Posted on 07/10/2018 3:50:58 PM PDT by Trump20162020
On Saturday, the U.S. Embassy in Haiti warned American citizens, volunteers and missionaries in Haiti to stay in place and hunker down after angry demonstrators attempted to get past a barricade and security guards at a Port-au-Prince hotel.
CNN reports that American Airlines, JetBlue and the Spirit Airlines (whose official slogan is: “We’re like a Greyhound bus with wings”) canceled all flights to Haiti following unrest in the country related to rising fuel prices, corruption and widespread poverty.
When comparing them side-by-side, the story of the American Revolution ain’t got shit on the history of Haiti. For black people, Haiti represents the most beautiful story of strength, resistance and freedom that has ever been told. It is the story of a people who thrust off the chains of bondage and took their liberty from the hands of their oppressors.
For others, Haiti is a tragedy. There are some, whose names do not deserve mention, who even refer to it as a “shithole country.” But when discussing anything having to do with the country of Haiti, we should never forget that every bit of struggle in Haiti is related to the legacy of slavery, capitalism and American hypocrisy.
As unrest envelops Haiti once again, it is important for us to remember that Haiti suffers from a worldwide collusion between America and European countries intent on making the tropical paradise suffer. To blame Haiti’s problems on white people is not a harebrained hypothesis. It is an unbelievably treacherous fact that it often sounds like a kooky conspiracy theory.
(Excerpt) Read more at theroot.com ...
Here's some more background.
https://civilwartalk.com/threads/civilian-deaths-civil-war.23466/
If they are wrong, I will disagree with them.
I guess you don’t get sarcasm.
Because it's a private resort leased to them for the use of their ships. Holland America has Half Moon Cay, Disney has Castaway Cay, Princess has Princess Cay - all in the Bahamas - and Royal Caribbean has Labadee.
Can't sell free labor.
Yes they did. Before 1808, American ships flying the American flag, crewed by Americans sailed to West Africa, bought slaves there and imported them into the country. The Americans participated in the slave trade. We were not the heavy weight hitters of that trade, only about 2 or 3 percent of slaves were carried on American ships but we did participate. After the importation of slaves became illegal, Americans continued to be involved in the slave trade. Instead of coming to America, the slaves went primarily to Cuba and the other Caribbean islands. Often American slave ships would sail under false flags. In addition to direct participation in the slave trade, American ship yards built ships for the slave trade, American banks lent money to pay for the voyages, and American insurance companies insured the ships and the black ivory they transported.
Do not understand your statement.
Therefore the war could not be about something that wouldn't change. It had to be about something that would change with the South's independence.
That change was where the money was going to go.
Slavery was the major driving impetus for the first seven Southern states to leave the Union. Not the only reason, but the major one. Had the Southern states not seceded, slavery would have remained legal in the United States for many more years to come before being outlawed or dying a natural death.
In what way? How was leaving the Union going to change slavery in their states? How was it going to change anything about slavery?
“In what way? How was leaving the Union going to change slavery in their states? How was it going to change anything about slavery”
Of the first seven seceding states, four issued “Reasons for secession” documents.
1. 1st out, South Carolina (12/20/1860): mentioned no reasons other than slavery.
“On the 4th day of March next, this party will take possession of the Government.
It has announced that the South shall be excluded from the common territory, that the judicial tribunals shall be made sectional, and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States.”
2. 2nd Mississippi (1/9/1981) mentioned no reasons other than slavery.
“Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery— the greatest material interest of the world.”
3. Florida (1/10/1861) listed no reasons period.
4. Alabama (1/11/1861) Ordnance of Secession mentions only slavery.
“Whereas, the election of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin to the offices of president and vice-president of the United States of America, by a sectional party, avowedly hostile to the domestic institutions...”
5. Georgia (1/19/1861) Reasons for Secession focuses primarily on slavery and does not mention either tariffs or taxes, but does complain about bounties for fishing smacks and other such Northern “aggrandizements”.
“A brief history of the rise, progress, and policy of anti-slavery and the political organization into whose hands the administration of the Federal Government has been committed will fully justify the pronounced verdict of the people of Georgia.
The party of Lincoln, called the Republican party, under its present name and organization, is of recent origin.
It is admitted to be an anti-slavery party.”
6. Louisiana (1/26/1861) listed no reasons period.
7. Texas (2/18/1861) focused primarily on slavery but does also complain, saying Secretary of war Jefferson Davis’ new army brigades (1856 — R.E. Lee 2nd in command) sent to protect Texans against “Indian savages” and Mexican “banditti” did a lousy job of it.
