If you want to stay ignorant, do not read any further .. but if you have any doubts that it was not ONLY the South whose hands (and $) was tied up into the slave trade (until 1808 in the USA) and slavery itself until 9 months after the War Against Southern Independence ended .. read on and read the whole thing at this link: https://www.unz.com/freed/fun-with-slavery/
Know the truth, and it will set you free.
Quotes from UNZ
“..First, slavery was always bad, frequently hideous, much worse in the Deep South than in Tidewater or New York, and consequent to the same desire for cheap labor that now results in importing Mexicans and exporting jobs to China. Any notion that abuses were rare or exaggerated is twaddle. A vast amount of contemporary writing documents this…”
… in the South AND the North. Yes snowflakes, one needs to know that in 1741 Manhattan had the 2nd largest slave population of any city in the thirteen Brit colonies here in North America .. after Charleston, South Carolina.
“.. Second, the slave trade being phenomenally profitable, much like the drug trade today, many were involved who today choose to forget this: Yankees, Arabs, Jews, Quakers, and Southerners. It was strongly defended by many Christians in the South, and attacked by Christians in the North, who had no financial stake in it. Yankees owned slaves and, in the draft riots in New York in 1863, lynched and burned them alive…”
Just think this through, entertain a thought without believing it for once .. if the deep South (7 states) had peacefully seceded .. all the Northern banks who had financed so much there would stand to lose interest income .. yeah, when it comes down to money, people and businesses throw away principles.
“.. Third, among the historically illiterate a notion exists that the South consisted of rich aristocrats living in mansions. A few, yes. Most, not even close. Poverty among whites in the South and the associated Appalachia was often extreme…”
Kind of like today, the “elite” gets all the perks and the rest of the people get less, much less.
“.. Fourth, freeing the slaves was an easy solution if you didn’t have the problem. If you were a planter with a wife and three little girls, would you give up your house and subject your family to poverty, rape, robbery, and revenge from blacks? I am not asking whether you think they should have done it, but whether in the circumstances you would do it. Another way of putting it: For what moral cause would you, today, give up your job, house, and investments, and step on the sidewalk with your family?..”
So easy to look back with scorn .. but that last sentence is key, what moral issue would YOU risk all?
“.. You might have done what many slaveowners did, what George Washington did: free your slaves in your will. (This reminds me of Saint Augustine’s cry, “Oh Lord, grant me chastity, but not just yet.”) You could thus express your opposition to slavery while enjoying its benefits…”
Yeah, pass down the hardships to your kids (oh yeah, GW had no kids) ..
“.. Fifth, many today would say that Southerners deserved their problems, having brought them on themselves by enslaving blacks. But of course they did not. By 1861 most were born into a slaveholding society. Most were not enthusiastic about it, but had little idea what to do.
Anyone interested in just how divided whites were about slavery might the debates in 1831-2 in the Virginia House of Delegates. There was heated argument favoring no emancipation, gradual emancipation, immediate and total emancipation, and Lincoln’s solution of sending blacks back to Africa…”
In the end, because no one would get a majority .. the can was kicked to a future generation(s) to deal with.
Context is crucial here .. what if you heard the result of freeing slaves ended up in some horrible revenge violence .. well remember in you history books when they talked about the Haitian Slave Revolt? Why the puzzled face? Oh yeah, you never heard of that did you.
“.. Sixth–and important–was the Haitian slave revolt of 1791-1804, of which few Americans have heard. Black Haitians butchered and tortured the whites in an unspeakable bloodbath. Southerners, well aware of this, decided that freeing the slaves would be mass suicide. As it happened when the slaves were emancipated after the Civil War, no bloodbath came. Events in Haiti provided ample reason for not taking the chance…”
Bingo .. one data point but hey, it is a solid data point!
“.. The sentiment was reinforced in 1831 by Nat Turner’s revolt in which slaves in Virginia revolted and butchered some sixty whites, families included…”
OK .. two data points ..
