Posted on 07/07/2015 3:17:08 AM PDT by dennisw
In 1860 only a small minority of whites owned slaves. According to the U.S. census report for that last year before the Civil War, there were nearly 27 million whites in the country. Some eight million of them lived in the slaveholding states.
The census also determined that there were fewer than 385,000 individuals who owned slaves (1). Even if all slaveholders had been white, that would amount to only 1.4 percent of whites in the country (or 4.8 percent of southern whites owning one or more slaves).
The rare instances when the ownership of slaves by free Negroes is acknowledged in the history books, justification centers on the claim that black slave masters were simply individuals who purchased the freedom of a spouse or child from a white slaveholder and had been unable to legally manumit them. Although this did indeed happen at times, it is a misrepresentation of the majority of instances, one which is debunked by records of the period on blacks who owned slaves. These include individuals such as Justus Angel and Mistress L. Horry, of Colleton District, South Carolina, who each owned 84 slaves in 1830. In fact, in 1830 a fourth of the free Negro slave masters in South Carolina owned 10 or more slaves; eight owning 30 or more (2).
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 thisnumber, 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
And you do like to twist things into knots. The purpose of this post seemed to be that slavery could not be a cause of the Southern rebellion because so few people owned slaves. It ignores the fact that far more people drew direct benefit from slavery than merely the slave owners. Therefore it makes sense that the South would be willing to rebel to protect it. You, on the other hand, throw in useless questions about the North benefiting from slavery when slavery was not a reason why they fought the war that was forced upon them.
And this is the truth. All the Slave money earned in the Northern states was allowed to remain in their hands instead of being confiscated to buy the freedom of Slaves. Indeed, Northerners traveled to the South to sell their slaves before the Deadlines for Abolition in the Northern states caught them.
Just as Apple uses virtual slave labor to build it's products, so too are modern Liberals perfectly content with profiting from the fruits of their labor so long as they are personally disassociated from the messy business of running a slave production line.
They can keep their profits and their moral superiority at the same time!
Men like Simon Legree existed. More to the point, there was nothing in the legal system to prevent him from doing what he did.
Stowe portrayed a wide variety of slave owners. Many of them decent, just or even kind.
She nowhere made any claim that Legree was typical, in fact quite the opposite. But southerners latched onto what they claimed was a distortion in an attempt to discredit the entire book.
Unlike most who opine about Uncle Tom’s Cabin, I’ve actually read the book.
An interesting point I've never been able to find figures on. If you have any, I'd be really interested in seeing them.
You mean they took the choice of having even less Federal power? How does that make any sense?
The dodge that the war was about slavery misses a crucial point. The Union did not launch an invasion of the South to stop slavery. They launched an invasion of the South to stop Independence.
The slavery dodge is just good propaganda, but at the start of the war, the union was going to stop independence, but continue slavery.
"Stamping out Independence" doesn't make for good press, but "Abolishing Slavery" does, so they pulled the old bait and switch.
A bunch of people are still falling for the con.
Or more importantly, the ultimate buyers of these products?
Well according to you, you say it was the engine of their economy. What would you feel like if someone decided to say, stop you from using fossil fuels because they thought it was a great moral imperative for you to do so?
Say they had this great moral crises, like, oh, I don't know, "Global Warming" and the only solution is that you have to stop using fossil fuels, but not them of course.
I dunno, if someone wanted to gut the engine of my economic activity, I would be concerned about it. On the other hand, you can let me know when you stop driving cars or heating your home. Electricity? Well that's out too, unless you live up in Hydroelectric Oregon or New York.
A reasonable point.
Except that abolitionists weren’t using slaves, so they weren’t trying to make southerners stop using them while continuing to use them themselves.
The problem was not that slavery would be easy to get rid of. Every reasonable person agreed it would not be easy. Lincoln stated many times that it would be very difficult.
However, the Republican position was simply that a great evil doesn’t become good because it’s difficult to get rid of. First agree that it is an evil, and then we can discuss ways of reducing and eventually eliminating it.
But southerners, increasingly over the 19th century and very nearly unanimously by 1860, refused to agree slavery was an evil. They insisted it was a positive good and should be continued forever and spread into new areas.
That’s what Republicans objected to and to support which the original seven states seceded.
Sounds like a bad agreement. If the Northern states had just stuck to their moral guns and refused to make a deal with the Southern states, why everyone would have been better off in the long run. Right?
As it is, they made a morally odious deal, which they subsequently sought to undermine at every opportunity, culminating in them eventually breaking the deal which they agreed to in the first place, after obtaining every possible advantage from it while it lasted.
It helped to secure their independence, it helped to boost their sales and economy, it provided them with much needed capital, and when they became rich, they didn't need it any more. They could afford their recently found morals. Now that the deal no longer served their interests, they could look down their noses at it, but without it, there is a good chance they would still be part of England.
Bait and switch. That was a very successfully played game.
