Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger
The Mississippi Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans has come up with an idea for celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Civil War—known to some as the “War between the States.” The veterans group has proposed that the state of
Mississippi issue a series of specialty license plates commemorating the war. These specialty plates, planned for the years 2011 through 2015, would each have a different design.
What has some people upset is the specialty license plate slated for the year 2014, which would honor General Nathan Bedford Forrest. Forrest, a native of Tennessee, is considered by some to have been a military genius. Others feel differently about Forrest who is “reviled” by some for allegedly having lead a massacre of Black Union troops at Fort Pillow in his home state in 1864. It should be noted that Forrest also served as the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
According to ABC News, the NAACP is planning to send a letter to Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour requesting “that he publicly denounce the license plate and use his office to prevent it from being issued.” Derrick Jackson, president of the Mississippi state NAACP, said of Forrest: “He should be viewed in the same light that we view Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. The state of Mississippi should deny any vanity tags which would highlight racial hatred in this state.”
Although many historians agree that Nathan Bedford Forrest distanced himself from the KKK later in his life, some believe “it was too little too late because the Klan had already turned violent before Forrest left.”
Sources
You wouldn’t know real law if it bit you on the ass.
no brent simply showed the real law, not the law with her agenda added in. there is no mention of free blacks in the law. just driving the stake in the lies. as i can see u dont dispute it an resort to attacking me instead of the truth! lol! you must be related to the rest, gyges. is that ur real name or an alias? why are all of you ashamed of your names?
So Brent’s reduced to the age old defense of “But Mom, Jimmy was throwing rocks at the cars too.” I hope that anyone who managed to get past his eye searingly bad writing(if you’re too lazy to type the letters Y and O in addition to U, you probably shouldn’t be taken seriously), will now get on to more useful discussions.
SLAVERY in MASSACHUSETTS
Massachusetts was the first slave-holding colony in New England, though the exact beginning of black slavery in what became Massachusetts cannot be dated exactly. Slavery there is said to have predated the settlement of Massachusetts Bay colony in 1629, and circumstantial evidence gives a date of 1624-1629 for the first slaves. “Samuel Maverick, apparently New England’s first slaveholder, arrived in Massachusetts in 1624 and, according to [John Gorham] Palfrey, owned two Negroes before John Winthrop, who later became governor of the colony, arrived in 1630.”[1]
The first certain reference to African slavery is in connection with the bloody Pequot War in 1637. The Pequot Indians of central Connecticut, pressed hard by encroaching European settlements, struck back and attacked the town of Wetherfield. A few months later, Massachusetts and Connecticut militias joined forces and raided the Pequot village near Mystic, Connecticut. Of the few Indians who escaped slaughter, the women and children were enslaved in New England, and Roger Williams of Rhode Island wrote to Winthrop congratulating him on God’s having placed in his hands “another drove of Adams’ degenerate seed.” But most of the men and boys, deemed too dangerous to keep in the colony, were transported to the West Indies aboard the ship Desire, to be exchanged for African slaves. The Desire arrived back in Massachusetts in 1638, after exchanging its cargo, according to Winthrop, loaded with “Salt, cotton, tobacco and Negroes.”
“Such exchanges became routine during subsequent Indian wars, for the danger of keeping revengeful warriors in the colony far outweighed the value of their labor.”[2] In 1646, this became the official policy of the New England Confederation. As elsewhere in the New World, the shortage and expense of free, white labor motivated the quest for slaves. In 1645, Emanuel Downing, brother-in-law of John Winthrop, wrote to him longing for a “juste warre” with the Pequots, so the colonists might capture enough Indian men, women, and children to exchange in Barbados for black slaves, because the colony would never thrive “untill we gett … a stock of slaves sufficient to doe all our business.”[3]
Most, if not all, of the limited 17th century New England slave trade was in the hands of Massachusetts. Boston merchants made New England’s first attempt at direct import of slaves from West Africa to the West Indies in 1644, but though the venture was partially successful, it was premature because the big chartered companies still held monopoly on the Gold Coast and Guinea. By 1676, however, Boston ships had pioneered a slave trade to Madagascar, and they were selling black human beings to Virginians by 1678. For the home market, the Puritans generally took the Africans to the West Indies and sold them in exchange for a few experienced slaves, which they brought back to New England. In other cases, they brought back the weaklings that could not be sold on the harsh West Indies plantations (Phyllis Wheatley, the poetess, was one) and tried to get the best bargain they could for them in New England. Massachusetts merchants and ships were supplying slaves to Connecticut by 1680 and Rhode Island by 1696.
