Posted on 10/24/2012 8:07:45 AM PDT by Perseverando
True origins of institution had little to do with racism
Jon Hubbard, a Republican member of the Arkansas House of Representatives, has a book, titled “Letters to the Editor: Confessions of a Frustrated Conservative.” Among its statements for which Hubbard has been criticized and disavowed by the Republican Party is, “The institution of slavery that the black race has long believed to be an abomination upon its people may actually have been a blessing in disguise. The blacks who could endure those conditions and circumstances would someday be rewarded with citizenship in the greatest nation ever established upon the face of the Earth.”
Hubbard’s observation reminded me of my 1972 job interview at the University of Massachusetts. During a reception, one of the Marxist professors asked me what I thought about the relationship between capitalism and slavery. My response was that slavery has existed everywhere in the world, under every political and economic system, and was by no means unique to capitalism or the United States. Perturbed by my response, he asked me what my feelings were about the enslavement of my ancestors. I answered that slavery is a despicable violation of human rights but that the enslavement of my ancestors is history, and one of the immutable facts of history is that nothing can be done to change it.
The matter could have been left there, but I volunteered that today’s American blacks have benefited enormously from the horrible suffering of our ancestors. Why? I said the standard of living and personal liberty of black Americans are better than what blacks living anywhere in Africa have. I then asked the professor what it was that explained how tens of millions of blacks came to be born in the U.S. instead of Africa. He wouldn’t answer, but an answer other
(Excerpt) Read more at wnd.com ...
You obviously did not read the entire article.
Read the entire article and then apologize to Dr. Williams
Your comments are exactly what this article is about;
My yet-to-be-learned lesson – and perhaps that of Rep. Hubbard – is that there are certain topics or arguments that one should not bring up in the presence of children or those with little understanding. Both might see that explaining a phenomenon is the same as giving it moral sanction or justification. It’s as if one’s explanation that the independent influence of gravity on a falling object is to cause it to accelerate at 32 feet per second per second could be interpreted as giving moral sanction and justification to gravity.
Re: Same article posted earlier - titled differently by Townhall.com :
What You Can’t Say
Not that the wonderful Walter Williams isn’t worth repeating :-)
Sorry, I missed it. I should have checked a little closer. Dittos to your comment. I love WW’s columns.
If the alternative was a certainty that they would be condemned to live in someplace like Rwanda, in perpetuity? Yes.
Nonsense. It had NOTHING to do with “racism” as we define it today. The reason slavery could be accepted in a nation founded on “all men are created equal” is that they (at least the majority who founded the nation) did not believe they were “men”. They believe blacks to be less than men. Now, I suppose you could make the case that that is its own form of racism, but it has nothing to do with how we use that word today. In other words, the people in those days did not hate black people simply because they were black. In fact, they did not hate them any more than they hated their mules or horses by “enslaving” them. I know that by today’s measure these are disgusting truths, but that is how people who tolerated slavery back then thought.
Wrong again. The problem began when more and more people began to understand that black people were human beings and indeed worthy of living as free as any other man.
“like in Britain that now holds sharia courts as equal to British common law”
No, it doesn’t.
Nope.
Like I said, that good can sometimes can from evil does not mitigate the evil.
Seems to me that’s the issue on this thread. Does the benefit to today’s black Americans mitigate the evil of past slavery? That’s what some conservatives mightsay, or probably more often, what some liberals will say the conservatives are saying. The answerL not in my book.
The equal and opposite fallacy, IMO, is the black racist and liberal claim that the good for American blacks today is completely invalidated by the fact that it is historically based on the past evil of slavery. Therefore blacks are always and eternally victims and we owe them forever, both guilt and money.
IMO, both the evil and the eventual good are real. The good does not justify the evil. But that the evil existed in the past also does not invalidate the good of today.
This is quite thoroughly disproven by the words of the Founders themselves, including those of Patrick Henry quoted upthread. Had they considered blacks to be less than men, there would have been no reason for slavery to bother them. And it most certainly did.
Most Americans didn't care much about it, and to the extent they gave it thought, disliked the institution while at the same time considering blacks inferior.
We should keep in mind that the "science" of the time pretty nearly unanimously concurred in this opinion. The only people who considered blacks fully the equals of whites were the occasional fanatical Christians who took their Bible seriously. Unfortunately, they were counter-balanced by other fanatical Christians who used other passages to "prove" that slavery was God's eternal will.
Over the course of the 19th century this consensus split. More and more in the North became opposed to slavery and especially to its spread. More and more in the South began to think of slavery as a positive good that could and must be spread over the Earth.
The first group tended, though not universally, to think of blacks as something approaching equals. The second group displaced them down the scale, to being less than men, as you say.
What you are doing here is displacing in time the attitude towards blacks common in the South of the 1850s back to the 1780s and making it the norm across the country. Which historical legerdemain Taney also tried in Dred Scott, but which was diced, sliced and dismembered in the dissenting opinions.
LOL! No problem. I just didn't want you hounded by the Posting Police. Not your fault the papers play switcharoonie with the title.
Ah, Walter Williams. I wonder if Romney could talk him into running the Dept of Education?
