Geographically, "The Old South" is a sub-region of the American South, differentiated from the Deep South by being limited to those Southern states represented among the original thirteen British colonies, which became the first thirteen U.S. states.

Culturally, "The Old South" is used to describe the rural, agriculturally-based, pre-Civil War or antebellum economy and society in the Southern United States.

The American Mind: the dangerous falsehoods of the NYT’s ‘1619 Project’

Washington, June 24, 2020

The following op-ed appeared at the American Mind, a publication of the Claremont Institute, on June 24, 2020.

-Congressman Jim Banks, Indiana

Have you turned on the news, seen organized groups pulling down statues—not of Confederate soldiers, but of our Founding Fathers or other presidents—and found yourself wondering what’s going on? My wife Amanda and I have watched with disgust as memorials to our country’s great heritage are attacked and vandalized. Our three girls are watching too. They ask: Why is this happening? I’ve been wrestling on how to give them an answer.

We could try to give these groups the benefit of the doubt. Was it too dark and they didn’t see that they were pulling down a statue of George Washington? Perhaps our education system has failed and some don’t realize Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence and was a critical figure in our fight for Independence? Or that Ulysses S. Grant actually fought to save the Union, the Confederacy surrendered to him at the Appomattox Court House and was a great leader in the Reconstruction efforts? Surely, they forgot that Abraham Lincoln was the signer of the Emancipation Proclamation that ultimately led to the abolition of slavery in America?

But that’s not what’s going on. I don’t know how to tell my daughters the truth, because the truth makes Amanda and I feel sad and angry.

You see, pulling down these statues isn’t a mistake. The groups pulling down statues are taking their cues from prominent figures in our nation’s elite. You can find their ideas in op-ed pages of the New York Times, on the news and even our children’s textbooks.

What’s going on, then? Some call it a revolution, but it’s a fundamental shift in the narrative about who we are, what we are, and why we are a nation.

On one of the statues of George Washington pulled down in Portland, the numbers 1619 were graffitied on his side.

What is 1619? It’s a reference to the year African slaves were brought to North America for the first time. It’s also the name of a new school curriculum published by the New York Times that’s being presented to our children in school.

The 1619 project teaches that America, at its core, is an irredeemably racist nation. According to Nikole Hannah Jones, the brainchild of the 1619 project, the Founding Fathers fought for independence from Britain not to protect the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness like they said they were, but to uphold the institution of slavery.

This is an absurd recasting of the birth of our nation, and it’s completely false. They don’t want you to dwell on the fact that George Washington freed his slaves toward the end of his life and expressed to see a plan for abolition in his will. Or that Civil Rights icon Martin Luther King fought for equitable treatment under the law using Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence.

But members of the Pulitzer Prize Board ignored those pesky details and historical inaccuracies. Earlier this year, they announced they’re giving Nikole Hannah Jones, the founder of the 1619 project, our country’s most coveted recognition and highest honor—the Pulitzer Prize. Not only did they accept these lies as truth, the Pulitzer Prize Board celebrated them and signaled we should celebrate them too. If they can get you to accept this rewriting of history, they can get you to say anything.

And so, taking their cues from our nation’s most prominent voices and cultural elites, lawless “protesters” are ripping down statues of some of our country’s revered figures. They say, and I’m paraphrasing, “Anyone who helped build America is a racist because America is a racist nation”—that’s what they think. “You can’t have pride in a country that is irredeemably racist. You shouldn’t honor the flag that represents it. And when that flag is presented, you should kneel.”

This is bigger than a simple call for police reform. This is a dramatic retelling of the American story. If we don’t push back on it, we may find ourselves living in a nation we don’t recognize when this is all done.

"On August 19 of last year (2019) I listened in stunned silence as Nikole Hannah-Jones, a reporter for the New York Times, repeated an idea that I had vigorously argued against with her fact-checker: that the patriots fought the American Revolution in large part to preserve slavery in North America.

"Far from being fought to preserve slavery, the Revolutionary War became a primary disrupter of slavery in the North American Colonies. Lord Dunmore's Proclamation, a British military strategy designed to unsettle the Southern Colonies by inviting enslaved people to flee to British lines, propelled hundreds of enslaved people off plantations and turned some Southerners to the patriot side. It also led most of the 13 Colonies to arm and employ free and enslaved black people, with the promise of freedom to those who served in their armies. While neither side fully kept its promises, thousands of enslaved people were freed as a result of these policies….

"Despite my advice, the Times published the incorrect statement about the American Revolution anyway, in Hannah-Jones' introductory essay. In addition, the paper's characterizations of slavery in early America reflected laws and practices more common in the antebellum era than in Colonial times, and did not accurately illustrate the varied experiences of the first generation of enslaved people that arrived in Virginia in 1619.

"Hannah-Jones has tended to be extremely dismissive of the project's critics, who include The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf and the American Institute for Economic Research's Phil Magness. Perhaps she will have a more difficult time discounting criticism from a historian whose expertise her project drew on.

"In any case, these ongoing issues with the project's accuracy are a good argument against school districts' swift mandates that it be taught in seventh-grade history classrooms."

-Leslie M. Harris is professor of history at Northwestern University, and author of In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863 and Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies

A Divisive, Historically Dubious Curriculum

'1619 Project' Winning the Pulitzer Shows Deep Corruption of Our Institutions

 By Jarrett Stepman | May 18, 2020

The New York Times’ “1619 Project”—despite being riddled with historical inaccuracies—is now the winner of a Pulitzer Prize, an outcome that is unfortunate but utterly unsurprising.

The award was given specifically to journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, the architect of the 1619 Project.

But her lead essay in the project has been lambasted by historians as inaccurate, in large part because of her assertion that the American colonists fought the Revolution to protect slavery.

That contention flowed from the project’s stated goal of showing that the country’s true founding was in 1619, when the first slaves from Africa were brought to the United States, rather than 1776, when the colonies declared their independence from England.

After months of pressure, The New York Times finally issued a correction—which it called a “clarification”—to the claim that slavery was the “one primary reason the colonists fought the American Revolution.”

As my colleague, Jonathan Butcher, a senior policy analyst in The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy, wrote, The Times hedged on this assertion to say that “some of” the colonists fought in the American Revolution to preserve slavery.

The idea that the American Revolution was motivated primarily by the desire to uphold slavery has been rightly assailed by numerous respected historians of all stripes, from conservative to liberal to even socialist.

The World Socialist Website, of all things, called the project “a politically motivated falsification of history.”

I’ve seldom, if ever, agreed with a socialist on anything, but that is spot on.

As I detailed in my book “The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America’s Past,” there has been a long-term and accelerating trend of distorting our history, to bury our accomplishments, and embellish our country’s sins.

The 1619 Project is even upfront with its stated intention to “reframe” America’s past. It does this not simply by making a different argument or interpretation, but by distorting the record, as so many historians have noted.

It’s important that when we discuss the past, we do so with a commitment to truth and accuracy. That shouldn’t be a left or right thing. Fake news is problematic, whether it has to do with reporting on the president or what happened in 1776.

So why would the Pulitzer Prize board, which supposedly gives awards for excellence in writing and journalism, give an esteemed award to what is at the very least a deeply flawed piece of work?

The truth, as those with common sense already know, is that the Pulitzer Prize recipients are chosen through a lens of politics. The 1619 Project might not be correct in fact, but it’s “correct” in feeling. It’s correct by the measure of the identity politics ideology that has become the de facto ideological lens of our country’s elite, liberal institutions.

This is hardly the first or only wild miss by Pulitzer. After all, Walter Duranty, The New York Times’ onetime Moscow bureau chief who lied about the Soviet Union’s starvation of Ukraine in the 1930s, never had his award rescinded, and the Times still occasionally touts Duranty as a past winner of the prize.

It seems that if you want accolades without regard to truth or accuracy, your best bet is to be on the political left and write for The New York Times.

The 1619 Project didn’t have to be excellent. It just had to be politically correct and written by the right people at America’s liberal publication of record. None of the criticism or flaws even mattered.

