Slavery - the Rest of the Story~

[Sunshine]

In an 1856 letter to his wife Mary Custis Lee, Robert E. Lee called slavery "a moral and political evil." Yet he concluded that black slaves were immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially and physically.

The fact is large numbers of free Negroes owned black slaves; in fact, in numbers disproportionate to their representation in society at large. In 1860 only a small minority of whites owned slaves. According to the U.S. census report for that last year before the Civil War, there were nearly 27 million whites in the country. Some eight million of them lived in the slaveholding states.

The census also determined that there were fewer than 385,000 individuals who owned slaves (1). Even if all slaveholders had been white, that would amount to only 1.4 percent of whites in the country (or 4.8 percent of southern whites owning one or more slaves).

In the rare instances when the ownership of slaves by free Negroes is acknowledged in the history books, justification centers on the claim that black slave masters were simply individuals who purchased the freedom of a spouse or child from a white slaveholder and had been unable to legally manumit them. Although this did indeed happen at times, it is a misrepresentation of the majority of instances, one which is debunked by records of the period on blacks who owned slaves. These include individuals such as Justus Angel and Mistress L. Horry, of Colleton District, South Carolina, who each owned 84 slaves in 1830. In fact, in 1830 a fourth of the free Negro slave masters in South Carolina owned 10 or more slaves; eight owning 30 or more (2).

According to federal census reports, on June 1, 1860 there were nearly 4.5 million Negroes in the United States, with fewer than four million of them living in the southern slaveholding states. Of the blacks residing in the South, 261,988 were not slaves. Of this number, 10,689 lived in New Orleans. The country's leading African American historian, Duke University professor John Hope Franklin, records that in New Orleans over 3,000 free Negroes owned slaves, or 28 percent of the free Negroes in that city.

To return to the census figures quoted above, this 28 percent is certainly impressive when compared to less than 1.4 percent of all American whites and less than 4.8 percent of southern whites. The statistics show that, when free, blacks disproportionately became slave masters.

The majority of slaveholders, white and black, owned only one to five slaves. More often than not, and contrary to a century and a half of bullwhips-on-tortured-backs propaganda, black and white masters worked and ate alongside their charges; be it in house, field or workshop. The few individuals who owned 50 or more slaves were confined to the top one percent, and have been defined as slave magnates.

Black Slave Owners Civil War Article by Robert M Grooms

Yes, there were many free blacks before the war of northern aggression. Blacks even owned slaves themselves.

 

[Katzndogz]

Contrary to popular belief, most slave owners were not rich, they knew to protect their considerable investment and treated slaves well. No one wanted a slave to die and lose all that money.

As odious as it is, and it is odious to mention, the black domination in sports today is largely the result of the selective breeding done in the slave days. They physiology of an American descendant of slaves is far, far different than the physiology of an African with no American slave ancestry.

 

[Sunshine]

When I was a girl, schools here were still segregated, so I didn't really know any blacks until I went to work in Nashville. There I met several who I consider friends. One of them told me that Lincoln was no friend to her people. I never knew until she told me that the freed slaves didn't really know how to care for themselves and when they left the plantations many of them starved or froze to death.

A few years later, the internet comes along and I am just doing some general reading when I happen upon W E B Dubois, a notable black scholar. He basically validated what she told me, and it was reading Dubois that I learned that they had nowhere to go after the war, so the government just sent them back to the plantations.

The experience of the army with the refugees and the rise of the departments of Negro affairs were a most interesting, but unfortunately little studied, phase of Reconstruction. Yet it contained in a sense the key to the understanding of the whole situation. At first, the rush of the Negroes from the plantations came as a surprise and was variously interpreted. The easiest thing to say was that Negroes were tired of work and wanted to live at the expense of the government; wanted to travel and see things and places. But in contradiction to this was the extent of the movement and the terrible suffering of the refugees. If they were seeking peace and quiet, they were much better off on the plantations than trailing in the footsteps of the army or squatting miserably in the camps. They were mistreated by the soldiers; ridiculed; driven away, and yet they came. They increased with every campaign, and as a final gesture, they marched with Sherman from Atlanta to the sea, and met the refugees and human property on the Sea Islands and the Carolina Coast.

Grant determined that Negroes should perform many camp duties ordinarily done by soldiers; that they should serve as fatigue men in the departments of the surgeon general, quartermaster, and commissary, and that they should help in building roads and earthworks. The women worked in the camp kitchens and as nurses in the hospitals. Grant said, "It was at this point where the first idea of the Freedmen's Bureau took its origin."