Texans said nothing about taxes, tariffs or bounties to northern industries.
“In all the non-slave-holding States, in violation of that good faith and comity which should exist between entirely distinct nations, the people have formed themselves into a great sectional party, now strong enough in numbers to control the affairs of each of those States, based upon an unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of equality of all men, irrespective of race or color — a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of Divine Law.
They demand the abolition of negro slavery throughout the confederacy, the recognition of political equality between the white and negro races, and avow their determination to press on their crusade against us, so long as a negro slave remains in these States. “
Two other “reasons for secession” documents are worth mention:
• South Carolina — Fire Eater Robert Rhett’s December 1861 address says more about slavery than any other reason, but does go on about Britain’s 1776 taxes, comparing them to 1861 US taxes.
Rhett says nothing specific about tariffs or “bounties”.
“The people of the South have been taxed by duties on imports not for revenue, but for an object inconsistent with revenue — to promote, by prohibitions, Northern interests in the productions of their mines and manufactures.”
Of course, those duties would also promote “mines and manufactures” in the South, had Southerners been interested.
• Georgia, CSA VP Alexander Stephen’s “Cornerstone Speech” March 21, 1861 puts the case as clear & simple as can be imagained:
“Our new government is founded upon exactly [this] idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone 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.
This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.[1]”
While not in its Secession declaration Arkansas’s view also apply:
Arkansas, like the entire Upper South, was torn on the issue of secession during Spring 1861. The state’s secession convention assembled on March 4, 1861, to consider the state’s future vis-à-vis the Union. It is clear that conditional unionists in Arkansas quickly took control of the gathering, as on March 20 rather than seceding, the convention issued a series of resolutions expressing its grievances and making constitutional demands to satisfy them. The March 2o resolution demonstrates that in Arkansas, like other southern states, the crisis that would shortly lead to the outbreak of the Civil War, centered on slavery.
Section 1 of the resolution statements criticized the Republican Party that the convention believed was an enemy of slavery.
“1. The people of the northern States have organized a political party, purely sectional in its character; the central and controlling idea of which is hostility to the institution of African slavery, as it exists in the southern States, and that party has elected a President and Vice President of the United States, pledged to administer the government upon principles inconsistent with the rights, and subversive of the interests of the people of the southern States.”
Section 2 expressed a number of grievances common to the southern states related to slavery, including the Republican Party’s intention of closing the territories to slavery and the refusal of northern states to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act.
“They have denied to the people of the southern States the right to an equal participation in the benefits of the common territories of the Union by refusing them the same protection to their slave property therein that is afforded to other property, and by declaring that no more slave states shall be admitted into the Union. They have by their prominent men and leaders, declared the doctrine of the irrepressible conflict, or the assertion of the principle that the institution of slavery is incompatible with freedom, and that both cannot exist at once, that this continent must be wholly free or wholly slave. They have, in one or more instances, refused to surrender negro thieves to the constitutional demand of the constituted authority of a sovereign State.”
Section 3 exhibited the Arkansas convention’s fear the Lincoln administration would seek to end slavery in areas of exclusive federal jurisdiction.
“They have declared that Congress possesses, under the constitution, and ought to exercise, the power to abolish slavery in the territories, in the District of Columbia, and in the forts, arsenals and dock-yards of the United States, within the limits of the slaveholding States.”
Section 4 berated northern state legislatures for passing personal liberty laws to obstruct the Fugitive Slave Act.
“They have, in disregard of their constitutional obligations, obstructed the faithful execution of the fugitive slave laws by enactments of their State legislatures.”
Section 5 complained the northern states would not allow slaveholders temporarily to bring their slaves securely into free territory.
“They have denied the citizens of southern States the right of transit through non-slaveholding States with their slaves, and the right to hold them while temporarily sojourning therein.”
Section 6 manifested the contempt of white Southerners for those northern states that had given African Americans suffrage, clearing articulating a radicalized view of citizenship.
They have degraded American citizens by placing them upon an equality with negroes at the ballot box.”
It was European ships, initially Portuguese/Spanish ships that transported the vast majority of slaves to their plantations in the Indies and South America. Later the British became the main transporters. It was Europeans that had the licenses to purchase slaves.
This isn’t to say Americans were more moral than the others. Rather, America didn’t have the ships and early on didn’t even have a Navy to protect them on the high seas. Some Africans did come in on ships flying the American flag. Some came from the Islands of the Caribbean up as north as Boston. Yes, Boston had slave auctions. Other American ships were those engaged in smuggling slaves. But we’re talking a minuscule number relative to the Portuguese, British and other European countries.
