Remove Confederate symbols, but don’t blame just the South for slavery

[struggle4progress]

October 19, 2015, 05:00 pm
By Gregory J. Wallance

... the Confederate cause was .. “one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.” Long after the Civil War had ended, the Confederate flag was the rallying standard for appalling racists, such as then Alabama Governor George Wallace, who raised the Confederate battle flag in 1963 in Montgomery, Alabama as part of his “Segregation Forever” campaign.

But the North was not a bystander to slavery or racism. In the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858, Abraham Lincoln observed that Southerners “are just what we would be in their situation” and that “when Southern people tell us they are no more responsible for the origin of slavery than we, I acknowledge the fact.” Slaves were once auctioned in downtown Philadelphia, on Merchants Row in Boston, and along Wall Street in New York City. Benjamin Franklin owned slaves and ran slave sale notices in his newspaper. Even after slavery ended in the Northern states, the Northern banking and textile industries provided financing and the market crucial to the South’s cotton-based economy, which made slavery economically sustainable ...

... no one in Columbus, Ohio apparently is demanding the removal from a Statehouse monument of the statue of one term President Rutherford B. Hayes. After the close election of 1876, the Bush v. Gore of its day, ended up in the House of Representatives, then Republican candidate Hays from Ohio secured the presidency by cutting the political deal from hell. Southern Democrats in Congress threw their support to Hayes, who in turn, once he became president, withdrew the last federal troops from the South and ended Reconstruction. While some historians argue that the ensuing century of white rule and the hideous oppression of black southerners was inevitable even without a back room deal, there is a good case for taking down Hays’ statue ...

http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/civil-rights/257209-remove-confederate-symbols-but-dont-blame-just-the-south-for

[Journeyman]

1. Mr Lincoln made this very plain in his 2nd Inaugural: Slavery was an American sin . . .

and to remove it the nation as a whole had to suffer, even if it meant that "all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and ... every drop of blood drawn with the lash … paid (for) by another drawn with the sword.

[Igel]

6. Not just an American sin.

Most slaves sent across the Atlantic didn't end up in N. America, much less the US. Nor were they traded primarily by either the Brits or the Americans.

It wasn't a Xian thing, either; Muslims had been involved for hundreds of years, Benghazi was home to a large slave market for centuries, and the Muslim slave trade probably involved enslaving more black Africans than the Europeans did. Strictly speaking, there is at least one Muslim country in which I would have been legally allowed to buy and own a black slave as an adult (I'm 55 now) because they only made it illegal in the early '80s but still have a problem with it "off the books". The Muslim slave trade also included extensive slaver raids against white communities, so their slave trade was primarily in non-Muslims. In fact, a number of (white) Americans had been captured and held as slaves or for ransom by Muslim slavers.

It was an American sin like drunkenness was as Irish vice. T'is true, but let's not slight the Russians by assuming it was only an Irish vice. It's easy to fall for the dark side of American exceptionalism and think we're exceptional in our badness instead of exceptional in our virtues.

[zipplewrath]

2. I don't blame them

I don't blame the south for creating slavery, I blame them for fighting a war in an attempt to sustain it.

[unc70]

4. Race-based slavery did not start in the South

Last edited Mon Oct 19, 2015, 09:46 PM - Edit history (1)

It began in New England. Just as the slave trade was centered in New England. It is/was very complicated. Let me recommend "Inheriting the Trade" and Slave North (http://slavenorth.com).

[zipplewrath]

5. Again

The south doesn't get blamed for starting it, merely trying to prevent the stopping.

[enough]

3. I recently read Eric Foner's book about the Underground Railroad.

Was interested to see that New York City, while a major hub in the efforts to transport enslaved people to safer places farther north, was also a major hub of resistance to emancipation, because of the deep financial connections with the southern slave economy.

http://books.wwnorton.com/books/Gateway-to-Freedom/