The break-up of the monopolies and the defeat of the Dutch opened the way for New England’s aggressive pursuit of the slave trade in the early 1700s. At the same time, the expansion of New England industries created a shortage of labor, which slaves filled. From fewer than 200 slaves in 1676, and 550 in 1708, the Massachusetts slave population jumped to about 2,000 in 1715. It reached its largest percentage of the total population between 1755 and 1764, when it stood at around 2.2 percent. The slaves concentrated in the industrial and seaside towns, however, and Boston was about 10 percent black in 1752.
As in other maritime colonies of New England, the chief families were among the chief slavers. Cornelius Waldo, maternal great-grandfather of Ralph Waldo Emerson, was a slave merchant on a large scale, a proud importer of “Choice Irish Duck, fine Florence wine, negro slaves and Irish butter.” His ship, Africa, plied the Middle Passage packed with 200 black people at a time crammed below-decks, though lethal epidemics of “flux” sometimes tore through the captives and cut into Waldo’s profits. Peter Fanueil, meanwhile, inherited one of the largest fortunes of his day, which was built in large part on his uncle’s slave trade. His philanthropy with this money gave Boston its famed Fanueil Hall.
Massachusetts, like many American colonies, had roots in a scrupulous fundamentalist Protestantism. Christianity was no barrier to slave-ownership, however. The Puritans regarded themselves as God’s Elect, and so they had no difficulty with slavery, which had the sanction of the Law of the God of Israel. The Calvinist doctrine of predestination easily supported the Puritans in a position that blacks were a people cursed and condemned by God to serve whites. Cotton Mather told blacks they were the “miserable children of Adam and Noah,” for whom slavery had been ordained as a punishment.
A Massachusetts law of 1641 specifically linked slavery to Biblical authority, and established for slaves the set of rules “which the law of God, established in Israel concerning such people, doth morally require.” When two Massachusetts slave merchants joined with London slave raiders in a massacre of an African village in 1645, the colonial government registered its indignation, because the two men were guilty of the Biblical crime of “man-stealing” (kidnapping Africans instead of acquiring them in the approved way, in exchange for rum or trinkets) — and because the slaughter of 100 or so villagers had taken place on a Sunday. Nonetheless, because of its Scriptural foundation, Massachusetts’ attitudes toward slaves in some ways were more progressive than those of other colonies.
Like Connecticut and Rhode Island, however, Massachusetts had a problem with masters who simply turned out their slaves when they grew too old or feeble to work. Unlike the later Southern system, which took pride in its paternal care for slaves in their old age, Massachusetts masters had to be forced to keep theirs by a 1703 law requiring them to post £50 bond for every slave manumitted, to provide against the slave becoming indigent and the responsibility of some town. There are also instances on record of slave mothers’ children given away like puppies or kittens by masters unwilling or unable to support them. There was no law against this.
Later reminiscences, long after slavery’s end, emphasized the benign nature of Massachusetts slavery, but the laws and statutes of the time show it to be grim enough, and the need for control over even so small a population of blacks as lived in Massachusetts was felt to be great. Fear of an uprising no doubt was behind the 1656 exclusion of blacks (and Indians) from military duty. Concern about fugitive slaves, meanwhile, probably lay behind the 1680 act by which the colony imposed heavy fines on captains of ships and vessels that took blacks aboard, or sailed away with them without permission from the governor. Protection of masters’ property from slave theft certainly motivated the 1693 statute that forbade anyone from buying anything from a black, Indian or mulatto servant.
