Slavery

On August 20, 1619, 398 years ago today, twenty black Africans were brought ashore from a Dutch ship that had landed in what is today Hampton, Virginia.  They were the first slaves brought to the British colonies in North America.  Unfortunately, they would not be the last.  

It is estimated that, between 1619 and 1808, when the African slave trade was abolished, 388,000 black Africans were brought as slaves to what is today the USA.  By comparison, from 1500 (when the Portuguese first came to Brazil) to 1888 (when slavery was abolished there), it is estimated that four million slaves were imported from Africa to Brazil.  One reason for the difference is that Brazil is closer to West Africa where the bulk of the slaves came from.

By 1860, the slave population in the United States had grown to 4.4 million, as a result of "natural increase."  Slaves in the US were treated as valuable assets, where as in Brazil, they were more easily replaced and thus, almost worked to death.

Why slavery?  The early land owners in the British colonies needed laborers.  Many so-called "indentured servants" came from Britain to fill this need.  The land owners had paid for their passage across the Atlantic and they thus were legally obligated to work off their debt before they were freed.  But this wasn't enough.  The black Africans were the better answer.  There was no debt that would eventually be paid off.  They were permanent.

Slavery is an ancient custom among human beings.  You can find it in the Bible.  Today, it is hard to fathom that people could own people, like owning a horse or a cow.  In the early days of British North America, all of the colonies permitted slavery. Eventually, in the early 19th Century, the northern states eliminated slavery, while for the more agrarian southern states, it was an integral part of their economy and culture.  Many southern slave-owners felt that, "slaves were happy, content, and well cared-for; being a slave was better than being a worker in a northern factory."      

After the invention of the cotton gin in 1793, cotton became the main export of the southern states and of the USA as well.  90% of the cotton used in British textile mills came from the USA's southern states.  Ships built in the northern states carried the cotton to Great Britain.  Banks in New York financed the cotton industry. "Cotton is king" meant that it was the biggest American industry, an industry that was dependent on slavery.

In the first half of the 19th Century, slavery became a bone of contention between the southern slave states and the northern "free" states.  Slave owners wanted the right to take their slaves to the new territories in the west.  Northerners did not want to send escaped slaves back to their masters in the south.  Some (Abolitionists) wanted slavery ended entirely.  The dispute came to a head with the election of 1860.  Abraham Lincoln, a man personally opposed to slavery and who believed that the USA could not remain half-free, half-slave, was elected as the sixteenth president without receiving a single vote in the south.  

On December 20, 1860, South Carolina adopted an ordinance seceding from the United States of America.  It believed it had joined the USA (ratified the US Constitution on May 23, 1788) as a sovereign state and that it had the sovereign right to leave the USA when it so desired. Some believe that the Civil War was a war about the southern states wanting separation from the northern states, similar to the Revolutionary War (1776-1783) where the American colonies wanted separation from Great Britain. However, it was really about the desire to preserve, protect and defend the institution of slavery.

The South Carolina secession ordinance states that, "an increasing hostility on the part of non-slave holding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations (under the US Constitution)."  In the Confederate Constitution, Article 1, Section 9, Clause 4 states that, "No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed."

Slavery is an abomination.  I can no longer watch Gone With The Wind.