Do you really think newspapers owned by white people during the civil war made a fuss when black people disappeared?
I’m not sure what you’re talking about, or whether you’re even following this discussion.
What we’re talking about here is whether reports in the black press of kidnappings of this sort is evidence that it was widespread. Are you addressing that?
I am addressing that, because reports in the black press, coupled with personal anecdotes, are pretty much the only contemporary evidence to speak of. Would you be so quick to doubt widespread stories in the white newspapers that had a better ability and resources to compare notes with each other than the black newspapers did at that time?
I would have no reason to doubt such stories, and I also don’t doubt the stories in the black press.
Now what?
According to Eric Foner:
He makes no assertions regarding how many of those 157 were actually fugitive slaves, and how many were free blacks who were falsely claimed to be slaves.
There’s a few things I think people are saying in this thread that expose a modernist bias and lack of understand of 19th century America.
- Pretty much delete any thought of “the police.” Almost no one in America lived in the jurisdiction of a professional police force during the period of 12 Years a Slave. The earliest anyone had something like our modern concept of police forces would have been in the 1820s, but it only would have covered some of the largest cities and even then they were really just watchmen. Anytime someone would have been kidnapped even these watchmen would just serve the purpose of being the first line of contact (if you ran into them first) for starting up the ancient “hue and cry”. When a crime was discovered you basically started running to neighbors and telling them what had happened, they run in and alert more people etc until you have a mass of a large portion of the local community basically fanning out looking for anyone suspicious.
Most jurisdictions would have had an established sheriff and some Federal marshal responsible for the region. However that’s one sheriff who may or may not be in the town where he is headquartered and that town may or may not be days and days travel away from where you are. If you went to him to report a kidnapping he probably would form up a posse to try and track down the kidnappers but you may have wasted days getting to wherever he was. The role of the sheriff and Federal marshals was more process based back then. They’d work warrants or transport prisoners and such, they weren’t doing patrols around their jurisdiction just hoping to catch criminals in the act.
- Don’t focus on the legalese. All this business about what rights the free black had or didn’t have are irrelevant. The 19th century was a much tougher, less legalistic place. I recently read a republished article originally published in The Atlantic during the election of 1860. Back then members of a party would gather and fill out election ballots together, then transport those ballots to a place where they would be counted. One of the opposition parties attacked the guy who was carrying the ballots and killed him to stop him from delivering them and thus to stop those votes from being counted (they succeeded.) The Atlantic article actually made the point that you need to be willing and able to defend yourself to vote. This was a major publication based out of a major city, and that’s the attitude they had.
The less legalistic society breaks both ways. If you’re a slave catcher you’re going to want to stick to border states. If you have to operate in a free state you want it to be one as close to a slave state as possible and where you can quickly get back to a slave state. Abolitionists and pro-slavery people were literally killing each other at this point in history. If a slave catcher had gone to upstate New York and tried to drag Simon down to slavery that slave catcher had a very high chance of being killed. Not stopped and then some legal dispute occurs where Simon has no rights or etc, angry abolitionists would kill him. They’d free Simon and probably lynch or beat the slave catcher to death. This actually would have probably nearly as much chance of happening even if it was a genuine runaway slave the slave catcher had genuine papers on.
I imagine this kidnapping of free blacks was common, but I imagine it commonly occurred like mentioned by the Gap Gang or as happened to Simon. You used subterfuge and waylaid people traveling alone away from their homes, and you did it somewhere you can get your ass back to the South very quickly. A slave catcher trying to move a bunch of blacks from too far North would be open to violence anywhere and everywhere he was seen, and since most people back then would want/need to travel on the more established roads it’d be difficult to travel hundreds and hundreds of miles covertly. If you’re in a border state and doing this regularly you probably have some more wilderness passes/trails you use to get from the North to the South, then when safely in the South back to the main roads.
Also kidnapping people in their home town (for example if they had tried to kidnap Simon in New York) exposes you not just to the risk of abolitionists but the person’s neighbors and family. Free blacks in the North often congregated together due to discrimination from whites and a desire to live near their friends/family, they wouldn’t be calling the sheriff or getting a lawyer if they saw a slave catcher transporting a friend/family member away, they’d be yelling for their friends/neighbors and they’d be coming with guns/clubs and the absolute best possibility for the slave catcher is he gets a beating and sent on his way but there’d be a real chance they kill him and dump his body in the woods.
OK, thanks.
If you assume that all these people were free blacks being kidnapped and none were escaped slaves, then an average of about 16 free blacks a year were sold into slavery during that decade. That’s out of a population of about 225,000 free blacks in non-slaveholding states, or about 1 in 14,000. (By way of comparison, the Chicago murder rate recently declined to 1 in 6,500 annually, having been higher the prior year.)
