Slave Status before the War
In the mid-nineteenth century, the three most prominent slave economies were Brazil, Cuba and the U.S. attributable to the production and exportation of cotton, coffee and sugar. The slave population in the U.S. quadrupled between 1790 and 1860 from natural increase, not from importation of seized Africans. Natural increase was not a factor in the slave population growth in Cuba or Brazil but was due to importation and the replenishment of those who perished. The life of a slave in the Caribbean compared to the life of a slave in the southern states was dramatically different because of better living conditions and treatment. Between 1790 and 1860, they imported approximately 800,000 Africans into Cuba and transported about 2.2 million to Brazil. In all three areas, whether from natural increase or importation, they considered forced labor a product, like the cotton, tobacco or sugar they produced. After 1807, they imported relatively few Africans into the U.S. or the British Caribbean.[623]
In the nineteenth century, prices for native-born, more acclimated slaves in the U.S., Cuba and Brazil were well over $1,000 for unskilled labor. Because of the high volume, prices for seized Africans decreased to well under $100 after 1807. One could purchase a young adult male for as little as $30 on the Congo River in the 1860s.[624] People characterized as the elite pillars of society carried out the slave trading activities. Establishment historians regularly sanitize their dreadful deeds. People have thoroughly documented the disastrous long-term effects of slave and drug trading and human trafficking. Those same traders used the proceeds acquired from generating human misery to purchase respectability, status and political offices.[625]
Many Southerners worked side by side with their slaves. Black mammies breast-fed white babies. After emancipation, many blacks stayed with their white families or if they left, they continued to interact on a social basis. Many New Englanders thought
emancipated slaves should be deported or colonized elsewhere, in Haiti or Africa, with climates, they thought, that were suitable for “niggers.” According to the majority of New Englanders, assimilation for freed slaves was unthinkable. Black codes prevented Africans from settling in certain areas or required fees. Freed slaves were subjected to harsh punishment such as beatings, property seizures, and monetary fines, all legalized by white courts.On August 8, 1860 a patroller, the U.S.S. Mohican seized several U.S. ships, registered in New York, in West Africa’s coastal waters. Eight ships, belonging to Nathaniel Gordon, carried 4,750 slaves en route to New York. According to a New York Times article, officers from the U.S.S. Mohican boarded the slave ship, the Erie. They found, “eight hundred and ninety-seven Negroes, men, women and children, one- fourth men and one-fourth women.... so crowded when on the main deck that one could scarcely put his foot down without stepping on them. The stench from the hold was fearful, and the filth and dirt upon their persons indescribably offensive. They were stowed so closely that during the entire voyage they appeared to be in great agony... running sores and coetaneous diseases of the most painful as well as contagious character infected the entire load.”[626]
Another patroller supervised the Erie to Monrovia, Liberia. The ships arrived there on August 23, 1860 with only 867 slaves as thirty had perished during the trip. The Africans were unloaded and placed with the American Colonization Society. On August 29, after outfitting the ships, they left for New York and arrived there on October 3, 1860. Authorities arrested Gordon, first Mate William Warren and Second Mate David Hall for slave trading. The Southern District Court of New York indicted them on October 29, 1860. James Roosevelt, the District Attorney, Theodore’s granduncle asked for a delay.[627] The court sentenced Gordon to death on November 30, 1861. The defense appealed to Lincoln for a pardon, which he rejected on February 4, 1862. Then the defense appealed to the Supreme Court where Chief Justice Roger B. Taney denied the appeal. Authorities hung Gordon on February 7, 1862. His final words were “I
did nothing wrong.”[628] Gordon, the first U.S. citizen executed for slave trading, originally came from Maine. About 25,000 New Yorkers petitioned Lincoln to commute his sentence, commentary on their views of slaves and slave trading.[629]
Keeping the Elite Master Race Pure
In the 1700s, the elites viewed all indentured servants as “slaves” – humans that they viewed as commodities. More than half of all white immigrants to England’s North America colony during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were indentured servants. The elites granted freedom to both black and white indentured servants after serving a specified length of time, typically seven years. The indentured servants worked, lived, and socialized together, apparently indifferent to skin color distinctions. The colonial elites, a definite minority grew concerned about a potential rebellion from the majority non-voting lower economic classes. Consequently, they enacted legal measures to divide the poor whites and blacks and gradually the slave’s mutual acceptance of each other subsided. Society was largely composed of servants, landless tenants or small yeoman who owned inconsequential pieces of land that the elite simply did not want. The elites established a “divide and conquer” tactic that still exists in most of the industrial and third world cultures.[630]
Edmund S. Morgan pointed out, “For those with eyes to see, there was an obvious lesson in the rebellion. Resentment of an alien race might be more powerful than resentment of an upper class.”[631] With that awareness, we can readily comprehend the contrived ineffectiveness in maintaining security along our southern borders. Citizens may then angrily vent about the illegal aliens while ignoring the self-serving activities of Washington’s elite ruling class who remain socially and financially unaffected by the hordes of hungry people seeking a livelihood that is no longer available in their own countries, the result of the elite’s economic warfare perpetrated in Mexico. Further, the elites will justify global governance based on the homogenization of the races. After all, they might assert, why maintain distinct nations when nationalities are non-existent and people have assimilated with each other.
