private consideration, whether some of the colored people may not be let in. 'The convention hadn't even happened. And Lincoln wanted his view to remain PRIVATE. I guess Lincoln striving so urgently for the right of black suffrage explains why the convention denied blacks the right to vote.
Did he? "...but I hold that ...
I guess that explains blacks having all those rights in Illinois when Lincoln served in congress. Absolutely none.
Sentiments that every one of your Southron leaders would have found repulsive.
Taney had no prejudice against negroes, and said to a friend: "Thank God that at least in one place all men are equal in the Church of God. I do not consider it any degradation to kneel side by side with a negro in the house of our Heavenly Father." [J. A. Walter, in Century Magazine, 1883, p. 958, cited in Steiner, Bernard C., Life of Roger Brooke Taney, Baltimore MD: Williams & Wilkins Co., (1922), p.347In the case of Williams v. Ash, Justice Taney had recognized that a black men could be a party to a suit in Federal Courts.
For Lee and Jackson and Davis and all the rest, a union of states founded for the protection and preservation of slavery was WORTH FIGHTING FOR.
George Washington, Lee et al did the same. That they are in this lofty company is a compliment.
Were they free blacks or escaped slaves who claimed to be free? We may never know.
One possible reason for that increase might have been the city of Chicago, which was a magnet for escaped slaves. A Negro police system was organized there in 1850 to patrol the streets and warn Negroes about slave catchers. Also, the Chicago City Council passed resolutions that nullified the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law there (source for both: page 54 of the 1970 The Slave Catchers paperback by Stanley W. Campbell).
A thousand escaped slaves reportedly moved into Chicago in late 1860, early 1861 according to an article in the New York Times of the period.
Hey, according to one poster, they might have been free but claiming to be slaves.
But seriously, I seem to remember some old newspaper story about a large number of runaways heading out of Chicago and bound for Canada ahead of the slave catchers.
I see you your points but I have to think about what the North’s “reconstruction” did to the south to bankrupt it.
The North nor the South knew what to do once the abolishment of slavery came about. We can rehash slavery but those arguments won’t be settled here.
As far as the political issues, I am a believer in State’s rights. I can move now amongst the States if I don’t care for the State’s laws or regulations however, I cannot escape the Federal Government. There is no denying our Federal government has gone beyond the Founder’s intentions.
I truly believe had the South abolished slavery prior to the war that there still would have been one. There were many other issues at the forefront.
As to taxes, we pay the same Federal taxes, our break is in the State taxes and more than taxes living here is more integrated, more friendly and on the whole there is less regulation, from gun laws to burning leaves.
I lived in the North and there was more racial inequality and racism than I have ever seen in the South. Here we live with each other.
I think it must be experienced rather than explained to fully appreciate the difference.
Southern, by the Grace of God.
Bull. I have never ever done that.
I don't see racism as the biggest evil to ever come down the pike and nor do I see it as our biggest problem today and certainly not your(s) fixation on racism 8 generations old either in the North or South.
It's stupid and only deflects from today's real issues.
Islam. Illegal immigration Abortion. Taxes. Race preference crap and forced busing (which ruined our public schools) Environmental Wackos. Homosexual Activists. As for blacks....I am a lot more worried black crime on me or my family and the culture of black illegitimacy that propels that predatory segment than I am about racism period....from any quarter.
Bloviating about racism is usually the provence of folks who see a problem they would rather not confront, so they trot out the same ol bogeyman.
that was nice.
We were discussing how it might be now had the South successfully seceded.
My point was how I thought it might have evolved to today.
“We were discussing how it might be now had the South successfully seceded.
My point was how I thought it might have evolved to today.”
Yes, that was my point as well. Given that it took a federal
law of the USA to end Jim Crow as recently as the early 1960s,
What would the south be like now had it been successful in it’s attempts to secede. Would blacks have any rights at all?
Would they be allowed to leave the CSA, or would they be held in place to keep the price of unskilled labor down. Abuse of workers like southern black sharecroppers, hung around about 100+ years past the end of the war. So when you say less intrusive, who exactly do you mean that is being intruded upon?
The effects of the New England slave trade were momentous. It was one of the foundations of New England’s economic structure; it created a wealthy class of slave-trading merchants, while the profits derived from this commerce stimulated cultural development and philanthropy. —Lorenzo Johnston Greene, “The Negro in Colonial New England, 1620-1776,” p.319.
