Lecture 5: The Burning Question of Slavery
Lecture 5: The Burning Question of Slavery
Objectives:
By the end of this lecture, students will be able to
Ø give a history of the roots of slavery in America, including who, when, how, and why
Ø demonstrate understanding of the slave trade
Ø discuss the actions and reactions of slaves
Introduction
Throughout their involuntary existence in the United States blacks, no matter what white American ideologies want to make people believe by distorting their contributive facts, remain an outstanding minority that nurtured American society, deepened, and diversified its culture. Most important of all, blacks were of great help to American political and economic wealth and prosperity. They served the colonies when they were both indentured servants and slaves subjected to all forms of oppression and injustice. They constituted a great source of labor when white Anglo-Saxons were still facing the hostilities and wilderness of the New Land. Thanks to these so-called “inferior”, docile, and “brutish” beings who were considered unable of mental endowment, the Americans rebelled, fought one another, and triumphed by building a powerful nation.
The Philosophy of the Whites
The laissey-faire doctrine and the philosophical Social Darwinism claimed the natural superiority of some races to others as the logical justification for slavery into a free society. Darwinists believed that freedom was the reward for superior intelligence, honesty, and thrift. They unhesitatingly attributed those qualities to the Anglo-Saxons who were freedom and democracy lovers. They said whites were self-reliant, ethical, and disciplined. They had a special talent for political organization that enabled them to form representative governments and create just laws. From this perspective, white “races” are destined to rule over nonwhite races. However, those doctrinarians seemed to have forgotten that blacks did not have the same opportunities as whites. That supremacy which whites are zealously proud of is built at the expense of those “inferior” beings.
The Origin of Slavery
Many ancient nations practiced slavery attributing a variety of factors to justify their acts. The pursuit of slaves had been the concern of men for countless centuries. Slavery had posed dilemmas for human societies in Africa as well as in other continents long before the time European profit-makers settled the Atlantic islands and the Americas. Some scholars cannot merely be content with the phenomenon in the geographical context within which slavery has existed but also the historical periods within which it prevailed. This will conventionally lead us to refer to slavery in the Greek and Roman world, Medieval Europe, and Muslim societies. A generally common agreement between all these societies practicing slavery was to consider their victims in some sense alien and inferior. Ethnic differences had also been other attributes for enslaving people. Yet these attributes lack a mark separating slaves from others.
The Presence of Blacks in the New World
The first group of black Africans to take part in the Northern American settlement was brought in 1619. Though these African “servants” were not technically slaves, within a few decades the practice of perpetual bondage for blacks had begun to take hold. Slavery existed il all the thirteen colonies, but the institution experienced much greater development in the South. This event marked the grim tale of black-white contact in British America. The settlers treated them as commodities to be sold or leased according to their whims. Vestigial practices, values, and beliefs led to the creation of a slave caste in America.
By the 1660s, the legislatures of the Southern colonies passed a series of legislative acts that created a status of slavery for black Africans. By the early 19 century, slavery became a deeply rooted institution with established defensive arguments and legal codes to justify and secure it. Consequently, blacks were overexploited, maltreated, and severely oppressed. The absolute power of the master led the blacks to forced miscegenation, perishable family legal basis, and separatism. They made them the engines of American economic growth. They were ripped off the least of human rights, and subjected to all kinds of evil practices. They were deprived of sacred and natural ties.
The Cotton Gin
It was Eli Whitney’s invention in 1793 of the cotton gin, a machine (or “engine”) for removing the seeds from cotton fibers that suddenly made cultivation of the crop profitable and helped ensure the growth of the plantation system and the institution of slavery.
Slavery and the Territories
From the earliest years of the United States, there was debate and disagreement over slavery. As the country expanded, much of the attention became focused on newly acquired lands, in which the status of slavery was unclear. Southerners, in general, felt that slavery should be permitted in the federal territories, while most Northerners were against its extension.
The first major confrontation came over the question of slavery in the Louisiana Purchase. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 provided for the admission of Missouri into the Union as a slave state, compensated for by the addition of Maine as a free state.
Abolitionism
Still pervasive in the hearts and minds of whites, discrimination became the predominant factor negatively affecting the lives of blacks. Even when they were freed, their status ranked from nothingness to industrial peonage and serfdom for almost two hundred and fifty years. A variety of stereotypes towards blacks were increasingly introduced as a convenient proxy for racial and cultural marginalization. The Europeans saw the black color as a symbol of hatred, impurity, obscurity, sin, and ugliness; whereas, the white color connoted purity, virginity, virtue, beneficence, beauty, and godliness.
Aided by some abolitionists, the blacks organized themselves in rebellious actions and uprising movements. The most important rebellion was the one led by Nat Turner in 1831, in Virginia among the white Southerners. Being scared of slaves’ future uprising and rebellious actions, whites in different states, especially in the south, enacted laws to forbid religious meetings of slaves without being supervised by a white preacher. A few decades later, when the Civil War broke out in 1861, President Abraham Lincoln–having as their ultimate objective in mind to preserve the Union-made his famous Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. He declared all the slaves in the rebellious states free. This decision opened the blacks’ search for liberty.
Although their expectations were always twined with doubt and fear, blacks did not remain passive, docile, and merely uncomprehending receivers of freedom as they had most often been stigmatized in some historical records. By contrast, their role in the Civil War for example was fundamental. The issue of their emancipation changed the motives of the war.
Consequently, many politicians as well as ordinary people became convinced that the Union could never be preserved without the abolition of slavery. When the war ended, Congress passed acts –the Fourteenth and the Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution— to ensure blacks' freedom, equal treatment in front of the law, the right to vote, and citizenship. Under the control of the Federal government, blacks cherished some of these rights that did not last long. By the end of Reconstruction in 1877, the white supremacists, through ideological assumptions, deeply rooted ethnocentrisms, and pervasive cultural prejudice could hardly admit freedom and equal rights to cursed people worthy only of enslavement. Whites, accordingly, took various hostile measures to reverse the newly acquired rights of blacks. They had legislated the Black Codes to maintain them in a lower, subordinate position. They even established terrorist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan that bitterly whipped and illegitimately lynched blacks.
How could Americans proclaim that “all men are created equal … endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” without noticing that they themselves were holding other men and women in bondage? They could not, of course. The ideas of the American Revolution — individualism, natural rights and free markets — led logically to agitation for the extension of civil and political rights to those who had been excluded from liberty, as they were from power — notably slaves, serfs and women. As the great English scholar Samuel Johnson wrote in 1775, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?”
The world’s first antislavery society was founded in Philadelphia that same year. Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, yet he included a passionate condemnation of slavery in his draft of the Declaration of Independence the following year: “[King George] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him.” The Continental Congress deleted that passage, but Americans lived uneasily with the obvious contradiction between their commitment to individual rights and the institution of slavery.
Racism is an age‐old problem, but it clearly clashes with the universal ethics of libertarianism and the equal natural rights of all men and women.
As the idea of liberty spread, slavery and serfdom came under attack throughout the Western world. During the British debate over the idea of compensating slaveholders for the loss of their “property,” the libertarian Benjamin Pearson replied that he had “thought it was the slaves who should have been compensated.”
In the United States, the abolitionist movement was naturally led by libertarians. Leading abolitionists called slavery “man stealing,” in that it sought to deny self‐ownership and steal a man’s very self. Their arguments paralleled those of John Locke and the libertarian agitators known as the Levellers. William Lloyd Garrison wrote that his goal was not just the abolition of slavery but “the emancipation of our whole race from the dominion of man, from the thraldom of self, from the government of brute force.”
References
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