Have They Always Made the Same Excuses for Enslaving People?

You can click on this picture to enlarge it.

It shows a man being publicly burned for some act of rebellion against a slaveholder.

Believe it or not, the so-called "moderate” abolitionists of the time claimed that slave revolts were harmful to the cause of emancipation. They believed in making arguments that would charm the slaveholders into freeing their slaves.

But ask yourself: Is it possible that slaveowners will be convinced to stop being slaveholders, by sweet-sounding arguments?

Here is how the slaveholders answered that question: by burning men who resisted, and by saying this to abolitionists:

“But if your course was wholly different— if you distilled nectar from your lips and discoursed sweetest music… do you imagine you could prevail on us to give up a thousand millions of dollars in the value of our slaves, and a thousand millions of dollars more in the depreciation of our lands...?”

—That quote is from James Hammond, speaking for the continuation of slavery, in 1845.

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How Could One Black Man Win, Against the Entire System of Slavery?

You can click on the painting to enlarge it. It was painted in 1839.

It shows "Cinqué", a married rice farmer who had three children. Cinqué was from Sierra Leone, in West Africa. His real name was actually Sengbe Pieh. He was born in 1813, and died in around 1879. But he entered the pages of history in 1839, when he rebelled against the entire European and American institution of slavery.

It started when he was kidnapped from Africa, and sold into slavery, in 1839.

He led a rebellion on the slave ship (called the "Amistad") carrying him and 54 other Africans into slavery, on June 30 , 1839.

The rebellion killed the captain of that slave ship, and the cook of the ship. Two Africans, who had been enslaved, also died. The Africans took prisoner Ruiz and Montez, the two European merchants who had made the purchase, and demanded that they direct the ship back to Sierra Leone, but instead they directed the ship towards the United States.

After about two months, the Amistad reached United States waters near Long Island, New York. Members of the USS Washington came aboard, the Africans were charged with mutiny and murder, and they were taken to New Haven, Connecticut to await trial.

The two Europeans claimed that the Africans were already slaves in Cuba at the time of their purchase and were therefore legal property. Translators from Mende to English were found, allowing the Africans to tell their story to the court. Cinqué served as the group's informal representative.

In March 1840, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the Africans mutinied to regain their freedom after being kidnapped and sold illegally. Former U.S. President John Quincy Adams served as the Africans' defense counsel. They were ordered to be permitted to return to Africa, against the protests of U.S. President Martin Van Buren.

Cinqué and the other Africans reached their homeland in 1842.


What Cinqué accomplished:

The “Amistad incident” created a major issue that the divided abolitionist movement could unite around. It focused public attention on what slavery really was.

The legal decision in the "Amistad" case did not challenge slavery itself. But for the first time the United States Supreme Court asserted that people of color had the same rights as anybody else and that the courts must enforce them.

It would be many years, however, before the United States would actually begin to respect the rights of people of color. In fact, sixteen years after the Amistad decision, the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case declared that Black people had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” The Dred Scott Court said: “They are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States.”

Only after the U.S. Civil War did the United States even pretend to implement the racial equality that the "Amistad" case had seemed to promise. Judge Constance Baker Motley has called the Supreme Court's Amistad decision "the first legal milestone in the long, difficult struggle in the courts by persons of color for equal justice under law."


What happened to Africa all this time:

As soon as European invaders had gotten a foothold on Africa’s coast, massive destruction was done to African society, to the intricate fabric of African justice, civil administration, religion, medicine, agriculture, communal landholding, family bonds, economy, currency, and trade.

The Europeans had encouraged frequent raids and wars, to obtain big profits from slave trading. Wars became endemic. Through these wars, African chiefs obtained slaves to sell to Europeans.

Thus Europe devastated many African civilizations, waged many wars, gave wealth and power to chiefs who helped them enslave Africans, and killed millions of Africans over the centuries. The slavery period gave way to outright European ownership of practically every African country, until the 1960’s African freedom movement.
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Why were Black ministers outlawed in Southern states?

You can click on this picture to enlarge it.

It shows Nat Turner (1800-1831).

Nat Turner formed an army approximately of 70 African-Americans, who traveled from house to house, freeing people from slavery, and killing at least 55 slave owners and their family members, starting August 21, 1831, in Virginia.

Turner’s army ran out of ammunition; many were executed.

The Virginia legislature panicked. They even debated whether slavery should end.

Over 100,000 white males were pulled into militias. Virginia’s total population was only 1,211,405.

This is a direct quote from Nat:

"My grand mother, who was very religious, and to whom I was much attached - my master, who belonged to the church, and other religious persons who visited the house, and whom I often saw at prayers, noticing the singularity of my manners, I suppose, and my uncommon intelligence for a child, remarked I had too much sense to be raised - and if I was, I would never be of any service to any one - as a slave..."