The Nobel Prize is hardly any different. Remember when then-President Barack Obama, after just nine months in office, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009? Can anyone actually recall what he did to deserve it, other than being a liberal president and not George W. Bush?

If one wants to look for an indication of why trust in America’s leading institutions—from Congress to the media—is in a state of collapse, this is a prime example.

Our meritocracy, to many Americans, is not very meritocratic. Our cultural elites are not so elite, but rather, committed to self-aggrandizement. Being “woke” is more important than being right. And the cultural elites are not content to simply hold those views and leave the rest of us alone. Instead, they work relentlessly to ensure that entire generations are all taught to think this same way, hence their war on school choice and homeschooling.

Despite the 1619 Project’s being so clearly flawed, and how obviously political the Pulitzer Prize board was, the award nevertheless provides an “official” stamp of approval that makes it a more effective tool to use in schools around the country. My wife, Inez Stepman, explained why in The Federalist:

"Unfortunately, endorsement of the 1619 Project goes beyond the establishment media and attendant self-congratulatory organizations. In large part due to the Pulitzer Center’s blessing, Common Core-compliant curricular materials based on the inaccurate history in the project are used in more than 3,500 schools across all 50 states. Thousands of American students are learning false historical information that gives them an unduly negative view of this country."

That’s bad enough, but now frustrated parents will be told that it’s all good, because after all, it won a Pulitzer Prize.

The left wields enormous power over our most powerful cultural institutions, a power wholly unjustified by its record. If there’s a characteristic that Americans from the time of the founding to today have maintained through the centuries, it’s our utter intolerance of a false aristocracy.

That’s why it’s essential that Americans now have a choice and the tools to work around those institutions and commit to giving themselves and their children those tools and the education necessary, such as those provided by the Woodson Center’s excellent “1776” project, to withstand the tide of mis-education.

Jarrett Stepman is a contributor for The Daily Signal.

The 1619 Project isn’t just a series of articles placing slavery fraudulently at the center of the American story. It is also a curriculum that is sweeping the land.

It teaches socialism—which forces man to work for others without remuneration, and expropriates private property—that is akin to slavery.

Teachers and Administrators will have to unite and act, now that the Pulitzer Board has allowed its coveted prize to be used in selling this project.

An interview with historian

Gordon Wood on the New York Times’

1619 Project

“When the Declaration says that all men are created equal, that is no myth”

By Tom Mackaman
28 November 2019

Gordon Wood is professor emeritus at Brown University and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Radicalism of the American Revolution, as well as Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815, and dozens of other books and articles on the colonial period, the American Revolution and the early republic.

Historian Gordan Wood speaks with WSWS about American Revolution and the NYT 1619 Project

Q. Let me begin by asking you your initial reaction to the 1619 Project. When did you learn about it?

A. Well, I was surprised when I opened my Sunday New York Times in August and found the magazine containing the project. I had no warning about this. I read the first essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones, which alleges that the Revolution occurred primarily because of the Americans’ desire to save their slaves. She claims the British were on the warpath against the slave trade and slavery and that rebellion was the only hope for American slavery. This made the American Revolution out to be like the Civil War, where the South seceded to save and protect slavery, and that the Americans 70 years earlier revolted to protect their institution of slavery. I just couldn’t believe this.

I was surprised, as many other people were, by the scope of this thing, especially since it’s going to become the basis for high school education and has the authority of the New York Times behind it, and yet it is so wrong in so many ways.

Q. I want to return to the question of slavery and the American Revolution, but first I wanted to follow up, because you said you were not approached. Yet you are certainly one of the foremost authorities on the American Revolution, which the 1619 Project trains much of its fire on.

A. Yes, no one ever approached me. None of the leading scholars of the whole period from the Revolution to the Civil War, as far I know, have been consulted. I read the Jim McPherson interview and he was just as surprised as I was.

Q. Can you discuss the relationship between the American Revolution and the institution of slavery?

A. One of the things that I have emphasized in my writing is how many southerners and northerners in 1776 thought slavery was on its last legs and that it would naturally die away. You can find quotation after quotation from people seriously thinking that slavery was going to wither away in several decades. Now we know they couldn’t have been more wrong. But they lived with illusions and were so wrong about so many things. We may be living with illusions too. One of the big lessons of history is to realize how the past doesn’t know its future. We know how the story turned out, and we somehow assume they should know what we know, but they don’t, of course. They don’t know their future any more than we know our future, and so many of them thought that slavery would die away, and at first there was considerable evidence that that was indeed the case.

Map of Free and Slave states:

At the time of the Revolution, the Virginians had more slaves than they knew what to do with, so they were eager to end the international slave trade. But the Georgians and the South Carolinians weren’t ready to do that yet. That was one of the compromises that came out of the Constitutional Convention. The Deep South was given 20 years to import more slaves, but most Americans were confident that the despicable transatlantic slave trade was definitely going to end in 1808.

Q. Under the Jefferson administration?

A. Yes, it was set in the Constitution at 20 years, but everyone knew this would be ended because nearly everyone knew that this was a barbaric thing, importing people and so on. Many thought that ending the slave trade would set slavery itself on the road to extinction. Of course, they were wrong.

I think the important point to make about slavery is that it had existed for thousands of years without substantial criticism, and it existed all over the New World. It also existed elsewhere in the world. Western Europe had already more or less done away with slavery. Perhaps there was nothing elsewhere comparable to the plantation slavery that existed in the New World, but slavery was widely prevalent in Africa and Asia. There is still slavery today in the world.

And it existed in all of these places without substantial criticism. Then suddenly in the middle of the 18th century you begin to get some isolated Quakers coming out against it. But it’s the American Revolution that makes it a problem for the world. And the first real anti-slave movement takes place in North America. So this is what’s missed by these essays in the 1619 Project.

Q. The claim made by Nikole Hannah-Jones in the 1619 Project that the Revolution was really about founding a slavocracy seems to be coming from arguments made elsewhere that it was really Great Britain that was the progressive contestant in the conflict, and that the American Revolution was, in fact, a counterrevolution, basically a conspiracy to defend slavery.

A. It’s been argued by some historians, people other than Hannah-Jones, that some planters in colonial Virginia were worried about what the British might do about slavery. Certainly, Dunmore’s proclamation in 1775, which promised the slaves freedom if they joined the Crown’s cause, provoked many hesitant Virginia planters to become patriots. There may have been individuals who were worried about their slaves in 1776, but to see the whole revolution in those terms is to miss the complexity.

In 1776, Britain, despite the Somerset decision, was certainly not the great champion of antislavery that the Project 1619 suggests. Indeed, it is the northern states in 1776 that are the world’s leaders in the antislavery cause. The first anti-slavery meeting in the history of the world takes place in Philadelphia in 1775. That coincidence I think is important. I would have liked to have asked Hannah-Jones, how would she explain the fact that in 1791 in Virginia at the College of William and Mary, the Board of Visitors, the board of trustees, who were big slaveholding planters, awarded an honorary degree to Granville Sharp, who was the leading British abolitionist of the day. That’s the kind of question that should provoke historical curiosity. You ask yourself what were these slaveholding planters thinking? It’s the kind of question, the kind of seeming anomaly, that should provoke a historian into research.

The idea that the Revolution occurred as a means of protecting slavery—I just don’t think there is much evidence for it, and in fact the contrary is more true to what happened. The Revolution unleashed antislavery sentiments that led to the first abolition movements in the history of the world.

Q. In fact, those who claim that the American Revolution was a counterrevolution to protect slavery focus on the timing of the Somerset ruling of 1772, which held that slavery wasn’t supported by English common law, and Dunmore’s promise to free slaves who escape their masters.

A. To go from these few facts to create such an enormous argument is a problem. The Somerset decision was limited to England, where there were very few slaves, and it didn’t apply to the Caribbean. The British don’t get around to freeing the slaves in the West Indies until 1833, and if the Revolution hadn’t occurred, might never have done so then, because all of the southern colonies would have been opposed. So supposing the Americans hadn’t broken away, there would have been a larger number of slaveholders in the greater British world who might have been able to prolong slavery longer than 1833. The West Indies planters were too weak in the end to resist abolition. They did try to, but if they had had all those planters in the South still being part of the British Empire with them, that would have made it more difficult for the British Parliament to move toward abolition.

