The United States has
long been the shining light of the world, a place where all are welcome to
come, and live, and embrace America and the United States, to contribute to its
growth, and to set an example for the world to look up to, and to become
Americans and proudly so.
Colonial America
existed as a safe haven for the people of the Reformation to come and worship
as they wished, without fear of remonstrations, or even imprisonment and
execution. And it was built up by an
enormous workforce composed almost entirely of African Slaves.
Slavery had been
going on in Africa since ancient times but what we call modern slavery was
conducted by the Arabian Muslims who moved coast to coast through Central Africa
taking slaves and marching them back to the Arab lands. This had been going on
from the 8th Century.
By the middle of the
15th Century, Prince Henry of Portugal had established a school for
sea captains, training them in sailing, seamanship and navigation. He began sending these captains in their
Caravels south from southern Portugal to the west coast of Africa. At the end of each thrust farther south along
the African Coast, the captains would establish a base camp/port, where they
could stockpile supplies, and conduct trade with the local natives, taking home
seeds, lumber, and elephant ivory.
But then they ran
into Arab Muslim slave raiding expeditions and learned what had been happening
for 700 years. The slave raiders sold
them a few slaves and they were taken back to Portugal.
Prince Henry and his
brother, King Duarte [Edward], were devout Catholics, and supported the Church
with riches brought back from Africa.
But when the slaves appeared in Portugal, the slave trade there was
underway. It was so lucrative that the
Pope, Nicholas the V, during his 8 years as Pope, issued two relevant Papal Bulls: the first, issued in 1452, basically said to
the Captains of Prince Henry go ahead and subdue and capture any non-Christians
they encountered for enslavement, and the second, issued in 1755, gave
exclusive economic rights as they reached and eventually rounded the Cape of Good Hope and
went on to India. It also authorized them
to buy or capture non-Christians as slaves to bring back to Portugal.
Portugal, and its
chief sea-going rivals, Spain and England, began exporting African slaves to
the New World shortly after Christopher Columbus [trained by Prince Henry’s
school] discovered it. The Portuguese
moved African slaves to what is now Brazil, while the Spanish moved them into
Mexico, Florida, throughout the West Indies and the Caribbean, through Mexico
north to California, and south through Central America and down the west coast
of South America. The English began importing
slaves into Virginia in the early 17th Century though most early
Black slaves were brought from the West Indies.
The African slaves
were the people who cleared the swamps along the North American coast, and
cleared and built the roads, and ports, and towns. Then they learned to pick cotton. Their owners got very rich from cotton. Southern culture changed, the plantation
owners gained great wealth, buying more land, and more slaves, to the extent
that wealth in the Colonial South was measured in how many slaves they
owned. And they determined that the
slaves were “less than human,” thus justifying the institution of slavery.
And then, an ancient
Greek political philosophy suddenly re-emerged in the American colonies, and a
new nation was formed in the fashion of that ancient Greek philosophy:
Democracy. It came to be called “The
Great Experiment”, among other expressions.
And it based its foundations on the core of the Enlightenment: the
natural rights of man.
By the time the
Virginia philosopher, politician and revolutionary Thomas Paine wrote his
treatise on “The Rights of Man”, talk had already started about slavery among
the political leaders of the Colonial states.
The Northern states wanted to extinguish slavery, the South said
“no.” But the British government in
England enacted some laws applying to Colonial Americans that became known as
the Intolerable Acts, and independence was suddenly more important than
slavery. During the Revolutionary War,
England offered freedom to any slaves that joined their army [as teamsters and
servants, not as soldiers]. George
Washington and Alexander Hamilton established a policy that any slave could
join the Continental Army earning a rifle and his freedom.
The Constitutional
Convention that followed the Independence of the United States and the
insufficient first attempt at government under the Articles of Confederation
took nearly a year to draft, and heated arguments on the floor during its
construction were daily low-lights. One
of the most important was the issue of slavery.
Deals were made between states in
order to obtain concessions from the Southern slave states. One of the more well-known concessions is
located in Section 9 of Article I:
Section
9. The Migration of Importation of such Persons as any of the States now
existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress
prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a Tax or duty may
be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person.