...

"Their condition was appalling. There were men, women and children in every stage of disease or decrepitude, often nearly naked, with flesh torn by the terrible experiences of their escapes. Sometimes they were intelligent and eager to help themselves; often they were bewildered or stupid or possessed by the wildest notions of what liberty might mean-- expecting to change labor, and obedience to the will of another for idleness and freedom from restraint. Such ignorance and perverted notions produced a veritable moral chaos. Cringing deceit, theft, licentiousness-- all the vices which slavery inevitably fosters-- were hideous companions of nakedness, famine, and disease. A few had profited by the misfortunes of the master and were jubilant in their unwonted ease and luxury, but these stood in lurid contrast to the grimmer aspects of the tragedy-- the women in travail, the helplessness of childhood and of old age, the horrors of sickness and of frequent death. Small wonder that men paused in bewilderment and panic, foreseeing the demoralization and infection of the Union soldier and the downfall of the Union cause."

https://facultystaff.richmond.edu/~aholton/121readings_html/generalstrike.htm

 

[Sunshine]

Contrary to popular belief, most slave owners were not rich, they knew to protect their considerable investment and treated slaves well. No one wanted a slave to die and lose all that money.

As odious as it is, and it is odious to mention, the black domination in sports today is largely the result of the selective breeding done in the slave days. They physiology of an American descendant of slaves is far, far different than the physiology of an African with no American slave ancestry.

The first article states that most slave owners had no more than 5. A slave had to be a significant investment for a plantation owner. I simply can't believe they horse whipped them, because that practice has the potential to seriously lower the value of their slaves. Yet, no one thinks it through. The whip and chain model is what we have. But I can tell you that W E B Dubois lets us know that blacks owe no real debt of gratitude to Lincoln or the north.

That is true about the breeding. I have one black friend who will preface some of her statements with: 'The white part of me thinks......'

 

[Mad Scientist]

Black Slave owners. Indian Slave owners. Northern Slave owners.

(Governor of Maine was a slave owner)

 

[Coloradomtnman]

So what is your point? That living as a slave is better than dying free? That black people were better off as slaves in a foreign land than free in their native lands? That being treated well as a slave justifies slavery? That slavery was just an excuse for the North to invade the South? For what? All its rich industry? Its rich farmlands that existed no where else except most of the continent? That black people are just as guilty for owning slaves as white people at the time? I don't get it. What's the point of this thread?

 

[konradv]

The point of apologizing for slavery is what?!?! Is it supposed to make us feel better that some blacks and Indians held slaves? What's really important is that the legacy of slavery still lives on. Old World slavery was usually the result of war, crime, debt or religion. It's in the New World that race was added to the equation and it continues to twist the minds of those of all races raised in this country, as evidenced by this self-serving OP.

 

[Toronado3800]

I will agree not all slaves were treated poorly. Then again I treat my pets decent as well. I would especially if I had sled dogs or the like which I depended on.

Want to be my pet? Probably not.

Now my old car, boy do I have to maintain that and take care of it. Could I use a human slave to drag my big bottom around on his back? Wanna be that person.

As an American I am offended by the thought of slavery. Maybe, maybe, you can tell me it was a condition of the time and not all slave owners were immoral or shouldn't be shot. Maybe.

But I am too deeply indoctrinated on this "all men are created equal" stuff, even including women if I have to force equality on them to help future generations.

Maybe in some non-American fuedal or royal way government type of way of thinking slavery is ok. Until then lets drop rule of constitutional law evenly on the people.

 

[Katzndogz]

When I was a girl, schools here were still segregated, so I didn't really know any blacks until I went to work in Nashville. There I met several who I consider friends. One of them told me that Lincoln was no friend to her people. I never knew until she told me that the freed slaves didn't really know how to care for themselves and when they left the plantations many of them starved or froze to death.

A few years later, the internet comes along and I am just doing some general reading when I happen upon W E B Dubois, a notable black scholar. He basically validated what she told me, and it was reading Dubois that I learned that they had nowhere to go after the war, so the government just sent them back to the plantations.

Keep studying that history.

The freed slaves had nowhere to go. They were told to leave the only homes they ever knew. They suddenly had no one to feed them, shelter them, clothe them. The Yankees had a solution. The plantations were hit with enormous property taxes retroactive to the beginning of the civil war. Carpetbaggers swept through the south buying up the property for fractions of pennies on the dollar. Then they divided up the plantations into plots and offered these plots to the newly freed slaves as their own land, free, just for a share of the crop they produced. As long as they produced a crop to share, they paid the "mortgage" on the plot of land. The concept of sharecropping was born.