For fun, try telling someone from Boston or from Portugal, Spain, England or any of the European countries about *their* involvement in the slave trade. They’ll say, Oh no, it’s the US that did all the trading and the shipping. The US owes reparations, not us.”
What was going to change in real practical terms?
In their view, secession would preserve slavery as it existed at the time they seceded. A rational thought, if they felt their economic underpinnings were threatened by the ideas of a Republican majority Congress and a Republican President.
It would not have changed. Any rational person can see that slavery would have continued in the Union unchanged as it had been for "four score and seven years".
You are asserting that the illusion of change was the cause of the war. Of course they didn't expect a war, so it's hard to see how you can assert that even the illusion that slavery was threatened could have led to a war.
A rational thought, if they felt their economic underpinnings were threatened by the ideas of a Republican majority Congress and a Republican President.
It's hard to see how anyone could rationally have believed that. Firstly it was constitutionally impossible, and secondly both Lincoln and the Congress had offered them additional constitutional protections, which somehow didn't sway them at all.
There was no real potential of any changes to their system either in or out of the Union. This is why I point out that the claim the war was about slavery doesn't make any sense, and I have since come to regard it as just propaganda to justify what was done to them.
“I have since come to regard it as just propaganda to justify what was done to them” Much of that “propaganda” can be found in the excerpts of their secession ordnances. Don’t tell me. Tell them. They left the Union before Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as President. The operative word is “rational.”
Well that dovetails with another of my points. It was propaganda for them too, meaning it was illusory rather than real.
What was the reality? Money was the reality. All the talk and hype don't disguise the numbers when you take the time to look at the numbers. Most people stop at the hype, and never bother looking at the numbers, but the numbers tell the truth.
"now the mask has been thrown off and it is apparent that the people of the principal seceding states are now for commercial independence. They dream that the centres of traffic can be changed from Northern to Southern ports . . . by a revenue system verging on free trade. . . . The government would be false to its obligations if this state of things were not provided against.
The Boston Transcript March 18, 1861
.
.
“We apprehend, that the Cotton States, especially the chief instigator of the present troubles—South Carolina,—have all along for years been preparing the way for the adoption of the policy of free trade.”
Newark Daily Advertiser April 2, 1861
If it's propaganda then a lot of Southerners fell for it.
"African slavery is the cornerstone of the industrial, social, and political fabric of the South; and whatever wars against it, wars against her very existence. Strike down the institution of African slavery and you reduce the South to depoulation and barbarism." - South Carolina Congressman Lawrence Keitt, 1860
"Our people have come to this on the question of slavery. I am willing, in that address to rest it upon that question. I think it is the great central point from which we are now proceeding, and I am not willing to divert the public attention from it." - Lawrence Keitt
"The triumphs of Christianity rest this very hour upon slavery; and slavery depends on the triumphs of the South... This war is the servant of slavery." - Rev John Wrightman, South Carolina, 1861.
"[Recruiting slaves into the army] is abolition doctrine ... the very doctrine which the war was commenced to put down." - Editorial, Jan 1865, North Carolina Standard
"What did we go to war for, if not to protect our [slave] property?" - CSA senator from Virgina, Robert Hunter, 1865
"I am not ashamed of having fought on the side of slavery—a soldier fights for his country—right or wrong—he is not responsible for the political merits of the course he fights in ... The South was my country." - John Singleton Mosby
"The vandals of the North . . . are determined to destroy slavery . . . We must all fight, and I choose to fight for southern rights and southern liberty." - [Lunsford Yandell, Jr. to Sally Yandell, April 22, 1861 in James M. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War, p. 20]
"A stand must be made for African slavery or it is forever lost." - William Grimball to Elizabeth Grimball, Nov. 20, 1860, Ibid.
"This country without slave labor would be completely worthless. We can only live & exist by that species of labor; and hence I am willing to fight for the last." - [William Nugent to Eleanor Nugent, Sept 7, 1863, Ibid., p. 107]
"Better, far better! endure all the horrors of civil war than to see the dusky sons of Ham leading the fair daughters of the South to the altar." - [William M. Thomson to Warner A. Thomson, Feb. 2, 1861, Ibid., p. 19]
"A captain in the 8th Alabama also vowed 'to fight forever, rather than submit to freeing negroes among us. . . . [We are fighting for] rights and property bequeathed to us by our ancestors.' " - [Elias Davis to Mrs. R. L. Lathan, Dec. 10, 1863 Ibid., p. 107]
"Even though he was tired of the war, wrote a Louisiana artilleryman in 1862, ' I never want to see the day when a negro is put on an equality with a white person. There is too many free [n-word]s. . . now to suit me, let alone having four millions.' " - [George Hamill Diary, March, 1862, Ibid., p. 109]
"A private in the 38th North Carolina, a yeoman farmer, vowed to show the Yankees ' that a white man is better than a [n-word].' " - [Jonas Bradshaw to Nancy Bradshaw, April 29, 1862 Ibid.]