This law ended the
United States involvement in the International Slave Trade by 1808, but it
spawned a new business in the South: slave breeding. The slave markets were thus supplied past
1808.
The Constitution also
contains another law that outlines slave-owners’ rights when a slave runs
away. The Runaway Slave Law is contained
in Article IV, Section 2:
No
Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping
into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be
discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of
the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.
The U.S. Navy began
patrolling the West Indies to prevent slaves being smuggled into the U.S. in
1819, and at the same time, began patrolling the eastern Atlantic along the
coast of Africa to stop the slaves from being smuggled to the U.S. from
Africa.
The make-up of early
Government of the United States tells a tale in its numbers. William Lee Miller wrote in his book Arguing
About Slavery [Arguing About Slavery: The Great Battle in the United States
Congress. Vintage Books Division of Random House, New York, 1996. ISBN
0-679-76844-0.]
"Five
of the first seven presidents were slaveholders, for thirty-two of the nation's
first thirty-six years, forty of its first forty-eight, fifty of its first
sixty-four, the nation's president was a slaveholder. The powerful office
of Speaker of the House was held by a slaveholder for twenty-eight of the
nation's first thirty-five years. The president pro-tem of the Senate was
virtually always a slaveholder. The majority of cabinet members and--very
important--of justices of the Supreme Court were slaveholders. The slave-holding Chief justice Roger Taney, appointed by the slave-holding president
Andrew Jackson to succeed the slave-holding John Marshall, would serve all the
way through the decades before the war into the years of the Civil War
itself; it would be a radical change of the kind the slaveholders feared when,
in 1863, President Lincoln would appoint the anti-slavery politician Salmon P.
Chase of Ohio to succeed Taney. But by then, even having a president
Lincoln had been the occasion for the slaveholders to rebel, to secede, and to resort
to arms.
"One
cites these facts about the formidable presence of the slave interests--to
which, of course, dozens more could be added--not as later unhistorical
moralizers sometimes do, as an indictment of the nation, but for almost the
opposite purpose, to dramatize the immense power of the interest that the
nation would nevertheless overcome."
As one can begin to
see, the fight to remove slavery from the United States was a
knock-down-drag-out battle in the United States Congress, and in the newspapers
throughout the nation. Northern
politicians also fought against the Slave interest in Congress by attempting to
admit new states as “Free” states, allowing no slavery. At least five generations of slave-owning
Southerners were born before the Constitution was adopted. To be sure there was indeed slavery in the
North. But by the 1840s most of those
Northern States had ended slavery by outlawing it and granting freedom to the
slaves.
Regardless, the fight
in Congress went on, and grew to focus on the admission of Slave and Free
states to the Union as the nation grew westward.
The Republican Party
grew up in the upper Midwest in the 1850s as an anti-slavery liberal
party. It lost the 1856 election when
Northern Democrat James Buchanan from Pennsylvania defeated explorer and scout
from the wild western state of California, John C. Fremont. It was a contest, but not really close. But it was encouraging enough to the
Anti-slavery states, and the Party grew.
By 1860 the U.S. was
preparing for war, particularly in the South.
Slavery had a major role in Southern Culture. Well over a century of successful
slave-owning had solidified that role as a natural part and a natural right of
the slave-holding South. Slavery was a
larger part of the Southern economy than real estate.
Along came Abraham
Lincoln. His seven fiery 1858 debates
with Stephen A. Douglas during the race for the Senate seat from Illinois
captured the attention of the nation.
Newspapers followed them around the state and reported in great detail
what both men said. It was Anti-Slavery
Republican Lincoln vs. Slavery Defender Northern Democrat Douglas. Douglas won the Senate seat, but it was
tight.
And so it was again
in 1860, when the two faced off in a fight for the White House. Both had enhanced their reputations during
the debates in Illinois, and it was clear what each man stood for. The issue of slavery had finally come to the
fore. But the Democratic Party split
along North-South lines, Southern Democrats backing John C. Breckinridge, and
Northern Democrats backing Douglas, against the Republican, Abraham
Lincoln.