Whether it was officially encouraged, as in New York and New Jersey, or not, as in Pennsylvania, the slave trade flourished in colonial Northern ports. But New England was by far the leading slave merchant of the American colonies.
The first systematic venture from New England to Africa was undertaken in 1644 by an association of Boston traders, who sent three ships in quest of gold dust and black slaves. One vessel returned the following year with a cargo of wine, salt, sugar, and tobacco, which it had picked up in Barbados in exchange for slaves. But the other two ran into European warships off the African coast and barely escaped in one piece. Their fate was a good example of why Americans stayed out of the slave trade in the 17th century. Slave voyages were profitable, but Puritan merchants lacked the resources, financial and physical, to compete with the vast, armed, quasi-independent European chartered corporations that were battling to monopolize the trade in black slaves on the west coast of Africa. The superpowers in this struggle were the Dutch West India Company and the English Royal African Company. The Boston slavers avoided this by making the longer trip to the east coast of Africa, and by 1676 the Massachusetts ships were going to Madagascar for slaves. Boston merchants were selling these slaves in Virginia by 1678. But on the whole, in the 17th century New Englanders merely dabbled in the slave trade.
Then, around 1700, the picture changed. First the British got the upper hand on the Dutch and drove them from many of their New World colonies, weakening their demand for slaves and their power to control the trade in Africa. Then the Royal African Company’s monopoly on African coastal slave trade was revoked by Parliament in 1696. Finally, the Assiento and the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) gave the British a contract to supply Spanish America with 4,800 slaves a year. This combination of events dangled slave gold in front of the New England slave traders, and they pounced. Within a few years, the famous “Triangle Trade” and its notorious “Middle Passage” were in place.
Rhode Islanders had begun including slaves among their cargo in a small way as far back as 1709. But the trade began in earnest there in the 1730s. Despite a late start, Rhode Island soon surpassed Massachusetts as the chief colonial carrier. After the Revolution, Rhode Island merchants had no serious American competitors. They controlled between 60 and 90 percent of the U.S. trade in African slaves. Rhode Island had excellent harbors, poor soil, and it lacked easy access to the Newfoundland fisheries. In slave trading, it found its natural calling. William Ellery, prominent Newport merchant, wrote in 1791, “An Ethiopian could as soon change his skin as a Newport merchant could be induced to change so lucrative a trade as that in slaves for the slow profits of any manufactory.”[1]
Boston and Newport were the chief slave ports, but nearly all the New England towns — Salem, Providence, Middletown, New London – had a hand in it. In 1740, slaving interests in Newport owned or managed 150 vessels engaged in all manner of trading. In Rhode Island colony, as much as two-thirds of the merchant fleet and a similar fraction of sailors were engaged in slave traffic. The colonial governments of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania all, at various times, derived money from the slave trade by levying duties on black imports. Tariffs on slave import in Rhode Island in 1717 and 1729 were used to repair roads and bridges.
The 1750 revocation of the Assiento dramatically changed the slave trade yet again. The system that had been set up to stock Spanish America with thousands of Africans now needed another market. Slave ships began to steer northward. From 1750 to 1770, African slaves flooded the Northern docks. Merchants from Philadelphia, New York, and Perth Amboy began to ship large lots (100 or more) in a single trip. As a result, wholesale prices of slaves in New York fell 50% in six years.
