Posted on 04/23/2019 1:19:22 AM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
"Christians ended slavery." Do you think that’s a conservative simpleton’s mock-worthy bombast, embarrassing the rest of us with his black-and-white, unapologetic caricature of American history? No. It is the considered conclusion of a Nobel laureate, a former communist, a secular Jew, and arguably the foremost scholar on American slavery.
Robert Fogel (1922-2013), the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, was president of Cornell University’s American Youth for Democracy, investing eight years promoting communism. Meanwhile, he married Enid Morgan, an African-American woman, consequently suffering the ugliness of American racism personally. Eventually, he rejected communism. Apparently, the data didn’t support it.
Fogel was driven by data, perhaps the purest pursuer of empirical truth I’ve ever met in academia...
Fogel’s bean-counting approach led to his discovery that plantations, organized in a business-like fashion with their “gang system,” had an assembly line-like efficiency. Hence Southern slavery was fantastically profitable.
He concluded that if the Civil War had not been sparked when it was, the South would have continued to outpace the North, adapt slavery to industrialization, been unconquerable if a later Civil War had broken out, and likely would have spread slavery indefinitely. Slavery was on the ascendancy at the outbreak of the Civil War.
Furthermore – and here it sounds scandalous – most Southern slaves were treated materially well by their “owners.” The average slave consumed more calories and lived longer than the average, white, Northern city-dweller.
The moral question: If Southern slavery was profitable, even providing for the slaves a relatively decent material life, then why is it evil? If slavery is wrong, then, we have to look beyond the beans that can be counted, the dollars that can be earned, the efficiency that can be charted. The answer is found in a system of morality that comes from beyond mere materialism...
(Excerpt) Read more at acton.org ...
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Not at all. Jefferson, Franklin and Adams DID dicuss adding slavery as an issue to put in the Declaration, but left it out, knowing some Patriots would balk at it, as DiongenesLamp had said.
Both are true.
I am Southern (Alabamian). I wish we never had slavery at all. As in “We should have picked our OWN cotton.”
I didn’t descend from plantation owners. Few Southerners did. My people were subsistence farmers, poor, but proud. In other words, the majority of pre-rednecks and hillbillies/piney woods folk. While we still fought for our States, we didn’t own slaves. Succession was a rich man’s game. Parts of Alabama did indeed oppose leaving the Union, but they were poor white mans’ counties.
I wish none of it happened, and we were a nation of free European men, with States still meaning something in a federal system.
A lot of the older, tiny churches actually take their religion seriously. So you find Free-will Baptists, Calvinist Baptists, and they know the fine points of their chosen theology.
What we have here in California is often something based in opportunism and entertainment.
I imagine that it would be futile on my part to point out that Herndon’s story has been discounted by virtually all of Lincoln’s biographers like Guelzo, White, Donald, and Basler? Oh, I keep forgetting. All Lincoln’s biographers have been intimidated into silence by the great cabal dedicated to keeping Lincoln’s life story pure. Just like all Taney’s biographers were so intimidated.
An effort to be independent of New York and Washington DC control, is what caused the war. The Corwin amendment tells you everything you need to know about how far away slavery was from being the cause of the war.
Slaves were an expensive proposition. Most slave holdings were small operations, you can easily see this in antebellum census records. But that doesn’t make good entertainment so popular fiction and movies center around plantations. And fiction and movies is where we get our education....
A worthwhile read for those curious about what former slaves thought about their past life and their former masters is ‘Weevils In the Wheat’. These were interviews conducted by college students during the Depression.
That's cute. Now do Obama.
The clueless "Progressive Regressives" often claim that Thomas Jefferson and other Founders were "slave owners."
When countering that claim, it is well to ask those know-it-all 21st Century "elitists" to consider the historical context within which those Founders found themselves, as well as the enormous contributions they and their generations made toward eradicating slavery from these shores and creating a constitutional republic which could, ultimately, affirm and protect the rights of ALL people:
Of special interest in that regard is Jefferson's “Autobiography,” especially that portion which states:
"The first establishment in Virginia which became permanent was made in 1607. I have found no mention of negroes in the colony until about 1650. The first brought here as slaves were by a Dutch ship; after which the English commenced the trade and continued it until the revolutionary war. That suspended...their future importation for the present, and the business of the war pressing constantly on the (Virginia) legislature, this subject was not acted on finally until the year 1778, when I brought a bill to prevent their further importation. This passed without opposition, leaving to future efforts its final eradication."
