Should Reparations Be Paid to the Descendants of Slaves? Christopher Hitchens Debate (2001)

The Second Amendment was Ratified to Preserve Slavery

The real reason the Second Amendment was ratified, and why it says "State" instead of "Country" (the Framers knew the difference - see the 10th Amendment), was to preserve the slave patrol militias in the southern states, which was necessary to get Virginia's vote.  Founders Patrick Henry, George Mason, and James Madison were totally clear on that . . . and we all should be too.
In the beginning, there were the militias. In the South, they were also called the "slave patrols," and they were regulated by the states.

In Georgia, for example, a generation before the American Revolution, laws were passed in 1755 and 1757 that required all plantation owners or their male white employees to be members of the Georgia Militia, and for those armed militia members to make monthly inspections of the quarters of all slaves in the state.  The law defined which counties had which armed militias and even required armed militia members to keep a keen eye out for slaves who may be planning uprisings.

As Dr. Carl T. Bogus wrote for the University of California Law Review in 1998, "The Georgia statutes required patrols, under the direction of commissioned militia officers, to examine every plantation each month and authorized them to search 'all Negro Houses for offensive Weapons and Ammunition' and to apprehend and give twenty lashes to any slave found outside plantation grounds."

It's the answer to the question raised by the character played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Django Unchained when he asks, "Why don't they just rise up and kill the whites?"  If the movie were real, it would have been a purely rhetorical question, because every southerner of the era knew the simple answer: Well regulated militias kept the slaves in chains.  READ MORE

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So we learn that the 2nd was not,  as claimed,  a necessity for the defense of either nation or state,  but merely a "quid pro quo" to get the slave states to ratify the bill.

What this means is that,  quite contrary to what people today are saying about the 2nd, in reality it was only meant as a way to preserve and protect the rights of slave owners to keep and hold slaves.  The fact that today's debates of the 2nd have focused on national and private security issues,  does nothing to change the fact that this was a "right" created for the sole purpose of keeping slave ownership viable.  In other words,  had there been no slavery,  the 2nd wouldn't exist.  Since the gov't and the several states already had whatever powers they needed to preserve,  either state or national,  security using either police or military powers.

Thus the 2nd is really just an anachronism,  meant and designed to preserve a social condition that is now completely illegal.  Those facts cannot be either hidden, changed nor erased. The 2nd is simply a slave ownership artifact in the U.S. Constitution and has nothing to do with a "well ordered militia" being needed to do anything more than keep (the now illegal) slavery viable. 

The Founding Fathers were very smart men,  and they knew that to keep this slave ownership "right" in the bill,  without raising protests from the other side of the slavery issue,  it had to be couched in language that belied it's true cause,  just like the "We hold that all men are created equal",  was conveniently believed not to describe people being held in captivity.  But,  while they chose their words very carefully,  the back stories  they wrote in missives,  letters,  and displayed in debates,  makes their true intentions abundantly clear,  so the 2nd was simply a slave ownership protection,  nothing less or more.

Could it be that the 2nd Amendment proponents are, merely seeking to keep their weapons,  for a day when slavery might return?  Well,  that would be anyone's guess,  but the fact remains that the 2nd Adm., has no state or national security issues at it's root.  I'll leave it to future debate about whether it should be done away with or "modernized" and how that might be accomplished.  But,  suffice it to say that the 2nd,  does not say,  or represent,  what people today seem to think that it does.  This is due to the all but "forgotten" back story issues that gave birth to it.

Tucker Carlson: 'Christianity Is The Reason We Don't Have Slavery In The World Today'

Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Sunday declared that all slavery in the world had been eradicated thanks to the Christian faith.

At the National Prayer Breakfast last week, conservatives accused President Barack Obama of comparing Christianity to the Islamic terrorist group ISIS when he observed that many religions had been used to justify violence throughout history.

"So we're responsible for the Crusades a thousand years ago?" Carlson complained. "Who's 'us' anyway? And by the way, who ended slavery and Jim Crow? Christians. The Rev. Martin Luther King. Christians."

"Christianity is the reason we don't have slavery in the world today," he added. "I mean, talk about ahistorical."

Co-host Ainsley Earhardt said that Obama's remarks were "completely inappropriate" because there were many evangelical Christians at the National Prayer Breakfast.

"Know your audience," she recommended. "No one expected the Inquisition to be mentioned at the National Prayer Breakfast."

"What's so striking though is his mention of the Crusades as a way to make the point, 'Before you judge ISIS, keep in mind that that Christians did it too,'" Carlson asserted. "The Crusades is a fixation among jihadis. There's not a press release from ISIS or from al Qaeda that doesn't call us Crusaders."

"And so for the president to use that specific word, aping the language of the jihadis is ominous and bizarre."

According to the 2014 Global Slavery Index, there are an estimated 35.8 million slaves in the world.
Late last year, leaders of the largest religions in the world -- including Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim and Christian faiths -- met to sign a declaration of commitment to end slavery by 2020.
At the time, Pope Francis called slavery an “atrocious scourge present on a large scale throughout the world." READ MORE

The slaves that time forgot

We've all been taught the horror's of the African slave trade. It's in all the school books and in plenty of Hollywood movies.

   But for some reason the largest group of slaves in the British Colonies in the 17th Century doesn't get mentioned at all: the Irish.

Most people have heard of the Great Famine, which reduced the population of Ireland by around 25%.

   That pales in comparison to the disaster that England inflicted upon Ireland between 1641 and 1652, when the population of Ireland fell from 1,466,000 to 616,000.   Then things got worse.

What to do with the Irish?
 
  From the Tudor reconquest of Ireland until Irish Independence in 1921, the English puzzled over the problem of what to do with all those Irish people.

