Well… no; we had our own Emancipation Proclamation on October 26 1846, and slavery was totally erradicated by the 1850s; however the first steps towards that began in 1825.
The page is run by the Library of Congress. The stories are presented as they were originally written during the Depression, with no modern-day editing. Some writers/compilers use dialect; some don’t. Some preserve the question-answer interview format; others present each story as a sort of monologue. Some are more condescending than others, and yes, some of the writers were white while others were black. Using the narratives as a teaching tool could serve as a lesson oon 1930s society and race relations as much as on what slavery was like.
Read Susan Hamilton’s story and compare it to Susan Hamlin’s (click on view page images).
Two very different stories, right? But Susan Hamlin and Susan Hamilton were the same person. Guess which of those two interviews was conducted by a black writer, and which by a white writer?
I don’t think slave children were protected to any significant degree, and surely the youngest of the freed slaves would grow up hearing up about the horrors from the older members of their communities. The main factor underlying any positive accounts of slavery was probably the eminently practical desire to not piss off this inquisitive white person with the pencil and notebook. And a lot of the “good ol’ days” aspects sound more like the age-old “I don’t know what’s wrong with these kids today” whine than a actual nostaglia for the institution.
If the school is indeed exposing kids to all sides of the debate, I support it completely. But I don’t see why they don’t use contemporary period sources rather than a modern booklet of dubious scholarship.
No, he’s saying that poor, poor God has no choice but to allow some of his pwecious childwen to burn in Hell for all eternity if that’s what they choose to do. Of course, that presupposes that God cannot change this “natural consequence” of the universe so that people who don’t follow his orders just kind of go off and exist elsewhere instead of dying horribly and painfully over and over and over.
It appears to be a viewpoint that sees God as a being who just happened to stumble across this horrible secret of the universe and set out to prevent poor humans from taking the wrong path, instead of being the all-powerful creator of the universe who set this all up in the first place.
Hey Reeder, I appreciate it. I think it’s well known that both of us have hot buttons, both of us are highly emotional about those buttons and it can result in hot tempers and quick retorts…
You and I don’t agree on much, but like Homer Simpson once said “our sames go right deep down”.
We both agree on working towards a world where everyone is given justice and freedom and where everyone has a voice in how we get there. Have a good holiday.
These may be at least close to what you are referring to:
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/black_voices/black_voices.cfm
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/wpa/index.html
I have taken no stand on the literal accuracy of the bible. (My position on the subject can be found in numerous posts elsewhere.) I only noted that in the text of the bible, there are explicit commands to refrain from (some) homosexual activity while the commands given to slaves and slaveholders presume the phenomenon of slavery and enjoin both the slaveholders and the slaves to behave in an ethical manner. The Exodus is a special case of God acting for the benefit of his people that stands outside those laws which were addressed to his people, not to the world. Even the Exodus narrative does not indicate that the Egyptians had a moral obligation to free the Hebrews, only that the Hebrews wanted freedom and God supported them in their desire. I recall no statement in the Exodus narrative that claims that slavery is wrong, in itself.
As to the OP, itself, I would tend to agree with dangermom that I am not sure that I would condemn either the pamphlet or its use in school without reading the actual pamphlet or seeing its use in context. According to the sidebar in the link, the pamphlet makes several claims that seem odd out of context. The three quotes from pages 24 and 25 strike me (out of context) as inaccurate historical revisionism. On the other hand, the quote from page 27 seems to be an accurate assessment of a stuation that did arise. There were, for example, slaves who chose to fight with their masters aginst the Union forces–although that number also gets exaggerated when personal servants are included with actual musket-bearing soldiers, there were a (hotly disputed) number of blacks who did actually fight for the South.
I would take issue with dangermom’s characterization of the pamphlet as an important historical documant; it seems to be a cut-and-paste modern apologia that has already had to be taken out of print for reasons of plagiarism. However, finding and presenting the source documents on which it was based could be a valuable historical lesson. (I have more trouble with the idea that the pamphlet was originally given to sixth graders to offset Uncle Tom’s Cabin: presenting a purported history book to fight a work of fiction to sixth graders does not seem a legitimate exercise. However, since it is now restricted to ninth graders, my main objection would be my standard objection to all U.S. history courses: that we should be using original documents rather than boiled pap to let kids see what actually was said and done at the times studied.
Here is the google definition for a fundie.
Here is a declaration of their faith
I can’t find anything that would contradict my assertion that the Quakers were fundamentalists.Perhaps you can find something to support your assertion.
What am I implying ? Perhaps the western ideal of separation of church and state (which I subscribe to) so often cited by members here as “fundamental” to a just society could have impeded the march towards the abolition of slavery if the ACLU were there to argue for the separation as they do today. That is ironic.
Yes, of course. If Heaven exists, then Hell cannot because, as Jesus teaches, “the light puts out the darkness”. The burning lakes of fire and whatnot are metaphorical images in parables, just like the wheat, the pearl, the vinyards, and so on. Heaven is not made of physical things like wheat. Parables are analogies, often allegories. God gives men what they treasure, and what they treasure is what they seek because their treasure is the desire of the heart. “Where your treasure is,” Jesus teaches, “there your heart is also.” Neither Heaven nor the so-called Hell is a physical place. Again, Jesus teaches that you cannot look here or look there and see the kingdom of God, because “the Kingdom of God is within you”. Hell is just a perspective of one subjective reference frame from another. If it helps to understand it, you may think of it as an accessibility relation such that where v ranges over w and u ranges over w, v and u are identical.