Jefferson also observed:
"Where the disease [slavery] is most deeply seated, there it will be slowest in eradication. In the northern States, it was merely superficial and easily corrected. In the southern, it is incorporated with the whole system and requires time, patience, and perseverance in the curative process."
He explained that,
"In 1769, I became a member of the legislature by the choice of the county in which I live [Albemarle County, Virginia], and so continued until it was closed by the Revolution. I made one effort in that body for the permission of the emancipation of slaves, which was rejected: and indeed, during the regal [crown] government, nothing [like this] could expect success."Below is another quotation, cited in David Barton's work on the subject of the Founders and slavery, which also cites the fact that there were laws in the State of Virginia which prevented citizens from emancipating slaves:
"The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him. From his cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees others do. If a parent could find no motive either in his philanthropy or his self-love for restraining the intemperance of passion towards his slave, it should always be a sufficient one that his child is present. But generally it is not sufficient. . . . The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances. And with what execration should the statesman be loaded who permits one half the citizens thus to trample on the rights of the other. . . . And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep for ever. . . . The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest. . . . [T]he way, I hone [is] preparing under the auspices of Heaven for a total emancipation."A visit to David Barton’s web site (www.wallbuilders.com) provides an essential, excellent and factual written record of the Founders' views on the matter of slavery. One source he does not quote, I believe, is the famous 1775 Edmund Burke "Speech on Conciliation" before the British Parliament, wherein he admonished the Parliament for its Proposal to declare a general enfranchisement of the slaves in America.
Burke rather sarcastically observed that should the Parliament carry through with the Proposal before it: "Slaves as these unfortunate black people are, and dull as all men are from slavery, must they not a little suspect the offer of freedom from that very nation (England) which has sold them to their present masters? from that nation, one of whose causes of quarrel with those masters is their refusal to deal any more in that inhuman traffic?"
He continued: "An offer of freedom from England would come rather oddly, shipped to them in an African vessel, which is refused an entry into the ports of Virginia or Carolina, with a cargo of three hundred Angola negroes. It would be curious to see the Guinea captain attempting at the same instant to publish his proclamation of liberty and to advertise his sale of slaves." Ahhh, how knowledge of the facts can alter one's opinion of the revisionist history that has been taught for generations in American schools (including its so-called "law schools"!!)
Human beings are allotted ONLY A TINY SLIVER OF TIME ON THIS EARTH. (Pardon shouting) Each finds the world and his/her own community/nation existing as it is.
If lawyers and judges cared enough to educate themselves (in this day of the Internet) on the history of civilization and America's real history, and if they used that knowledge and the resulting understanding, to do as much on behalf of liberty for ALL people as did Thomas Jefferson and America's other Founders, the world in the next century would be a better place.
Remember: Thomas Jefferson was only 33 years old when he penned our Declaration of Independence which capsulized a truly revolutionary idea into a simple statement that survives to this day to inspire people all over the world to strive for liberty!
The existence of the manuscript influenced by Paine was originally described by Herndon in his biography on Lincoln. Harvey Lee Ross, mail carrier who lived in New Salem with Lincoln in 1834, asserts that this was a fictional story by Herndon. He states the following issues with the original biographer's account. Herndon was 16 years old in 1834 and lived 20 miles away in Springfield and did not have contact with Lincoln. There was no stove in Samuel Hill's store in 1834 where the manuscript was allegedly burned. There was not a copy of The Age of Reason on the bookshelf at the tavern where Herndon said Lincoln had read it. Finally, Ross states he was very well acquainted with everyone in the community of New Salem and he would have known about any conversations regarding a document of this nature. It is a reasonable conclusion that there was never a manuscript written and Paine was not a contributing factor in Lincoln's ideas towards religion.
Some have said that the young Lincoln's manuscript expressed Universalist ideas - that all would be saved.
That's possible, but it would go against what Lincoln believed for most of his life.