Q. Hannah-Jones refers to America’s founding documents as its founding myths…

A. Of course, there are great ironies in our history, but the men and the documents transcend their time. That Jefferson, a slaveholding aristocrat, has been—until recently—our spokesman for democracy, declaring that all men are created equal, is probably the greatest irony in American history. But the document he wrote and his confidence in the capacities of ordinary people are real, and not myths.

Jefferson was a very complicated figure. He took a stand against slavery as a young man in Virginia. He spoke out against it. He couldn’t get his colleagues to go along, but he was certainly courageous in voicing his opposition to slavery. Despite his outspokenness on slavery and other enlightened matters, his colleagues respected him enough to keep elevating him to positions in the state. His colleagues could have, as we say today, “cancelled” him if they didn’t have some sympathy for what he was saying.

Q. And after the Revolution?

A. American leaders think slavery is dying, but they couldn’t have been more wrong. Slavery grows stronger after the Revolution, but it’s concentrated in the South. North of the Mason-Dixon line, in every northern state by 1804, slavery is legally put on the road to extinction. Now, there’s certain “grandfathering in,” and so you do have slaves in New Jersey as late as the eve of the Civil War. But in the northern states, the massive movement against slavery was unprecedented in the history of the world. So to somehow turn this around and make the Revolution a means of preserving slavery is strange and contrary to the evidence.

As a result of the Revolution, slavery is confined to the South, and that puts the southern planters on the defensive. For the first time they have to defend the institution. If you go into the colonial records and look at the writings and diary of someone like William Byrd, who’s a very distinguished and learned person—he’s a member of the Royal Society—you’ll find no expressions of guilt whatsoever about slavery. He took his slaveholding for granted. But after the Revolution that’s no longer true. Southerners began to feel this anti-slave pressure now. They react to it by trying to give a positive defense of slavery. They had no need to defend slavery earlier because it was taken for granted as a natural part of a hierarchical society.

We should understand that slavery in the colonial period seemed to be simply the most base status in a whole hierarchy of dependencies and degrees of unfreedom. Indentured servitude was prevalent everywhere. Half the population that came to the colonies in the 18th century came as bonded servants. Servitude, of course, was not slavery, but it was a form of dependency and unfreedom that tended to obscure the uniqueness of racial slavery. Servants were bound over to masters for five or seven years. They couldn’t marry. They couldn’t own property. They belonged to their masters, who could sell them. Servitude was not life-time and was not racially-based, but it was a form of dependency and unfreedom. The Revolution attacked bonded servitude and by 1800 it scarcely existed anywhere in the US.

The elimination of servitude suddenly made slavery more conspicuous than it had been in a world of degrees of unfreedom. The antislavery movements arose out of these circumstances. As far as most northerners were concerned, this most base and despicable form of unfreedom must be eliminated along with all the other forms of unfreedom. These dependencies were simply incompatible with the meaning of the Revolution.

After the Revolution, Virginia had no vested interest in the international slave trade. Quite the contrary. Virginians began to grow wheat in place of tobacco. Washington does this, and he comes to see himself as more a farmer than a planter. He and other farmers begin renting out their slaves to people in Norfolk and Richmond, where they are paid wages. And many people thought that this might be the first step toward the eventual elimination of slavery. These anti-slave sentiments don’t last long in Virginia, but for a moment it seemed that Virginia, which dominated the country as no other state ever has, might abolish slavery as the northern states were doing. In fact, there were lots of manumissions and other anti-slave moves in Virginia in the 1780s.

But the black rebellion in Saint-Domingue—the Haitian Revolution—scares the bejesus out of the southerners. Many of the white Frenchmen fled to North America—to Louisiana, to Charleston, and they brought their fears of slave uprisings with them. Then, with Gabriel’s Rebellion in Virginia in 1800, most of the optimism that Virginians had in 1776—1790 is gone.

Of course, I think the ultimate turning point for both sections is the Missouri crisis of 1819–1820. Up to that point, both sections lived with illusions. The Missouri crisis causes the scales to fall away from the eyes of both northerners and southerners. Northerners come to realize that the South really intended to perpetuate slavery and extend it into the West. And southerners come to realize that the North is so opposed to slavery that it will attempt to block them from extending it into the West. From that moment on I think the Civil War became inevitable.

Q. There’s the famous quote from Jefferson that the Missouri crisis awakened him like a fire bell in the night and that in it he perceived the death of the union...

A. Right. He’s absolutely panicked by what’s happening, and these last years of his life leading up to 1826 are really quite sad because he’s saying these things. Reading his writings between 1819 and his death in 1826 makes you wince because he so often sounds like a southern fire-eater of the 1850s. Whereas his friend Madison has a much more balanced view of things, Jefferson becomes a furious and frightened defender of the South. He sees a catastrophe in the works, and he can’t do anything about it.

John Adams, painted by Gilbert Stuart:

His friend Adams was, of course, opposed to slavery from the beginning, and this is something that Hannah-Jones should have been aware of. John Adams is the leading advocate in the Continental Congress for independence. He’s never been a slaveowner. He hates slavery and he has no vested interest in it. By 1819–1820, however, he more or less takes the view that the Virginians have a serious problem with slavery and they are going to have to work it out for themselves. He’s not going to preach to them. That’s essentially what he says to Jefferson.

By the early nineteenth century, Jefferson had what Annette Gordon-Reed calls “New England envy.” His granddaughter marries a New Englander and moves there, and she tells him how everything’s flourishing in Connecticut. The farms are all neat, clean and green, and there are no slaves. He envies the town meetings of New England, those little ward republics. And he just yearns for something like that for Virginia.

Q. How it is that the American Revolution raises the dignity of labor? Because it seems to me that this concept certainly becomes a burning issue by the time of the Civil War.

A. It’s a good question. Central to the middle class revolution was an unprecedented celebration of work, especially manual labor, including the working for money. For centuries going back to the ancient Greeks, work with one’s hands had been held in contempt. Aristotle had said that those who worked with their hands and especially those who worked for money lacked the capacity for virtue. This remained the common view until the American Revolution changed everything.

The northern celebration of work made the slaveholding South seem even more anomalous than it was. Assuming that work was despicable and mean was what justified slavery. Scorn for work and slavery were two sides of the same coin. Now the middle-class northerners—clerks, petty merchants, farmers, etc.—began attacking the leisured gentry as parasites living off the work of others. That was the gist of the writings of William Manning, the obscure Massachusetts farmer, writing in the 1790s. This celebration of work, of course, forced the slaveholding planters to be even more defensive and they began celebrating leisure as the source of high culture in contrast with the money-grubbing North.

Slavery required a culture that held labor in contempt. The North, with its celebration of labor, especially working for money, became even more different from the lazy, slaveholding South. By the 1850s, the two sections, though both American, possessed two different cultures.

Q. In my discussion with Professor James Oakes, he made the point about the emergence of the Democratic Party in the 1820s, that in the North it can’t do what the southern slave owners really want it to do, which is to say slaves are property, but what they do instead is to begin to promote racism.

A. That’s right. When you have a republican society, it’s based on equality of all citizens; and now many whites found that difficult to accept. And they had to justify the segregation and the inferior status of the freed blacks by saying blacks were an inferior race. As I said earlier, in the Colonial period whites didn’t have to mount any racist arguments to justify the lowly status of blacks. In a hierarchical society with many degrees of unfreedom, you don’t bother with trying to explain or justify slavery or the unequal treatment of anyone. Someone like William Byrd never tries to justify slavery. He never argues that blacks are inferior. He doesn’t need to do that because he takes his whole world of inequality and hierarchy for granted. Racism develops in the decades following the Revolution because in a free republican society, whites needed a new justification for keeping blacks in an inferior and segregated place. And it became even more complicated when freed blacks with the suffrage tended to vote for the doomed parties of the Federalists and the Whigs.

Purchase of Christian captives from the Barbary States:

Q. The 1619 Project claims basically that nothing has ever gotten any better. That it’s as bad now as it was during slavery, and instead what you’re describing is a very changed world...