   They were the wrong religion. They spoke the wrong language. But the big problem was that there were just too many of them.

  The English had been practicing a slow genocide against the Irish since Queen Elizabeth, but the Irish bred too fast and were tough to kill. On the other side of the Atlantic, there was a chronic labor shortage (because the local natives tended to die out too quickly in slavery conditions).

  Putting two and two together, King James I started sending Irish slaves to the new world.

  The first recorded sale of Irish slaves was to a settlement in the Amazon in 1612, seven years before the first African slaves arrived in Jamestown.  

READ MORE

Society: 1600-1770 The Colonial Experience

From 1689 to 1763, England and France waged a war in Europe that extended to their respective colonies across the Atlantic. Known as the French and Indian Wars, these battles were largely fought by Indian allies of each country. Although the British prevailed, they quickly came to view their Indian allies as "savages." The English already had a well-developed sense of "savagery" from their long history with the Irish. They simply transferred their cultural attitudes and beliefs about the Irish to the Indians. At the time, "captivity narratives" were popular among the colonists. The storyline usually involved an English woman, representing Puritan virtue, being captured by Indians. Faced with the choice of marriage to a “savage” or becoming an Indian sacrifice, the captive was ultimately saved and returned to “civilization,” providing a metaphor for Puritan beliefs about temptation, redemption and salvation. Among the more popular captivity novels of the time were: Cotton Mather's Humiliations Follow'd with Deliverances (1697); The Redeemed Captive (1704) by John Williams; and Jesuit Relations, a serial published by Jesuit missionaries from 1632-1673. Captivity narratives were a means of religious expression, reinforced Indian stereotypes, reflected cultural bias and justified the exploitation of Indians to satisfy European westward expansion. The first recorded arrival of Africans in the Virginia colony was in 1619, when a Dutch warship brought 20 blacks captured from a Spanish slave ship, including three women, to Jamestown. Though not much is known about them, many of these early African arrivals had already been assimilated into European cultures. Some had Spanish or Portuguese names and spoke those languages. They came as agricultural laborers, but some of them may have been servants and easily fit into the system of indentured labor that was devised for poor Europeans. During the 17th century, English workers came to Virginia in the thousands to work for at least six years as servants and laborers in return for passage to the New World. Black slaves and white indentured laborers worked along side each other on Virginia’s farms and tobacco plantations during the first 30 years of the colony’s history. African slaves and indentured Europeans were even known to marry and have children. More than a few slaves earned their freedom, acquired land or worked as skilled laborers for themselves. Indeed, the line between slavery and freedom was not always clearly defined in the early years. For the first 60 or 70 years after Jamestown was settled, the English used the terms "servant" and "slave" interchangeably. But by the 1660s, black captives were typically treated as slaves. They were assigned different work than whites and were no longer listed in ledger books or population counts with surnames, unlike white indentured servants. More importantly, a number of slave codes, or laws aimed at defining in detail the lives of enslaved persons, were enacted. READ MORE

The Messy Link Between Slave Owners and Modern Management

The Messy Link Between Slave Owners and Modern Management While studying the history of business practices, HBS researcher Caitlin Rosenthal made a startling discovery: Many of the techniques pioneered by slave owners in the 1800s are widely used in business management today. Rosenthal discusses her findings in this story by Katie Johnston, which first appeared on the HBS Working Knowledge website. Caitlin C. Rosenthal didn’t intend to write a book about slavery. She set out to tackle something much more mundane: the history of business practices. But when she started researching account books from the mid-1800s, a period of major economic development during the rise of industrialization in the United States, Rosenthal stumbled across an unexpected source of innovation. Rosenthal, a Harvard-Newcomen Fellow in business history at Harvard Business School, found that southern plantation owners kept complex and meticulous records, measuring the productivity of their slaves and carefully monitoring their profits—often using even more sophisticated methods than manufacturers in the North. Several of the slave owners’ practices, such as incentivizing workers (in this case, to get them to pick more cotton) and depreciating their worth through the years, are widely used in business management today. As fascinating as her findings were, Rosenthal had some misgivings about their implications. She didn’t want to be perceived as saying something positive about slavery. On the contrary, she sees her research as a critique of capitalism—one that could broaden the understanding of today’s business practices. The work is part of her current book project, “From Slavery to Scientific Management: Capitalism and Control in America, 1754-1911,” and the forthcoming edited collection Slavery’s Capitalism. READ MORE

Why the White South Is Still in Denial About Slavery

On a trip through the South, Civil War culture is presented as "authentic." They just leave out the slavery part. 

December 28, 2011

The menu at the Cabin was long, one of those unwieldy, laminated mega-menus that grace the tables of roadside diners and chalets everywhere, and reflected a classic attention to theme (gumbo burger, gumbo omelet, gumbo). If the menu had been covered in tinfoil, I would’ve had a late-summer tan by the time I reached the dessert page. When our waiter approached, I asked — in what I imagined was a small act of clever, Yankee defiance — if the gumbo was any good.

My friend Gabbie and I had come directly from a tour of a former sugar plantation down the road, in Vacherie, La., called Oak Alley, and I had a crook in my neck. Up until that morning, whenever I heard the word “plantation,” I’d thought “slavery.” When I’d booked the tour, I had done so in the spirit of a visitor to Dachau or Wounded Knee. 

But the tour itself was given in the spirit of a visit to the home of a tasteful, Southern movie star. Our guide, in a tone equal parts admiring and envious, devoted 90 minutes to the armoires, linens and chamber pots of the home, but almost no time to the people who built, creased and cleaned them. The words “slave” and “slavery” were never mentioned.

“I guess the white people in antebellum drag getting misty about ‘the Golden Age of the South’ might have been our first clue,” Gabbie observed. READ MORE