I was using “Simon Legree” figuratively. The majority of slaves were held by the big planters, who were a tiny minority of the slaveholders, who were themselves a minority of white southerners. From the black perspective, slavery was typified by large slave gangs, extensive slave quarters, overseers, a divergent slave culture, and generally impersonal relations with their owners. The arrangement may not have been brutal, though it sometimes was, but it was NOT the small scale, often paternalistic “domestic servitude” that typified the institution for the great majority of white slave owners. 150 years later, white people and black people both look back and see slavery, but they tend to see very different impressions of it. And both are correct.
In 1860 southern Democrats insisted on a pledge in their party platform that a Federal Slave Code protecting slave property would be imposed by Congress on all territories, and that federal troops would be used if necessary to enforce it.
The idea being to get around Douglas and his notion that territories in could exclude slavery by simply refusing to enforce it. Southern Democrats insisted this out be removed and that the Democratic Party agree to actively support the expansion of slavery. This would of course be an expansion of federal power.
Northern Democrats refused, and southern Democrats walked out of the convention, twice. Guaranteeing Lincoln’s election and therefore secession.
Which are effectively the same Demographic groups. I read this the other day. It argues that the Civil war was really a continuation of a much older war between the English and the Scots-Irish.
Of course, the flag is not really the issue. That’s why normal people are caught off-guard whenever the Cult starts waving it around and ululating like lunatics. The real issue is the long War Between the Whites that started in the 19th century and continues to this day. We call this the Civil War and that’s a good label, but I prefer my label, as it is more precise. Civil War implies both sides were equal or the same or viewed one another in that way. They never did and they still don’t.In the 19th century, northern whites of mostly English ancestry used slavery as an excuse to attack and kill as a many Southern whites as possible. Those southern whites were of mostly Scots-Irish ancestry. The northern whites were ready to join their European coevals in the industrial, global age and they did not want those backward agrarian crackers holding them back. Slavery had to go and the people responsible for it had to be punished.
Interesting take on the topic.
Well, no. Because if northerners had insisted on abolition as a condition of Union, there would have been no Union.
As I think I’ve repeatedly noted, slavery at the Convention is a much bigger issue in our eyes than it was at the time.
Everybody believed it would just fade away. So they simply let the sleeping dog lie, on the theory he would just die in his sleep.
Oh please. Tariffs on imported Machinery suited Northern Interests at the expense of Southern Interests. (It raised the costs of their competition.) No Tariffs on imported agricultural products also suited Northern Interests at the expense of Southern Interests.
They consistently kept their thumb on the legislative scale in ways that always suited the financial interests of the North, but did not suit the financial interests of the South.
One might say North and South was comprised of the same demographic groups, but as a born and raised southerner, I know that isn’t true with respect to culture and ideas about freedom, tradition, and belonging.
You can feel the palpable hatred by Northerners for Southerners in most any comedian’s routine when playing to a NYC audience, for example.
And this is a valid and objective point from you. I have seen others argue that the Slave holders expected the same sort of "Executive Order" bullshit and Executive Departmental foot dragging and obstinacy, interfering with their rights in the manner Obama uses today to accomplish most of his agenda.
There were refusals to enforce the fugitive slave laws, and every legal or sophist trick was being used against them; the events that triggered the Dred Scott case being an example.
Yeah they were lying, and were doing anything in their power to refuse to comply with the deal they made back in 1789, or the actual and correct meanings of the law. Much like with many issues of today, such as "Gay Marriage".
My family did not arrive until after 1900. They also did not settle in a Confederate state. I have no ancestral bone in this fight, I merely point out that the Declaration of Independence should apply to the Southern States in the same manner it applied to the original 13 slave holding colonies.
Tariffs did not directly affect regions differently.
The effects were distributed by occupation, not region.
North and South, most people were farmers at the time. An Iowa corn farmer was affected pretty much the same as an Alabama planter by tariffs.
Those who benefited most from protective tariffs were the manufacturers and workers in specific industries. Two of the heaviest protective tariffs, BTW, were on hemp and sugar, both growth primarily with slave labor.
But you still haven’t answered a couple of questions I posed above.
Are you aware that tariffs in 1860 were the lowest they’d been in decades?
Let’s assume tariffs did indeed fall disproportionately on the southern economy. Would getting out from under them justify secession and the distinct chance of war?
Finally, let’s assume secession went over peacefully. How do you think southerners were going to pay for their new government and its armed forces? Would they be content permanently to have necessary military supplies be subject to interruption by blockade, or would they have introduced something with the effect if not the name of protective tariffs to encourage production of essential military supplies domestically?
Sometimes for a quick~n~dirty confirmation I’ll use wackypedia but I’m sure you would like something a bit more credible than them ;’)
Here’s one brief source:
http://constitution.laws.com/three-fifths-compromise
And here is a better one:
http://www.heritage.org/constitution#!/articles/1/essays/6/three-fifths-clause
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