Boston, which had the largest slave population, also had its own layer of controls, on top of the province-wide ones. In statutes enacted at various times between the 1720s and 1750s, slaves in Boston were forbidden to buy provisions in market; carry a stick or a cane; keep hogs or swine; or stroll about the streets, lanes, or Common at night or at all on Sunday. Punishments for violation of these laws ranged up to 20 lashes, depending on aggravating factors.
Black slaves were singled out for punishment by whipping if they broke street lamps, under a law of 1753, and a special law allowed severe whippings for any black person who hit a white one (1705-6).
The colony, along with Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland, punished both races for miscegenation. But Old Testament abhorrence of “mixed natures” may help explain why the Massachusetts statue was more severe than that of any other colony on the continent. The Massachusetts law against mixed marriage or sexual relations between the races [Massachusetts Acts and Resolves, I, 578], dating to 1705, was passed “for the better preventing of a spurious and mixt issue.” It subjected a black man who slept with a white woman to being sold out of the province (likely to the cruel plantations of the West Indies). Both were to be flogged, and the woman bound out to service to support any children resulting from the illicit union. In cases involving a white man and a black woman, both were to be flogged, the man fined £5 and held liable for support of any children, and the woman to be sold out of the province.
1. Lorenzo Johnston Greene, The Negro in Colonial New England, 1620-1776. N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 1942, p.16.
2. Edgar J. McManus, Black Bondage in the North, p.6.
3. Greene, p.62.
SL,
I’ll not have you badmouthing the Three Stooges. Moe had a price on his head because of his portrial of Hilter in You Nazty Spy.
Free Black Slaveowners in South Carolina
Domestic slavery was quite common in West Africa, although the Europeans organized the trade to a much greater magnitude and value. Free black slaveowners resided in states as north as New York and as far south as Florida, extending westward into Kentucky, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Missouri. According to the federal census of 1830, free blacks owned more than 10,000 slaves in Louisiana, Maryland, South Carolina, and Virginia. The majority of black slaveowners lived in Louisiana and planted sugar cane. The majority of black masters had not been slaves themselves. Yet, the ranks of black slave masters were diverse: some acquired slaves as soon as they had accumulated enough capital after their own freedom, others received slaves with their own freedom from their white masters, and others had been free for several generations.
Free black masters used slaves to work their farms as skilled and unskilled workers in urban centers and as hired workers to other employers. Although some black masters, such as those in Louisiana, owned scores of slaves and large tracts of land, most were small slaveholders who owned one or two slaves. Many of these small slaveholders owned family members who could not be emancipated because state legislatures prohibited private manumission unless the freed slaves left the state. The South Carolina Act of 1806 required slaves who lived outside their master’s household to have written permission from their masters to do so. The statute also made it illegal to rent lots, houses, or enclosures directly to slaves. Some scholars explain the large number of slaves living in black households in Charleston, for example, as the slaves being merely boarders. But the detailed tax and manuscript census records show that slave boarding can not account for the majority of recorded slaveholdings among free blacks in Charleston.
Descendants of mulatto slaveowners who were intermarried with Indians often rejected their African ancestry and passed as free Indians, which allowed them to avoid paying the “state capitation tax” that all free blacks were required to pay (between 16 and 60 years for men and from 14-55 for women), and they were permitted to give sworn testimony in court litigations concerning the race of other Indian-blooded bl. In South Carolina, the courts decided that 1/4 to 1/8 Negro ancestry (or three generations) would make a person white! In 1820 the South Carolina legislature passed an act that banned personal manumissions — only by petition to both houses of the legislature could slaves be freed.