"A farmer from the Shenandoah Valley informed his fiancée that he fought to assure 'a free white man's government instead of living under a black republican government.' " - [John G. Keyton to Mary Hilbert, Nov. 30, 1861, Ibid.]
"The son of another North Carolina dirt farmer said he would never stop fighting the Yankees, who were 'trying to force us to live as the colored race.' " - [Samuel Walsh to Louisa Proffitt, April 11, 1864, Ibid.]
"Some of the boys asked them what they were fighting for, and they answered, 'You Yanks want us to marry our daughters to the [n-word]s.' " - [Chauncey Cook to parents, May 10, 1864, Ibid.]
"An Arkansas captain was enraged by the idea that if the Yankees won, his 'sister, wife, and mother are to be given up to the embraces of their present dusky male servitors.' " -[Thomas Key, diary entry April 10, 1864, Ibid.]
"Another Arkansas soldier, a planter, wrote his wife that Lincoln not only wanted to free the slaves but also 'declares them entitled to all the rights and privileges as American citizens. So imagine your sweet little girls in the school room with a black wooly headed negro and have to treat them as their equal.' " - [William Wakefield Garner to Henrietta Garner, Jan 2, 1864, Ibid.]
"[If Atlanta and Richmond fell] we are irrevocably lost and not only will the negroes be free but . . . we will all be on a common level. . . . The negro who now waits on you will then be as free as you are & as insolent as she is ignorant.' " - [Allen D. Chandler to wife, July 7, 1864, Ibid.]
"The South had always been solid for slavery and when the quarrel about it resulted in a conflict of arms, those who had approved the policy of disunion took the pro-slavery side. It was perfectly logical to fight for slavery, if it was right to own slaves." [John S. Mosby, Mosby's Memoirs, p. 20]
'We have dissolved the Union chiefly because of the negro quarrel. Now, is there any man who wished to reproduce that strife among ourselves? And yet does not he, who wished the slave trade left for the action of Congress, see that he proposed to open a Pandora's box among us and to cause our political arena again to resound with this discussion. Had we left the question unsettled, we should, in my opinion, have sown broadcast the seeds of discord and death in our Constitution. I congratulate the country that the strife has been put to rest forever, and that American slavery is to stand before the world as it is, and on its own merits. We have now placed our domestic institution, and secured its rights unmistakably, in the Constitution; we have sought by no euphony to hide its name - we have called our negroes "slaves," and we have recognized and protected them as persons and our rights to them as property.'- Alabama Congressman Robert H. Smith, Source: http://books.google.com/books?id=zQ4wzvvk5dIC&pg=PA65&lpg=PA66
As the last and crowning act of insult and outrage upon the people of the South, the citizens of the Northern States, by overwhelming majorities, on the 6th day of November last, elected Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin, President and Vice President of the United States. Whilst it may be admitted that the mere election of any man to the Presidency, is not, per se, a sufficient cause for a dissolution of the Union; yet, when the issues upon, and circumstances under which he was elected, are properly appreciated and understood, the question arises whether a due regard to the interest, honor, and safety of their citizens, in view of this and all the other antecedent wrongs and outrages, do not render it the imperative duty of the Southern States to resume the powers they have delegated to the Federal Government, and interpose their sovereignty for the protection of their citizens.
What, then are the circumstances under which, and the issues upon which he was elected? His own declarations, and the current history of the times, but too plainly indicate he was elected by a Northern sectional vote, against the most solemn warnings and protestations of the whole South. He stands forth as the representative of the fanaticism of the North, which, for the last quarter of a century, has been making war upon the South, her property, her civilization, her institutions, and her interests; as the representative of that party which overrides all Constitutional barriers, ignores the obligations of official oaths, and acknowledges allegiance to a higher law than the Constitution, striking down the sovereignty and equality of the States, and resting its claims to popular favor upon the one dogma, the Equality of the Races, white and black." -- Letter of S.F. Hale, Commissioner of Alabama to the State of Kentucky, to Gov. Magoffin of Kentucky
In the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course.
