The US participation in the world slave trade was really the rump end of it. By far, the bulk of it was with Brazil and the Caribbean islands.
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 ...
To hear our white liberal elites talk we all want illegals in the US... but in fact that illegal 'servant class' only services white liberal elites.
Elites get the gold - we get the shaft. Just like slavery - slavery only serviced white liberal elites in the South.
The rest of us paid for that with reduced wages then - and massive debt now.
And for that - to this day - blacks blame most of their problems on slavery... idiots. We all paid - well, except liberal elites.
The US participation in the world slave trade was really the rump end of it. By far, the bulk of it was with Brazil and the Caribbean islands.
One entirely constitutional way of putting a major crimp in slavery would have been for Congress to prohibit interstate trade in slaves. I’ve never seen this discussed anywhere, however, neither then or now.
BTW, Lincoln agreed fugitive slaves must be returned. He just insisted on reasonable due process to determine they actually were slaves, which seems reasonable.
Abortion was thrust upon the nation against it's will, largely in part due to the Horribly written and blatantly abused 14th amendment which was the consequence of the violations of other and more important principles back in the 1860s.
You Union Supporters own abortion, homosexual marriage, anchor babies, Wickard v Fillburn, the banning of prayer in schools and even the election of this current @$$hole in chief who does not posses "natural born citizenship" but is instead only a citizen as a consequence of the 14th amendment.
You guys own that 14th amendment disaster.
But the article doesn't appear to support the assertion:
"Initially, taxes were levied not in accordance to the population numbers, but the actual value of the land. Many states began to depreciate the value of the land in order to provide for relief from their taxes. A committee was held that would rectify the situation by implementing the apportionment of taxes in relation to the state’s population. However, this idea was met with the dispute over how to consider slaves in the apportionment process and the actual ratio of slaves to free people at that time.
For the most part, those who opposed slavery only wanted to consider the free people of a population, while those in favor wanted to include slaves in the population count."
Nor did we bother launching a massive invasion army to stamp out that evil slavery in the nearby Caribbean Islands. Funny how it was only a moral imperative when it was connected with Washington D.C. losing power over a group of people.
It's almost as if the US Union took no real notice of slavery, except when it was convenient to a larger issue; That of who would rule.
1808. The Constitution banned Congress from interfering with the importation of slaves up till 1808, after which they promptly banned it.
At any rate, because of the Bloodiest war in American history,the south was ruined, the powerful benefitted. It was lunacy on the scale of what we have today.
Same forces, just different arguments. Today we still have the elite and monied Liberal interests dictating what morality the rest of the Nation will have forced upon us.
Now our new morality is "Gay Marriage", and in the future they will teach that the Constitution has Always protected "Gay Marriage" and "Transgenders".
Future Union supporters (brainwashed useful idiots) will argue about how immoral it was to deny equality to homosexuals who wanted to get married.
And so the North agreed to a term that provided absolutely no benefit whatsoever to themselves? Oh, but Wait! They wouldn't have gotten a deal otherwise, so apparently whatever benefit they received was a consequence of the Deal they made! (It was continuing independence from England. That was their benefit. )
But you make the argument that the North would have been far better off not to make such a deal, and i'm inclined to think the South certainly would have been.
The consequences remain, not the least of which are the constantly occurring outrages that are the result of the horribly written, and extortion ratified, 14th amendment.
This also says nothing about the social devastation that has been the aftermath of the Civil War. It was that conflict that birthed our existing FedZilla and it's disdain for states rights and it's annoyance with constitutional law.
That is the question you need to ask Thomas Jefferson who mischievously introduced this dichotomy into the American conscience.
Obviously no one agreed with him at the time, nor did he himself apply this idea to his own life.
I don’t disagree. Yet I always, for myself, come back to the circumstances of the forming of said “union” wherein the signees entered freely into a union that contained no mention of the inability to remove themselves from the union if they so desired. A “union” is by choice, and its perpetuation should be “by choice,” not by armed conflict to forcibly retain the constituents.
But not until two years after a group of states threw off the rule of Washington D.C. *THAT* is when it suddenly became necessary to look after their rights and interests.
Prior to that, they didn't need their rights and interests looked after.
Don’t try to reason with these pro union uber alles Free republic Lincoln worshipping fascists.
And those that started the war, lost the war. Your point is?
There is one way to enter the union - through Congress. There are two ways to leave - through Congress or by rebellion. The southern slaver aristocracy chose the latter. They chose poorly.
Yes, someone from the freedom loving state of Washington would say that.
You guys won. But that doesn’t mean what you collectively did to accomplish that was forgotten.
At the same time, though, poor whites in the south were some of the most ardent supporters of slavery because they didn't want to have to compete with free black labor. In the years before the war, there were efforts in parts of the south to either expel or re-enslave free blacks for exactly this reason.
It was a compromise, and better than counting each and every slave for purposes of congressional representation which is what the slave states were demanding.
But you make the argument that the North would have been far better off not to make such a deal, and i'm inclined to think the South certainly would have been.
And when did I make that argument?
They chose what seemed like a reasonable path at the time. They restricted importing slaves by ship in 1794, just 6 years after the Constitution was ratified.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_Trade_Act_of_1794
After 20 years, importing slaves was banned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_Prohibiting_Importation_of_Slaves
It was reasonably thought these measures would lead to an end of slavery without needing a war. That proved to be a false hope, but it was a reasonable approach.
I have no idea of what you point is here. Not quite two years into the rebellion, Lincoln issues his Emancipation Proclamation as a war-time measure to free Southern slaves that might have been used to further the rebel war effort. Nowhere in that document is there anything about "rights" for the freed slaves. In fact the 3/5ths rule remained in effect until the 14the Amendment. But as free men and women then the newly emancipated slaves did count as a whole person because they were no longer property.
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