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W.E.B. DuBois wrote about the white panic that seized the nation after Nat Turner's rebellion:

"A wave of legislation passed over the South prohibiting the slaves from learning to read and write, forbidding Negroes to preach, and interfering with Negro religious meetings. Virginia declared, in 1831, that neither slaves or free Negroes might preach, nor could they attend religious service at night without permission.

"In North Carolina slaves and free Negroes were forbidden to preach, exhort or teach 'in any prayer-meeting or other association for worship where slaves of different families are collected together' on penalty of not more than thirty-nine lashes. Maryland and Georgia had similar laws. The Mississippi law of 1831 said: It is 'unlawful for any slave, free Negro, or mulatto to preach the gospel' upon pain of receiving thirty-nine lashes upon the naked back of the presumptuous preacher. If a Negro received written permission from his master he might preach to the Negroes in his immediate neighborhood, providing six respectable white men, owners of slaves, were present (Williams II, 163).

"In Alabama the law of 1832 prohibited the assembling of more than five male slaves at any place off the plantation to which they belonged, but nothing in the act was to be considered as forbidding attendance at places of public worship held by white persons. No slave or free person of color was permitted to 'preach, exhort, or harangue any slave or slaves, or free persons of color, except in the presence of five respectable slaveholders or unless the person preaching was licensed by some regular body of professing Christians in the neighborhood, to whose society or church the Negroes addressed properly belonged.' "

--quoted from "Toussaint L'Ouverture, Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey & Nat Turner", by W.E.B. DuBois, from Chapter 9 of his book entitled "Negro Church", published in 1903 by Atlanta University Press.

You can click on this picture to enlarge it.

It shows Dr. W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963), Ph.D., Harvard University, 1896.
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Muslims have been in North America for Centuries

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She was still living in bondage in the early 1860's, when this picture was taken.

Even 40 years after being being kidnapped from Africa, people were still asking for a Qur’an.

According to the late Professor John Blassingame, writing in his book, The Slave Community, some of the Africans who were enslaved, in the U.S. South, were Muslims. They could read and write Arabic.

Even 40 years after being kidnapped into slavery, some of these Muslims were still pleading with the slaveholders to see a Qur’an.

Some slaveholders read English-language Qur’ans to those Muslims, until they learned English. Then the slaveholders replaced the Qur’an with the Bible.

--Professor Blassingame cites “The Autobiography of Omar ibn Said, Slave in North Carolina in 1831”, from the American Historical Review XXX (1925), pages 787-795, and several other sources.
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Professor John W. Blassingame (1940-2000), Yale University.
His book, entitled "Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies", has been called the best collection of primary sources about the slave experience in a single volume.

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How did the land end up with the U.S. Army?

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Before the U.S. Army killed him in 1813, Tecumseh said all the Native American nations should “unite in claiming a common and equal right in the land, as it was at first and should be yet; for it was never divided, but belongs to all for the use of each.”

He said nobody “has a right to sell, even to each other, much less to strangers—those who want all and will not do with less.”
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Toussaint

You can click on the picture to enlarge it.

It shows Toussaint L'Ouverture (1743-1803).

Toussaint broke France's grip on Haiti, and destroyed any chance that Haiti could ever be enslaved again.

Toussaint was the leader of the Haïtian Revolution, and the first leader of a free Haiti.

Toussaint was not the first revolutionary in Haiti's history. In 1791, slave revolts broke out in Haiti, and plantations went up in flames. It took Toussaint a while to join the revolution. The early leaders of these rebellions were far too willing to compromise with whites who sounded radical.

Toussaint scorned those early rebel leaders, and used his experience in administration and implementation of authority to gather a following of his own, to train soldiers, and to lead a Black Haitian army to victories against the European troops.

Toussaint led Haiti to victory over the European occupiers, and established his control over Haiti in 1797.

He expelled the French commissioner, Léger-Félicité Sonthonax, as well as the British armies, invaded Santo Domingo to free the slaves there, and wrote a constitution naming himself governor for life.

Between 1800 and 1802, Toussaint tried to rebuild the collapsed economy of Haiti and to re-establish commercial contacts with the United States and Great Britain. Although he was deceived by Napoleon, caged, and exiled to France, he had given the colony a taste of freedom that could not ever be taken away.

He had destroyed slavery forever in Haiti.

As early as 1797, General Toussaint had written this, to France:

“Blind as they are!...Do you think that men who have been able to enjoy the blessing of liberty will calmly see it snatched away?...If they had a thousand lives they would sacrifice them all rather than be forced back into slavery again. But no, the same hand which has broken our chains will not enslave us anew.”

--This quote is taken from C.L.R. James' book entitled "The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution" (Published in 1938).


France went broke fighting Haiti.

That’s why France sold the “Louisiana Purchase” to the United States.

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You can click on this picture to enlarge it.

It shows C.L.R. James (1901-1989), pioneering historian of the Haitian Revolution.
He was also a leader of pan-African political thought, and Chair of the International African Friends of Abyssinia, which fought against Italy's invasion of Ethiopia in 1935.
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The U.S. Mail was censored to keep anti-slavery publications from reaching the South

You can click on this picture to enlarge it.

