Posted on 07/12/2021 6:27:56 AM PDT by ProgressingAmerica
Are you not even reading above?
Why are you talking to me about 1833, some sixty years later? Sixty years too late? The Americans were leading this in 1774.
You’re too late.
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.
I have noticed.
The historians have very effectively polluted conversations on this. Read some of the replies, I’m trying to talk about the early 1770s and I have someone replying to me about the mid 1830s as if that’s even on topic.
But I’m not even really worried about Lincoln here - that’s just how the blogger wrote their introduction. I’m talking about how the colonists(later Americans) were actively leading a charge toward abolitionism and Britain were heavily promoting slavery.
It would take a few decades for Britain to get their minds right and follow America’s lead.
“.... mechanical inventions....”
Are you talking about Eli Whitney’s cotton gin?
I remember being taught that the cotton gin gave southern slavery a new lease on life.
From Dr. Sowell.
A very readable and remarkable new book that has just been published — “Bury the Chains” by Adam Hochschild — traces the history of the world’s first anti-slavery movement, which began with a meeting of 12 “deeply religious” men in London in 1787.The dozen men who formed the world’s first anti-slavery movement saw their task as getting their fellow Englishmen to think about slavery — about the brutal facts and about the moral implications of those facts.
Even more remarkable, Britain took it upon itself, as the leading naval power of the world, to police the ban on slave trading against other nations. Intercepting and boarding other countries’ ships on the high seas to look for slaves, the British became and remained for more than a century the world’s policeman when it came to stopping the slave trade.
This is my final post on this subject and I will read no more of your responses.
Have a nice day. And brush up on your history while you're at it.
The hills of the Appalachian frountier contained a ready force of Scots-Irish indian fighters, brought there by the crown to quiet the frontier for colonization. They were seasoned and their loyalty was to the livelihood scatched from the good land around them. Any threat from any quarter, was not welcome.
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.
This is exactly why I'm hammering on this. This is why I collaborated to create an audiobook on this. The progressives and their historians have successfully erased this part of history. I'm being excoriated about an event that happened in 1787 in Britain, meanwhile I posted about events in 1771 and 1767 and being told I need to "read my history".
In what world does 1771 happen after 1787???
This is the issue we face. The progressives have removed even our own ability to effectively defend our own country against the lies that progressives tell. It was progressive historians who did this, they are the ones writing the books and omitting this. This is how progressives win, they rig the game in their favor and change all the rules and they've been doing it for a very long time.
We must correct the damage done to the history books.
bump
That is a very broad brush.
The British slavers opposed it.
The rest of the British then ended slavery.
William Wilberforce led the way.
Once he flipped the British government on the issue - by getting a stealth bill passed that allowed the British Navy to seize ‘neutral’ flagged ships. It was all over.
That broke the power of the slavers in parliment. The new parliments then strongly opposed and banned slavery. The British navy then implemented the policy.
Just as in the US, there were slavers and free people.
I appreciate your thoughtful reply. I don’t think absolution is really the issue. There are plenty in early America who deserve their due blame. These moves toward abolition were actions taken “in their infancy”, to use a phrase.
These bills didn’t become law, but I still say that the colonists who made the attempt deserve credit for it.
I’m actually quite sick of seeing America always get blamed. There were decades and decades of abolitionist efforts here, and all of it has been excused. Every item has its ready-made propaganda response. “well that one doesn’t count because it wasn’t the whole nation” “well that one doesn’t count because it wasn’t an organizational abolitionist effort” “well that one doesn’t count because gradual abolitionism is immoral, only immediate abolitionism is humane” “well that one doesn’t count because of some other whataboutism”.
No. No more. America deserves better.
(Nevermind that now the whataboutit propagandists have now contradicted themselves in their efforts to attack America, and have invalidated nearly every abolitionist effort ever attempted)
Is it your intent to say that William Wilberforce completely invalidates the work of Granville Sharp and Thomas Clarkson?
That is the result.
Unfortunately, as you’ve said, no one knows of Sharp and Clarkson.
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.”
Well, they needed pins. They couldn’t find any.
The problem is that we care.
“The was slavery in the US!!!”
Who cares? Slavery has existed for most of mankind’s history and pre-history. It still exists today.
The fact that, for this brief, glorious moment in history, slavery is considered an aberration rather than the natural state of mankind is, itself, an anomaly, that, judging from the current trajectory of civilization, will soon be corrected.
Our response to crap about slavery should a callous “So what?” Slavery is the natural state of mankind and if we don’t want to experience it for ourselves or our children we need to get to work, starting with crushing these jackwads who keep whining about what happened to their ancestors.
I think that’s intentional. Clarkson and Sharp had to be erased too.
Clarkson wrote glowingly of Adam Smith and Sharp was supportive of the colonists.(Americans) Not surprising about Sharp, since in those days only one side of the Atlantic had anything of note happening on the abolitionist effort.
Sharp’s works in particular are rather remarkable, he sounds just like the Founders with talk of Natural Law and etc.
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