A. Imagine the inequalities that existed before the Revolution. Not just in wealth—I mean, we have that now—but in the way in which people were treated. Consider the huge number of people who were servants of some kind. I just think that people need to know just how bad the Ancién Regime was. In France, we always had this Charles Dickens Tale of Two Cities view of the society, with a nobleman riding through the village and running over children and so on. But similar kinds of brutalities and cruelties existed in the English-speaking world in the way common people were treated. In England, there must have been 200 capital crimes on the books. Consequently, juries became somewhat reluctant to convict to hanging a person for stealing a handkerchief. So the convict was sent as a bonded servant to the colonies, 50,000 of them. And then when the American Revolution occurs, Australia becomes the replacement.

I don’t think people realize just what a cruel and brutal world existed in the Ancién Regime, in the premodern societies of the West, not just for slaves, but for lots of people who were considered the mean or lowly sort. And they don’t appreciate what a radical message is involved in declaring that all men are created equal and what that message means for our obsession with education, and the implications of that for our society.

Q. You spoke of the “consensus school” on American history before, from the 1950s, that saw the Revolution, I think, as essentially a conservative event. And one of the things that they stressed was that there was no aristocracy, no native aristocracy, in America, but you find, if I recall your argument in The Radicalism of the American Revolution, that though aristocracy was not strong, it was something that was still a powerful factor.

A. There’s no European-type aristocracy, the kind of rich, hereditary aristocracy of the sort that existed in England—great landholders living off the rents of their tenants. But we had an aristocracy of sorts. The southern slaveholding planters certainly came closest to the English model, but even in the more egalitarian North there was an aristocracy of sorts. Men of wealth and distinction that we would label elites sought to make the title of gentlemen equal some kind of aristocracy. “Gentleman” was a legal distinction, and such gentlemen were treated differently in the society because of that distinction. With the Revolution, all this came under assault.

It’s interesting to look at the debates that occur in the New York ratifying convention in 1788. The leading Anti-Federalist, Melancton Smith, a very smart guy but a middling sort and with no college graduate degree, gives the highly educated Alexander Hamilton and Robert Livingston a run for their money. He calls Hamilton and Livingston aristocrats and charges that the proposed Constitution was designed to give more power to the likes of them. Hamilton, who certainly felt superior to Smith, denied he was an aristocrat. There were no aristocrats in America, he said; they existed only in Europe. That kind of concession was multiplied ten thousand-fold in the following decades in the North, and this denial of obvious social superiority in the face of middling criticism is denied even today. You see politicians wanting to play down their distinctiveness, their elite status. “I can have a beer with Joe Six-pack,” they say, denying their social superiority. That was already present in the late 1780s. That’s what I mean by radicalism. It’s a middle-class revolution, and it is essentially confined to the North.

President Martin Van Buren, photo by Matthew Brady:

Q. You were speaking earlier of the despair of Madison, Adams and Jefferson late in life. And it just occurred to me that they lived to see Martin Van Buren.

A. That’s right. Van Buren is probably the first real politician in America elected to the presidency. Unlike his predecessors, he never did anything great; he never made a great speech, he never wrote a great document, he never won a great battle. He simply was the most politically astute operator that the United States had ever seen. He organized a party in New York that was the basis of his success.

Van Buren regarded the founding fathers as passé. He told his fellow Americans, look, we don’t need to pay too much attention to those guys. They were aristocrats, he said. We’re Democrats—meaning both small “d” and also capital “D.” Those aristocrats don’t have much to say to us.

Did you know that the “founding fathers” in the antebellum period are not Jefferson and Madison and Washington and Hamilton? In the antebellum period when most Americans referred to the “founders,” they meant John Smith, William Penn, William Bradford, John Winthrop and so on, the founders of the seventeenth century. There’s a good book on this subject by Wesley Frank Craven [ The Legend of the Founding Fathers (1956)].

It’s Lincoln who rescues the eighteenth-century founders for us. From the Civil War on, the “founders” become the ones we celebrate today, the revolutionary leaders. Lincoln makes Jefferson the great hero of America. “All honor to Jefferson,” he says. Only because of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson didn’t have anything to do with the Constitution, and so Lincoln makes the Declaration the most important document in American history, which I think is true.

Q. For our readership, perhaps you could discuss something of the world-historical significance of the Revolution. Of course, we are under no illusion that it represented a socialist transformation. Yet it was a powerful revolution in its time.

A. It was very important that the American colonial crisis, the imperial crisis, occurred right at the height of what we call the Enlightenment, where Western Europe was full of new ideas and was confident that culture—what people believed and thought—was man-made and thus could be changed. The Old World, the Ancién Regime, could be transformed and made anew. It was an age of revolution, and it’s not surprising that the French Revolution and other revolutions occur in in the wake of the American Revolution.

The notion of equality was really crucial. When the Declaration says that all men are created equal, that is no myth. It is the most powerful statement ever made in our history, and it lies behind almost everything we Americans believe in and attempt to do. What that statement meant is that we are all born equal and the all the differences that we see among us as adults are due solely to our differing educations, differing upbringings and differing environments. The Declaration is an Enlightenment document because it repudiated the Ancién Regime assumption that all men are created unequal and that nothing much could be done about it. That’s what it meant to be a subject in the old society. You were born a patrician or a plebeian and that was your fate.

Q. One of the ironies of this Project 1619 is that they are saying the same things about the Declaration of Independence as the fire-eating proponents of slavery said—that it’s a fraud. Meanwhile, abolitionists like Frederick Douglass upheld it and said we’re going to make this “all men are created equal” real.

A. That points up the problem with the whole project. It’s too bad that it’s going out into the schools with the authority of the New York Times behind it. That’s sad because it will color the views of all these youngsters who will receive the message of the 1619 Project.

Stereotyping the Old South

As we approach the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War, the war over that conflict's meaning is less civil today than ever.  Jack Hunter explains:

 Native American Indian ownership of Black slaves is discussed in the documentary

"Black Slaves, Red Masters."

From the late eighteenth century through the end of the War Between the States, Choctaw and Chickasaw Indians bought, sold, and owned Africans and African Americans as slaves, a fact that persisted after the tribes' removal from the Deep South to Indian Territory.

The tribes formulated racial and gender ideologies that justified this practice and marginalized free black people in the Indian nations well after the War Between the States and slavery had ended. Through the end of the nineteenth century, ongoing conflicts among Choctaw, Chickasaw, and U.S. lawmakers left untold numbers of former slaves and their descendants in the two Indian nations without citizenship in either the Indian nations or the United States. In this groundbreaking study, Barbara Krauthamer rewrites the history of southern slavery, emancipation, race, and citizenship to reveal the centrality of Native American slaveholders and the black people they enslaved.

Krauthamer's examination of slavery and emancipation highlights the ways Indian women's gender roles changed with the arrival of slavery and changed again after emancipation and reveals complex dynamics of race that shaped the lives of black people and Indians both before and after removal.

"The role of black Indians, largely omitted from or distorted in conventional history books, is traced by William Katz with careful and committed research. . . . he integrates their general history with brief individual biographies, including leaders, army scouts and soldiers, frontiersmen and explorers, (and) dangerous outlaws".--Booklist.

Slavery existed in North America long before the first Africans arrived at Jamestown in 1619. For centuries, from the pre-Columbian era through the 1840s, Native Americans took prisoners of war and killed, adopted, or enslaved them. Christina Snyder's path-breaking book takes a familiar setting for bondage, the American South, and places Native Americans at the center of her engrossing story.

Indian warriors captured a wide range of enemies, including Africans, Europeans, and other Indians. Yet until the late eighteenth century, age and gender more than race affected the fate of captives. As economic and political crises mounted, however, Indians began to racialize slavery and target African Americans. Native people struggling to secure a separate space for themselves in America developed a shared language of race with white settlers. Although the Indians' captivity practices remained fluid long after their neighbors hardened racial lines, the Second Seminole War ultimately tore apart the inclusive communities that Native people had created through centuries of captivity.