On the eve of the Revolution, the slave trade “formed the very basis of the economic life of New England.”[2] It wove itself into the entire regional economy of New England. The Massachusetts slave trade gave work to coopers, tanners, sailmakers, and ropemakers. Countless agents, insurers, lawyers, clerks, and scriveners handled the paperwork for slave merchants. Upper New England loggers, Grand Banks fishermen, and livestock farmers provided the raw materials shipped to the West Indies on that leg of the slave trade. Colonial newspapers drew much of their income from advertisements of slaves for sale or hire. New England-made rum, trinkets, and bar iron were exchanged for slaves. When the British in 1763 proposed a tax on sugar and molasses, Massachusetts merchants pointed out that these were staples of the slave trade, and the loss of that would throw 5,000 seamen out of work in the colony and idle almost 700 ships. The connection between molasses and the slave trade was rum. Millions of gallons of cheap rum, manufactured in New England, went to Africa and bought black people. Tiny Rhode Island had more than 30 distilleries, 22 of them in Newport. In Massachusetts, 63 distilleries produced 2.7 million gallons of rum in 1774. Some was for local use: rum was ubiquitous in lumber camps and on fishing ships. “But primarily rum was linked with the Negro trade, and immense quantities of the raw liquor were sent to Africa and exchanged for slaves. So important was rum on the Guinea Coast that by 1723 it had surpassed French and Holland brandy, English gin, trinkets and dry goods as a medium of barter.”[3] Slaves costing the equivalent of £4 or £5 in rum or bar iron in West Africa were sold in the West Indies in 1746 for £30 to £80. New England thrift made the rum cheaply — production cost was as low as 5½ pence a gallon — and the same spirit of Yankee thrift discovered that the slave ships were most economical with only 3 feet 3 inches of vertical space to a deck and 13 inches of surface area per slave, the human cargo laid in carefully like spoons in a silverware case.
A list of the leading slave merchants is almost identical with a list of the region’s prominent families: the Fanueils, Royalls, and Cabots of Massachusetts; the Wantons, Browns, and Champlins of Rhode Island; the Whipples of New Hampshire; the Eastons of Connecticut; Willing & Morris of Philadelphia. To this day, it’s difficult to find an old North institution of any antiquity that isn’t tainted by slavery. Ezra Stiles imported slaves while president of Yale. Six slave merchants served as mayor of Philadelphia. Even a liberal bastion like Brown University has the shameful blot on its escutcheon. It is named for the Brown brothers, Nicholas, John, Joseph, and Moses, manufacturers and traders who shipped salt, lumber, meat — and slaves. And like many business families of the time, the Browns had indirect connections to slavery via rum distilling. John Brown, who paid half the cost of the college’s first library, became the first Rhode Islander prosecuted under the federal Slave Trade Act of 1794 and had to forfeit his slave ship. Historical evidence also indicates that slaves were used at the family’s candle factory in Providence, its ironworks in Scituate, and to build Brown’s University Hall.[4]
Even after slavery was outlawed in the North, ships out of New England continued to carry thousands of Africans to the American South. Some 156,000 slaves were brought to the United States in the period 1801-08, almost all of them on ships that sailed from New England ports that had recently outlawed slavery. Rhode Island slavers alone imported an average of 6,400 Africans annually into the U.S. in the years 1805 and 1806. The financial base of New England’s antebellum manufacturing boom was money it had made in shipping. And that shipping money was largely acquired directly or indirectly from slavery, whether by importing Africans to the Americas, transporting slave-grown cotton to England, or hauling Pennsylvania wheat and Rhode Island rum to the slave-labor colonies of the Caribbean.
Northerners profited from slavery in many ways, right up to the eve of the Civil War. The decline of slavery in the upper South is well documented, as is the sale of slaves from Virginia and Maryland to the cotton plantations of the Deep South. But someone had to get them there, and the U.S. coastal trade was firmly in Northern hands. William Lloyd Garrison made his first mark as an anti-slavery man by printing attacks on New England merchants who shipped slaves from Baltimore to New Orleans.
Long after the U.S. slave trade officially ended, the more extensive movement of Africans to Brazil and Cuba continued. The U.S. Navy never was assiduous in hunting down slave traders. The much larger British Navy was more aggressive, and it attempted a blockade of the slave coast of Africa, but the U.S. was one of the few nations that did not permit British patrols to search its vessels, so slave traders continuing to bring human cargo to Brazil and Cuba generally did so under the U.S. flag. They also did so in ships built for the purpose by Northern shipyards, in ventures financed by Northern manufacturers.
In a notorious case, the famous schooner-yacht Wanderer, pride of the New York Yacht Club, put in to Port Jefferson Harbor in April 1858 to be fitted out for the slave trade. Everyone looked the other way — which suggests this kind of thing was not unusual — except the surveyor of the port, who reported his suspicions to the federal officials. The ship was seized and towed to New York, but her captain talked (and possibly bought) his way out and was allowed to sail for Charleston, S.C.
Fitting out was completed there, the Wanderer was cleared by Customs, and she sailed to Africa where she took aboard some 600 blacks. On Nov. 28, 1858, she reached Jekyll Island, Georgia, where she illegally unloaded the 465 survivors of what is generally called the last shipment of slaves to arrive in the United States.