The English and French elites relegated the Africans they had imported into their countries during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the very bottom rung of society. The African slaves endured the same lowly status as the poor white multitudes. Officials in both countries, Britain and France, accepted intermarriage between blacks and whites. Many of Britain’s colonial leaders in the many British outposts also accepted interracial marriage due to the ethnicity existing in most of those colonies. However, French officials changed their policies and soon restricted the importation of slaves and passed legislation to prohibit intermarriage but they did not strictly enforce the ban.[632]
Then, colonial lawmakers also outlawed interracial marriage and rigorously altered the criminal codes in their efforts to mete out harsher punishments to blacks, compared to whites who committed the same crime. They viewed the white population, even the poorest, as superior to the black people. Essentially, in those actions, the lawmakers institutionalized inequality and legally reinforced the idea that black slaves were merely property. Unequal punishment, based on skin color, blatantly invalidated the Declaration of Independence’s promise of equality, creating resentment among the blacks that later erupted into violence. Additionally, the lawmakers imposed land ownership restrictions on former indentured servants, even the former white indentured servants. Only certain whites could engage in the most skilled occupations thus emphasizing and perpetuating economic barriers and class distinctions. The wealthy excluded the poorer whites and blacks, the subjugated classes, from participating in the voting process. The poor had little or no opportunity to express any opinions about the manner in which their moneyed superiors ruled them.[633]
Occasionally, when the elite allowed the poorer white male residents among them to cast a vote, it was
with restrictions. Poor white males could only express their opinions, through their votes, on local issues only, not significant national issues. Higher political offices were available only to the wealthy. Because the poor had inadequate choices, and an absence of political freedoms, the wealthy were at liberty to enact policies for the benefit of the wealthy, those who had the most to gain from the legislation.[634] Two major slave revolts occurred in New York in the first half of the eighteenth century, which resulted in the deaths of thirty-one slaves and four whites, who they either hanged or burned at the stake.[635] One year prior to America’s revolt against British tyranny, Connecticut had over 5,000 enslaved Africans. By 1790, according to the federal census for Connecticut, the most prosperous merchants owned at least one slave and approximately 50% of the Christian ministers owned slaves.[636]
U.S. citizens like to envision their nation as equitable and just, supported by the rhetoric of the founding documents. However, in practice, by 1772, citizens adopted racial prejudice, which was deeply entrenched in the thirteen colonies. Even Benjamin Franklin, a proponent of Wheatley’s Philadelphia- based antislavery society, placed Africans on the low rung of the humanity chain.[637] After the American Revolution and its purported battle against oppression, white bias against Africans had developed into a pervasive antagonistic ideology. Thomas Jefferson, in his Notes on the State of Virginia, declared in a lengthy statement regarding Africans that black inferiority – “in the endowment of both body and mind – might be an unchangeable law of nature.”[638]
Jefferson endorsed black colonization and privately applauded the American Colonization Society’s objectives. Henry Clay, John Randolph, and Richard Bland Lee founded the American Colonization Society (The Society for the Colonization of Free People of Color of America) in 1816 as a primary vehicle for returning or deporting the blacks to Africa. The American Colonization Society (ACS) helped found the colony of Liberia in 1821-1822 as a place for freedmen. Paul Cuffee, a wealthy New England ship owner advocated the settlement of freed blacks in Africa. He financed two trips to Africa, in 1811 and 1815-6, specifically to Sierra Leone, then under British domination. Quakers and slave owners comprised most of the membership of the ACS. The slave owners were anxious to deport or repatriate the free blacks, people they perceived as a danger to their society.