“.. Seventh, Southerners believed that they knew the Negroes and that they could not function as equals of whites and thus would destroy society. Except for ardent abolitionists–perhaps for ardent abolitionists–so did Northerners, but by then these latter didn’t have many Negroes and never expected to…”
So .. were the Southerners right? I mean we are over 150 years post slavery and it seems that in the 1950s it was the most tranquil for blacks as they had low unemployment and a vast majority of dads were part of the family. Did the US government blow that up by being a daddy to the majority of black families (so that they would vote Democrat? Thanks LBJ)
“.. Eighth, controversy, usually witless, persists over whether the South fought to preserve slavery. The usual approach is to quote Southern planters, politicians, and newspapers as to the sacred quality of the peculiar institution and how God liked it. QED.
But of course these were the slave-owners, the rich, and their hangers on. They favored slavery for the same reason American businesses favor remote wars in Afghanistan: they make money at it. People do not fight bloody wars over years for the benefit of people that, after the war, they will have no desire to associate with. If you had asked a thousand Confederate infantrymen why they were fighting, do you think they would have said, “I’m fighting and dying and seeing my friends screaming gutshot so that rich bastards can own slaves while I live in a shack?” ..”
No shit Sherlock …geez people, learn you REAL history for once so you can stand your ground on the truth. In context for TODAY consider:
“.. You, the reader, probably do not favor mistreatment of women and girls. Would you favor fighting a war in Afghanistan in which America would lose over six and a half million dead–proportionately to population, what the country lost in the Civil War–to impose civil rights for women in Afghanistan?..”
Would you!!!
On to EPIC HYPOCRACY!
“.. Ninth, hypocrisy. You, the reader, probably live (as I long did) in a society in which millions of blacks live pointless lives, shooting each other in decaying cities with horrible schools. If you are a Yankee of the usual intolerable virtue, as so many are, note that blacks suffer these awful conditions chiefly in Southern cities such as Trenton, Newark, Camden, Philadelphia, New York, Detroit, Chicago, Flint, Gary, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Baltimore, and Washington DC. What have you done about it–other than, perhaps, talk? And you are in no danger of the consequences of whatever you might propose. Southerners were…”
Ya think? Y’all can’t understand it I am sure, ever, must be some heavy cognitive dissonance is my guess .. in any case, “Bless Your Hearts”
“… Tenth, it is worth noting that the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, now also sold as a moral measure by the sainted Lincoln, in fact freed not a single slave. It applied only in the Southern states, where it was intended to ignite a revolt. Slaves in the North remained in slavery. Lincoln himself said, in letter after letter after document after speech and before Congress, over and over and over, that he would not oppose slavery in the South if only it would come back to the Union, and–yes, boys and girls–he wanted to send blacks back to Africa…”
Textbooks come from New York, so you can understand what that jewel is not in your high school or college history books.
Next is Lincoln’s view, as he nor his state (Illinois) wanted blacks there (illegal to migrate there before the so-called Civil War)
“.. IN fact, the North wanted no blacks of any kind, having discovered that sweating European immigrants was more profitable. If you own slaves, you have to feed them and care for them no matter the business climate. This was suited to an agricultural economy. But the North was industrial. It made more sense to pay helpless immigrants almost nothing while they lived in tubercular filth with their children working twelve hours a day and dying of preventable diseases. After all, the next ship in would bring more. In short, it was the moral equivalent of slavery but more cost-effective and without the stigma…”
The bottom line is that the North was complicit in this slavery thing:
“.. Eleventh, edited out of history for an American public with a bumper-sticker mind is that slavery was a product of the North. Slave ships in hundreds left from New York, Rhode Island, and Connecticut for Africa. When the slave trade was outlawed in 1808, Northern slavers sold contraband slaves to the South or to the godawful sugar-raising West Indies or to South America. The North grew rich from the cotton of the South, financed its plantations, and provided the slaves. Further huge profits came from trading in the products of the sugar plantations, which it turned into rum…”
So don’t get all uppity with the Yankee high morals .. it is just that they write the textbooks .. as historical fraud is promoted generation after generation here in the “land of the free”.