Common Sense in an Uncommon World

After completing our first year as teachers, a friend and I decided to take a three-week leisurely tour of the south and east.  It was 1970, less than 10  years after the passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964, and we had been warned about the south.  We had been told that southern sheriffs often pulled over and arrested northerners who had not broken any laws, jailed them, and if they were women, often raped them.  Ridiculous?  Of course, but we had been told that was what happened, and, perhaps already a bit nervous about driving so far alone, we believed it. So, rather than take the scenic smaller highways we had intended, we drove the interstate all the way to Florida. Everyone we met was unfailingly polite and nice, so on the way to visit my friend’s cousin at Ft. Bragg, we drove those “dangerous” small highways.  And we never encountered a single problem then, nor the following summer when we drove through the south again, this time to the Outer Banks of North Carolina.  That experience taught me that what Nazi Joseph Goebbels smugly said is absolutely true: “If you tell a big enough lie and you tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.”  And this is exactly the situation in which we find ourselves.

Recently, former President Obama gave a speech on his website about the George Floyd killing in which he stated that America’s “original sin” was systemic racism. “Systemic” mean relating to or part of a system.  In this case, one presumes that Obama was suggesting that racism is an integral part of the system of government that is the United States of America.  Is he right?  Has racism, first in the form of slavery, later in the Jim Crow laws, and finally in fewer opportunities for black Americans been a deep flaw,” the original sin” of America?  This blog will consider only the historical portion of that question.  A second blog will discuss the modern logic of the “systemic racism” argument.

Few would argue that slavery is morally wrong.  However, for most of history, slavery has been an accepted policy.  Slavery first began in about 6800 B.C. in Mesopotamia when those who were captured during wars were brought back to Mesopotamia as slaves. Later, the Egyptians often sent expeditions out with the sole purpose of capturing and bringing back slaves.  Roman legions brought back slaves by the thousands and the population of Rome was soon about half slave.  With the fall of the Roman Empire, Germanic tribes took over what had been Roman Europe and often used those they had defeated as slaves. Then, following the devastation of the Black Plague, slaves were brought in from all over, even Africa, to augment the depleted work force. Slavery remained legal in Europe into the 1800 and many Muslim countries still make use of slaves, often Christians,  today.

Black slaves were brought to American shores to the Spanish colony of Florida as early as the 1500s and to the Caribbean.  Africans were aboard other ships that came to our coasts, but not all of them would have been slaves, and slavery in the Americas was not limited to African slaves. Among the native American tribes, slaves were often taken during raids of other tribes and later, white settlers who were captured in raids sometimes became slaves.  The Cherokees, famous for The Trail of Tears when they were forcefully moved to Oklahoma, owned Black slaves, all of whom were moved along the Trail of Tears.   Between 1607 and 1622 thousands of indentured servants arrived in Virginia, as well. Treated much like slaves, they were expected to work off their passage to the colony.  Many were treated poorly and some were sold as property, virtually becoming the first slaves in Virginia. Native Americans were sometimes enslaved as well, especially in the areas of the current United States controlled by Spain.

The now famous date of 1619 relates the arrival and purchase of a dozen black slaves in Virginia.  The slaves were captured by other African tribes and sold to Europeans, mostly Spanish, Portuguese, and English, who then carried them to British and Spanish colonies to sell them. As it became apparent that the South was a good place to grow cotton and tobacco, southerner plantation owners saw slaves as an economic way to plant and harvest their crops.  Slavery in the colonies was born. 

The recent 1619 Project contains many historical inaccuracies, only one of which is that the 13 Colonies rebelled against England because England was going to outlaw slavery in the Colonies.  That is patently false. Great Britain, which was one of the most active slave traders, only abolished the slave trade in 1807, years after the American Revolution, and it was not until 1834 that Britain abolished the use of slavery in the British Empire, including its colonies.  That date comes long after both the American Revolution and the War of 1812.  The American Colonies sought and obtained their independence from Great Britain not to protect slavery, but, as children have always been taught, to gain the right to govern themselves.  The famous slogan of “No taxation without representation!” explains exactly why the United States separated from Great Britain. To suggest that slavery was the reason is to perpetuate a lie.