This was a huge boon to the new northern owners. While they got the fruit of the freed slave's labors, they had no responsibility to them. If they got sick, too bad. If they didn't have enough to eat, no one would send over food. Appeal for medical care or food for the starving could be met by a kindly owner - for a price, that would be tacked on to the mortgage and paid out of the share the sharecropper was entitled to keep. Technically the sharecroppers were a free people. When someone got too sick or was too injured to work the land, it was quickly repossessed and given "free" to another freed slave.

The North had plenty of experience in this kind of business model. They enslaved white northerners the same way in Company towns where the company owned all the housing and all the stores with the workers endlessly unable to work off the company debt.

Of all the cruelties of slavery none compared to the cruelty visited on the free sharecroppers.

 

[hoosier88]

Slavery was a tragedy for the South & all around. See Dominion of Memories: Jefferson, Madison & the Decline of VA - Susan Dunn - Basic Books, 2007. For decades, the Commonwealth of Virginia led the nation. The premier state in population, size, and wealth, it produced a galaxy of leaders: Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Mason, Marshall. Four of the first five presidents were Virginians. And yet by the middle of the nineteenth century, Virginia had become a byword for slavery, provincialism, and poverty. What happened?

In her book, Dominion of Memories, historian Susan Dunn reveals the little known story of the decline of the Old Dominion. While the North rapidly industrialized and democratized, Virginia's leaders turned their backs on the accelerating modern world. Spellbound by the myth of aristocratic, gracious plantation life, they waged an impossible battle against progress and time itself.

In their last years, two of Virginia's greatest sons, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, grappled vigorously with the Old Dominion's plight. But bound to the traditions of their native soil, they found themselves grievously torn by the competing claims of state and nation, slavery and equality, the agrarian vision and the promises of economic development and prosperity.

 

[Katzndogz]

So what is your point? That living as a slave is better than dying free? That black people were better off as slaves in a foreign land than free in their native lands? That being treated well as a slave justifies slavery? That slavery was just an excuse for the North to invade the South? For what? All its rich industry? Its rich farmlands that existed no where else except most of the continent? That black people are just as guilty for owning slaves as white people at the time? I don't get it. What's the point of this thread?

Nothing of the sort. As a 21st century people we should all recognize that slavery is cruelty. More than that, it is no longer necessary. If I were a 19th century or earlier person, slavery would be an allocation of labor units. It isn't like there was an alternative, very few people worked for wages.

 

[konradv]

When I was a girl, schools here were still segregated, so I didn't really know any blacks until I went to work in Nashville. There I met several who I consider friends. One of them told me that Lincoln was no friend to her people. I never knew until she told me that the freed slaves didn't really know how to care for themselves and when they left the plantations many of them starved or froze to death.

A few years later, the internet comes along and I am just doing some general reading when I happen upon W E B Dubois, a notable black scholar. He basically validated what she told me, and it was reading Dubois that I learned that they had nowhere to go after the war, so the government just sent them back to the plantations.

Keep studying that history.

The freed slaves had nowhere to go. They were told to leave the only homes they ever knew. They suddenly had no one to feed them, shelter them, clothe them. The Yankees had a solution. The plantations were hit with enormous property taxes retroactive to the beginning of the civil war. Carpetbaggers swept through the south buying up the property for fractions of pennies on the dollar. Then they divided up the plantations into plots and offered these plots to the newly freed slaves as their own land, free, just for a share of the crop they produced. As long as they produced a crop to share, they paid the "mortgage" on the plot of land. The concept of sharecropping was born.

This was a huge boon to the new northern owners. While they got the fruit of the freed slave's labors, they had no responsibility to them. If they got sick, too bad. If they didn't have enough to eat, no one would send over food. Appeal for medical care or food for the starving could be met by a kindly owner - for a price, that would be tacked on to the mortgage and paid out of the share the sharecropper was entitled to keep. Technically the sharecroppers were a free people. When someone got too sick or was too injured to work the land, it was quickly repossessed and given "free" to another freed slave.

The North had plenty of experience in this kind of business model. They enslaved white northerners the same way in Company towns where the company owned all the housing and all the stores with the workers endlessly unable to work off the company debt.

Of all the cruelties of slavery none compared to the cruelty visited on the free sharecroppers.