It is worth emphasizing this did not end in 1865. The abolition of slavery in the US did not stop the slave trade to Brazil.
nice job on this thread.
I pasted that from a site called Slavenorth.com since X wondered aloud upthread which port was most prolific.
I confess I did want to take the time to dress it up html.....but I should have attributed it
though anyone here knows I don’t write that well...lol
i have several books on slavery that i just glanced at but none list which port had the most traffic
i did discover that NOLA was a bigger slave port than Charleston though....although much of that was secondary tween New England and the lower Mississippi delta plantocracy
Considering the precedent set by Jefferson Davis, of an over-reaching and intrusive government, a minimal respect for states rights, and the proposal of confiscatory level income taxes, I don't think the South would have turned out as you hoped.
You neglected to mention who had bought the Wanderer and fitted her out for slave importing. A Southern syndicate headed by Charles A. L. Lamar of Savannah.
My fixation on racism? Look back along this thread. The first and most frequent charges of racism come from the Southron mob.
The southern constitution allowed secession. The confederate congress would most likely have been quite mild for that reason after the war. The prospect of secession is after all the only real check on central government power.
Largest exporter of what? I'm not sure what you're referring to. The words above weren't from a quote of mine, at least not on this thread.
But seriously, I seem to remember some old newspaper story about a large number of runaways heading out of Chicago and bound for Canada ahead of the slave catchers.
You are probably referring to one of my posts. See Link.
After making that post I purchased the Campbell book I mentioned above. It is one of the better WBTS books I've ever bought. Fairly balanced and very informative about the fugitive slave situation in the 1850-1860 period.
The Campbell book noted that the large flight of fugitive slaves from Chicago in April 1861 occurred after the April 3 arrest of a slave named Harris, his wife, and two children. Harris belonged to one Missouri slave owner; his wife and children to another. The New York Times, where I found the articles I posted in the above link, had not included the name or the ownership details. Unfortunately, I didn't have access to old Chicago newspapers to get names and other details or I would have looked them up and posted them.
It is important to distinguish between slave ports after 1808 and before 1808. Prior to 1808 slaves could still be legally imported from Africa and the New England ports dominated the trade. The southern ports after 1808 were centers for the internal slave trade. Mobile is the other huge slave trading port in the south. It was founded somewhat late but was well funded by New York banking interests who were looking to compete against Citizens bank in NOLA.
FYI: Citizens bank was owned by a french family. The french word for ten is "dix" and that appeared on CB banknotes. A New York banker commissioned a black-faced minstrel show to lampoon the southern banking industry. The chorus written for that show was the song Dixie. That's the origin of both the name for the south and the song.
Economic reasons? What was the economic reason for Thomas Jackson owning as many as 9 slaves? A large majority of Southern slaves didn't work in the fields. They were cooks, butlers, maids, gardeners, grooms, nannies, and other household help. Sloth might have been the reason for owning slaves, not economics.
I stated that CONGRESS had passed the Amendment, which it did.
And as I pointed out, CONGRESS didn't pass the amendment until March 2, 1861. That was some weeks AFTER the original 7 states had seceded. Like I said.
Since you seem to have forgotten, the US Supreme Court (that august body that you seem to revere] held that the territories were open to blacks - free or slave - and that Lincoln's white dream would not be realized.
And what you forget is that there is no doubt that the Dred Scott decision would be challenged by additional legislation and future court cases. It is doubtful that many of the provisions would have withstood the challenges, especially since several members who voted with the majority believed Taney had exceeded the scope of the issue in his decision. And amendment, on the other hand, could not be challenged. Nor could specific clauses in a constitution guaranteeing slavery in all territories for all time. The option that the Southern states chose to follow.
The Confederate Constitution Article I§9 limited expansion of slavery to the existing union states and territories only
Try reading the entire document sometime. Article 4, section 3, clause 3: "The Confederate States may acquire new territory; and Congress shall have power to legislate and provide governments for the inhabitants of all territory belonging to the Confederate States, lying without the limits of the several Sates; and may permit them, at such times, and in such manner as it may by law provide, to form States to be admitted into the Confederacy. In all such territory the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected be Congress and by the Territorial government; and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories shall have the right to take to such Territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the States or Territories of the Confederate States."
