Burton Cummings?
I remember reading something that said during the Revolutionary War the British offered freedom to Southern slaves who joined their side.
It was Trump’s ancestors.
Just realized I could have copied a better link.
https://americansystemnow.com/guess-who-insisted-on-slavery-in-colonial-america
Johnson v Parker (1655)
To hear them say tell America broke free because the British Empire opposed slavery.
Never mentioned in all these demands for reparations, etc. is the FACT that Whites - lead by the British - put an end to slavery.
Reparations were paid in the form of 600,000, mostly White lives lost and families destroyed in the WBTS.
We are owed a debt of gratitude for this - and what do we get? Out statues torn down, our holidays erased, our history and traditions thrown down the memory hole.
Just try to bring up Lincoln’s comments when engaged in a conversation about slavery and CW-1. You get verbally assaulted by every leftist for miles around (figuratively). Then add to your comments the fact that coming online in the late 1800s were mechanical inventions that picked cotton and processed it more effectively than slaves. Plantation owners were realizing that overall machines were cheaper. One didn’t have to feed machines. These things would eventually lead to the huge drop in slave-holding which would virtually disappear sometime in the late 1800s or early 1900s.
Slavery would have died a natural economic death in the nascent US, except for one colony: South Carolina. Without SC, the Revolution would likely have failed. Without SC, slavery likely would not have been exported into the Southeast, except perhaps Louisiana. The British Crown certainly fueled slavery in the colonies, just as it did in its Caribbean sugar islands, but blaming the British for blocking Virginia’s self-interested attempts to stop importation gives scant absolution.
bump
In the 1800s, we had Navy ships off the coast of Africa to prevent Africans from shipping slaves to America. We had to end the practice in 1861 because there was some kind of war.
Yes, I try to make this point on FR all the time. There are a lot of FReepers who are interested only in demonizing the South.
Under the charter system, the Southern colonies had zero control over the terms of their charters granted by the Crown. In many cases, the terms of their charters stated that the colonies must accept payment for traded goods in the form of slaves.
Their choice was to accept slaves as payment or not be paid at all. The Southern colonies petitioned the Crown over and over again to pay them in gold instead, but the Crown refused.
The reasons for the petitions were varied: for one thing, slavery was as unpopular in the South as it was anywhere else - perhaps more.
Slave owners were a only a small fraction of the population and the non slave owning super majority had absolutely nothing to gain from slavery and much to lose.
Aside from the obvious moral objections, which fed strong abolitionist movements in the South, there were strong practical objections to slavery.
The slave population was growing very rapidly, and with that population growth, the difficulties of eventual assimilation of freed slaves into the non-slave population would be exponential.
Many in the colonial South were desperate to end slavery - and the sooner the better. The Crown had control and did not let them.
By the time of the American Revolution, when it was no longer up to the Crown, the practical problems of how to end slavery in the South, unravel the economic blowback, and how to assimilate the slave population - had already become the subject of bitter disagreement.
The question may seem simple in retrospect, and from our vantage point as people who have never been involved in slavery: no human being should ever be the slave of another. Period.
But that wasn’t their vantage point. Ending slavery did not impact only slave owners, who measured their wealth in slaves, and who would give up their wealth over night. It’s easy to say that they should never have had that wealth - so they do not warrant sympathy or compensation.
But the slave population had grown so large that now the roots of slavery wound their way throughout the entire economy. There were legitimate fears of a deep economic collapse, and massive civil unrest, if slavery wasn’t ended carefully and gradually over time.
Everyone should hate slavery and be glad it was ended. But I think we should be careful not to presume we understand the complexity of the problems the people in the south were facing at that time - slave owners and non-slave owners alike.
Al Sharpton?
“He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.”
Note well that all of the abolitionist talk mentioned was among northern states, not southern states. It was the southerners who wanted to keep slavery going to pick their crops.
We still have slavery now. I bet the clothes you are wearing are made by slaves in China. We need to fight the Chinese slave traders...
We look at all this through the prism of slavery. I suspect that slavery was much less of a factor than people today assume it was.
Anthony Johnson, a black man. He enslaved John Casor,a black man, by suing in Virginia court.