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 ...
States Rights - the south went to war over the issue of the centralized government (feds) wanting to lord it over them. slavery was a secondary issue. The average everyday southern had no slaves. The average Confederate Soldier was not fighting for the blacks, but for a way of life that they only knew.
Your mention of Uncle Tom stimulated this question: How many of our ancestors were abolitionists or part of the underground railroad ? Has anyone ever studied that subject?
(Mine were. Have my grandmothers copy of Uncle Toms Cabin)
I don't see how that is relevant to what the article at the top of this thread is saying. Regardless it's hard to drum up a lot of sympathy for those who started the war and then lost it.
Many families were on both sides of the issue.
Not according to the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography.
So how was the centralized government lording it over the southern states?
My family picked cotton on plantations next to slaves. They saw slaves as people who took jobs away from them. Kind of like companies that use illegal aliens and foreign labor today; they do so to cut out Americans and get cheap labor. They were happy to end slavery but the issue of what to do with all the slaves wasn’t answered. On one hand freeing slaves into the general population scared them and free slaves would present even more of a labor competition. Taking them back to Africa wasn’t going to be practical, either. The issue of slavery was a massive headache no matter how it was addressed.
The Northern states benefitted indirectly from slavery just as your family members benefitted from your Father's car. The difference is the people in the North who built vast fortunes for themselves and their progeny trading in the commodities of slavery got to keep theirs.
“Same with slavery. Maybe 4.8% of the people in the South owned slaves. But those people had spouses and children who all gained from that person owning the slave.”
No, they didn’t. Ridiculous conclusion.
From Wiki
>>Though Casor was the first person declared a slave in a civil case, there were both black and white indentured servants sentenced to lifetime servitude before him. Many historians describe indentured servant John Punch as the first documented slave in America, as he was sentenced to life in servitude as punishment for escaping in 1640.<<
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Johnson_%28colonist%29#Casor_suit
“Same with slavery. Maybe 4.8% of the people in the South owned slaves. But those people had spouses and children who all gained from that person owning the slave.”
We don’t benefit from illegal aliens or foreigners holding job in the US today no more than anyone other than the slave holder benefitted from a slave.
Being forced to spend 40% of one’s working life slaving for the gov’t is really only a difference in degree not a difference in kind. Especially for a gov’t not acting in the consent of the ruled (”governed”).
Ridiculous how? Ridiculous in that no slave holders had spouses and families? Or ridiculous in that those family members got no benefit from the slaves?
Irrespective of what percentage of American families owned slaves. The fact is it was legal in this nation for sometime. So where do we go from here? If historical slavery is the ultimate evil. What do we do about most of the founders? What about the American flag that flew over legal slavery much longer than the Confederate flag? Do we just eradicate our history?
Righto. Sadly, that way of life was based on slavery, as they themselves repeatedly said.
Feel free to point out exactly how the central government was lording it over the South in 1860.
In actual fact, southern Democrats walked out of the Democratic Party convention in 1860 (twice) over refusal of northern Democrats to bow to their demand for a federal Slave Code imposing slavery in every territory, regardless of whether the inhabitants wanted it or not.
So there is actually a better case that the South seceded because they didn’t get the expansion of federal power they wanted.
Perspective is right.
Today, many Southerners will tell you that the War of Northern Aggression was about States’ rights. (That’s the point of the comments that make up the thread title; see, most Southerners weren’t slave owners so that couldn’t be why they fought...)
Yankees will tell you the Civil War was fought over slavery.
Both perspectives have value.
Indeed, the two issues were intricately linked from our founding:
The 3/5ths compromise was designed to prevent an overrepresentation of the pro-slavery position in the new government. Our founders punted this issue down the decades.
The 3/5ths clause that kept apportionment down in slave areas kept representation down in the South, generally. The two issues, slavery and representation, were tied together from our start.
I believe that it’s correct to say that the average rebel fighter was fighting to protect his home and not slavery (or States’ Rights for that matter). His leaders had a different agenda. They wanted freedom from a representation mismatch that put them at a disadvantage, for sure. They also believed that the “necessary evil” would be essential to provide the economic freedom that would be an integral part of the political freedom they sought. Cotton is King.
To say that the War was only about slavery misses the point just as much as to say it wasn’t about slavery at all.
It was about States’ rights. For those making decisions in the South, that meant the war was about slavery as well.
What is ridiculous about it? Did Scarlett O’Hara benefit from slavery?
The spouse and children of the guy employing illegal immigrants for increased profit don’t benefit from his doing so?
A reasonable perspective. Except that the only states’ right southern leaders really were concerned about, or that they felt was threatened was the right to own slaves.
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