It shows Frederick Douglass, who publicly spoke and wrote against slavery from 1841 until it was abolished at last.

Until abolitionists, like Douglass, got heard, slavery was not a major subject of public discussion among white people in the United States.

A few old anti-slavery societies had continued a quiet existence, most of them in the South, without being noticed much.

But starting with the 1830's, the abolitionists, Black and white, men and women, got themselves noticed.

They taught that not only the slaveholders, but the people of the North too -- were all responsible for the crime of slavery.

The new abolitionists, of the 1830's, refused the completely insincere proposal of "gradual emancipation" of slaves, or the idea of sending free Black people to form colonies in Africa.

These new abolitionists, in 1831, began to organize the New England Anti-slavery Society, and started a movement which spread throughout the North.

As Carl Schurz, a U.S. Senator after the Civil War, tried to explain it:

"This agitation was carried on with singular devotion, but its startling radicalism did not at first enlist large numbers of converts, or result in the organization of a political force that might have made itself felt at the polls. It did, however, have the effect of exciting great irritation and alarm among the slave-holders, and among those in the North who feared that a searching discussion of the slavery question might disturb the peace of the country; and thus it started a commotion of grave consequences."

In 1831, a slave revolt broke out in Virginia under the leadership of Nat Turner. It was suppressed, but caused a widespread panic among slaveholders, and a huge military mobilization of the white population.

In 1833, the emancipation of the slaves in the British West Indies made the slaveholders keenly aware of the hostility of public opinion in the outside world, and increased their alarm. Events like these gave the agitation of the abolitionists a new significance.

The slaveholders fiercely denounced the Northern abolitionists as reckless incendiaries, inciting the slaves to insurrection, robbery, and murder, -- as enemies to the country, as fiends in human shape, who deserved to be hung.

The slaveholders demanded that the North silence the abolitionists by force; that laws be made to imprison their speakers, to stop their presses, to prevent the circulation of their tracts, and by every means to put down their agitation. They said that, unless this were done, the United States, as a country, could not survive.

A fierce outcry arose in the Free States against the abolitionists. Turbulent mobs, composed in part of men of property and prominent standing, broke up anti-slavery meetings, destroyed their printing-offices, wrecked their houses, and threatened them with violent death. There were riotous attacks upon anti-slavery gatherings in Philadelphia, New York, Utica, and Montpelier. In Boston, William Lloyd Garrison was dragged through the streets with a halter round his body. In Connecticut and New Hampshire, schools which received Black pupils were sacked.

In Cincinnati, a large meeting of citizens resolved that an anti-slavery paper published there must cease to appear, and that there must be "total silence on the subject of slavery." A foaming mob executed the decree, threw the press into the Ohio, and looted the homes of Black citizens. Some time later, Pennsylvania Hall, the meeting house of the abolitionists, was burned in Philadelphia, and the famous abolitionist Elijah P. Lovejoy was murdered in Illinois.

But this violent persecution failed to silence the abolitionists.

The number of abolition societies grew, not rapidly, but steadily. The leading abolitionists themselves never became popular with the multitude. But the immediate effect of their work has frequently been much underrated. The abolitionists served to keep alive in the Northern mind that secret trouble of conscience about slavery which later, in a ripe political situation, was to break out as a great force. They accomplished another immediate result of the highest importance.

By the alarm they excited in the South the abolitionists caused slavery to disclose to public view, more openly than ever before, those tendencies which made it incompatible with the fundamental conditions of free government.

The slavery question then started appearing in tracts and periodicals by the abolition societies. Those publications caused an outcry from the South that those publications were calculated to incite slaves to insurrection.

On July 29, 1835, the post-office of Charleston in South Carolina was invaded by a mob, who took out what anti-slavery documents they could find and destroyed them. A public meeting, at which the clergy of all denominations appeared in a body, ratified these proceedings. The postmaster of Charleston assumed the right to prevent the circulation of such literature, and wrote to the postmaster at New York, Samuel L. Gouverneur, to stop its transmission. Gouverneur asked the Postmaster General for instructions.

The U.S. Postmaster General, Amos Kendall, answered that the law had not vested any power in his department to exclude any species of newspapers or pamphlets from the mail, for such a power would be "fearfully dangerous;" but if any postmaster took the responsibility of stopping those "inflammatory papers," he would "stand justified in that step before the country and all mankind." His instructions to the postmaster at Charleston were of the same tenor. It was patriotism, he said, to disregard the law if its observance would produce a public danger. "Entertaining these views," he added, "I cannot sanction, and will not condemn, the step you have taken."

In August, 1835, the Anti-slavery Society of Massachusetts published an "Address to the Public" in which rushed to say that, no, they were not circulated incendiary publications among the slaves, and, no, they had no desire to incite any slaves to revolt.

But the slaveholders decided that any declaration that all men were born free and equal was "incendiary."

So the U.S. mail became effectively censored, to prevent any anti-slavery material from reaching the South.

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