Year
Owners
Slaves
Free Black Slaveowners and Their Slaves
in Charleston, 1790-1860
The diagram above shows that mulattos were more likely to be free, be slaveowners, and live in cities than darker-skinned Africans. Can you explain this?
By 1800, one third of colored heads of households in Charleston recorded slave property. Between 1820-1840, the percentage increased to 75 percent.
By 1850, the percentage had declined to 42 percent. See the table to the left.
By the 1880s a few free Blacks and former slaves had accumulated sufficient wealth to own ‘plantations;’ see the map of the Natchez area (Davis 1994).
1790
49
277
1800
36
315
1810
17
143
1820
206
1,030
1830
407
2,195
1840
402
2,001
1850
266
1,087
1860
137
544
The majority of urban black slaveowners were women. In 1820, free black women represented 68 percent of heads of households and 70 percent of slaveholding heads of colored households. The large percentage of black women slaveowners is explained by the combined effects of manumission (by their white masters for whom they fathered children), inheritance (from their white masters, relatives, and even husbands who had a higher mortality rate than women), and personal industry once they were free. Black women were the majority of slaves emancipated by white slave owning men with whom they had had sexual relations. The miscegenous nature of South Carolina society is nowhere better revealed than by the fact that 33 percent of all the recorded colonial manumissions were mulatto children and 75 percent of all adult manumissions were females. If homosexual relations existed between black male slaves and their white masters, these relations were not directly acknowledged through emancipation. By 1830 in Charleston, 65 percent of black slaveowners bought slaves for profit rather than to free family members, as indicated in registered documents. Black slaveowners often owned family members and slaves that they used in their businesses, but only 8 percent of black slaveowners who recorded slave transactions were purely benevolent masters–buying a slave’s family members, such as their spouses, children, and other relatives.
Examine the 1790 federal census yourself for free colored slave owners. Do this 1790 slaveowner assignment.
Slave Revolt in 1822
Denmark Vesey, a slave who bought his freedom when he won a lottery, plotted with hundreds of free blacks and slaves to take control of Charleston and kill all whites on 16 June 1822 in Charleston. The plans of the insurrection were kept from whites for nearly four years. A mulatto slave told his free mulatto friend about the planned revolt and asked what to do. The mulatto told him to tell his white slavemaster. Once the slave conspiracy was discovered, a mob of white Charlestonians burned the African Methodist Church and the city officials forced the church’s bishop to flee the state, even though he and his congregation had nothing to do with the plot. The police seized the leaders and participants, who were held in irons in the city jail. Thirty-five slaves were executed, and more than 30 blacks were deported from the state. Black sympathizers were prohibited from dressing in black and wearing black crape to mourn the executed. The bodies of the executed were dissected by the city surgeon!
When Vesey was organizing, Charleston’s black community was divided into three groups: affluent persons of color who shared a direct interest in preserving slavery, poor members of the free black community, and the vast number of slaves. For the Negro elite to take part in a slave insurrection was unthinkable because they had their own slaves and wealth to lose. They also risked losing the “respect” of the white community upon whom they relied for their income. The black elite continued to join churches of primarily white denominations, such as St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, and they frequently lived on the same streets as white families. Vesey, on the other hand, identified with slaves and he belonged to the African Methodist church.
See the map of Vesey’s Charleston.
In fact, the lighter-colored mulatto families distinguished themselves from the darker-colored free black families, who had their own exclusionary club (the Brown Fellowship) and who in turn separated themselves from the dark-skinned slaves. Many free mulattos had sought refuge from the slave revolt in Santo Domingo where they had lost land and slaves. Consequently, they were unlikely to identify with slaves, their fellow Africans.
After Vesey’s attempted rebellion, the Citadel (state-run military academy) was built just outside of the historic city to protect against future slave revolts. Today, the original Citadel is a hotel and a current one is on the northside.
