Posted on 02/17/2021 7:09:23 AM PST by SJackson
There is no need for me to name names. So many people do it. Secular people as well as religious people; lay historians as well as men and women of the cloth; rabbis as well as ministers and priests; people who believe that Adam and Eve's disobedience resulted in their expulsion from paradise and the estrangement of human beings from God, and people who have never given the Fall and its consequences a moment's thought; left-wingers, right wingers and just about everyone in between. It is one of the few things about which longtime political opponents Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and former President Barack Obama agree: Slavery was America's original sin.
The habit might seem harmless, shorthand for saying that slavery was distant, deeply embedded and bad. All history is hindsight. We often see things that people couldn't or didn't see at the time. We tell stories and offer interpretations that depend on our knowledge of events that happened between then and now. We make comparisons and all kinds of judgements. We employ metaphors.
The idea that slavery was America's original sin is one such metaphor, used at least as far back as the debate, in 1819, about the admission of Missouri to the union as a slave state. The problem is that it is a weak, misleading metaphor, concealing much more than it reveals about early American history, the institution of slavery, the aftermath of slavery and the messy business of making a nation. We should abandon it. Here are a few of the reasons why.
For starters, the phrase is a theological characterization of a secular institution.
As history, it is anachronistic.
Then there is the question of who committed "our" original sin.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
From CNN? Looks like someone was ready to retire and was ready to turn in their notice. He’s toast.
Might as quote from Roger Tawney’s decision in the Dred Scot decision. This position has always been the Democrat / progressive / racist and now multicultural position.
The Republican position was well stated by Abraham Lincoln in his Cooper Union address.
https://www.aier.org/article/what-would-lincoln-do/
Slavery was ended in 1865, less than 100 years after the founding of the United States. It was ended by moral and just white men. Leave it in the past. That would be possible, save for those who profit from keeping the hate alive.
Slavery was NOT America’s sin.
It was here before the Europeans and African and Middle Easterners brought THEIR brand of it here...
Sheesh... we broke from those idiots, formed a nation and got RID of slavery within a hundred years...
Why is this NEVER celebrated???
Meanwhile, slavery STILL goes on in countries our government continues to send our tax $$$$ to!
Not a PEEP about that tho!..
They are never honest and answer the question "why LaQueefa can't read?". My mother went barefoot to a one room schoolhouse, ate white bread with margarine sprinkled with sugar for lunch. No electricity at home. A wood stove to cook and heat the house with. Ma had far more in common with "slaves" and poor blacks than do the EBT Section 8 WIC welfare crowd.
Ma was way, way poorer than any of ghetto dwellers can imagine. Yet my mother was one of the most well read persons I've ever known. She could quote Kipling by heart, and Charles Dickens too. Ma imparted that love of knowledge and morality to all her children. And thanks to training in the US military, ma acquired a skilled career and met a good man, stayed married, and they provided us kids with a wonderful home, pointing us onto the straight and narrow.
Really most humans that ever lived before 1776 were slaves of one kind or another. Call them what you want, coolies, peasants of a king, serfs, captives of another tribe, life under the Soviets, or Mao, etc.
Most humans alive came from slavery.
Those pyramids and megaliths all over earth weren’t built by hired labor under the rules of capitalism.
We are the people who ended slavery. We hear all kinds of chatter about how it was the British who ended it. What the Brits did was cynical self interest. After they lost the colonies and had none in South America, they wanted the transatlantic slave trade killed so they could work their Indians and coolies.
They didn’t want competition.
And he repeats the same ignorant libel. It’s inexcusable because he is a history professor.
“Practically, the three-fifths clause allowed enslavers to maintain political power disproportionate to their numbers.
Symbolically, and horribly, it defined enslaved people (and by extension all African Americans) as subhuman.”
It did the opposite. In the face of the world’s main superpower the colonies had to unite or would face certain death. The compromise was a weakening the political power of the slaveholding south, without a split that would kill the budding nation. It was also a tacit message to the south. “If you insist the slaves are not fully human, you may not count them as such to increase your political power”.
This “professor” has it backwards. the 3/5 compromise is something to be proud of.
The South advocated counting slaves as fully human for the purpose of representation in Congress - an unintended baby-step by the South toward eventually recognizing full racial equality.
The North was having none of it. They did not want slaves counted at all. The 3/5 compromise was just that: compromise.
It still rankles many that the North advocated giving zero recognition to slaves. To do more would probably brought the North's slave trade into question.
More unbalanced than that. Most estimates of slaves transported from Africa to the hemisphere range from 11 to 13 million. Around 5 million to Brazil. Transported to the English colonies, all 25 to 31 or 32 of them, about 660-700,000. Of those, about half to the 13 North American colonies. Approximately, Henry Lewis Gates Jr puts the number a little higher, 388,000 to the 13 colonies, of 10.7 million surviving the passage, just over 3.5%.
I'd tend to come down on maintaining slave holders power side, but both are credible. Depends on whether you consider non citizen (free) slaves to deserve representation in Congress. Same argument we're having today over counting illegals in the census, providing non citizens representation in Congress, which I oppose.
Completely, yes as a Federal Republic it was a state issue, Lincoln agreed with that. But before we had states, colonies banned slavery. Vermont the first in 1777, a year after the Declaration of Independence. By 1804, less than 30 years later, all the northern states had banned slavery.
If you want to change the 21st century nation dramatically, destroying it's heritage is essential. Destroying history at the forefront. The current progressive objective is the destruction and replacement of our mode of government, thus history must be changed, starting with the children. And yes, at some point dissidents will have to be dealt with.
Really most humans that ever lived before 1776
Indeed in the 1600’s to the 1700’s Africa had more slave trading of European’s the Iris were sold for half the price then the blacks.
I like to trigger LibTards by saying slavery is Africa’s original sin and Africa’s most consequential export to mankind.
Hope you remind them it includes both black and Arab Africans. That'll get an enhanced response.
I certainly do. I also ask them why they are obsessed with events that happened 500 years ago but ignore the slavery that exists today.
People here in the north fought a war to stop slavery. My family lost several family members and some were wounded during the civil war. To call slavery America’s original sin is just wrong. It was people in the south that tried to hang on to slavery, not the northerners. More Americans than not objected to slavery. We won out in the end. It has been 160 years or so since there were slaves in this country. I object to those who would label all Americans slave owners. We were not!
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