Snyder's rich and sweeping history of Indian slavery connects figures like Andrew Jackson and Cherokee chief Dragging Canoe with little-known captives like Antonia Bonnelli, a white teenager from Spanish Florida, and David George, a black runaway from Virginia. Placing the experiences of these individuals within a complex system of captivity and Indians' relations with other peoples, Snyder demonstrates the profound role of Native American history in the American past.

In The Native Ground, Kathleen DuVal argues that it was Indians rather than European would-be colonizers who were more often able to determine the form and content of the relations between the two groups. Along the banks of the Arkansas and Mississippi rivers, far from Paris, Madrid, and London, European colonialism met neither accommodation nor resistance but incorporation. Rather than being colonized, Indians drew European empires into local patterns of land and resource allocation, sustenance, goods exchange, gender relations, diplomacy, and warfare. Placing Indians at the center of the story, DuVal shows both their diversity and our contemporary tendency to exaggerate the influence of Europeans in places far from their centers of power. Europeans were often more dependent on Indians than Indians were on them.

Now the states of Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Colorado, this native ground was originally populated by indigenous peoples, became part of the French and Spanish empires, and in 1803 was bought by the United States in the Louisiana Purchase. Drawing on archaeology and oral history, as well as documents in English, French, and Spanish, DuVal chronicles the successive migrations of Indians and Europeans to the area from precolonial times through the 1820s. These myriad native groups—Mississippians, Quapaws, Osages, Chickasaws, Caddos, and Cherokees—and the waves of Europeans all competed with one another for control of the region.

Only in the nineteenth century did outsiders initiate a future in which one people would claim exclusive ownership of the mid-continent. After the War of 1812, these settlers came in numbers large enough to overwhelm the region's inhabitants and reject the early patterns of cross-cultural interdependence. As citizens of the United States, they persuaded the federal government to muster its resources on behalf of their dreams of landholding and citizenship.

With keen insight and broad vision, Kathleen DuVal retells the story of Indian and European contact in a more complex and, ultimately, more satisfactory way.

Late in April 1861, President Lincoln ordered Federal troops to evacuate forts in Indian Territory. That left the Five Civilized Tribes—Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles—essentially under Confederate jurisdiction and control. The American Indian and the End of the Confederacy, 1863–1866, spans the closing years of the War Between the States, when Southern fortunes were waning, and the immediate postwar period.

Annie Heloise Abel shows the extreme vulnerability of the Indians caught between two warring sides. "The failure of the United States government to afford to the southern Indians the protection solemnly guaranteed by treaty stipulations had been the great cause of their entering into an alliance with The Confederacy, "she writes. Her classic book, originally published in 1925 as the third volume of The Slaveholding Indians, makes clear how the Indians became the victims of uprootedness and privation, pillaging, government mismanagement, and, finally, a deceptive treaty for reconstruction.

Indian Slavery/Slaveries in early

Eastern North America

Kristofer Ray, Dartmouth College, “Constructing a Discourse of Indian Slavery, Freedom, and Sovereignty in Anglo-Virginia, 1600–1830”

Margaret Newell, Ohio State University, “‘As good if not better then Moorish Slaves’: Region and Ethnicity in slavery—the case of New England”

Hayley Negrin, New York University, “Interconnected Regimes: The Indian Slave Trade in Carolina and Plantation Slavery in Virginia after the Westo War of 1679”

Here is a picture of Puritan New England far different from the “city upon a hill” that John Winthrop hoped he and the other first settlers would leave for posterity. It opens with the kidnapping of a Patuxet Indian. It closes with one of the wealthiest men in Massachusetts justifying the enslavement and sale of Africans. In between, Wendy Warren, an assistant professor of history at Prince­ton, scatters massacres, a rape, beheadings, brandings, whippings and numerous instances of forced exile. The behavior of New England settlers differed less from that of their contemporaries who established plantation colonies in the Chesapeake and the Caribbean than might be assumed.

Warren’s theme in “New England Bound” — the place of slavery in the making of colonial New England — echoes preoccupations of the moment in the writing of American history, as the pervasive influence of slavery on the nation, its institutions and its cultures attains wider recognition. In time, perhaps, this perspective will no longer surprise, and even now, few familiar with colonial American history will be astonished by Warren’s account. She builds on and generously acknowledges more than two generations of research into the social history of New England and the economic history of the Atlantic world. But not only has she mastered that scholarship, she has also brought it together in an original way, and deepened the story with fresh research.

The economic ties between early New England and the Caribbean deserve to be better known. Prominent merchant families like the Winthrops and the Hutchinsons made their fortunes by linking New England farmers and fishermen to West Indian markets, by sending food to the sugar colonies, where, in the 17th century, the real wealth lay. Enslaved Africans came to New England through these same merchant networks, as one of several imports from the English Caribbean. These forced migrants never became more than 10 percent of the population. Still, many New England households soon kept a captive African or two.

Slave ownership reached down the social scale and into New England’s hinterland. African captives helped replace the ­Native-American communities displaced by English colonists. As enslaved Africans came in, New England merchants sent Indian captives out, banishing them to Barbados or somewhere else beyond the seas.

This economic dependence on West Indian slavery and the routine exploitation of Indian and African captives drew little comment from English colonists at the time. Warren finds some “wincing in the face of .?.?. cruelty,” but acknowledges that doubts about slavery ran no more deeply in New England at the turn of the 18th century than in any of the other European colonies in the Americas. The emergence of the antislavery North lay more than a century off.

What is most fascinating here is the detailed rendering of what individual enslaved men and women experienced in New England households. “New England Bound” conveys the disorientation, the deprivation, the vulnerability, the occasional hunger and the profound isolation that defined the life of most African exiles in Puritan New England, where there was no plantation community. Though the surviving record allows limited access to their thoughts, Warren effectively evokes their feelings. Ripped from kin on the far side of the Atlantic, “dreaming of other people and other places,” but unable to go home, the lost tried and sometimes succeeded in making meaningful connections with others suffering a similar fate. For this was the ordinary pain and sorrow of slave life in New England: Belonging to someone often meant having no one to belong to.

(Review written by Christopher L. Brown is a professor of history, director of the Society of Fellows and vice provost for faculty affairs at Columbia University.)

Colonial America Depended on the Enslavement of Indigenous People

Dr. Margaret Newell:

New England Indians, Colonists, & the Origins of American Slavery

(A discussion on Ben Franklin's World podcast)

Did you know that one of the earliest practices of slavery by English colonists originated in New England?

In fact, Massachusetts issued the very first slave code in English America in 1641. Why did New Englanders turn to slavery and become the first in English America to codify its practice?

Margaret Ellen Newell, a professor of history at The Ohio State University and the author of Brethren By Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery, joins us to investigate these questions and issues.

Dr. Margaret Ellen Newell

presents a lecture on "Brethren by Nature:

New England Indians, Colonists,

and the Origins of American Slavery."

Dr. Margaret Ellen Newell presents another lecture: The Influence of the Colonists’ Relations with American Indians

Dr. Gary Gallagher, University of Virginia, in an excerpt from a lecture, "The Real Lost Cause," discusses why too many read history from the end instead of at the beginning; why the majority of people in the North were racist; why the Civil War could have ended with a victorious Union Army, and............ with slavery intact:

What countries were involved in the triangle trade?

How do scholars get information about slave trading voyages?

Forgotten History: How The New England Colonists Embraced The Slave Trade

American slavery predates the founding of the United States. Wendy Warren, author of New England Bound, says the early colonists imported African slaves and enslaved and exported Native Americans.

In 1640, five years after being freed from slavery himself, Anthony Johnson (born in Angola, Africa), acquired a black slave named John Casar (sometimes spelled Casor or Gesorroro). In 1648, Johnson, who had come to the Eastern Shore in the 1620s, purchased four head of livestock from four different planters. Two years later he was given a patent for an isolated 250-acre tract of land on the north side of Nandua, where he settled with his wife Mary (who had arrived from Africa in 1622) and proceeded to build a livestock business. A patent was a legal claim to land given by the government in exchange for bringing dependents (called "headrights") into the colony. In 1654, he acquired a second slave, Mary Gersheene. Over the next few years, the Johnson's sons, John and Richard, accumulated 650 acres adjacent to their parents' land.