Source: Larry Koger. Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790-1860. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 1985. — provides great details about specific families and their personal histories; fascinating reading.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Fugitive_Slave_Act_of_1850. here is the link elaine, please tell the truth an leave the fiction at home
elaine do u ever quit telling half truths? where do u get the law was for freed blacks? this is the same type of bs you used to start this blog. what paper do u print your brand of half truth news in? here is the law elaine
The Fugitive Slave Law or Fugitive Slave Act was passed by the United States Congress on September 18, 1850, as part of the Compromise of 1850 between Southern slave holding interests and Northern Free-Soilers. This was one of the most controversial acts of the 1850 compromise and heightened Northern fears of a ‘slave power conspiracy’. It declared that all runaway slaves be brought back to their masters.
no mention of free blacks elaine. quit adding content to promote your agenda. there were free blacks who owned slaves elaine did you know that? the largest in louisianna owned 165. he was a free black man.
SL/OS,
Foote was one helluva writer. Seconded.
OS,
Shelby Foote’s narratives on the Civil War should be required reading for all high school students, particularly for the Three Stooges posting here.
One of the best book series, both fact and fiction, I have ever read.
“There is no rational reason for them to do so. It seems that celebrating the commencement of a lost war that would have preserved an immoral institution would be secondary to promoting unity between the descendants of slaves and slave-owners. Maybe that will happen at the secession bicentennial.”
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Elaine, do not hold your breath. They are True Believers and have drunk the Kool Aid. They cherry pick facts, and if they cannot find any facts, they just make up stuff that fits their world view. They do not tolerate being corrected or educated, as you have seen. Being shown to be wrong just makes them double down on the ignorance.
Shelby Foote, the great civil war historian, admits that Nathan Bedford Forrest was a military genius. But like Dr. Moriarty, he was an evil genius. we know that based on some of the things he did both during the war and afterward.
AY,
“SL,
So do you really, really like my avatar….It was a hard decision…do you have an ideal that you’d like …..”
Yes, I really, really like the avatar … as I said on another thread, Elf Headmaster is a cool little dude and he cracks me up!
————————————————
Whoa! JEB, brentley AND Josephine … it’s a trifecta of tomfoolery, y’all!!!!
Josephine,
Here’s a video for you to show to your choir of revisionist singers:
http://www.youtube.com/user/gascv11?blend=23&ob=5
I will leave you all be, and Miss Elaine can entertain you and sing to the choir. ……………….
Don’t be played the fool by thre likes of sebesta, the hate monger pitts ilk. There are plenty of other black authors out there of Walter Williams ilk to compare them with. Teach thyself!
If the Confederacy had won, slavery would have continued in the South
My Beef: Revisionist History
by Dwayne Green
Charleston City Paper
http://www.charlestoncitypaper.com/charleston/if-the-confederacy-had-won-slavery-would-have-continued-in-the-south/Content?oid=2610694
Excerpt:
Confederate sympathizers today have mostly abandoned the argument that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery, although 50 years ago, slavery was hardly mentioned in the 100th celebration of secession. Instead, they try to argue that Lincoln and other Northerners were not really opposed to slavery and that while slavery might have been a cause for the conflict, it was not the primary cause. These arguments are off base for two primary reasons.
First, had the Confederacy won the Civil War, slavery would have undoubtedly continued in the South. As a result of the Emancipation Proclamation and the Union victory, slavery was abolished. For that reason, it does not matter what some Northerners thought or what Lincoln may have said in one quote. A victory by the North did equate to the end of slavery. A victory by the South would have meant the opposite.
Secondly, it was well known prior to 1860 that slavery was the central issue dividing the country, not taxes or states’ rights. Said S.C. Rep. Laurence Keitt in an 1860 speech: “African slavery is the cornerstone of the industrial, social, and political fabric of the South, and whatever wars against it, wars against her very existence. We of the South contend that slavery is a right, and that this is a confederate republic of sovereign states.” The New York Tribune echoed this sentiment when it wrote: “We are not one people. We are two peoples. We are a people for freedom and a people for slavery. Between the two conflict is inevitable.”
