If you listen to the current and recent stories about slavery and the slave trade you will be
led to think of it as an entirely Southern institution. You will think it was created by Southerners for the benefit of Southerners and that no one else had anything to do with it.
This is how you are supposed to think. This is how your public school “education” has programmed you to think. Truth has little or nothing to do with it. You are “educated” to believe “Marxist” truth whether you realize it or not. However, those who have educated your teachers realize it even if the teachers don’t.
Most of the time, though, Marxist truth (whatever supports the current agenda) will be a far cry from reality. This is one more reason to remove your kids from public school.
One small example here, from Donnie Kennedy’s book Myths of American Slavery:
“On April 21, 1861, the American slaver Nightingale, affectionately known as the ‘Prince of Slavers” was built in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, fitted out for the slave trade in Salem, Massachusetts, and its captain was from New York. When captured by the USS Saratoga, the Nightingale was flying the United States flag, and had more than nine hundred slaves on board. One of the last American vessels to be captured in the slave trade was the Erie, Nathaniel Gordon of Portland, Maine, commander.
It should be noted that these vessels were not bringing slaves into the South.” How come, you might ask? Well, for a couple good reasons—one was that the Constitution of the Confederate States did not allow the importation of African slaves. Another reason was that the Union blockage had pretty much curtailed any importation of slaves into the South. Don’t expect to find this kind of information in your history books. They are usually so full of the “Uncle Tom's Cabin” sort of fables they frequently have no room for the truth.
You are never told that, in much of the North, slavery was abolished to protect the white population from having to compete with slave labor. Lincoln, contrary to the popular myths about his fondness for black people and how he “grew” into this cherished position, felt that blacks were inferior and he was strongly in favor of moving them out of the country once they became free. He never changed that opinion. Donnie Kennedy’s book states, on page 165,: “Add to these the state of Illinois, which, in 1862 (while its sons were pillaging the South) by an overwhelming vote of the people, passed an amendment to the state constitution declaring that ‘no negro or mulatto shall immigrate or settle in this state.”
If you ever noticed, the “underground railway” to free slaves ran all the way from different places in the South up into Canada. It didn’t end in New York or Michigan or wherever, and part of the reason for this was that most Northern folks did not want the blacks living too close to them.
Recently an article Lincoln’s Inversion of the American Union by Donald W. Livingston dealt, to some degree, with the slavery issue.
Dr. Livingston made several interesting points. He noted: “Only around fifteen percent of southerners even owned slaves, and the great majority of those had holdings of one to six.
Jefferson Davis was an enlightened slave holder who said that once the Confederacy gained its independence, it would mean the end of slavery. The Confederate Cabinet agreed to abolish slavery within five years after the cessation of hostilities in exchange for recognition by Britain and France.
Southerners were not fighting to preserve slavery, but simply and solely because they were being invaded. And the North certainly did not invade to abolish slavery. Nor should this be surprising considering the Negrophobia that prevailed everywhere in the North. It was assumed by the vast majority of Americans, North and South, that America was a white European polity, and that the Indian and African populations were not—and were never to be—full participants in that polity.“ Dr. Livingston cited a passage from the Oregon state constitution to prove this.
Again, where have you read this in your “history” books? Dr. Livingston noted that free blacks in Northern states were “severely regulated.” All you ever see in the “history” books are comments about how Jim Crow laws were enacted in the South. You are never told they had the same thing in the North. That part is just omitted.
And why did the northern states emancipate the blacks who had been slaves there? Dr. Livingston observed: “Emancipation laws in the antebellum North were designed to rid the North of its African population. They typically declared that the children of slaves born after a certain date would, upon reaching a certain age, be emancipated. This meant the adult slaves were not freed and that families could be sold South before the children reached the age of emancipation. Emancipation led to a reduction of the African population in the North, not to an increase, as it did in the South.” And that was the sole reason, in most cases, for African emancipation up North. Sell the slaves South and then complain about Southern slaver holders and the “sin”of slavery. If it was a sin for Southerners to own them wasn’t it also a sin for Northerners to own them? Hush! You ain’t supposed to ask that question!
Livingston pointed out that: “Even abolitionists were careful to point out that it was not the slave they loved but the slaveholder they hated, and that emancipation did not at all mean social and political equality with whites.” This is the part you are never told about.
So basically the abolitionists hated the South and Southerners and they used the slaves as a wedge to pry the South apart from its foundations. If you look at the theological underpinnings of many of the abolitionists the reason for this is apparent. Their agenda called for much more than freeing slaves. That was the foot in the Southern door and that’s all it was.
I have never forgotten the story my father told me years ago. When he was a boy he knew an ex-slave. They used to fish in the same river and got talking. The old slave talked about what life had been like before he was free. He told my Dad that the family that owned them always treated them well and they had grown to love them. After the 13th Amendment was passed freeing them, many of the slaves did not want to leave what, to them, was home. One day the Yankee soldiers came and to them they were free and so they should pack up whatever they could carry on their backs and go. One of the slaves, with a little presence of mind asked the soldier “If we free then why can’t we stay if we want to?” My Dad never forgot the soldier’s reply. He told the slave “You’re free to go but not to stay.” How typical of Yankee/Marxist “freedom.” You’re free to do what we tell you to do but not what you might want to do. How different is our “freedom” today? “Reconstruction” still marches on! But, with our public school “educations” we still don’t get the message.