Posted on 07/12/2021 6:27:56 AM PDT by ProgressingAmerica
Abraham Lincoln was right when he declared that, at the time of the Declaration of Independence and the founding of the Constitution, it was widely expected that slavery was on the wane, and would soon die out. That broad sentiment is actually a matter of public record, but that record has been effectively suppressed.
...
Massachusetts in the Lead
In 1767, the General Court of Massachusetts (the equivalent of the House of Representatives) passed a bill “to prevent the unnatural and unwarrantable custom of enslaving mankind in this province and the importation of slaves into the same.” That is, the most representative body in the state called for complete abolition of slavery.
What happened then? The King’s representative, Governor Bernard, vetoed the bill.
In 1768 the same bill was passed again, only to be met with the dissolution of the body by the Governor.
Fast forward to 1771. This time it was the General Court and the Council which took the decision to abolish the slave trade. The bill was vetoed by Governor Hutchinson.
...
And Then in Virginia
The last case I want to mention in this short summary came in Virginia itself.
In 1767 Virginian Arthur Lee printed an address in the Virginia Gazette to the House of Burgesses calling for the abolition of slavery. The first step toward that end, he recommended, should be to put a heavy duty on the importation of slaves. While this idea was not taken up immediately, it was reintroduced in 1769 by Richard Henry Lee, and passed.
The action was then suspended by the British Crown as being hurtful to a major source of British revenue.
You bring up a good point. The Southern states were just as negatively impacted by the King’s veto as the northern were. Perhaps even worse, since ultimately they continued the King’s institution wheras the Northern states started abolishing it and when you put it into the context of the Civil War the Southern states might have been the most negatively impacted out of all of the states due to their inability to freely abolish slavery at their own will.
People sometimes forget that Georgia was originally founded as a free-soil state.(Oglethorpe opposed it) Well what do you get with a never-ending drum beat from the Empire and an overwhelming force to keep that door open. By the time they drive the Spanish out of nearby areas, that’s the last straw. Once you get to 1776 Georgia is one of two states primarily responsible for shielding any criticism of the King’s slavery institution.
We had even more religious men who sought that ban years earlier, but were overruled by the British.
Hochschild graduated from Harvard in 1963 with a BA in History and Literature. As a college student, he spent a summer working on an anti-government newspaper in South Africa and subsequently worked briefly as a civil rights worker in Mississippi during 1964. Both were politically pivotal experiences about which he would eventually write in his books Half the Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son and Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels. He later was part of the movement against the Vietnam War, and, after several years as a daily newspaper reporter, worked as a writer and editor for the left-wing Ramparts magazine. In the mid-1970s, he was a co-founder of Mother Jones.[3] Much of his writing has been about issues of human rights and social justice.
A longtime lecturer at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, Hochschild has also been a Fulbright Lecturer in India, Regents’ Lecturer at the University of California, Santa Cruz and Writer-in-Residence at the Department of History, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Jefferson’s “original Rough draught” of the Declaration of Independence full audio
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-XJcYxRziE
Jefferson did this twice.(to my knowledge)
A SUMMARY VIEW OF THE RIGHTS OF BRITISH AMERICA (1774)
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/jeffsumm.asp
The highlight:
“yet our repeated attempts to effect this by prohibitions, and by imposing duties which might amount to a prohibition, have been hitherto defeated by his majesty’s negative”
Full paragraph:
“That we next proceed to consider the conduct of his majesty, as holding the executive powers of the laws of these states, and mark out his deviations from the line of duty: By the constitution of Great Britain, as well as of the several American states, his majesty possesses the power of refusing to pass into a law any bill which has already passed the other two branches of legislature. His majesty, however, and his ancestors, conscious of the impropriety of opposing their single opinion to the united wisdom of two houses of parliament, while their proceedings were unbiassed by interested principles, for several ages past have modestly declined the exercise of this power in that part of his empire called Great Britain. But by change of circumstances, other principles than those of justice simply have obtained an influence on their determinations; the addition of new states to the British empire has produced an addition of new, and sometimes opposite interests. It is now, therefore, the great office of his majesty, to resume the exercise of his negative power, and to prevent the passage of laws by any one legislature of the empire, which might bear injuriously on the rights and interests of another. Yet this will not excuse the wanton exercise of this power which we have seen his majesty practise on the laws of the American legislatures. For the most trifling reasons, and sometimes for no conceivable reason at all, his majesty has rejected laws of the most salutary tendency. The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies, where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state. But previous to the enfranchisement of the slaves we have, it is necessary to exclude all further importations from Africa; yet our repeated attempts to effect this by prohibitions, and by imposing duties which might amount to a prohibition, have been hitherto defeated by his majesty’s negative: Thus preferring the immediate advantages of a few African corsairs to the lasting interests of the American states, and to the rights of human nature, deeply wounded by this infamous practice. Nay, the single interposition of an interested individual against a law was scarcely ever known to fail of success, though in the opposite scale were placed the interests of a whole country. That this is so shameful an abuse of a power trusted with his majesty for other purposes, as if not reformed, would call for some legal restrictions.”
The Guess Who - 1970.
Yes, I think people looking back at that period of history fail to appreciate what the South was up against.
That the colonists, black and white, born here, are free born British subjects, and entitled to all the essential civil rights of such, is a truth not only manifest from the provincial charters, from the principles of the common law, and acts of parliament; but from the British constitution which was reestablished at the revolution, with a professed design to secure the liberties of all the subjects to all generations...Asking for a friend.
Keep going and thank you for blessing us with truth!
Founded
Bancroft was a historian long before the Progressive Era of the 1900s and the birth of their revisionist streak in the early 1910's, which means the work that can be trusted.
