Vanity - Some facts I didn't know about slavery

Due to the recent hullabaloo involving Wright's sermons and liberation theology, I did some reading about slavery in the US, and discovered a number of things I hadn't heard before.

1 - Jefferson's original draft of the Declaration of Independence criticized King George for permitting the slave trade:

"He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.(3)

Jefferson's committee wanted to keep this passionate paragraph, and Adams considered it the best part. But Congress struck it from the Declaration, substituting the vague and self-serving charge "He has excited domestic insurrections among us."

2 - Just 4 years after winning the Revolutionary War, the Constitutional Convention debated slavery in the US. Many wanted to immediately ban the importing of slaves, but that would cost the votes of the southern states. As a compromise, importing slaves was permitted for another 20 years. In 1808, as soon as Congress could legally do so, importing slaves was outlawed.

"The Founding Fathers, however, could not resolve the issue of Slavery which divided the Colonies and was preventing agreement on the remainder of the Constitution. Accordingly, they made the decision to keep the status quo and leave it to future generations to resolve this issue.[12] As a result, the original Constitution contained four provisions tacitly allowing slavery to continue for the next 20 years. Section 9 of Article I allowed the continued "importation" of such persons, Section 2 of Article IV prohibited the provision of assistance to escaping persons and required their return if successful and Section 2 of Article I defined other persons as "three-fifths" of a person for calculations of each state's official population.[13] Article V prohibited any amendments or legislation changing these provisions until 1808, thereby giving the States then existing 20 years to resolve this issue. The failure to do so led to the Civil War.[14]"

Note the slave holders outsmarted the anti-slavery forces. In most places, banning the importing of slaves ended slavery - the death rate was too high for it to be self-sustaining. Slaveholders in the south, however, adjusted the proportions of male/female and improved living conditions. This allowed them to breed more slaves, and the slave population increased greatly after importing slaves was banished.

3 - The 3/5th person rule was NOT a statement that blacks were not really people. Slaveholders WANTED blacks counted as people, because their states would be represented in Congress based on the number of people present. Anti-slavery folks were appalled, and wanted no slaves to be counted as people, since they couldn't vote for themselves. Again, this was a compromise position.

4 - Very few of the slaves taken from Africa ended up in the USA - only about 600,000 out of 10 million or more. The vast majority went to South America or the Caribbean. It is a bit of a reach to criticize the US Government for failing to end slavery in Brazil!

5 - Independent US government really began with victory in 1783, with the last British troops leaving New York City on November 25, 1783.

25 years later, importing slaves became illegal. By that time, many northern states had outlawed slavery.

It has now been 143 years since slavery was outlawed. 36% of the USA's history allowed slavery, although it was strongly contested.

This year, 2008, celebrates 200 years since it became illegal to import slaves. It was only legal for 11% of our total history.

"In the 1870s, Democrats regained power through affiliated militia terrorism of black and white Republicans, assassination of community leaders and political activists, and intimidation and restriction of voters at the polls. Even after the Democrats regained power throughout the South, between 1880 and 1951 the Tuskegee Institute recorded lynchings of 3,437 African-American victims, as well as 1,293 white victims.

...After increased immigration to the US in the late 19th century, Italian-Americans also became lynching targets, chiefly in the South. On March 14, 1891, eleven Italian-Americans were lynched in New Orleans after a jury acquitted them in the murder of a New Orleans police chief [16] David Hennessy. The eleven were falsely accused of being associated with the Mafia. This incident was the largest mass lynching in U.S. history.[17] A total of twenty Italians were lynched in the 1890s. Although most lynchings of Italian-Americans occurred in the South, Italians did not immigrate there in great numbers. Isolated lynchings of Italians also occurred in New York, Pennsylvania, and Colorado.

Particularly in the West, Chinese immigrants, East Indians, Native Americans and Mexicans were also lynching victims. The lynching of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the Southwest was long overlooked in American history. Attention became focused on the South. The Tuskegee Institute, which kept the most complete records, noted the victims as simply black or white. Mexican, Chinese, and Native American lynching victims were recorded as white.[18]

Researchers estimate 597 Mexicans were lynched between 1848 and 1928. Mexicans were lynched at a rate of 27.4 per 100,000 of population between 1880 and 1930. This statistic was second only to that of the African American community, which endured an average of 37.1 per 100,000 of population during that period. Between 1848 and 1879, Mexicans were lynched at an unprecedented rate of 473 per 100,000 of population.[19]"

During a 70 year period, roughly 3400 blacks were lynched. That was undoubtedly evil, but how does its impact compare to this:

"WASHINGTON - Nearly half of the nation’s murder victims in 2005 were black, and the number of black men who were slain is on the rise.

A majority of the black murder victims were relatively young — between 17 and 29, the Justice Department said in a study released Thursday.