 Slavery, unfortunately,  spread quickly throughout the Colonies. Since England itself was engaged in the slave trade and slaves had existed in Europe throughout the Middle Ages, slavery did not seem to most British Colonists to be wrong.  In fact, in 1667, the British Parliament passed “An Act to Regulate the Negroes on the British Plantations.”  In the Act it says that Blacks have a “wild, barbarous and savage nature, to be controlled only with strict severity” (possibly because they wanted to be free?)  But anti-slavery sentiments began to be expressed as the Colonies were populated, led by Christians.  As early as 1676, one hundred years before the Declaration of Independence, Quaker William Edmondson of Rhode Island wrote an anti-slavery letter to all Quakers in America. In 1688, in Philadelphia, Germantown Mennonites issued an anti-slavery proclamation written by Francis Daniel Pastorius that declared that slavery was inconsistent with Christian values. In 1700, even Chief Justice Samuel Sewall wrote an anti-slavery document and organized anti-slavery organizations.  In 1711, the Quakers and the Mennonites successfully convinced the Pennsylvania Colonial Legislature to ban slavery, but the ban was immediately overturned by British Crown authorities.  Great Britain found it profitable to maintain slavery in the American colonies.  Still, in 1712 Pennsylvania was able to ban the importation of slaves, becoming the first colony to ban slavery. 

In 1726, Benjamin Franklin began an organization called the Junta whose members were to work against slavery. In 1766, some Blacks filed suits against their owners and were able to win their freedom.  In 1774, Thomas Jefferson wrote “A Summary View of the Rights of British America” in which he said that “the abolition of slavery is the great object of desire in the colonies where it was unhappily introduced,” and recommends it would be important “to exclude all further importation from Africa.”  Thomas Paine soon joined with pamphlets condemning slavery.

Throughout the mid to late 1700s, colony after colony in New England banned slavery.  On October 29, 1774, the Continental Congress adopted a clause stating that they would no longer engage in the slave trade stating “we will no longer be concerned in it ourselves, nor will we hire our vessels, nor sell our commodities or manufatures to those who are concerned in it.” 

On July 4, 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  Although himself a slave ownee, Jefferson was not, as some would suggest, referring only to white men in these words, but rather to all men, including the slaves of the rebelling colonies.  This is apparent in his previous anti-slavery works and the fact that he proposed a gradual emancipation of the slaves in Virginia, an idea that was opposed by plantation owners and never carried out.

More and more states, even those in the South, began to admit that slavery was wrong.  In 1786 the State of North Carolina declared that the slave trade was “ of evil consequences and highly impolitic.” In 1787 the Constitution institutionalized slavery by declaring that a slave would only count as 3/5 of a person when being counted for representation in Congress.  This is used by proponents of  “systemic racism” to prove that the founders of our country did not recognize Blacks as people.  But in fact, the move was a purely political one, and one designed to attempt to prevent slavery from spreading again to the northern states which had by now eradicated it. The writers of the Constitution were in a bad position.  More than half of the slaves in America were in the state of Virginia and the rest of them were scattered throughout the other southern states.  To count each slave as a person would greatly increase the population of those southern states, giving them a much higher representation in Congress and allowing their practice of slavery to more easily spread again throughout the fledgling states.  But to count each slave as only 3/5 of a person reduced the number of southern Representative to Congress, giving the North more power over the running of the country. It was the only way the North could include the southern states in the young country and still protect the freedom of Blacks in the North. 

Between 1790 and 1830 numerous petitions to abolish slavery were introduced in Congress, but the southern states were able each time to prevent their passage into law.  Unable to abolish slavery legally, anti-slavery groups began quietly assisting in the escape of thousands of slaves into the northern states. The Underground Railroad was born. Between 1795 and 1835, a religious movement known as The Great Awakening toke place, and as more Americans turned to God, they joined the anti-slavery movement, recognizing that slavery did not fit with the teachings of Jesus.   