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery, the greatest material interest of the world. --Mississppi Declaration of the Causes of Secession
SIR: In obedience to your instructions I repaired to the seat of government of the State of Louisiana to confer with the Governor of that State and with the legislative department on the grave and important state of our political relations with the Federal Government, and the duty of the slave-holding States in the matter of their rights and honor, so menacingly involved in matters connected with the institution of African slavery. --Report from John Winston, Alabama's Secession Commissioner to Louisiana
This was the ground taken, gentlemen, not only by Mississippi, but by other slaveholding States, in view of the then threatened purpose, of a party founded upon the idea of unrelenting and eternal hostility to the institution of slavery, to take possession of the power of the Government and use it to our destruction. It cannot, therefore, be pretended that the Northern people did not have ample warning of the disastrous and fatal consequences that would follow the success of that party in the election, and impartial history will emblazon it to future generations, that it was their folly, their recklessness and their ambition, not ours, which shattered into pieces this great confederated Government, and destroyed this great temple of constitutional liberty which their ancestors and ours erected, in the hope that their descendants might together worship beneath its roof as long as time should last. -- Speech of Fulton Anderson to the Virginia Convention
Texas abandoned her separate national existence and consented to become one of the Confederated Union to promote her welfare, insure domestic tranquility and secure more substantially the blessings of peace and liberty to her people. She was received into the confederacy with her own constitution, under the guarantee of the federal constitution and the compact of annexation, that she should enjoy these blessings. She was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery-- the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits-- a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time. -- Texas Declaration of the causes of secession
What was the reason that induced Georgia to take the step of secession? This reason may be summed up in one single proposition. It was a conviction, a deep conviction on the part of Georgia, that a separation from the North-was the only thing that could prevent the abolition of her slavery. -- Speech of Henry Benning to the Virginia Convention
Gentlemen, I see before me men who have observed all the records of human life, and many, perhaps, who have been chief actors in many of its gravest scenes, and I ask such men if in all their lore of human society they can offer an example like this? South Carolina has 300,000 whites, and 400,000 slaves. These 300,000 whites depend for their whole system of civilization on these 400,000 slaves. Twenty millions of people, with one of the strongest Governments on the face of the earth, decree the extermination of these 400,000 slaves, and then ask, is honor, is interest, is liberty, is right, is justice, is life, worth the struggle?
Gentlemen, I have thus very rapidly endeavored to group before you the causes which have produced the action of the people of South Carolina. -- Speech of John Preston to the Virginia Convention
This new union with Lincoln Black Republicans and free negroes, without slavery, or, slavery under our old constitutional bond of union, without Lincoln Black Republicans, or free negroes either, to molest us.
If we take the former, then submission to negro equality is our fate. if the latter, then secession is inevitable --- -- Address of William L. Harris of Mississippi
But I trust I may not be intrusive if I refer for a moment to the circumstances which prompted South Carolina in the act of her own immediate secession, in which some have charged a want of courtesy and respect for her Southern sister States. She had not been disturbed by discord or conflict in the recent canvass for president or vice-president of the United States. She had waited for the result in the calm apprehension that the Black Republican party would succeed. She had, within a year, invited her sister Southern States to a conference with her on our mutual impending danger. Her legislature was called in extra session to cast her vote for president and vice-president, through electors, of the United States and before they adjourned the telegraphic wires conveyed the intelligence that Lincoln was elected by a sectional vote, whose platform was that of the Black Republican party and whose policy was to be the abolition of slavery upon this continent and the elevation of our own slaves to equality with ourselves and our children, and coupled with all this was the act that, from our friends in our sister Southern States, we were urged in the most earnest terms to secede at once, and prepared as we were, with not a dissenting voice in the State, South Carolina struck the blow and we are now satisfied that none have struck too soon, for when we are now threatened with the sword and the bayonet by a Democratic administration for the exercise of this high and inalienable right, what might we meet under the dominion of such a party and such a president as Lincoln and his minions. -- Speech of John McQueen, the Secession Commissioner from South Carolina to Texas
History affords no example of a people who changed their government for more just or substantial reasons. Louisiana looks to the formation of a Southern confederacy to preserve the blessings of African slavery, and of the free institutions of the founders of the Federal Union, bequeathed to their posterity. -- Address of George Williamson, Commissioner from Louisiana to the Texas Secession Convention
you are entitled to your opinion.
(?) Is that the right way to use that word.? Wrought?
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