The accumulation of several hundred acres of land, a herd of cattle, and a few slaves constituted a singular economic achievement for a free black family in mid-seventeenth-century Virginia. Historians have pointed to Anthony Johnson as proof that in the early and mid-1600's at least, Virginia's free blacks sometimes operated on an equal footing with whites. It is true that during the 17^th-century free black men occasionally purchased not only black slaves, but indentured white servants, and they sometimes married white women. They established profitable farms and livestock businesses, and successfully sued whites in court.

But more recent investigations into the lives of free blacks on the Eastern Shore suggest that while colonial blacks had relatively more opportunity and freedom than their descendants in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they too suffered at the hands of the white majority.

The Johnsons, for example, were harassed by two of their white neighbors, George and Robert Parker, who connived to lure John Casar away from the Johnson household in early 1655. Johnson successfully petitioned the court for Casar's return, ironically setting an early legal precedent for slavery in Virginia. A white planter attempted to defraud the Johnsons out of their land in 1653, and in 1658 another planter, Matthew Pippen, succeeded in taking land away from Richard Johnson.

Perhaps seeking an atmosphere more congenial for free blacks, the Johnson family moved north to Somerset County, Maryland in 1665, where Anthony Johnson leased 300 acres and founded a tobacco farm that he called Tories Vineyards. But their Virginia troubles were not over. In 1667, Edmund Scarburgh, the Shore's most prominent planter and politician, cheated Johnson out of more than 1,300 pounds of tobacco. And in the greatest injustice of all, in 1670 a jury of white men decided that "because he was a Negroe and by consequence an alien," the Virginia land originally held by Johnson should revert to the Crown.

Anthony Johnson died on his estate in Somerset before the 1670 decision was handed down. Mary Johnson died there 10 years later. Only one son, Richard Johnson, born about 1632, remained on the Eastern Shore, on 50 acres given to him by his father. In the next generation this property was inherited by Anthony's grandson, John Johnson Jr., who named the farm “Angola” as a tribute to his grandfather's birth country. John Johnson was unable to pay the taxes on the property and subsequently lost ownership. He died in 1721.

The Johnson family's economic success is a tribute to their hard work and resourcefulness, but the attempts by their white neighbors to ruin them are indicative of the severe obstacles to success placed in the path of blacks even during colonial times.

(Source: Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, “Site of 17th Century Estate of Anthony and Mary Johnson,” African American Historic Sites Database.)

The First Official Slave and Slave Owner in (North) America...from "Stolen History, Part 2":

William Ellison: Largest African American Slave Owner and Breeder

in South Carolina.....

and he was Black

By 1860, William “April” Ellison was South Carolina's largest Negro slave owner; and in the entire state, only five percent of the people owned as much real estate as did William Ellison. His wealth was 15 times greater than that of the state's average for whites. Ellison also owned more slaves than did 99% of the South's slaveholders.

William Holmes Ellison, Jr. "April"

a Black (mulatto) Slave Owner in South Carolina

In 1800, the South Carolina legislature had set out in detail the procedures for manumission. To end the practice of freeing unruly slaves of "bad or depraved" character and those who "from age or infirmity" were incapacitated, the state required that an owner testify under oath to the good character of the slave he sought to free. Also required was evidence of the slave's "ability to gain a livelihood in an honest way." On June 8, 1816, William Ellison of Fairfield County appeared before a magistrate (with five local freeholders as supporting witnesses) to gain permission to free his slave, April, who was at the time 26 years of age. April was William Ellison, Jr. of Sumter County.

At birth, William Ellison, Jr. was given the name of "April." It was a popular practice among slaves of the period to name a child after the day or month of his or her birth. It is known that between the years 1800 and 1802 April was owned by a white slave-owner named William Ellison, son of Robert Ellison of Fairfield County in South Carolina. It is not documented as to who his owner was before that time. It can only be assumed that William Ellison, a planter of Fairfield district was either the father or the brother of William Ellison, Jr., freedman of Sumter County. April had his name changed to William Ellison by the courts, obviously in honor of William Ellison of Fairfield.

At the age of 10, William "April" Ellison was apprenticed and he was trained as a cotton gin builder and repairer. He spent six years training as a blacksmith and carpenter and he also learned how to read, write, cipher and to do basic bookkeeping. Since there are no records showing the purchase of April (later William Ellison of Sumter) by William Ellison of Fairfield, it is unknown as to how long April was owned by William Ellison. It is known that William Ellison of Fairfield inherited a large estate from his father Robert, and that the slaves of the estate, named in the will were left to his siblings. It is possible that Robert Ellison gave several slaves to his son before his death, so they would not have needed to have been mentioned in his will. William owned several slaves according to the census records. Both Robert and William were of an age to have been able to be the father of April.

April was trained as a machinist and he became a well known cotton gin maker. Upon receiving his freedom he decided to pursue his expertise in Sumter County, South Carolina where found an eager market for his trade. He is well known for perfecting the cotton gin invented by Eli Whitney.

William Holmes "April" Ellison was born in 1790, in Fairfield, SC, which was 40 miles NW of the High Hills, to William Holmes Ellison and Mary Harrison. He married a woman named Matilda and together they had the following children: Aliza Ann, Marie, Henry, William Holmes III, and Reuben Ellison. He had an illegitimate child named Maria Ellison that he sold. "April" was a slave owner and one time slave himself. It was told that he was hard on his slaves and interestingly none of his slaves were Mulattoes, they were all black. When he was 26 he became a free man and 3 years later at the Sumter District courthouse he had his name changed to William. William was the name of his former master (William Holmes Ellison I). He changed his name from April because it was tied to slavery.

He was known for being a Cotton Gin Maker. In 1822, he built his Cotton gin shop on an acre of land that he purchased for $375 from General Thomas Sumter. This shop would be operated by William and even his grandsons for many decades. The shop was located at the NW corner of a busy intersection of the roads of Charleston-Camden and Sumterville-Columbia, SC. Now at the Holy Cross Episcopal Church were he attend services, William rose in respectability. His family became so respected that they were the only colored family allowed to worship on the main floor. William Ellison was permitted to place a Bench under the Organ Loft for the use of himself and family. William Ellison died on December 5, 1861 in Statesburg, SC, and was buried with his wife, Matilda. His tombstone was placed in the first row of the family's graveyard.
------------------------------------

Additional Bio Info provided by Art Wells:

In 1800 the South Carolina legislature had set out in detail the procedures for manumission. To end the practice of freeing unruly slaves of "bad or depraved" character and those who "from age or infirmity" were incapacitated, the state required that an owner testify under oath to the good character of the slave he sought to free. Also required was evidence of the slave's "ability to gain a livelihood in an honest way." On June 8, 1816, William Ellison of Fairfield County appeared before a magistrate (with five local freeholders as supporting witnesses) to gain permission to free his slave, April, who was at the time 26 years of age. April was William Ellison, Jr. of Sumter County.

At birth, William Ellison, Jr. was given the name of "April." It was a popular practice among slaves of the period to name a child after the day or month of his or her birth. It is known that between the years 1800 and 1802 April was owned by a white slave-owner named William Ellison, son of Robert Ellison of Fairfield County in South Carolina. It is not documented as to who his owner was before that time. It can only be assumed that William Ellison, a planter of Fairfield district was either the father or the brother of William Ellison, Jr., freedman of Sumter County. April had his name changed to William Ellison by the courts, obviously in honor of William Ellison of Fairfield.

At the age of 10, William "April" Ellison was apprenticed and he was trained as a cotton gin builder and repairer. He spent six years training as a blacksmith and carpenter and he also learned how to read, write, cipher and to do basic bookkeeping. Since there are no records showing the purchase of April (later William Ellison of Sumter) by William Ellison of Fairfield, it is unknown as to how long April was owned by William Ellison. It is known that William Ellison of Fairfield inherited a large estate from his father Robert, and that the slaves of the estate, named in the will were left to his siblings. It is possible that Robert Ellison gave several slaves to his son before his death, so they would not have needed to have been mentioned in his will. William owned several slaves according to the census records. Both Robert and William were of an age to have been able to be the father of April.

