The United States has long been the
shining light of the world, a place where all are welcome to come, and
live, and embrace America and the United States, to contribute to its
growth, and to set an example for the world to look up to, and to become
Americans and proudly so.
Colonial America existed as a safe haven
for the people of the Reformation to come and worship as they wished,
without fear of remonstrations, or even imprisonment and execution. And
it was built up by an enormous workforce composed almost entirely of
African Slaves.
Slavery had been going on in Africa
since ancient times but what we call modern slavery was conducted by the
Arabian Muslims who moved coast to coast through Central Africa taking
slaves and marching them back to the Arab lands. This had been going on
from the 8th Century.
By the middle of the 15th
Century, Prince Henry of Portugal had established a school for sea
captains, training them in sailing, seamanship and navigation. He began
sending these captains in their Caravels south from southern Portugal
to the west coast of Africa. At the end of each thrust farther south
along the African Coast, the captains would establish a base camp/port,
where they could stockpile supplies, and conduct trade with the local
natives, taking home seeds, lumber, and elephant ivory.
But then they ran into Arab Muslim slave
raiding expeditions and learned what had been happening for 700 years.
The slave raiders sold them a few slaves and they were taken back to
Portugal.
Prince Henry and his brother, King
Duarte [Edward], were devout Catholics, and supported the Church with
riches brought back from Africa. But when the slaves appeared in
Portugal, the slave trade there was underway. It was so lucrative that
the Pope, Nicholas the V, during his 8 years as Pope, issued two
relevant Papal Bulls: the first, issued in 1452, basically said to the
Captains of Prince Henry go ahead and subdue and capture any
non-Christians they encountered for enslavement, and the second, issued
in 1455, gave exclusive economic rights as they reached and eventually
rounded the Cape of Good Hope and went on to India. It also authorized
them to buy or capture non-Christians as slaves to bring back to
Portugal.
Portugal, and its chief sea-going
rivals, Spain and England, began exporting African slaves to the New
World shortly after Christopher Columbus [trained by Prince Henry’s
school] discovered it. The Portuguese moved African slaves to what is
now Brazil, while the Spanish moved them into Mexico, Florida,
throughout the West Indies and the Caribbean, through Mexico north to
California, and south through Central America and down the west coast of
South America. The English began importing slaves into Virginia in the
early 17th Century though most early Black slaves were brought from the West Indies.
The African slaves were the people who
cleared the swamps along the North American coast, and cleared and built
the roads, and ports, and towns. Then they learned to pick cotton.
Their owners got very rich from cotton. Southern culture changed, the
plantation owners gained great wealth, buying more land, and more
slaves, to the extent that wealth in the Colonial South was measured in
how many slaves they owned. And they determined that the slaves were
“less than human,” thus justifying the institution of slavery.
And then, an ancient Greek political
philosophy suddenly re-emerged in the American colonies, and a new
nation was formed in the fashion of that ancient Greek philosophy:
Democracy. It came to be called “The Great Experiment”, among other
expressions. And it based its foundations on the core of the
Enlightenment: the natural rights of man.
By the time the Virginian philosopher,
politician and revolutionary Thomas Paine wrote his treatise on “The
Rights of Man”, talk had already started about slavery among the
political leaders of the Colonial states. The Northern states wanted to
extinguish slavery, the South said “no.” But the British government in
England enacted some laws applying to Colonial Americans that became
known as the Intolerable Acts, and independence was suddenly more
important than slavery. During the Revolutionary War, England offered
freedom to any slaves that joined their army [as teamsters and servants,
not as soldiers]. George Washington and Alexander Hamilton established
a policy that any slave could join the Continental Army earning a rifle
and his freedom.
The Constitutional Convention that
followed the Independence of the United States and the insufficient
first attempt at government under the Articles of Confederation took
nearly a year to draft, and heated arguments on the floor during its
construction were daily low-lights. One of the most important was the
issue of slavery. Deals were made between states in order to obtain
concessions from the Southern slave states. One of the more well-known
concessions is located in Section 9 of Article I:
“Section 9. The Migration of Importation
of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to
admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one
thousand eight hundred and eight, but a Tax or duty may be imposed on
such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person.”