At the peak of slavery just before the Civil War, only about 1.4% of all Americans owned slaves. Roughly 3,000 blacks owned about 20,000 black slaves themselves, a fact which is little talked about in liberal circles. About 24% of southern families owned slaves, though some owned only one or two. But through the generations that had lived in the South with slavery, the thought of living side by side with freed slaves seemed alien and frightening.  It was this which drove the majority of other southerners to fight for the Confederacy and the way of life that their families had known for two hundred years.  Some will argue that the South seceded from the Union over the question of states’ rights, but they clearly seceded because of slavery.  The pressure to abolish slavery and free the slaves had become intense from abolitionists in the North and more and more slaves were being whisked away to safety. As more states had been added to the Union, the North had forced the South to accept that for each slave state which was added, another state must be admitted as a free state.  In Missouri, a line had to be drawn at 36º30 to separate the slave portion of the state from the free half.  The divide in the country over slavery was intense. President Abraham Lincoln, himself anti-slavery, did not go to war against the seceding states of the South in order to free the slaves, but in order to preserve the Union.  That to him was the most important issue, but his Republican advisors soon pushed him to use the secession as a way to free the slaves, and in 1863 Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring that all slaves in states waring against the Union “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”

Republican abolitionists were worried that the courts would deem the emancipation a temporary, wartime effort, and that slavery would thus be allow to continue after the end of the war.  So they pushed for a constitutional amendment.  It easily passed the Republican dominated Senate, but was narrowly defeated in the House by Democrats who felt that each state should decide the slavery question for itself and by Republicans who wanted to win the war at any cost.  Only four Democrats broke ranks and voted for the amendment.  That summer at the Republican Convention, Lincoln pushed for a platform demanding the complete abolition of slavery. Lincoln and Secretary of State William Seward used both strong arm tactics to garner Democrat votes for a constitutional amendment and even offered patronage jobs and even an ambassadorship to Denmark to lame duck Democrats.  The amendment passed on January 31, 1865, and became the 13^thamendment to the Constitution  when Georgia approved it on December 6, 1865.

Although slavery is indeed a dark blot upon the history of the United States, it is a blot on the histories of most countries in the world.  And it is difficult to realistically call it “systemic racism” since from only a few years after the introduction of African slaves into Virginia, Christians in the Colonies began protesting the practice. By the time of the American Revolution, most northern colonies had already banned slavery within their states.  Countless men and women, both in the North and the South, risked their own freedom and even their lives in order to smuggle escaped slaves to the freedom of the North. Though slave owners themselves, Jefferson and Washington recognized the immorality of the practice and Washington freed his slaves upon his death.  Other noteworthy early Americans like Ben Franklin and Thomas Paine worked against the practice.  

The Declaration of Independence clearly states that all men are created equal by their Creator, and that the job of the government is to protect their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  The Constitution now guarantees the freedom of all people in the United States through the 13^th amendment, but by the time of the Civil War, sentiment was growing so strong against slavery that the Confederacy was made up of only 11 slave states while the Union was composed of 20 free states and four border states in which popular opinion eradicated slavery during the course of the war.  Countless young men from the North fought and died to preserve the Union and to free the slaves. 

If indeed the system of government in the United States supported and encouraged racism, there would have been no abolitionists, no Declaration of Independence declaring the equality of all men, no Emancipation Proclamation, no 13^thamendment to the  Constitution to protect the freedom of former slaves fought for tooth and nail by Northern Republicans.  It is not systemic racism from which the country has suffered, but rather the personal lack of morality of many Americans.  Just as the Germans willingly believed that all of their problems were caused solely by the Jewish people living in their midst, so many Americans came to blame their lack of a job or poor wages on the blacks living near them. But World War II was to usher in the greatest chapter in the fight for freedom and equality of all blacks.  My next blog will pick up the story  in the 20^th century.