Does that make you feel better, placing the blame on others? What good does that do? What we all need to do is to look inside ourselves to change the things that are causing the legacy of slavery to persist into the present.

 

[Coloradomtnman]

So what is your point? That living as a slave is better than dying free? That black people were better off as slaves in a foreign land than free in their native lands? That being treated well as a slave justifies slavery? That slavery was just an excuse for the North to invade the South? For what? All its rich industry? Its rich farmlands that existed no where else except most of the continent? That black people are just as guilty for owning slaves as white people at the time? I don't get it. What's the point of this thread?

Nothing of the sort. As a 21st century people we should all recognize that slavery is cruelty. More than that, it is no longer necessary. If I were a 19th century or earlier person, slavery would be an allocation of labor units. It isn't like there was an alternative, very few people worked for wages.

^THAT was the point of this thread? Really? Honestly? Truthfully? Swear to God?

 

[Toronado3800]

When I was a girl, schools here were still segregated, so I didn't really know any blacks until I went to work in Nashville. There I met several who I consider friends. One of them told me that Lincoln was no friend to her people. I never knew until she told me that the freed slaves didn't really know how to care for themselves and when they left the plantations many of them starved or froze to death.

A few years later, the internet comes along and I am just doing some general reading when I happen upon W E B Dubois, a notable black scholar. He basically validated what she told me, and it was reading Dubois that I learned that they had nowhere to go after the war, so the government just sent them back to the plantations.

Keep studying that history.

The freed slaves had nowhere to go. They were told to leave the only homes they ever knew. They suddenly had no one to feed them, shelter them, clothe them. The Yankees had a solution. The plantations were hit with enormous property taxes retroactive to the beginning of the civil war. Carpetbaggers swept through the south buying up the property for fractions of pennies on the dollar. Then they divided up the plantations into plots and offered these plots to the newly freed slaves as their own land, free, just for a share of the crop they produced. As long as they produced a crop to share, they paid the "mortgage" on the plot of land. The concept of sharecropping was born.

This was a huge boon to the new northern owners. While they got the fruit of the freed slave's labors, they had no responsibility to them. If they got sick, too bad. If they didn't have enough to eat, no one would send over food. Appeal for medical care or food for the starving could be met by a kindly owner - for a price, that would be tacked on to the mortgage and paid out of the share the sharecropper was entitled to keep. Technically the sharecroppers were a free people. When someone got too sick or was too injured to work the land, it was quickly repossessed and given "free" to another freed slave.

The North had plenty of experience in this kind of business model. They enslaved white northerners the same way in Company towns where the company owned all the housing and all the stores with the workers endlessly unable to work off the company debt.

Of all the cruelties of slavery none compared to the cruelty visited on the free sharecroppers.

It is true the freed slaves had nowhere to go. And your diatribe against pre-big government capitalism is noted. I will quote you. In some ways me and old country western singers share your hatred of the mortgage system and company towns. Just don't go too far off the socialist end with the complaints. We do need to dangle the carrot of profit in front of folks as well as the fear of hunger.

Anyways, in the context of post civil war America until the rise of the socialist threat and labor unions the slaves were somewhat in the same boat as immigrants who were "flocking" to this country with no place to go.

Much like Pa Ingalls he could get some government welfare land grant and take his daughter Laura and the rest of the family out Indian lands we purchased from the Europeans or captured from Mexico and used big government troops to secure for him.

Still it was a great, effective, system of colonization.

Now racism, and it was alive and well against the shanty Irish, Italians and blacks and lord forbid the Natives, made it more difficult for blacks since they looked the MOST different.

I do agree capitalism must be controlled by our labor union inspired regulations on businesses which have become part of the national morality over the last century. I just do not want to beat up the capitalist in favor of the "kings" and "barons" of the backwards feudal south too much. This is America not 13th Century Europe.

 

[Circe]

Contrary to popular belief, most slave owners were not rich, they knew to protect their considerable investment and treated slaves well. No one wanted a slave to die and lose all that money.

As odious as it is, and it is odious to mention, the black domination in sports today is largely the result of the selective breeding done in the slave days. They physiology of an American descendant of slaves is far, far different than the physiology of an African with no American slave ancestry.

I have always assumed they selected the biggest males from the Africans brought in for sale on the Gold Coast. And that this explains the sports giants today.

I mean, anybody would! We know they selected for health; there are a lot of descriptions of that. The chieftains who sold them were always trying to foist off old crazy men and broken-down men for the same amount of trade goods, of course.