This law ended the United States
involvement in the International Slave Trade by 1808, but it spawned a
new business in the South: slave breeding. The slave markets were thus
supplied past 1808.
The Constitution also contains another
law that outlines slave-owners’ rights when a slave runs away. The
Runaway Slave Law is contained in Article IV, Section 2:
“No Person held to Service or Labour in
one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in
Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such
Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to
whom such Service or Labour may be due.”
The U.S. Navy began patrolling the West
Indies to prevent slaves being smuggled into the U.S. in 1819, and at
the same time, began patrolling the eastern Atlantic along the coast of
Africa to stop the slaves from being smuggled to the U.S. from Africa.
The make-up of early Government of the
United States tells a tale in its numbers. William Lee Miller wrote in
his book Arguing About Slavery [Arguing About Slavery: The Great Battle
in the United States Congress. Vintage Books Division of Random House,
New York, 1996. ISBN 0-679-76844-0.]
“Five of the first seven presidents were
slaveholders, for thirty-two of the nation’s first thirty-six years,
forty of its first forty-eight, fifty of its first sixty-four, the
nation’s president was a slaveholder. The powerful office of Speaker of
the House was held by a slaveholder for twenty-eight of the nation’s
first thirty-five years. The president pro tem of the Senate was
virtually always a slaveholder. The majority of cabinet members
and–very important–of justices of the Supreme Court were slaveholders.
The slave-holding Chief justice Roger Taney, appointed by the
slave-holding president Andrew Jackson to succeed the slave-holding John
Marshall, would serve all the way through the decades before the war
into the years of the Civil War itself; it would be a radical change of
the kind the slaveholders feared when, in 1863, President Lincoln would
appoint the anti-slavery politician Salmon P. Chase of Ohio to succeed
Taney. But by then, even having a president Lincoln had been the
occasion for the slaveholders to rebel, to secede, and to resort to
arms.
“One cites these facts about the
formidable presence of the slave interests–to which, of course, dozens
more could be added–not as later unhistorical moralizers sometimes do,
as an indictment of the nation, but for almost the opposite purpose, to
dramatize the immense power of the interest that the nation would
nevertheless overcome.”
As one can begin to see, the fight to
remove slavery from the United States was a knock-down-drag-out battle
in the United States Congress, and in the newspapers throughout the
nation. Northern politicians also fought against the Slave interest in
Congress by attempting to admit new states as “Free” states, allowing no
slavery. At least five generations of slave-owning Southerners were
born before the Constitution was adopted. To be sure there was indeed
slavery in the North. But by the 1840s most of those Northern States
had ended slavery by outlawing it and granting freedom to the slaves.
Regardless, the fight in Congress went
on, and grew to focus on the admission of Slave and Free states to the
Union as the nation grew westward.
The Republican Party grew up in the
upper Midwest in the 1850s as an anti-slavery liberal party. It lost
the 1856 election when Northern Democrat James Buchanan from
Pennsylvania defeated explorer and scout from the wild western state of
California, John C. Fremont. It was a contest, but not really close.
But it was encouraging enough to the Anti-slavery states, and the Party
grew.
By 1860 the U.S. was preparing for war,
particularly in the South. Slavery had a major role in Southern
Culture. Well over a century of successful slave-owning had solidified
that role as a natural part and a natural right of the slave-holding
South. Slavery was a larger part of the Southern economy than real
estate.
Along came Abraham Lincoln. His seven
fiery 1858 debates with Stephen A. Douglas during the race for the
Senate seat from Illinois captured the attention of the nation.
Newspapers followed them around the state and reported in great detail
what both men said. It was Anti-Slavery Republican Lincoln vs. Slavery
Defender Northern Democrat Douglas. Douglas won the Senate seat, but
it was tight.
And so it was again in 1860, when the
two faced off in a fight for the White House. Both had enhanced their
reputations during the debates in Illinois, and it was clear what each
man stood for. The issue of slavery had finally come to the fore. But
the Democratic Party split along North-South lines, Southern Democrats
backing John C. Breckinridge, and Northern Democrats backing Douglas,
against the Republican, Abraham Lincoln.
The split doomed the Democrats, Lincoln won in a landslide.
