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To: Non-Sequitur
Those laws were not enforced.
But of course they were rigidly enforced in Northern states, huh?

Particularly in the Midwest. There was a great deal of xenophobia towards blacks there. They were very much afraid southerners would try to offload their black population.

They were enacted during the period when the northern states were trying to eliminate their own black populations through structures manumission laws.
How would those affect Southern states? Virginia passed a law, later incorportated into their state constitution, that said a slave freed in Virginia had 12 months in which to leave the commonwealth or else be sold back into slavery. Now how could anything that a Northern state did require a law like that on Virginia's books?

It affected the southern states because that's where slaves from the north who were sold instead of freed wound up. They didn't arrive as free men, but were taken there as slaves - so the law you are referencing wouldn't matter.

And we had this conversation before and I showed you a citation showing that this law was not enforced.

And the free black numbers in the census are known to be bogus. Free black men listed their wives and children as slaves for legal reasons.
You're making this stuff up as you go along, aren't you?

When you run out of arguments the gracious thing to do is concede - not switch to insults.

In some places it was not legal to free a slave and almost everywhere there were costs to do so. For a good look at the difficulties in teasing out the meaning of those census figures you worship so much may I suggest Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790-1860.

68 posted on 10/11/2007 7:10:41 PM PDT by antinomian
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To: antinomian
Particularly in the Midwest. There was a great deal of xenophobia towards blacks there. They were very much afraid southerners would try to offload their black population.

Sure. Look at the census figures for 1850 and 1860. The growth in the number of free blacks in most southern states was flat if it did not, in fact, decline. If the laws you are speaking about were rigidly enforced in in Midwestern states as you claim, and states like Illinois and Ohio and Michigan saw increases in the black population of 40 or 50 or 110 percent, then how can you claim that such laws were not enforced in Southern states where the free black population in most states hardly grew at all?

Free blacks were hardly welcomed in Northern states, that is irrefutable. They were disliked, discriminated against, and were denied rights in many states. But it is also irrefutable that blacks were welcomed in Southern states only if they were property. That the were distrusted, disliked, and discriminated against more in Southern states than in Northern ones. That the kinds of laws you complain about in some Northern states also existed in all Southern ones and that they were enforced. And that as bad as things were for free blacks up North, they were significantly worse for free blacks in the South.

71 posted on 10/12/2007 4:01:37 AM PDT by Non-Sequitur (Save Fredericksburg. Support CVBT.)
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