Tag: Negro slavery

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Jim Goad has produced a short film to accompany his latest essay, “Juneteenth: It’s All So Junetiresome,” on this year’s round of Juneteenth-related violence, and why Juneteenth is growing to be so Junetiresome. (more…)

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Imagine existing as a distinct racial group on a continent for 400 years. Now imagine that your group’s greatest collective “achievement” is being freed from slavery — not rebelling against your slaveowners and freeing yourselves, but walking into freedom atop a red carpet of 600,000 or so bloody cracker corpses that reputedly died in the service of either freeing you or keeping you enslaved. (more…)

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Kirkpatrick Sale
Emancipation Hell: The Tragedy Wrought by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation
Columbia, S. C.: Shotwell Publishing, 2015

The emancipation of African slaves following the War Between the States is almost universally perceived as a great moral triumph, hence the enshrinement of Juneteenth as America’s newest federal holiday. While one will occasionally hear objections voiced to the way that then-President Abraham Lincoln conducted the war itself, the presumed righteousness of emancipation is rarely subjected to serious scrutiny. (more…)

US Civil War recruiting poster, 1863 (image courtesy of Picryl)

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Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

[The present constitutional crisis over slavery] embraces the fearful issue whether the Union shall stand, and slavery, under the steady, peaceful action of moral, social, and political causes, be removed by gradual voluntary effort, and with compensation; or whether the Union shall be dissolved and civil war ensue . . . — William H. Seward, speech to the US Senate, 1850

Their vices are vices aped from white men, or that white men and bondage have taught them: improvidence and intemperance and evasion — and laziness . . . Promiscuity. (more…)

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Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here)

The South could “win” the war by not losing; the North could win only by winning. — James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom

Like my father before me
I will work the land.
And like my brother above me,
I took a rebel stand.
He was just 18, young and brave,
But a Yankee laid him in his grave. (more…)

Woodcut of a slave caravan in the Congo from 1888.

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White people commonly respond to demands for reparations for slavery and slave trading by pointing out that it was whites who abolished these things.[1] I don’t know whether they notice that this doesn’t get them the credit from their antagonists that they seem to expect; they certainly don’t appear to see why this is. (more…)

Africans selling other Africans into slavery, which was an integral component of the transatlantic slave trade.

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The recently completed royal tour of the Caribbean has provoked debates about Britain’s participation in the transatlantic slave trade. Animated by propaganda, such discussions obscure the slave trade’s complexity. (more…)

Thomas Nelson Page

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What was life like in the antebellum South? Obviously it’s going to be a matter of perspective. Thomas Nelson Page provided one such viewpoint, the type we seldom hear about lately. He was a lawyer in his early career and a diplomat later, but is best known as a writer.

Aside from several novels, he published a non-fiction account of the Old South as he remembered it during his boyhood. This was Social Life in Old Virginia Before the War (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1897). It’s a quick read, providing a glimpse into a bygone time. (more…)

Hinton Rowan Helper

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Hinton Rowan Helper was a curious and fascinating figure from nineteenth-century American history. Although mostly forgotten today, he was one of the most important and discussed men in the nation during the lead-up to the Civil War. As an unswerving race realist and white patriot at a time when whites were by far the dominant racial group in North America, he was (and probably still is) ahead of his time. (more…)

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Roots, the mother of the television miniseries, recently reached its 45th anniversary. It was based on Alex Haley’s book Roots: The Saga of an American Family. The story begins with Kunta Kinte, a young Mandinka tribesman from the Gambia who was captured and put on a slave ship bound for colonial America. It further covers his descendants and their tribulations, ending during the Radical Reconstruction.

All told, the acting is pretty decent for a TV program, featuring several existing and up-and-coming stars. LeVar Burton, who played the younger Kunta Kinte, does the haunted look just about as well as Nicolas Cage. (more…)

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Joseph Ford Cotto, 1st Baron Cotto, GGGCR
Runaway Masters: A True Story of Slavery, Freedom, Triumph, and Tragedy beyond 1619 and 1776
Monee, Ill.: self-published, 2021

Some time ago I considered writing a white advocate-style article about one of America’s longest-running brush wars. My research centered on the outstanding book, History of the Second Seminole War, 1835-1842 by John K. Mahon. I didn’t write the article because I thought that the conflict could only be packaged as ancient history, an old-style Indian War best memorialized in some campy Western film from the 1930s. (more…)

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The New York Times has undertaken a “1619 Project” designed to place “the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the center of the national narrative.” In other words, more of the same. While the Times presents the usual fairy tales about put-upon yet angelic blacks being oppressed by malevolent whites, at least one of our thinkers would agree that blacks have a central place in American history. (more…)

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Shortly after the Civil War, the American South found itself in ruins. Much has been written about the devastation of the war and the indignities and strife which followed during Reconstruction. Beyond the poverty and oppression and the rapid demise of the old regime with its “outdated” culture of honor, loyalty, and heroism, the inheritors of the former Confederacy found themselves without defense in the national and international courts of moral opinion. (more…)