Volume 3 (for one, probably others) covers some of the British vetos of abolitionist laws. P. 410
https://archive.org/details/historyoftheunit037604mbp
The audiobook I just recently completed(Free, public domain/open source) also contains it, here's the text only version. In chapter 8.
Agreed. But even through all of this mess it’s still a shining example of American Exceptionalism.
When slavery was all over the world, where’s the one place it wasn’t?
Right on the governor’s desk. That’s where. It was the colonists who were becoming Americans who put together these abolitionist bills, with the Empire playing veto.
These abolitionist bills were the exception to the rule - Exceptionalism.
We always win when we appeal to our history as it actually happen and that’s why the progressives have done everything they can to erase every part of it they can. Progressivism cannot survive American history, all of the erasure proves it.
Thank you...now how to get my brainwashed 30 yr old attorney niece (with History undergrad) to read this.
You might not read it, but I will post it.
I like Thomas Sowell a lot. He is not a historian, and while seldom wrong in fact, is often a little off in broader interpretation.
I would suggest “Freedom National” by James Oakes, a great historian who did a wonderful bio of Lincoln. His history of the AMERICAN antislavery movement is fantastic, showing that they latched onto the CONSTITUTIONAL remedy, which was the term “unfree PERSONS” as opposed to slaves and that chattel slavery was never mentioned in the constitution. The difference between persons & property was at the root of ALL slavery debates.
The Brits had a far, far easier job eliminating slavery. The # of planters in the West Indies was tiny compared to the American South; the islands were a thousands of miles away; there were NO blacks in England-—which was a major stumbling block to emancipation here. “What is to be done with the Negro?” is the most commonly asked question of antebellum times by abolitionists, and none of them had a good answer.
Arguments for return to Africa went nowhere, especially among free blacks here. Figuring out the social solution was every bit as important as figuring out the political solution-—but not in England.
This is not true. It is refuted by every economic historian across the political spectrum. Slavery was bringing only 2-4% profits while manufacturing in the South brought 22%, but still they wouldn’t end slavery.
Slavery has been proven by historians to be effective in manufacturing, mining, and service work. Most of the VA slaves on the eve of the Civil War were in service, not field, work.
In his fantastic book “Freedom National,” James Oakes explains the long evolution of the anti-slavery movement in America that had a two-tiered plan: 1) make a cordon of freedom around the slave states to make slavery unworkable. 2) If the South seceded, use the military solution. What is interesting is that most of those who believed in the former didn’t really think it would work because the state governments in the South supported slavery, it was a closed society with NO challenge to slavery in literature, law, or culture permitted; in VA and other places, freed slaves were ushered out of the state immediately so as to not cause rebellion OR provide a counter-image that blacks were helpless.
No, sorry, the overwhelming evidence in both historical and economic circles is against you.
That is why the TERRITORIES were what the Civil War was all about because of the definition of slavery as property, not people.
The problem with citing Br or Fr was they had no black people at all in their home countries, and the # of planters they were dealing with was miniscule, not 1/2 the physical country and 10% of the total pop.
You are obfuscating the point, the truth, the reality.
Two % of a billion $ is $20,000,000
While 22% of $10 million is only $2,200,000
And that comparison doesn’t include the investment and improvements in the land
What exactly am I obfuscating?
My point is that in standard simple profit loss, not counting the value of the slaves or land itself, slavery was falling behind other profit-making ventures.
But when land and slaves themselves were included, the south was the richest section of the country. 10 of the top 11 wealthiest states were slave states. Slave wealth constituted more than all the norther RRs and textile mills combined. Not clear what you are arguing with.
However, slave lands had VERY little improvements. In the entire antebellum period, the South had a tiny handful of patents. It made no sense to substitute tech or machines for slaves because even as expensive as they were, they were still cheaper than large-scale mechanical improvements.
Give her the free audiobook version?(At least, for one of those two) If she won’t read, maybe she will listen.
That’s part of the problem I’m trying to solve. Some people won’t read. But sometimes they will listen.
https://librivox.org/the-wrong-of-slavery-by-robert-dale-owen/
As a recent indoctrinated history undergrad, maybe rely on the fact that this is pretty much a government-produced report. That’ll probably give it weight in her eyes.
Just wanted to be sure, there has been a lot of discussion now at this point in this thread that has gone several directions.
What specifically was it you wanted to introduce to your family members?
You neglect to take into account the economic benefits TO slaves.
Free room and board. They were housed and clothed and fed and educated.
Not every slave was captured running in the jungle in Africa and chained. It was a way of life back then. People went to Africa for slaves because that’s where the market was. People also voluntarily sold themselves into slavery, it was like getting a job.
Not every slave was whipped and beaten. Many were treated like family. Many stayed and worked for their families after the civil war.
While Jefferson Davis was the leader of
the south he was morally against slavery, and taught his slaves to read and write- despite laws against it.
While there were absolutely horrors, it was not always the case.
This judgment of 200 years ago by today’s standards while ONLY pointing out the bad things ignores the fact that slavery existed for thousand of years.
The USA did not invent slavery- we ended it.
This is true. I never claimed we did invent it.
But the “benefits” of slavery?
I will direct you to actual court testimony from a runaway slave in an IN court in the 1850s.
Judge: “How were you fed?”
Slave: “Oh, master fed us good. Corn and taters. Meat once a week.”
Judge: “What were your living quarters like?”
Slave; “Had a nice little cabin of my own with flowers on the window sill.”
Judge: “Were you whipped? Punished?”
Slave: “Oh no! Me and master best of friends. Went huntin’ and fishin’ together.”
Judge: “Well, I don’t understand why you ran away.”
Slave: “Well yo’ honor, the position is still available if you’d like to apply for it.”
Talking about slave “benefits” is akin to talking about the benefits of having MS.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.