American citizens of the day knew that slavery was the driving force between North-South tensions and that it was the direct, primary cause for the Civil War. The reason for the revisionist history is that slavery is now widely understood to have been immoral, even in the South. For any member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans to concede that the Civil War was fought for slavery, they must admit that their ancestors died in furtherance of an immoral cause. Who wants to do that? There must be some noble purpose, even if it’s concocted after the fact, to justify the immense loss of human life. Hence the celebration of Southern valor and bravery in the face of so-called Northern aggression. When one understands the alternative to commemorating secession as something positive, one understands why denials about the true cause for the Civil War persist to this day.
Knowing this does not prevent me from recoiling whenever I read an op-ed or see a television interview promoting this “celebration of history.” You do not see the Japanese celebrating the bombing of Pearl Harbor or England commemorating the start of the Revolutionary War. There is no rational reason for them to do so. It seems that celebrating the commencement of a lost war that would have preserved an immoral institution would be secondary to promoting unity between the descendants of slaves and slave-owners. Maybe that will happen at the secession bicentennial.
Elmer Smith: Black History and the revisionists
February 15, 2011
http://articles.philly.com/2011-02-15/news/28536167_1_black-history-month-fugitive-slave-act-confederate-president-jefferson-davis
Excerpt:
Revisionists are having a ball with the Civil War. To hear them tell it, slavery was a mere footnote. All over the South this year, sons of the Confederacy are holding secession balls to celebrate the “brave” stand their ancestors took to defend the holy principle of states’ rights.
In Virginia and South Carolina, local historical societies have donned their hooped skirts and period suits to re-enact this mythical period when Southern gentility took a stand to protest the tyranny of the federal government.
They never mention that their esteemed forefathers didn’t invoke states’ rights while insisting that the federal government impose the Fugitive Slave Act on Northern states.
They never read the words of Alexander Stephens, first vice president of the Confederacy, who declared that “proper status of the Negro in our form of civilization” was “the immediate cause” of the war.
American government, Stephens wrote, is based upon the “great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man: that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.”
Confederate President Jefferson Davis cast it in economic terms. Excluding slavery from U.S. territories, as Lincoln had proposed in his campaign, would reduce the value of slaves, “thereby annihilating in effect property worth thousands of millions of dollars.” (My italics.)
States’ rights was also the code word that the great communicator Ronald Reagan used in 1980 when he opened his first presidential bid in Philadelphia, Miss., scene of one of the most notorious, racist assassinations in civil-rights history.
Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman were kidnapped and brutally murdered by Klansmen in July 1964. A few weeks earlier, a black church was firebombed and worshippers beaten by Klan members in Neshoba County, just outside Philadelphia.
Reagan chose to open his campaign in that white-supremacist stronghold without so much as a mention of the fact that they died because they were working to register black voters in Neshoba County.
The great communicator of American values couldn’t bring himself to mention Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman. Instead, he pledged his fealty to states’ rights, which he knew to be code for the new Southern strategy.
It worked. Reagan is hailed as the father of the conservative movement, who expanded upon the GOP’s Southern strategy and was most responsible for the ascendency of the Republican Party.
But his decision to ignore that history of racism was entirely consistent with his opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, his attempts as president to water down the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and his opposition to sanctions against South Africa’s apartheid regime.
America has a lot to thank Ronald Reagan for. But we should never forget the cynical ploy of his campaign strategy any more than we should forget why we sacrificed 620,000 American lives in the Civil War.
Well….It appears that the Ghosts of the South have all resurfaced..and been fully resurrected….Amen…..
The Civil War and Football in the South….Now you know what they have in common…..What was, could have been, what could have been, is… and that’s my story and I’m sticking with it…..