My understanding is that Lincoln believed in a God or Providence, but doubted Jesus's divinity, and, having a strong Calvinist sense of predestination and damnation, doubted the possibilities of salvation.
Another story is that a lost letter was found and returned to Lincoln who was postmaster and he was reading it aloud in an effort to find out who wrote it.
I don't know what's true, but Herndon had his own agenda and isn't that great a source for things that happened before he met Lincoln, and 1834 was decades before Lincoln became president.
Maybe it's just you.
Or the charictature you've been playing.
That's not a put-down.
It's very entertaining.
A little too much like Forrest Gump, though.
It's pretty axiomatic that Wikipedia will rewrite anything to have a liberal tilt. Attempts to correct Wikipedia on subjects like Abortion or Homosexuality get rewritten to reflect a liberal bias on those subjects.
Is it not reasonable to assume they would do the same for a great Liberal Icon like Lincoln?
And in what context are we supposed to consider this statement?
"The Bible is not my book nor Christianity my profession. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma."
Lincoln lives in his head, rent free. Lincoln is the bane of his existence.
Wikipedia is at least sourced with footnotes. I have no idea where your quote comes from or when Lincoln was supposed to have said it or written it. The only thing I was able to find out about it is that a freethinker said it in a speech about Lincoln in 1924. Not exactly firsthand evidence.
I agree with you here, wholeheartedly.
And the Christian thing to do with the African slaves after 1865 was to claim a part of Africa and send them back.
And ensure they had good conditions to go to, with even promises to buy their own produced goods and natural resources.
It would have cost a ton of money, but been far cheaper on the government as a whole and far less than the welfare state we wound up creating for them.
One thing Northerners don’t see that I see down here in Lower Alabama—rural blacks. Take my neighboring county, Macon County, Alabama. About 12 miles across the Tallapoosa river from me.
It is 89% black. Back before the War it was one the richest counties in the entire USA, and the cotton was everywhere. Only a few white families owned the land, and each plantation had 3-5000 negro slaves.
I know others have said that on average, Southerners were small slaveholders, but not this part of the South, which was extraordinarily fertile. It was named the Black Belt, not for negro slaves, but for the rich, fertile soil. And the land was some of the most expensive land in the 1850s.
Anyway, when the war ended, most of the white families lost their plantations, or simply never came home (father, brothers, sons, etc., killed in the war), moved to Montgomery or Columbus, Ga, etc. All the slaves were left in place. They had no place to go.
And they’re still here. Poor as dirt, all on assistance of some kind. Some got out, others moved North, especially during WWI and WWII looking for work, but most stayed.
It would have been better for them all to go back to Africa. We should have done that for them, instead of just basically, “Ok, you’re no longer slaves, and good luck and bye-bye!”
I've done a little searching on the subject and i've found Lamon and Herndon claim he was an atheist, and the place where I found that quote claimed that it came from Lincoln's "Speeches and Writings 1832–1858."
I think it's admitted by most sources which touch on the point that Lincoln did not attend church services regularly. Do you think this was the norm during his era? I think it is quite the outlier.
The problem here with discerning the truth is that many politicians will lie about what they believe to keep the electorate on their side, and so statements from politicians cannot always be accepted at face value. If Lincoln was an atheist, an admission of this would have utterly destroyed his political career in the USA of that era.
Now you suggested that Herndon (Lincoln's law partner) had some sort of agenda that would make him lie about Lincoln for some reason. What agenda could that have been? And what about Lamon, whom considered Lincoln a friend?
How could the claim that Lincoln was an atheist have ever gotten any traction? One would think that so many people would have spoken out against this claim, that no one would have seriously suggested it.
You see, back when I was learning about the topic of Abortion, I quickly found out it was "Penumbra'd" out of the 14th amendment. I found a *LOT* of issues conservatives had problems with (gay marriage, ban on prayer in schools, anchor babies, etc) emanated from the 14th amendment.
Not the first part of it, that is quite straightforward and easy to understand. No, it's the *Incorporation doctrine* that causes most of our troubles.
I started to see more and more how so many issues we are dealing with today were put on the path to wrongness by the consequences of the Civil War.
And how did that start? Well you see, there was this guy named Lincoln...
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