Sunday, July 27, 2014
On the North and Slavery
There isn't a single solitary thing that the North, the Republican party, and President Lincoln wouldn't have done to accommodate the South on the issue of slavery. NOTHING. That, and I will also point out that the vast, Vast, VAST, percentage of northerners were NOT anti-slavery (they were either pro-slavery - Wall Street, especially - or completely indifferent to it) and if anything the level of racism in the North was worse than it was in the South (the fact that the slave ships were virtually all from the North, the fact that multiple northern states had black codes which made it almost impossible for blacks to enter, the fact that the New York City draft riots probably killed more black folks than all of the slave insurrections combined, etc.). I mean, I know that the "official" story has changed over the years and the good guy, bad guy mentality certainly reigns supreme in the present but the record is the record is the record and there really isn't all that much that Lincoln boot-lickers like quasi-Marxist, Eric Foner (he writes for "The Nation", for Christ), can do to change THAT.
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9 comments:
"...the fact that the New York City draft riots probably killed more black folks than all of the slave insurrections combined..."
Specifics like that often cause mt to wonder, and investigate...
The NYC draft riots had 119 fatalities, most of whom were said to be the rioters themselves, mostly Irish.
In Nat Turner's "slave insurrection" revolt alone, more than 250 African/etc slaves were executed. And this is just one of the slave insurrections.
Most of the 119 blacks were killed by the rioting Irish immigrants- even burned down a black orphanage. The army lacked
sufficient troops to maintain control. We accept the horror of the NYC event, but note in the
slave-holding south, records indicate 1,161 slave executions
concomitant with "brutality, degradation, branding, whipping and rape" Typical, IMO, is the report of an escaped slave,
slave- "men were required to pick 80 pounds-per-day of cotton, while women were required to pick 70 pounds; if any slave failed in his or her quota, they were given lashes of the whip for each pound they were short. The whipping post stood right next to the cotton scales" -it seems reasonable to conclude that free blacks had it rough; black slaves had it rougher.
I used this source
I purposefully avoided political axe grinders.
"In fact, about 300, over half of them policemen and soldiers, were injured, and there were no more than 119 fatalities, most of them rioters.....A majority of the rioters were Irish, living in pestilential misery"
Looks rather cut and dried to me.
The largest massacre of African/African-Americans in a riot that I found reference to looking this up was the Tulsa Riot.
This is from Wikipedia and while it certainly isn't a perfect source it's probably better than the organization that gives us "Pawn Stars", "Ice Road Truckers", and "Mountain Men" - "Initially intended to express anger at the draft, the protests turned into a race riot, with white rioters, mainly but not exclusively Irish immigrants,[3] attacking blacks wherever they could be found. At least 119 blacks are estimated to have been killed."
And BB, you do realize, don't you, that of the 50,000+ southern civilian casualties (a number that even the folks at Gettysburg acknowledge) of Mr. Lincoln's war a significant chunk of those were slaves (and this doesn't even include all of those that starved to death and died due to disease) and that the Union soldiers routinely raped and pillaged their way through the slave quarters in some of the most barbaric displays in all of human history?......And of course the South was racist. My only point here is that the whole country was racist and at least according to de Toqueville, the North was probably a little bit more so (I have some great quotes from abolitionists that I'll be sharing with you soon).
And Mr. Lincoln was more than willing to allow this peculiar institution to continue on indefinitely, just as long as the southern states didn't secede. I mean, you have read his '61 inaugural (where he supports the Corwin Amendment, promises to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act, and even supports an act which would have made any state's nullification of the Fugitive Slave Act illegal!!!!) right?
He was: even THAT wasn't enough for the leaders of the rebellion.
Lincoln should simply have let the southern states spin off from the union.
But then again they'd have become more states to give foreign "aid" to.
Actually, Les, I think that the South probably would have been the ones giving the aid.
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