Considering who I am now, I’d say that I would have been a loudmouth in favor of abolition and would have given money to the cause and voted (well, urged my husband to vote), but that I wouldn’t have done anything else. I wouldn’t have gotten my hands dirty even when given the opportunity.
Frankly, I think that’s a worse form of moral cowardice: knowing what’s right and still not doing it. I’ve got that down pat.
As I get older, I get more active, though, so maybe I’d end up a doddering 90 year old woman running an Underground RR station. There were a number of houses in the two towns I grew up that had secret tunnels underneath them, so it’s not like I would have been the only abolitionist in the area.
It is from readings by people of the times and about the times. Nothing citable or easy to back up. There was a lot less polling back then so I don’t know where reliable figures could come from. I do know the movement was alive and kicking at least back to the Colonial days. Abigail Adams was very much for abolition and wrote and acted on it and she was far from alone.
Not alone, certainly. Ben Franklin helped establish the first abolitionist society in Pennsylvania (back when the colony still permitted slavery, IIRC), and there were others from the earliest days of the republic. It was regarded as something of an out-there - even dangerous - cause until the 1850s, though. Most Union soldiers fought to restore the Union and not to free the slaves, at least at first. Even when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862, in the middle of the Civil War, there were concerns that desertions would spike - which fortunately didn’t happen.
I’m not in favor of enslaving human beings unless it’s in order to settle a debt and the person in service is treated with dignity.
Our Father (YHWH - GOD) told us to abide by the laws of the land, to ‘Obey the Superior Authorities’ unless and until we are asked to violate God’s Laws. Slavery isn’t against God’s Laws, so if one is a Christian one knows where one stands.
OTOH, if a runaway slave were to come to my door, I would let him or her in without hesitation, and tend to them - even hide them.
As a missionary, I’ve broken the laws of many lands consistently in order to preach and teach the Gospel and help oppressed people in need. This is in keeping with Christ’s mandates, and yes, I’ve dedicated my life to it - thirty-four years of it so far, praise God!
We don’t have to go back 150+ years to find oppression and degradation. Just visit a major city anywhere and we have an obscene amount of 'Immorality being practiced legally around you every day.'
Heh. I remember one of David Letterman’s Top Ten Lists, re: fun things to do in NYC, which included “Get the Gideon’s Bible from your hotel room nightstand, look out the window, and cross out the Ten Commandments as you see them being violated.”
It would take a lot, Skald, especially after 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Act when you’d be explicitly violating the law of the land any time you harbored an escaping slave, who would be hunted down by gun-toting slave catchers who spent their lives monitoring likely paths for slaves to take en route to Canada and freedom. Basically, those who ran the Underground Railroad were deciding to become professional criminals for life–that’s a big decision.
Yes, but I’m a hotheaded idiot who frequently embarks on unwise courses of action and then stays the course not so much out of bravery but because I’m too damn stubborn to change my mind or admit that I was wrong in the first place. I promise you, the entire time I was doing the Underground Railroad thing, I’d be thinking, “Gak! Why the fuck am I doing this? Damn it, I so want to quit. But I can’t as long as that bitch Harriet Tubman is still at it, because no way I am going to admit that some chick is manlier than me. Stupid machismo.”
ETA: By the way, do you intend to call me a racist again and then quickly edit it away? Just wondering.
The risks were so high I can’t blame anyone for not doing so.
I assume, though I don’t know, that the risks would be higher for black persons caught conducting than for whites. I know the whites could be fined or imprisoned, but I’m guessing the blacks could have been enslaved or killed.
If I was anything like I have been so far in this life, I think I would have been killed or hung before having the opportunity to pay much attention to the idea.
If I made it to adulthood, I am really not sure. I think I would have gotten myself in trouble by espousing the wrong opinions, but it would have taken an overly evil slave owner routinely and publicly hurting/violating his slaves to get me involved in direct action.
Hell, yes. I could never, ever own people. Nor could I ever make any sense of anyone else owning people. You can’t ownpeople.
And given that my intrinsic nature would be the same, I have to believe that my determination of what constitutes “people” would be the same, then as now. It’s simple and obvious.
Hard to tell, but if the path of my life then even roughly mirrored the path of my life now (born and raised in NH, university educated in Washington DC) I think it likely I’d have been an abolitionist. Not from the get-go, but from seeing the daily functioning of the peculiar institution right in front of my eyes once I got down South. How much of an abolitionist would depend on how well I’d been convinced on the subject. I might not have done like John Brown but I’d probably have his portrait in my parlor at the least.
Okay, it’s funny you should say that. Some people in my husband’s family were abolitionist, but it wasn’t the principle, it was the money of the thing. How can you compete with slave labor? If you’re one farmer with a small plot of land, and you’re being squeezed out by the big plantations, you’re opposed to slavery, regardless of how you feel about the slaves themselves. You probably favor colonization, as Elendil’s Heir mentioned, but you’d gladly employ former slaves as long as the playing field is level. (I don’t know how deeply they got into the abolitionist movement, but those were their reasons for being in it at all.)
I was born in South Africa, and was razed there until I was nine.
I lived in Durban in the seventies, when Apartheid was in full effect, we had a black nanny and an older man to do the garden work, both stayed in a shack in the back of the garden. I remember (or think I remember) that I did not like the fact that everyone called the older man (he was old enough to be a grandfather) “Boy” and the nanny “Girl”
And I would get into fights with my father (who was/is a racist) about the treatment of our help. I have no memories about my mother’s views on racism /apartheid. We left South Africa when I was nine when my mother divorced my father.
I later found out that a some of my mother’s (white) friends were active in the ANC, and she was even let some black activists hide in the shack outside(i.e. she knew that wanted people were staying there and did not tell anyone).My mother does not like to talk about this period, my father was abusive. These are things I learned from friends of my mother
One of my childhood friends in South Africa, a white boy got expelled from South Africa for his contacts with the ANC, he was in many ways similar to me.
Not sure if I would stand up and be counted for my views, but I am kind of proud of my mother’s
- Jess.