I wasn’t around at the time so I can’t claim any personal involvement. And back in the 1860’s many of my ancestors were still living in Canada and Ireland. But some had already moved to America where they had settled in New England and New York. I’ve lived all my life in New York as did both of my parents.
So I don’t self-identify with the Confederacy or the South. I guess as a life-long American citizen I tend to self-identify with the United States. And in the Civil War era, the United States fought against the Confederacy, defeated it, and ended slavery in America. So I think of that as something “we” did.
For the North, ending slavery didn’t really impact them.
It’s like in Japan, they love cool little devices that add new features. Japanese cellphones were way ahead of American ones for a decade before the iPhone hit (and it was, outside of the multi-touch feature, worse than Japanese phones from a hardware standpoint, I believe). But, at the same time as the Japanese love modernity, they don’t have a modern kitchen. They were highly resistant to the introduction of diapers. In general, they don’t want anything that would free up the time or workload of a house wife, because that would affect their lives in a significant, not trivial, way.
In the US, women didn’t really stop being property of their husbands until ~1900, legally, and probably not in many practical senses for another few decades. It’s not really until the 70s that women were really allowed to start having a career and their own life, without the permission and control of a man.
White or black, you have women in your life. Union or Confederate, however, the odds that you had a slave was quite different.
It’s easy for a non-smoker to tell a smoker to stop smoking and to ban smoking. A group of smokers…they ain’t going to vote for that law.
I have lived in the South almost my whole life. Many whites down here are schizoprenic wrt to “we”. “We” fought the Union to defend “our” homeland, but “we” also fought the Indians, the British, the Japs, and Hitler. Also, these people are quick to say they don’t owe the decendants of slavery nothing, since they weren’t a part of that ancient business. But then they turn around and say “we” should be proud of “our” Southern heritage. Robert E. Lee and them all died for “us”.
It is crazy making.
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It is. I never noticed until my second or third year teacher, when an African American lady I worked with mentioned how alienating it felt to sit in a history class where the teacher talked about “we” when discussing the Civil War. She was like “Who is this ‘we’?” It seems so stupid now, but that was a complete epiphany to me. “White” is the unmarked case. It caused me to police my own language so much more carefully going forward, and to be aware of the fact that when I say “people”, I often mean “white people”.
Interesting. I’m quite sure that I’ve not ever heard of this before. Thanks for the information/cite.
So now I Googled ‘black exclusion laws’. I learned that California was close to having such a clause in its new state constitution, although it was narrowly defeated. Ohio had laws and policies that discouraged Blacks from settling in the state. So although slavery was banned in ‘free’ states, prejudice and segregation were alive and well.
The cotton gin is what made slavery profitable. Without it, slavery would have probably wound down from the expense. Later agricultural developments, such as mechanized farming might have had an effect but we didn’t get to that stage before the Civil War happened.
The argument that slavery wasn’t profitable was pushed hard by southern historians in the mid-20th C. It was the academic face of the whole “Lost Cause” myth: slavery hadn’t even been profitable! It was just a peculiar social structure that everyone was an equal victim of! And slaves were getting the better end of the bargain!
Largely it was religious arguments. Starting with Quakers, but spreading throughout various Christian groups, particularly in the North which has always enjoyed a more progressive Christian outlook.
I think the board would take a dim view of a person calling another “a jap”, or even in referring to the Japanese as “japs”, but this was plainly a reference to the nomenclature of the 1940’s.
(bolding added)
I assume that you are just speaking poetically (that “the world” means external reality), or “we” means all the countries that abolished slavery.
Because the US was far from the first.
The answer, of course, is that it was obviously an odious and dehumanizing practice that was damaging to society. Anybody exposed to it would have to realize it. Slavery meant routine violence; it meant treating fellow people as property. And it meant a constant obsession with these things.
Slavery meant devoting considerable resources to guarding against the type of slave rebellion that marked Haiti, which creates a state of constant fear and agitation, in addition to expense.
And the standard of “slave”’ included the proverbial “one drop”, so many many slaves were not even that dark skinned. I read recently of a woman who escaped from George Washington, and she is described as having freckles! Think Mya Rudolph, perhaps. Today, we celebrate the beauty of people like Rashida Jones, but she would have been considered inherently inferior. Lots and lots of slaves were deemed mere property by a painfully ridiculous metric.
There were lots of slaves who were the the children of their masters; these kids would have looked like their fathers. How can that enslavemet not rot the proverbial soul?
Slavery is like societal sanctioned abuse. The people who lived it realized it, even as some continued trying to justify it.
Sadly, we weren’t the last either. I’d estimate we were in the middle of the pack wrt abolition of slavery, though of course something like slavery still continued on in many of the colonial empires far after it was officially abolished by many European nations (and, ETA, the US as well…plus Asia, the Middle East, and Africa).
As to the OP…I’m beginning to suspect he’s not the real Barack Obama! :eek:
Pretty much, European countries “abolished” slavery before the US did but it was very much in name only. In their African colonies you had legitimate slavery going on well until those countries gained their actual independence in the 1950’s and 60’s. Belgium officially abolished slavery in 1890 but then you still had the horrors of the Congo Free State going on until 1908. British and French colonies extensively utilized slave labor in their colonies in both the world wars due to “national emergencies” as well.
“In name only” would imply no change, which I don’t think is an accurate characterization.
Also “European countries” would include countries that were never engaged in the african (or asian) slave trade or did not continue owning slaves anywhere after abolishment. But yes, several countries did.