The split doomed the
Democrats, Lincoln won in a landslide.
The South was in
shock, and immediately began serious talk of secession and Civil War. Lincoln made it clear he would not seek to
end slavery. What he didn’t say is that
he would seek to block any new states from joining as Slave States. It wasn’t enough. By the time Lincoln reached Washington in the
Spring of 1861 to be sworn in, many of the deep Southern states had already
left the Union forming the Confederate States of America.
The rest of the South
seceded. Lincoln moved to keep Maryland,
Kentucky and Missouri from leaving the Union.
America was at war with itself. The Civil War was
fought over four long years, killing approximately 620,000 men. That is almost half the total of U.S. war
dead in all wars.
In December of 1865
the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified. It states in full:
Section
1. Neither Slavery, nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime
whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United
States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section
2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate
legislation.
Slavery is the United
States was ended. A great moral and
ethical wrong was righted, decided on the Battlefields of the Civil War. The deaths of 620,000 men locked that down
tight. Those 620,000 men included both
Union and Confederate, men from North and South. For the most part the war was fought with
honor, and with a full belief in the cause of each side. Those beliefs were not abandoned on either
side, but they accepted the outcome.
Both sides honored their returning soldiers, sailors and marines. Both sides held reunions. Many Veterans from both sides returned repeatedly
over the rest of their lives to the fields on which they fought. They were drawn there. Fate drew them there as it was fate that
allowed them to survive.
At home, statues and
monuments were erected honoring the leaders and heroes of both armies. They were doing the bidding of their
political leaders, and for those leaders’ political and economic reasons. They did so with ferocity and honor – how
else can you explain 620,000 dead men?
We now have
generations that have, on the surface, grown distant from that event. They look at these events only on the
surface, and through the colored glass of the present. This is called Presentism: judging the past
by modern values and mores. It is a terrible mistake to judge someone
by today’s standards that lived 155 years ago.
The result of presentism is the mistake that
George Santayana warned about: "Those who do not learn history are
doomed to repeat it."
It was a different
time. The universal mores were different
-- vastly different. For example, science
had not advanced to the point where there was accepted dogma on race:
specifically Darwin’s “Origin of the Species” was
not published until 1859, and was not readily accepted by scientists. And Africa south of the Sahara and north of
the Limpopo River had not been studied or even explored to any great
degree. Dr. David Livingston left on his
expedition into Africa’s interior in 1866, and he was not found by reporter
Henry Morton Stanley until 1871. Little
was really known about Black, non-Muslim Africans of Central Africa.
That is looking at an
historical era with objectivity. Indeed,
if we remove the monuments and markers from the locations where they were
erected, then we risk erasing a part of history. The next step, already underway in some
schools and colleges, is to remove that unpleasant past from the history curriculum because
it offends.
If that is allowed to
persist, and is not corrected, we will not only lose our history, we will lose
the significance of the great events of our past. And thus, we will lose our national identity
of being not just a beacon of hope for the world, but how we became one by recognizing
and righting the wrongs that we made as a people, as a nation, along the way.
Do not look at a
Confederate monument and be offended.
Instead, be proud that the nation recognized the inhumanity of slavery
and eradicated it, at the expense of 620,000 American lives. We need to remember that man is not
infallible: Benjamin Franklin sold slaves, George Washington owned slaves,
Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, James Madison owned slaves, yet these men are
honored for founding and framing our country.
It was these men and others in their conventions, who framed the
nation’s charter of laws to include paths and mechanisms for change. The larger good far outweighs their
slave-owning or dealing, because of the times, not because of now. Good people can do bad things, as well as
good things, but look at their lives in the light of the mores of the times,
not the mores of today. 620,000 men died, in part,
so you would not judge them by today’s mores, but by the mores of their times, but by the mores of their time.
Novus Livy
”Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history."-- Abraham Lincoln
Now in our 13th Year!
Copyright © 2005-2017: Novus Livy and The History of the World Blog; All Rights Reserved.
”Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history."-- Abraham Lincoln
Now in our 13th Year!
Copyright © 2005-2017: Novus Livy and The History of the World Blog; All Rights Reserved.