Of course, there could have been a lot of blacks kidnapped without resorting to the FSA, and it’s very likely that in southern states the rate was higher. (Though it should also be noted that it’s likely that a lot of the 157 were in fact escaped slaves.) But at any rate, to the extent that people are relying on the FSA, it would not suggest a rate higher than the risk of murder in a large city these days.
[It seems a bit surreal to be making the distinction between escaped slaves and free blacks, as if the escaped slaves “deserved” to be sent back to slavery. But that happens to be the question in this thread, FWIW.]
It was a severe issue to the person being kidnapped and to the black community. But not a racist white owned newspaper or to their readership. That’s why you are never going to get the hard numbers. You expect a 21st century answer to a mid-19th century problem. So no, I can’t do anything for you, you should really try and care enough to do some research of your own since you actually seem to care about people getting your point that it wasn’t prevalent based upon some back of the envelope calculations you have drawn from our limited(to you) responses.
White Europeans were enslaved probably to a comparable scale as black Africans throughout history.
The trans-Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the United States are notable for a few reasons:
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The United States was part of the Christian/Western world that continued to practice widespread slavery at a time when the rest of that world was abolishing it with relatively minor issue through legislation.
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The United States dominates the membership of this board and internet discussions generally.
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The enslaved peoples of the United States have descendants who form a still extant and prominent community.
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The above is true because it was strict racial based slavery, overwhelmingly the norm before this slice of history cultures that practiced slavery didn’t discriminate along skin color lines in determining who could/could not be enslaved.
What I think is that a number of people have attempted to answer this question to best of their ability based on limited data available to them, and you, depite not being the OP, and while professing no particular interest in the topic, are complaining about these responses for…obscure reasons.
I guess it is indeed the case that you object to any responses unless they include hard statistics. Me, I’m a bit more flexible.
Anyway, carry on; I’m done here.
The last four points are about right, but they make your first observation completely wrong.
Atlantic slavery not only changed the nature of slavery, in terms of creating an institution based almost exclusively on race, but changed the scale of slavery incredibly. Slavery had been practiced extensively throughout the world, but on a relatively limited scale; with Atlantic slavery, the sheer size of the institution dwarfed all prior systems of slavery.
If you changed your first sentence to “White Europeans were enslaved probably on a comparable scale to black Africans before the 17th century” then you’re getting close. But you can only use the term “throughout history” if you’re willing to ignore the period of the trans-Atlantic trade.
Slight hijack: The excellent novel “Canaan’s Tongue” by John Wray addresses the act of kidnapping people into slavery.
A) That’s an unwarranted assumption–particularly when the people it affected were very often illiterate and poor. Additionally they had far fewer rights than whites and were generally considered inferior by a large portion of the North and South.
And
B) I was reported on at the time. It was an issue leading up to the Civil War.
I can’t agree. If you read your history widespread large scale slavery is thousands of years old and formed the basis of many, many societies and large numbers of Europeans (white) persons were enslaved for thousands of years. Slavery was the economic (at least in terms of the labor market) foundation of European civilizations from Rome til the early middle ages. Additionally the Arab conquests meant that in the earliest days of the Arab slaving operations Europeans were actually the primary targets. As European societies became more advanced and less easy targets for raids Europeans being enslaved became much less common (often persons like sailors capture at sea, or the rare coastal raids–by the time that whole Irish village famously disappeared that was the exception) and the Arab slavers focused much more on African sources for slaves.
Since we have no firm numbers on any of this but do know that slavery was practiced on such a wide scale I find it unpersuasive that trans-Atlantic/American/New World slavery was historically unique in being “large scale.”
If you’ve got some evidence of ca. 10-12 million people being captured and transported in a period of about 300 years at any other time in history, i’d be happy to see it. Also, the hereditary nature of Atlantic slavery compounded this scale, whereas much slavery of the ancient and medieval world was not hereditary in the same way.
I’m never quite sure, either, about the apparent motivation behind these “white Europeans were held as slaves, too” arguments. The point generally seems to be some silly attempt to deracialize the institution of slavery, and to suggest that it’s not only blacks who suffered.
I guess if your only point is that, during the centuries that slavery existed before the Atlantic trade, white Europeans were victims also, then sure, what the hell, i’ll get on board. But basically every historian of slavery agrees that the nature and scale of the trans-Atlantic trade was basically unprecedented. Also, to dismiss the racialization of it, as if it’s only total numbers that matter, is to miss the fundamental heart of the historical issue. The racialization of the Atlantic trade was an essential transformation, not something to be dismissed by some ahistorical cry of “whites were enslaved too!!!”
If I may, I do not think that is the only motivation. I think people don’t know how to put slavery in a historical context.
If there does appear to have been slavery throughout recorded history, why then was slavery in the U.S. so heinous it nearly ripped apart the country?
I don’t accept it was the scale or the distance or the race basis, only. I believe U.S. slavery was caught on the crux of history. Because of the industrial structure, people were forced to defend an indefensible practice and accepted violence as the means.