[lit-ideas] Re: God said to Abraham, "Slavery's wrong", Abe said "Man, you must be puttin' me on"

  • From: Eric Yost <mr.eric.yost@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2011 15:29:22 -0500



On 2/10/2011 5:37 AM, Donal McEvoy wrote:

If you consider that the north was equally inhospitable to blacks as the south.
In fact, in New England there was a complicated system of seizures, fines, whippings and punishments for all sorts of activities for blacks that were considered perfectly legal for whites. Blacks were denied title to property, were deported regularly under vagrancy laws, their communities regularly abused and attacked and burned to the ground.
This must be some other revisionist history. It isn't US history, even though the sentence makes no sense at all and could be attributed to the Bushmeister.
The writer is probably referring to laws that allowed slaveholders to reclaim escaped slaves, and submit them to punishment before mandatory return to the horrendous South.
The Civil War was sparked by the issue of allowing slavery in the frontiers. Because of their slave population, slave = fractional human, the South had disproportionate representation in Congress from the beginning of the republic. The South demanded that the frontiers be open to slavery so that they could continue to maintain disproportionate representation, allowing them to pass laws like the escaped-slave laws mentioned above.
Not to forget context either. In the 19th century, all Americans (excepting the fringe groups in New England) and certainly all Europeans were racists. Long after the US ended slavery, Europeans were perpetrating acts like the genocide in the Belgian Congo, so I understand why European writers might want to take the shine off Abe's image. 
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