There was slavery in Brazil for more than 20 years after it ended in the U.S. I read an article about the last living New World person who was born into legal slavery. She was an infant when slavery was abolished in Brazil and was still alive in the early 1990’s.
Haj
Don’t do that. Are not your own affairs sufficient burden for you? If you want to speak for me and live my life, pay my mortgage.
The Civil War was not fought to end slavery. Slavery is often presented as the cause of the war. It wasn’t.
The war was about the issue of state’s rights. Slavery was the focal point of the state’s rights issue, however, and as such, it is often confused with the real issue. Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation as a military tactic, hoping that two things would happen:
- The newly freed slaves would then rise up against their former master and in effect put the South in the position of having to fight a war and at the same time put down domestic insurrection. The idea was that the South would not be able to do that and would collapse immediately.
- The freed slaves would join the Northern Army and fight against the South.
Good plan, but it didn’t work because the former slaves did NOT rise up as planned. Yes, many of them did join the Northern army, that part of it was somewhat successful.
Lincoln never intended to free the slaves wholesale at that time. The EP was specifically limited to the states that had seceded and were still in active conflict. It did not cover the north, nor did it cover southern territory that had been conquered and reclaimed by the north.
As an institution in and of itself, slavery would probably have collapsed within 20 more years. There’s a real arguement to be made that we didn’t need to fight the Civil War at all. All the northern states would have had to do was wait and then pick up the pieces after the collapse of the Southern Confederacy.
Makes for some fascinating “what if?” speculation, doesn’t it!
http://home.fuse.net/juneteenth/history.htm
http://www.archives.gov/exhibit_hall/featured_documents/emancipation_proclamation/transcript.html
Not sure how. The ACLU never opposed political statements by religious groups or actions by religious groups to persuade their own members to agitate for change. Numerous churches and synagogues were active in the 1950s and 1960s, agitating for Civil Rights, and the ACLU never attempted to prevent their private activities. The notion of PACs vs tax-exempt status is a later development and I suspect that the ACLU supports laws denying tax exemptions to organizations that donated money to elections, but given that the ACLU has defended the rights of students to read the bible and pray in schools–provided the readings or prayers were not assigned or organized by the school staff–I see no reason to believe that they would have opposed Quaker activity.
Your first sentnce is correct. Your second sentence is in error.
No one fought the war to end slavery, but the South seceded to preserve and expand slavery. The North initially fought to preserve the Union, and, since the South made slavery the issue, the North was quite willing to use that as a wedge between the Confedracy and any European supporters, however the South was only interested in States Rights on those occasions when those rights supported slavery. There were no calls in the South to repeal the Fugitive Slave Act on the grounds that it interferred with the right of states such as Ohio or Pennsylvania to declare escaped slaves free.
As Mike Buckner has had to remind us on several occasions, most recently in July, 2003, several of the states explicitly named slavery as the point on which they decided to secede.
When Virginia got a coalition of states together to declare war in 1812, “Mr. Madison’s War,” harming the economy of New England*, the New Englanders gathered on several occasions, ultimately leading to the Hartford Convention, to discuss withdrawing from the Union. At that time, the editorials in Southern papers and comments on the floors of Southern legislative bodies were filled with denuncation of the “treason” of which they accused the New Englanders. That rhetoric simply came back to bite them, later.
- (If one wishes to examne irony, consider the aspect of the non-mercantile South declaring a war purportedly over the issue of seaman impressment where the states most directly affected by impressment did not want to engage in war.)
Ale’s location is listed as “Uruguay”. I believe that’s a different country than Brazil.
Corporations should have no rights, and they certainly should be allowed to coerce no one. That’s what government is for — to suppress coercion. Incidentally, your wild and desultory philippics are nothing more than brain farts intended to feed the fetishes of your mental masturbation. There is no weaker argument to be found than one of the form, “if X happened tomorrow, then Y would result”. You sound like a Christian fundamentalist bemoaning what would happen to the world if some random child saw some random celebrity’s bare nipple.
You’re right. I’m sorry. I’m actually kind of sorry I responded to that in the first place because, while it IS how I interpret that argument, it was unnecessarily snarky and sarcastic. I apologize.
Well, then, that’s the end of that. Onward. 
And of course opinion in the South was not uniform about the War. Frex, there’s a county in Georgia named Union County, and it was so named because it was for the Union and not the Confederates prior to the Civil War. This was a fairly common snetiment among folks in the north Georgia mountains, because the smaller plots of arable land to be found in the mountains didn’t tend to support plantations. Hence, there weren’t all that many slaveowners in north Georgia (though there were some). Combined with the insular nature of Appalachian culture, it tended to produce people who weren’t all that crazy about the war. Of course, the general butt-ignorance that was also a part of the culture tended to produce people who were for the war just because it seemed like a chance for a good fight.
If there was a widespread slave insurrection, at the least, Lincoln would have been impeached. It would have been disastrous for the Union cause. I can’t see that as one of Lincoln’s motivations
Legally, it couldn’t cover the North or southern territory that had already been conquered. Dred Scott had ruled that the federal government couldn’t legally outlaw slavery, and even if they could, Lincoln do it in a proclamation, any more than Bush could issue an executive order seizing your house.
Lincoln was able to outlaw slavery in the places in active rebellion as a war power, making the argument that the rebels had forfeited their rights to their slaves. So, therefore, those slaves automatically become the property of the government, which can then free them. In a lot of ways, it was an extension of the Contraband order.
A good book to read about that is “Reluctant Confederates”, a look at early Unionism in the Upper South.