Historians consistently idealize or even sanctify the elite founders, though many of them are quite flawed. Some people view those who point out these character inconsistencies as anti-American. Jefferson, in a letter to Jared Sparks, editor of the North American Review and a friend of the Colonization Society, suggested a legal policy of removing only the young Africans, thereby reducing the number of “breeders.”[639] In 1781, advocating mass relocation, Jefferson said, “The slave, when made free, might mix with, without staining the blood of his master...but when freed, he is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture.”[640] He felt that a growing black population might ignite “a revolution of the wheel of fortune” that would reverse the roles of master and slave. His colonization plan called for state laws that would abolish slavery outright. “I advance as a suspicion ...that the blacks are inferior to the whites in the endowments of both body and mind.” As planter and slave-owner, he thought the blacks to be “dull, tasteless, and anomalous.” [641] DNA evidence recently suggested a biological link between Jefferson and the black Hemings families with the implications that Jefferson fathered children with Sally Hemings, one of his slaves. The Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society argues that Randolph Jefferson, Thomas’ brother, often drank and fraternized with the Monticello slaves and was most likely the father.[642]
Jefferson thought that failure to segregate the two races would generate a future race war. He fearfully envisioned the mongrelization of society wherein everyone would be a mulatto. He promoted emancipation followed by colonization and advocated deportation as a sure method of segregation. The South could liberate and purge the slaves at the same time. Because he believed in the superiority of the white race, Jefferson wanted to enact strong political measures to maintain the country exclusively for the
white race. Before he died in 1826, he recommended the West Indies as a prospective colony for the blacks. While he promoted manifest destiny, he thought it should exclude the black man.[643]
Benjamin Lundy, an abolitionist, supported colonization. Whites accepted freedom for the blacks as long as the government deported them soon afterwards. Many people in the South endorsed gradual emancipation. The relocation concept created an advantageous atmosphere for the sponsorship of abolition societies. During the 1820s, there was an upsurge in the number and membership of colonization and abolition societies. By 1832, there were 306 colonization societies, 70% of them in the southern slave states. By 1827, according to Lundy, there were 106 abolitionist societies with 5,150 members in slave states and twenty-four societies with 1,475 members in the Free states.[644]
An early eugenicist, Samuel George Morton, anatomy professor at the University of Pennsylvania, claimed that he could determine the intelligence of a specific race by their skull size. He claimed that a larger skull meant a larger brain and therefore greater intellectual capacity while a smaller skull was indicative of decreased capability. He collected hundreds of skulls from all over the world and then created his pseudo-scientific theories from his study of these skulls. He claimed that ancient Egyptians were not Africans but were white.[645] He wrote two books –The Crania Americana, An Inquiry into the Distinctive Characteristics of the Aboriginal Race of America (1839) and Crania Aegyptiaca (1844). Wealthy sponsors probably popularized, financed and promoted his work, which provided fuel for the elite’s later eugenics program, forced sterilization and natural selection.