 

[konradv]

Contrary to popular belief, most slave owners were not rich, they knew to protect their considerable investment and treated slaves well. No one wanted a slave to die and lose all that money.

As odious as it is, and it is odious to mention, the black domination in sports today is largely the result of the selective breeding done in the slave days. They physiology of an American descendant of slaves is far, far different than the physiology of an African with no American slave ancestry.

I have always assumed they selected the biggest males from the Africans brought in for sale on the Gold Coast. And that this explains the sports giants today.

I mean, anybody would! We know they selected for health; there are a lot of descriptions of that. The chieftains who sold them were always trying to foist off old crazy men and broken-down men for the same amount of trade goods, of course.

There's also the consideration that only the healthiest would have survived the journey.

 

[Sunshine]

So what is your point? That living as a slave is better than dying free? That black people were better off as slaves in a foreign land than free in their native lands? That being treated well as a slave justifies slavery? That slavery was just an excuse for the North to invade the South? For what? All its rich industry? Its rich farmlands that existed no where else except most of the continent? That black people are just as guilty for owning slaves as white people at the time? I don't get it. What's the point of this thread?

Nothing of the sort. As a 21st century people we should all recognize that slavery is cruelty. More than that, it is no longer necessary. If I were a 19th century or earlier person, slavery would be an allocation of labor units. It isn't like there was an alternative, very few people worked for wages.

That's true. And I had such a wonderful time on the east coast last spring. There, I learned that most of the slaves in the colonies were indentured staves, working off their passage to the new world. As one of my Nigerian friends said, 'Now we are all slaves.'

Slavery was on the way out thanks to the industrial revolution which would soon hit the US. I think everyone should read W E B Dubois. He, a black scholar, makes some really good points about the cruelty of the emancipators.

 

[Sunshine]

Well, it's been a long day. I'm tired and think I will retire before I expire. I'll just have to think about this tomorrow, after all, tomorrow is another day!

 

[The Infidel]

Has anyone consulted Sheila Jackson Lee.?

I hear she is a free'd slave. (her words)

 

[poet]

In an 1856 letter to his wife Mary Custis Lee, Robert E. Lee called slavery "a moral and political evil." Yet he concluded that black slaves were immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially and physically.

The fact is large numbers of free Negroes owned black slaves; in fact, in numbers disproportionate to their representation in society at large. In 1860 only a small minority of whites owned slaves. According to the U.S. census report for that last year before the Civil War, there were nearly 27 million whites in the country. Some eight million of them lived in the slaveholding states.

The census also determined that there were fewer than 385,000 individuals who owned slaves (1). Even if all slaveholders had been white, that would amount to only 1.4 percent of whites in the country (or 4.8 percent of southern whites owning one or more slaves).

In the rare instances when the ownership of slaves by free Negroes is acknowledged in the history books, justification centers on the claim that black slave masters were simply individuals who purchased the freedom of a spouse or child from a white slaveholder and had been unable to legally manumit them. Although this did indeed happen at times, it is a misrepresentation of the majority of instances, one which is debunked by records of the period on blacks who owned slaves. These include individuals such as Justus Angel and Mistress L. Horry, of Colleton District, South Carolina, who each owned 84 slaves in 1830. In fact, in 1830 a fourth of the free Negro slave masters in South Carolina owned 10 or more slaves; eight owning 30 or more (2).

According to federal census reports, on June 1, 1860 there were nearly 4.5 million Negroes in the United States, with fewer than four million of them living in the southern slaveholding states. Of the blacks residing in the South, 261,988 were not slaves. Of this number, 10,689 lived in New Orleans. The country's leading African American historian, Duke University professor John Hope Franklin, records that in New Orleans over 3,000 free Negroes owned slaves, or 28 percent of the free Negroes in that city.

To return to the census figures quoted above, this 28 percent is certainly impressive when compared to less than 1.4 percent of all American whites and less than 4.8 percent of southern whites. The statistics show that, when free, blacks disproportionately became slave masters.

The majority of slaveholders, white and black, owned only one to five slaves. More often than not, and contrary to a century and a half of bullwhips-on-tortured-backs propaganda, black and white masters worked and ate alongside their charges; be it in house, field or workshop. The few individuals who owned 50 or more slaves were confined to the top one percent, and have been defined as slave magnates.

Black Slave Owners Civil War Article by Robert M Grooms

Yes, there were many free blacks before the war of northern aggression. Blacks even owned slaves themselves.

Yawn. Propaganda. Lies.