The department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics report offers a snapshot of racial disparities among violent crime victims. Black people represented an estimated 13 percent of the U.S. population in 2005, the latest data available, but were the victims of 49 percent of all murders and 15 percent of rapes, assaults and other nonfatal violent crimes nationwide.

Most of the black murder victims — 93 percent — were killed by other black people, the study found. About 85 percent of white victims were slain by other white people."

From other statistics presented in the story, nearly 8000 blacks were murdered in 2005 alone. This means some 7400 blacks, mostly young men, were murdered by other blacks in just one year.

During the 70 years without a federal anti-lynching law, 3400 black men were murdered by whites. In 2005 alone, over twice that number were murdered by other blacks.

How ther Left (Victimists) twist the history of slavery in the education system:

From: The Textbook Letter, July-August 1998

http://www.textbookleague.org/93fakes.htm

More Fake “History” from Glencoe

By Prof. William J. Bennetta

Wherever multiculturalism goes, it brings Victimism with it. Victimism is an integral part of the multi-culti ideological package, and its practitioners, whom we may call Victimists, have two principal concerns: They invent fake stories and images that are intended to bring sympathy, admiration, glory and political advantage to groups of people who have been officially designated as Victims by the multi-culti establishment; and they strive to disseminate their fake stories and images in the guise of “history.”

The Victims are always groups, not individuals. This isn’t surprising, because all multi-culti ideology revolves around tribalism, the rejection of individualism, and the doctrine that a person’s primary identity is his group identity — i.e., the tribe to which he belongs. In practice, all the principal tribes turn out to be racial or quasiracial groups, which are defined in terms of their real or imaginary ancestries.

Among the racial groups represented in the population of the United States, two have not merely been certified as Victims but have also been selected for especially lavish treatment by the Victimists. These groups — Amerindians and American blacks — figure prominently in the multi-culti version of “American history,” where they are sanitized and glorified beyond recognition, and are depicted as the hapless prey of evil white men.

Sanitization is an indispensable part of this endeavor, because certified Victims must always be depicted as innocent, righteous paragons of humanity. The sanitization process consists largely of hiding or denying any facts which show that the Victims had victims of their own, whom they slaughtered, displaced, subjugated, enslaved or exploited. This is why, for instance, the fabricators of multi-culti “history” conceal the fact that slavery and slave-trading were widespread among the Amerindians. And this is why they refuse to acknowledge that in Britain’s American colonies, some blacks were slaves but other blacks were slave-owners. (See, for example, the reviews of the high-school book United States History: In the Course of Human Events in TTL, January-February 1997.)

The Victimists have been particularly vigorous in their efforts to distort the history of slavery, and in this context they have invented and promoted two grand lies. The first is the notion that slavery was unknown in the New World until it was introduced by Europeans. The second is the explicit claim that Europeans established, in the Americas, a form of slavery which entailed unprecedented cruelties — cruelties that made American slavery different from all the other slave systems that ever had existed.

To the delight of the Victimists, the assertion that the American slave system was uniquely cruel is routinely parroted in today’s high-school books and middle-school textbooks, as Jonathan Burack has told us in his Textbook Letter article “How Textbooks Obscure and Distort the History of Slavery.” Usually, the textbook-writers are content to present this assertion as a throwaway line, without pretending to explain it. However, the writers of Glencoe’s multi-culti high-school text American Odyssey: The United States in the 20th Century have done something different, for they have invented a list of features that supposedly set the American slave system apart from all others. In so doing, Glencoe’s writers have provided an exceptional demonstration of the art of perverting the historical record for the sake of promoting Victimist delusions.

The false depiction of American slavery in American Odyssey begins on page 34, under the headline “A New Type of Slavery.” The writers briefly note that slavery had existed in some other places, and they mention — but do not describe — a few examples. (Predictably, all the examples are drawn from the Old World. In American Odyssey, the slavery practiced by Amerindians is never mentioned at all.) Then the writers settle down to deception: “Before the American slave trade, however, slavery had never been permanent and irrevocable — nor had enslaved persons ever before been treated as subhuman, denied the rights of education, marriage and parenthood, or forced to pass on their slave status to their descendants.”

Every item in that passage is false or meaningless.

Consider, as an example, Glencoe’s claim that the American slave system was the first in which slavery was hereditary — the first in which “slave status” passed from parent to descendant. What a travesty! To find cases of hereditary slavery, we need only look to the Amerindians of the Pacific Northwest. Perhaps my readers will recall two such cases that I cited in these pages last year:

Though customs varied from group to group, slavery was often hereditary. Among the Tsimshians, for example, a child of any slavewoman was a slave from birth, and he remained a slave unless a freeman adopted him. Among the Chinooks, a freeman could marry a slave — but if he did, he himself became a slave, and all the offspring originating from the marriage were slaves.