“Well cared for slaves not only live longer and produce more, they also reproduce.”
Which was VERY important for the slave owner, seeing as how the importation of new slaves was made illegal in 1808.
You misunderstand the attitude of the South. They knew it was evil... it was just a necessary evil for their way of life. They didn't think it was a good thing that should be spread everywhere. They wanted new territories and states to be slave states not so the "good" of slavery could be extended but so they would not be crushed by an increasingly abolitionist Congress. They were trying to maintain a balance of power not argue for slavery's virtues.
T. Jefferson in an 1819 letter to his overseer:
“I have had no reason to believe that any overseer, since Griffin’s
time has over worked them, accordingly, the deaths among the
grown ones seems ascribable to natural causes, but the loss of 5
little ones in 4 years induces me to fear that the overseers do not
permit the women to devote as much time as is necessary to the
care of their children: that they view their labor as the 1st object
and the raising their child but as secondary. I consider the labor of a
breeding woman as no object, and that a child raised every 2. years
is of more profit than the crop of the best laboring man. in this, as
in all other cases, providence has made our interests and our duties
coincide perfectly [...] I must pray you to inculcate upon the
overseers that it is not their labor, but their increase which is the
first consideration with us.
Pretty disgusting IMO.
“Slavery in the New World and especially in American certainly was.”
How do you explain the number of black property owners who owned slaves then?
Less than 1% of whites owned slaves, but from an article I read a number of years ago, 7% of black free men owned slaves.
In 1800, true. By 1850 and even more 1860, not true.
The VP of the CSA, in his most famous speech.
Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split." He was right. ... The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. ...
Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the "storm came and the wind blew."...
Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition...
The substratum of our society is made of the material fitted by nature for it, and by experience we know that it is best, not only for the superior, but for the inferior race, that it should be so. It is, indeed, in conformity with the ordinance of the Creator.
This is what is colloquially known as bull puckey.
In the Lower South 36% of white families owned slaves.
In the Upper South 25.3% of all white families owned slaves.
Total percentage for the whole CSA: 30.8%.
In the Union Border States 15.9% of all white families owned slaves.
7% of black free men owned slaves.
Possible, though I doubt it. Reference, please.
I also fail to see how it is relevant. Black men enslaving blacks (or whites, or any other color) is every bit as evil.
I believe the majority of southern free blacks who owned slaves were family members. Here’s what would happen.
A black man might be freed, then spend years gradually saving the money to buy his wife and children. When he succeeded, the often large fees associated with emancipation (in hopes of discouraging it) meant they often kept their family members in a legal state of slavery to Dad.
There were also a few free mulattos, mostly in LA, who had extensive properties inherited from their wealthy French descent fathers. The French had different ideas on this issue from anglo-Americans.
slavery was and still is evil. I will agree with you on that. But you made the statement that it was due to racists in the new world. I point out that is not the case. it was business.
Here is an article written about in WND that references another article by Henry Gates. Gates, if you remember, is the black professor who Obama had a beer summit with. Here is the first article.
http://www.wnd.com/2010/05/149113/
In this article you might take note that it gives the following information; “One of this nation’s most distinguished black historians has discovered and reported that in North Carolina, alone, there were 721 slaves owned by 232 black slave owners. … I was able to reach Dr. (John Hope) Franklin by phone this week. I asked him if North Carolina was any kind of rarity in having black slaves owned by blacks. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘I would estimate that there were surely more in Louisiana, South Carolina, Virginia and Maryland.’”
The second article is the one mentioned in the WND article. It is the actual article by Gates. While it does not include the statement I gave about blacks making up 7% of the slave owners, it does give a good history of the black involvement in the slave trade.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/23/opinion/23gates.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0
Here is an article about blacks who owned slaves. It gives the percentage of blacks who owned slaves in the South as 2%.
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2821/before-the-civil-war-were-some-slave-owners-black
Here is a very good article written about the percentages of whites who owned slaves. Not the amount you said for sure. It lists the amount at 1.4% of whites did.
The article below gives the percentage of blacks who owned slaves in NO as 28%. Here is a cut and paste from this article: According to federal census reports, on June 1, 1860 there were nearly 4.5 million Negroes in the United States, with fewer than four million of them living in the southern slaveholding states. Of the blacks residing in the South, 261,988 were not slaves. Of this number, 10,689 lived in New Orleans. The country’s leading African American historian, Duke University professor John Hope Franklin, records that in New Orleans over 3,000 free Negroes owned slaves, or 28 percent of the free Negroes in that city.
http://americancivilwar.com/authors/black_slaveowners.htm
There are more articles. I did a search on Yahoo asking “what percentage of blacks owned slaves” and came up with this.
I think you’ll find that is the case in small numbers, but as you might take note from the small number of links I provided it disputes your given percentages and shows some historical facts taken from census counts at the time. It also shows a number of blacks who owned numerous slaves to run their plantations.
Please provide some proof to backup your given percentages. I would be interested in seeing the sources.
The survival rates of slaves in North America were, I believe, higher than in the West Indies and South America even before 1808.
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