April was trained as a machinist and he became a well known cotton gin maker. Upon receiving his freedom he decided to pursue his expertise in Sumter County, South Carolina where found an eager market for his trade. He is well known for perfecting the cotton gin invented by Eli Whitney.

In 1816, April, now known as William Ellison, Jr. arrived in Stateburg where he initially hired slave workers from their local owners. By 1820 he had purchased two adult males to work in his shop. On June 20, 1820, April appeared in the Sumter District courthouse in Sumterville. Described in court papers submitted by his attorney as a “freed yellow man of about 29 years of age,” he requested a name change because it “would yet greatly advance his interest as a tradesman.” A new name would also “save him and his children from degradation and contempt which the minds of some do and will attach to the name April.” Because “of the kindness” of his former master and as a “Mark of gratitude and respect for him” April asked that his name be changed to William Ellison. His request was granted.

The Ellison family joined the Episcopalian Church of the Holy Cross in Stateburg and on August 6, 1824, William Ellis was the first black to install a family bench on the first floor of the church, among those of the other wealthy families of Stateburg. The poor whites and the other black church members, free and slave, sat in the balcony of the church.

Gradually, Ellison built up a small empire, purchasing slaves in increasing numbers as the years passed. He became one of South Carolina's major cotton gin manufacturers and sold his machines as far away as Mississippi. He regularly advertised his cotton gins in newspapers across the state. His ads may be found in historic copies of the Black River Watchman, the Sumter Southern Whig, and the Camden Gazzette.

By 1830, he owned four slaves who assisted him in his business. He then began to acquire land and even more slaves. In 1838 Ellison purchased 54.5 acres adjoining his original acreage from former South Carolina Governor Stephen Decater Miller. Ellison and his family moved into a large home on the property. (The house had been known as Miller House but became known as Ellison House.) As his business grew, so did his wealth and by 1840, Ellison owned 12 slaves. His sons, who lived in homes on the property, owned an additional nine slaves. By the early 1840s, he was one of the most prosperous men in the area. By the year 1850, he was the owner of 386 acres of land and 37 slaves. The workers on Ellison's plantation produced 35 bales of cotton that year.

In 1852, Ellison purchased Keith Hill and Hickory Hill Plantations which increased his land holdings to over 1,000 acres. By 1860 William Ellison was South Carolina's largest Negro slave owner and in the entire state, only five percent of the people owned as much real estate as did William Ellison. His wealth was 15 times greater than that of the state's average for whites. Ellison also owned more slaves than did 99% of the South's slaveholders.

When War Between the States broke out in 1861, William Ellison, Jr. was one of the staunchest supporters of the Confederacy. His grandson joined a Confederate Artillery Unit, and William turned his plantation over from cotton cash crop production to farming foodstuff for the Confederacy.

William Ellison, Jr. died on 5 December 1861, at the age of 71 and per his wishes, his family continued to actively support the Confederacy throughout the war. Aside from producing corn, fodder, bacon, corn shucks, and cotton for the Confederate Army, they contributed vast amounts of money, paid $5000 in taxes, and invested a good portion of their fortune into Confederate Bonds which were worthless at the end of the war.

William Ellison, Jr. had died with an estate appraised at $43,500, consisting of 70 slaves. His will stated that his estate should pass into the joint hands of his daughter and his two surviving sons. He bequeathed $500 to a slave daughter he had sold. At his death he was one in the top 10% of the wealthiest people in all of South Carolina, was in the top 5% of land ownership, and he was the third largest slave owner in the entire state.

In 1816, April, now known as William Ellison, Jr. (not to be confused with one of his own sons, whom he would name William Ellison, Jr.) arrived in Stateburg where he initially hired slave workers from their local owners. By 1820, he had purchased two adult males to work in his shop. On June 20, 1820, "April" appeared in the Sumter District courthouse in Sumterville. Described in court papers submitted by his attorney as a “freed yellow man of about 29 years of age,” he requested a name change because it “would yet greatly advance his interest as a tradesman.” A new name would also “save him and his children from degradation and contempt which the minds of some do and will attach to the name April.” Because “of the kindness” of his former master and as a “Mark of gratitude and respect for him” April asked that his name be changed to William Ellison. His request was granted.

The Ellison family joined the Episcopalian Church of the Holy Cross in Stateburg and on  August 6, 1824, William Ellis was the first black allowed to install a family bench on the first floor of the church, albeit in the back of the church, among those of the other wealthy  families of Stateburg. The poor whites and the other black church members, free and slave, sat in the balcony of the church.

Gradually, Ellison built up a small empire, purchasing slaves in increasing numbers as the years passed. He became one of South Carolina's major cotton gin manufacturers and sold his machines as far away as Mississippi. He regularly advertised his cotton gins in newspapers across the state. His ads may be found in historic copies of the Black River Watchman, the Sumter Southern Whig, and the Camden Gazette.

By 1830, he owned four slaves who assisted him in his business.   He then began to acquire land and even more slaves. In 1838, Ellison purchased 54.5 acres adjoining his original acreage from former South Carolina Governor Stephen Decater Miller. Ellison and his family moved into a large home on the property. (The house had been known as Miller House but became known as Ellison House.) As his business grew, so did his wealth and  by 1840, Ellison owned 12 slaves.

His sons, who lived in homes on the property, owned an additional nine slaves. By the early 1840s, he was one of the most prosperous men in the area. By the year 1850, he was the owner of 386 acres of land and 37 slaves. The workers on Ellison's plantation produced 35 bales of cotton that year. 

In 1852, Ellison purchased Keith Hill and Hickory Hill Plantations which increased his land holdings to over 1,000 acres. By 1860 William Ellison was South Carolina's largest Negro slaveowner and in the entire state, only five percent of the people owned as much real estate as did William Ellison. His wealth was 15 times greater than that of the state's average for whites. Ellison also owned more slaves than did 99% of the South's slaveholders.

And how did he treat his slaves?  The records found in "Black Masters," tell us "He had a reputation as a harsh master.  His slaves were said to be the district's worst fed and worst clothed.  Hungry for more land and slaves, Ellison and his family lived frugally, and he probably was even more tightfisted in providing food, clothing, and housing for his slaves.   Harsh treatment could have stemmed from Ellison's need to prove to whites that, despite his history and color, he was not soft on slaves.  A reputation for harshness was less dangerous than a reputation for indulgence."

Did he pay for "slave catchers" to find his runaway slaves?  Yes, the record is clear on that point. 

He was also a slave "breeder" who sold off black slave girls to help raise the large sums he needed to buy more adult slaves and more land.  To him, slaves were a source of labor, and the laborers he needed most were adult men who could work in his gin shop and cotton fields.  Rather than accumulate slaves he could not exploit, it is seen that he sold twenty or more girls, retaining only a few who could eventually have more children, and in some cases, work in his home as domestics.  If Ellison sold twenty slave girls for an average price of $400, he obtained an additional $8,000 cash, a sum large enough to have made a major contribution to the land and slave purchases that made him a planter.  Thus, Ellison's economic empire was in large part constructed by slave labor and paid for by the sale of slave girls.  And from the local records available, local tradition is silent about Ellison's slave sales, but outspoken about his reputation as a harsh master.  In summary, his slaves were said to be the district's worst fed and worst clothed. 

When War Between the States broke out in 1861, William Ellison, Jr. was one of the staunchest supporters of the Confederacy. His grandson joined a Confederate Artillery Unit, and William turned his plantation over from cotton cash crop production to farming foodstuff for the Confederacy.

William Ellison  died on 5 December 1861, at the age of 71 and per his wishes, his family continued to actively support the Confederacy throughout the war. Aside from producing corn, fodder, bacon, corn shucks, and cotton for the Confederate Army, they contributed vast amounts of money, paid $5000 in taxes, and invested a good portion of their fortune into Confederate Bonds which were worthless at the end of the war.