The South was in shock, and immediately
began serious talk of secession and Civil War. Lincoln made it clear he
would not seek to end slavery. What he didn’t say is that he would
seek to block any new states from joining as Slave States. It wasn’t
enough. By the time Lincoln reached Washington in the Spring of 1861 to
be sworn in, many of the deep Southern states had already left the
Union forming the Confederate States of America.
The rest of the South seceded. Lincoln moved to keep Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri from leaving the Union.
America went to war with itself. The Civil War was fought over four long years, killing approximately 620,000 men. That is almost half the total of U.S. war dead in all wars.
In December of 1865 the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified. It states in full:
“Section 1. Neither Slavery, nor
involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the
party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United
States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
“Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”
Slavery in the United States was ended.
A great moral and ethical wrong was righted, decided on the
Battlefields of the Civil War. The deaths of 620,000 men locked that
down tight. Those 620,000 men included both Union and Confederate, men
from North and South. For the most part the war was fought with honor,
and with a full belief in the cause of each side. Those beliefs were
not abandoned on either side, but they accepted the outcome. Both sides
honored their returning soldiers, sailors and marines. Both sides held
reunions. Many Veterans from both sides returned repeatedly over the
rest of their lives to the fields on which they fought. They were drawn
there. Fate drew them there as it was fate that allowed them to
survive.
At home, statues and monuments were
erected honoring the leaders and heroes of both armies. They were doing
the bidding of their political leaders, and for those leaders’
political and economic reasons. They did so with ferocity and honor –
how else can you explain 620,000 dead men?
We now have generations that have grown
distant from that event. They look at these events only on the surface,
and through the colored glass of the present. This is called
Presentism: judging the past by modern values and mores. It is a terrible mistake to judge someone by today’s standards that lived 155 years ago.
The result of presentism is the mistake that George Santayana warned about: “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.”
It was a different time. The universal
mores were different — vastly different. For example, science had not
advanced to the point where there was accepted dogma on race:
specifically Darwin’s “Origin of the Species”
was not published until 1859, and was not readily accepted by
scientists. And Africa south of the Sahara and north of the Limpopo
River had not been studied or even explored to any great degree. Dr.
David Livingston left on his expedition into Africa’s interior in 1866,
and he was not found by reporter Henry Morton Stanley until 1871.
Little was really known about Black, non-Muslim Africans of Central
Africa.
That is looking at an historical era
with objectivity. Indeed, if we remove the monuments and markers from
the locations where they were erected, then we risk erasing a part of
history. The next step, already underway in some schools and colleges,
is to remove that unpleasant past from the curriculum because it
offends.
If that is allowed to persist, and is
not corrected, we will not only lose our history, we will lose the
significance of the great events of our past. And thus, we will lose
our national identity of being not just a beacon of hope for the world,
but how we became one by recognizing and righting the wrongs that we
made as a people, as a nation, along the way.
Do not look at a Confederate monument
and be offended. Instead, be proud that the nation recognized the
inhumanity of slavery and eradicated it, at the expense of 620,000
American lives. We need to remember that man is not infallible:
Benjamin Franklin sold slaves, George Washington owned slaves, Thomas
Jefferson owned slaves, James Madison owned slaves, yet these men are
honored for founding and framing our country. It was these men and
others in their conventions, who framed the nation’s charter of laws to
include paths and mechanisms for change. The larger good far outweighs
their slave-owning or dealing, because of the times, not because of
now. Good people can do bad things, as well as good things, but look at
their lives in the light of the mores of the times, not the mores of
today. 620,000 men died, in part, so you would not judge them by
today’s mores, but by the mores of their time.
GettysBLOG
We support the Roadmap to Reform!
“Be steadfast in your anger, be sure in your convictions, be moved by the right and certainty that abuse of power must be defeated at every turn; uphold Liberty as the just reward of a watchful people, and let not those who have infringed upon that Liberty steal it away from you. Never loosen your grip on Liberty!" --
GettysBLOG
“Legislation without representation is tyranny.” --
GettysBLOG
Remember in May and November! Before you vote,
GettysBLOG!
Now in our 14th year!
Copyright © 2005-2018:
GettysBLOG; All Rights Reserved.