[from my review of McDougal Littell’s America’s Past and Promise in TTL, September-October 1997.]

Now remember the well known slave system of ancient Rome. Among the Romans, hereditary slavery was established in law and was reflected in, among other things, the deliberate breeding of slaves. The historian M.I. Finley — an outstanding student of the ancient Roman economy — has considered slave-breeding in his classic book Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, and he has remarked that:
“We must take seriously … the assertion of Columella (1.8.19) that it was his practice to reward the slave mother of three children with exemption from work, [and] with freedom if she produced still more; or the statement of Appian (Civil War 1.7) that slave-owners in the Italian countryside made substantial subsidiary profits from the multitude of slave progeny, … .”

Finley also gives the lie to Glencoe’s claim that, until Europeans established slavery in America, slaves had never before been regarded as “subhuman.” In this connection, I hope that history educators will be sure to read Finley’s fine book and will give particular attention to his chapter “Slavery and Humanity.”

I hope, too, that they will read Jonathan Burack’s article again and notice the view recorded by the 14th-century Islamic historian Ibn Khaldun: Blacks were well suited to slavery, wrote Khaldun, because they were hardly human and had attributes “quite similar to those of dumb animals.”
Next, look at Glencoe’s claim that slaves had never before been denied the right to education. This isn’t even false. It is a meaningless absurdity. It is an absurdity because the idea of a universal “right” to education is a recent novelty — and for that matter, so is the very idea of a universal right. Glencoe’s notion that a “right” to education has existed always and everywhere, and has been extended to slaves everywhere but in America, is nonsense.

As my final example, I point to Glencoe’s claim that slavery had never before been “permanent and irrevocable.” That is another travesty. In North America at least, slavery certainly was not permanent and irrevocable — and every educated American knows that such eminent figures as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, in their wills, granted freedom to all or some of their slaves. Similarly, every educated American knows that the most famous American slave of all, Dred Scott, eventually became a free man. The American Odyssey writers, however, are evidently seeking to produce dupes, not educated citizens.

END

“William J. Bennetta is a professional editor, a fellow of the California Academy of Sciences, the president of The Textbook League, and the editor of The Textbook Letter. He writes frequently about the propagation of quackery, false “science” and false “history” in schoolbooks….”

Black slaves were brought into the Islamic world by a number of routes—from West Africa across the Sahara to Morocco and Tunisia, from Chad across the desert to Libya, from East Africa down the Nile to Egypt, and across the Red Sea and Indian Ocean to Arabia and the Persian Gulf. There are notable differences between the slave trade in the Islamic world and the trans-Atlantic variety. The former has been going on for 13 centuries and it is an integral feature of the Islamic civilization, while the influx of slaves into the New World lasted less than three hundred years and effectively ended by the middle of the 19th century.
It is estimated that ten to twelve million Africans were taken to the Americas during that period. The number of captives taken to the heartlands of Islam—while impossible to establish with precision—is many times greater. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that there are tens of millions of descendants of slaves in the Americas, and practically none in the Muslim world outside Africa. For all its horrors, the Atlantic slave trade regarded its victims as valuable assets whose lives and progeny should be preserved, admittedly not for altruistic but primarily for economic reasons. In the Muslim world, by contrast, slaves were considerably cheaper, far more widely available, and regarded as a dispensable commodity. They were not allowed to have families, and most men were brutally castrated even before reaching the market.
In the early Caliphate, in Mesopotamia, considerable numbers of black slaves were used as labor on large estates, but the practice effectively ceased after a mass rebellion in the ninth century that at one moment even threatened Baghdad. Since that time the Muslim heartland has been apprehensive of using large contingents of male African slaves working in one location. They were used primarily as domestic servants, or, in the case of women, as sex objects: some harems had hundreds of concubines. In North Africa black slaves were also used as soldiers blindly obedient to their masters.
Many African slaves were eunuchs, and the method of their mutilation, before they could fetch the best price in the Islamic world, defies imagination:
Castration was admittedly against the Islamic law, but its letter—the “spirit” being non-existent—often offered a pragmatic way out for the imaginative believer. Regarding African captives, a handy contrivance was to buy already castrated slaves whose mutilation occurred prior to the wretch’s importation into the lands of the Faithful. The dealers thus had a clear incentive to perform the operation themselves along the route. For African captives nothing short of “castration level with the abdomen” would do; no mere removal of the cojones, like with the Slavic and Greek captives, by the mere removal of testicles. Only such radically castrated eunuchs were deemed fit to be guardians of the harem: that way there was no risk of their damaging any of the property in the harem. The mortality rates were enormous [Islam’s black slaves—an interview with Ronald Segal by Suzy Hansen].

link

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.