In the 1840s and 1850s, because of the government’s Indian policies and the class-defining acceptance of the institution of slavery, politicians and citizens supported the concept of manifest destiny and the idea that white Americans were divinely destined to control the land mass between the Pacific and the Atlantic regardless of the non-white inhabitants and their longevity in the land. The elite exploited false racial theories, supported by their own scientific ideas, in order to seize resources from people they viewed as insignificant.[646] Many whites supported black emancipation, with the equal protection of the law, as long as whites were scientifically assured that the blacks were inferior in intelligence, physical stamina, and ambition. Thus, according to the elites, they certainly did not warrant political, cultural or social parity with the superior white races.[647]
Northern abolitionists, while endorsing black inferiority, acted altruistic and sympathetic over the plight of southern slaves, people they called “niggers,” a term that Lincoln regularly used. Northerners characterized the blacks as meek, submissive, and mentally backward. Harriet Beecher Stowe referred to them as “a race hitherto ignored by the associations of polite and refined society; an exotic race, whose ancestors, born beneath a tropic sun, brought with them, and perpetuated to their descendants, a character so essentially unlike the hard and dominant Angle-Saxon race.”[648]
Many Free Soilers (no blacks welcome) and Republicans adopted the biologically bogus, racial ideas promoted by the scientific community of the period because it served their objectives. Writers, physicians, scientists, the founding members of the Free Soil and Republican Parties claimed that the physical and mental inequities between the races were inherent and permanent. They also decided that opportunities and environmental circumstances were insignificant to the development of the races or their cultural standing.[649]
Democratic Congressman David Wilmot, a Freemason, proposed the Wilmot Proviso, dated August 8, 1846.[650] It provided for the colonization of the blacks outside of the country and the prohibition of slavery in land acquired because of the Mexican-American War (1846-1848). It was predicated on the idea that black people were inferior and unfit to socialize, intermarry or copulate with whites, a superior Caucasian race. Therefore, they needed to shunt them off into their own society to maintain the purity and exclusivity of the higher race. By deporting the so-called lower class people, the higher-class people
would be able to enjoy the abundant material resources of the land.[651]
The whole point of colonization was that the U.S. should be composed exclusively of white Anglo- Saxons. In 1858, Francis Blair wrote, “It is certainly the wish of every patriot that all within the limits of our Union should be homogeneous in race and of our own blood.” Wisconsin Senator James R. Doolittle said colonization would “keep our Anglo-Saxon institutions as well as our Anglo-Saxon blood pure and uncontaminated.” Other supporters argued that free blacks were “a grievous nuisance to every State of the Union” and that colonization “would relieve us from the curse of free blacks.”[652] People believed that white signified someone good while black suggested evil. The threat of the expansion of slavery, especially to the west, was really about racism rather than antagonism against the labor system. Northerners frequently exhibited a fanatical fear and deep-seated loathing of the blacks and wanted nothing to do with them.[653]
The Republican’s objectives suggest social structuring instead of social and political equality. Court historians portray false moralists as gallantly “battling against the immorality of Southern slavery” and as standing “upon principle and shunned expediency” before and during Lincoln’s War. The Republican Party’s operative phrase before and during that war was “Human freedom.” Now, the Republican Party uses the phrase “Fighting for our freedom” to rationalize America’s serialized warfare since then. Some historians argue that the Republicans “morally regenerated the nation through a successful battle with slavery” as if that preposterous notion of moral reform even begins to justify the needless slaughter of 622,000 people during the war. The Lincolnites purportedly based their crusade-style revolution upon some idealistic morality – wiping out the evildoers of yesteryear. Other writers claim that the slaughter was about the defense of Christianity, democracy and progress.[654]
Lincoln convened a special meeting, exclusively for black leaders, at the White House on August 14, 1862, for the primary purpose of promoting mass deportation and colonization. Lincoln began by saying, “you and we are different races.” He claimed that commingling was the basic cause of the war. Therefore, the government would facilitate the relocation of the black people. He told them that it would be “selfish” of them to remain in America where they were unwanted by the white population. Further, he said, blacks “should sacrifice” their “present comfort, for the purpose of being as grand...as the white people.” He told them they were not compelled to go to Liberia where many deportees had already perished due to lack of preparation and resources.[655] However, somewhere closer like Central America, would be more appropriate. Lincoln prevailed upon the blacks, including Frederick Douglass, to persuade their people to vacate the country.[656]
Lincoln told the group, “But for your race among us there would not be war, although many men engaged on either side do not care for you one way or the other.” He always maintained that the races “should be separate.” During the war, Congress allocated $600,000 to transport and colonize the blacks. He suggested putting them to work cutting trees in Haiti or working in the mines in Panama. He also suggested that the government pay compensation to the slaveholders without any concern or compensation for the slaves themselves.[657]
Brown Brothers, Slave Traders and Money Laundering
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