The Confederate Congress COULD interfere with future expansion while the federal Congress could not.
Damn, you really need to read that confederate constitution some time. Article 1, section 9, clause 4: "No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed."
So yes, if that's an 'open' viewpoint, I agree that Southerners did NOT share his white-separatist viewpoint.
What you conveniently forget is that the Southern viewpoint was that blacks in the territories was a fine idea...but only if they were somebodies property. But it would be nice if you would address the original question. Can you come up with a quote by a single Southern leader who believed blacks had any rights worthy of respect? Or that blacks were their equal in any way? Can you do that?
Gee wally, forgot about those advocating colonization?
Well, Beaver, how about some of those quotes?
But let's cut to the chase regarding the end of the institution...
No, let's stay where we were. How about some quotes from some Southern leaders that demonstrate that they were more enlightened than Lincoln? Some quotes advocating an early end to slavery? Some quotes advocating rights for blacks, or the freedom to live wherever they wanted in the Union. You criticize Lincoln, show your own saints were better men than he.
From your saint:
And how about quotes from your saints showing that they were in favor of making black men their equal? I can understand why you are desperate to keep attention away from them. The simple fact of the matter is that regardless of how racist Lincoln appears by today's standards, there is not a single, solitary Southern leader who does not appear even worse by comparison. Why not admit it?
Slaves that could have escaped and joined the Union army, but just had to much fun shooting yankees and defending their homeland.
Several hundred thousand more found it more fun to run off, join the Union army, and shoot rebels.
The convention hadn't even happened. And Lincoln wanted his view to remain PRIVATE. I guess Lincoln striving so urgently for the right of black suffrage explains why the convention denied blacks the right to vote.
And Lincoln wanted his view to remain PRIVATE.
And what did Lincoln say in public? "It is also unsatisfactory to some that the elective franchise is not given to the colored man. I would myself prefer that it were now conferred on the very intelligent and on those who serve our cause as soldiers. Still the question is not whether the Louisiana government, as it stands, is quite all that is desireable. The question is "Will it be wiser to take it as it is, and help improve it; or to reject and disperse it."
The Louisiana government was made of Southern men, to whom the idea of blacks voting was repulsive. Lincoln could propose, he could ask, but he couldn't make the Southerners give the vote to any blacks if they refused to do so. But you conveniently overlooked that point.
I guess that explains blacks having all those rights in Illinois when Lincoln served in congress. Absolutely none.
And what could Lincoln, in Congress, do about that? And here I thought you supported states rights?
Taney had no prejudice against negroes...
That would be the same Taney who ruled that a black man had no rights that a white man was bound to respect? Perhaps God believed blacks to be the equal of a white but Taney certainly did not.
George Washington, Lee et al did the same. That they are in this lofty company is a compliment.
Try again. The revolution was not launched to protect slavery. The Southern rebellion was.
Where? Read the preamble and it says "We, the people of the Confederate States, each State acting in its sovereign and independent character, in order to form a permanent federal government..." That doesn't look like they were will to let anyone go.
The confederate congress would most likely have been quite mild for that reason after the war.
Let's not look at 'most likely' but instead let's look at what they did. Davis and the confederate congress ignored the requirement for a supreme court and the prohibition against protective tariffs, enacted conscription and forcibly extended the enlistment of the state militia regiments for the duration of the war, seized private produce without compensation 'for the war effort', forced private ship owners to reserve a large percentage of their cargo space without compensation 'for the war effort', conscripted slave labor without compensation 'for the war effort', nationalized industries like salt and liquor, suppressed newspapers, enacted martial law in cities hundreds of miles from the front, proposed confiscatory taxes, and that was in the first 4 years. Doesn't bode well for the future, IMHO.
They _just_ seceded. You don't think they would actually forget to sanction it?
It's right here:
The powers not delegated to the Confederate States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States, respectively, or the people thereof.
The confederate congress would most likely have been quite mild for that reason after the war.
Let's not look at 'most likely' but instead let's look at what they did... ...Doesn't bode well for the future, IMHO.
You listed war measures. None of those would have been sustainable after the war. The states would not have allowed them. Unfortunately the unitary government model has no such protections and we live with the consequences today.
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