 William Ellison, Jr. had died with an estate under-appraised at $43,500, consisting of 70 slaves. His will stated that his estate should pass into the joint hands of his daughter and his two surviving sons. He bequeathed $500 to a slave daughter he had sold. At his death he was one in the top 10% of the  wealthiest people in all of South Carolina, was in the top 5% of land ownership, and he was the third largest slave owner in the entire state. 

Slave records show that Ellison owned by year and number:

1820: 2, 1830: 4, 1840: 30, 1850: 36, and 1860: 63.

Skilled artisans who made and repaired cotton gins and other agricultural equipment were a common feature in many communities of antebellum South Carolina.  While some enslaved craftsmen and mechanics did this type of work, this was also a business for white laborers and even free persons of color.  The 1860 census, however, listed only 21 fulltime gin makers in the state.  The above newspaper advertisements shed light on the business of making and repairing cotton gins during the mid-nineteenth century.  The ad, “Improved Cotton Gins,” comes from William Ellison of Stateburg, a successful cotton gin maker, as well as planter, slaveholder, and free person of color. 

Ellison’s remarkable story began in 1790, as a child born into slavery in Fairfield District.  At the time of his birth, the South Carolina backcountry was still very much a frontier society.  His father was likely a white man (either Robert or William Ellison), who was among those early cotton farmers that helped transform the backcountry into a plantation society.  Around 1802, he became an apprentice to a nearby gin maker in Winnsboro, helping construct cotton gins for planters in the region.  In 1816, at the age of 26, he purchased his freedom, and he legally changed his name from April to William in 1820.  Changing his name was an important step, since “April” was considered a slave name.  William Ellison, as a free person of color and entrepreneur, set up his own successful gin shop in Stateburg.

William Ellison to Henry Ellison, 26 March 1857.  Document Description:

Freedman William Ellison’s cotton gin shop in Stateburg proved to be a lucrative enterprise for him and his family.  In this letter dated March 26, 1857, Ellison wrote to his son Henry, who was clearly involved in handling the accounts of the ginning business.  By the time of this letter, William Ellison and his family were a part of an elite group of free African Americans based largely in Charleston.  Ellison maintained his wealth and financial security by purchasing land and slaves.  By 1860, Ellison owned over 900 acres of land, as well as 63 slaves.  According to the census of 1860, Ellison was one of 171 black slaveholders in South Carolina.  His home in Stateburg, which had previously belonged to former governor, Stephen Miller, still stands today.

The above letter comes from the Ellison Family Papers, which consist of letters, notices, receipts, and accounts for William Ellison.  These papers are unique, since they are perhaps the only sustained collection of papers between members of a family of free African Americans during the mid-nineteenth century (ranging in time from 1848 to 1864).  Selected Ellison Family Papers have been published in Michael P. Johnson and James L. Roark, ed., No Chariot Let Down: Charleston’s Free People of Color on the Eve of the Civil War.  (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984).

Citation:

William Ellison to Henry Ellison, 26 March 1857.  Ellison Family Papers, 1845-1870. Manuscripts Division, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina.

Transcription:

Stateburg, March 26th 1857

Dear Henry,

Your letter of 23rd instant was duly received and I perceived by it that you had not received mine of the 22d.  John went over the river yesterday.  He saw Mr. Ledinham.  He said that he had not sold but half of his crop of cotton and had not the money but when he got the money and was working on this side of the river that he would send his son with it and rake up his account.  He also saw Mr. Van Buren and he was ready to pay but before he did so he wished his overseer to certify to it but John could not find him and as it became late he had to leave for home but left the account with Mrs. Mitchel, his wife.  You will find enclosed Mrs. Mathew Singleton’s account.  She will be found at No. 4 Akins range.  Mr. Turner said that it was his fault that the account was not paid before.  He thinks that she will get another gin.  There is one of the saws in the new gin that is worn half in two.  He says that he will send the gin over to be repair[ed] and also another old gin providing Mrs. Singleton don’t get a new gin.  As you did not get my letter in due time and for fear that you may not [have] as yet received it, I will mention a few items of importance that  I

[Page 2]

wish attended to at one if you have not done so.  Leave three hundred dollars in Messrs. Adams and Frost hands subject to my order.  And also the money that I have borrowed from William.  Mr. Benbow wrote to me and I sent you a copy in the letter that I wrote you.  Mr. E. Murray’s account and order was presented to him last Friday and he was to send his note when he sent to the post office but he failed to do so.  I want you to get me a half doz. weeding hoes.  No. 2 get two hand saws from Mr. Adger for the shop.  I want you to get me 8 bags of guano.  The above articles and instruction was states in the other letter.  I mention the same incase you should not have received my other letter.  We are all well as usual.  Give my respect to all my friends.

Your father,

William Ellison

Birth:            Jul. 19, 1819

Death:          Jul. 24, 1904

 Parents:

  William Holmes Ellison (1790 - 1861)

  Matilda Ellison (1764 - 1850)

 Spouses:

  Mary Thomson Mishaw Ellison (1829 - 1853)

  Gabriella Miller Ellison (1832 - 1920)*

 Children:

  William John Ellison (1845 - 1894)*

  Robert Mishaw Ellison (1851 - 1854)*

  Henry McKinzie Ellison (1852 - 1853)*

 Siblings:

  Aliza Ann Ellison Buckner Johnson (1811 - 1820)*

  William Holmes Ellison (1819 - 1904)

  Reuben Ellison (1821 - ____)*

Inscription:

At Rest

Birth:            Sep. 4, 1829

Death:           Jun. 2, 1853

Consort of William Ellison Jr. Daughter of John Mishaw.

Family links:

 Spouse:

  William Holmes Ellison (1819 - 1904)*

 Children:

  William John Ellison (1845 - 1894)*

  Robert Mishaw Ellison (1851 - 1854)*

  Henry McKinzie Ellison (1852 - 1853)*

Inscription:

Mary Thomson Ellison, Consort of William Ellison Jr. and Daughter of the late John Mishaw, formerly of Charleston who departed this life in 2nf of June 1853 age 24 years, 9 months, & 28 days in the prime of life and vigor of youth she was visited with a painful & lingering disease & as a Christian she bore with patience thru faith in her redeemer until her spirit was called away unto him that gave it.

Burial:

Ellison Cemetery

Sumter

Sumter County

South Carolina, USA

Gabriella Miller Ellison

Birth:            Nov. 18, 1832

Death:           Dec. 24, 1920

Gabriella Miller is the daughter of Ruben Miller and Louise Barrett. She 1st married Charley Johnson with whom she had one daughter, Charlotte Johnson. After Charley's death, she married William Ellison III.

Family links:

 Spouse:

  William Holmes Ellison (1819 - 1904)

Burial:

Ellison Cemetery

Sumter

Sumter County

South Carolina, USA

Gabriella Miller Ellison's death certificate:

John Wilson Buckner, of the Ellison family line,  also served with the CSA, in the company of Captains P.P. Galliard and A.H. Boykin, local white men who knew that Buckner was a Man of Color. Although it was illegal at the time for a Man of Color to formally join the Confederate forces, the Ellison family's prestige nullified the law in the minds of Buckner's comrades. Buckner was wounded in action on July 12, 1863. He did not die then. He applied for and received a pension from the Federal Government, as did all Confederate soldiers who applied. At his funeral it was held in Stateburg in August, of 1895 he was praised by his former Confederate officers as being a "faithful soldier."

1st Artillery

1. Man of Color --- appears on a report of operations and casualties Fort Sumter, August 23, 1863.

Report date: Ft. Sumter, Aug. 24, 1863.

Remarks: Severely wounded head (Unfiled Papers and Slips Belonging in Confederate Compiled Service Records)

2. John Wilson Buckner -- Co. I. Enlisted March 27, 1863 at Franklin S. C. for 3 years. Roll of May and June 1863-- present, July and August 1863--present wounded in action at Battery Wagner, July 14, 1863. Roll of Sept and Oct 1863 --present, Nov. and Dec. 1863 --present. Jan. to Oct 19, 1864 -- present Deserted Oct. 19, 1864.

It is believed that John Wilson Buckner served with other South Carolina Confederate units, Capt. P.O. Gaillard's company and later became a scout in Capt. Boykin's company, both South Carolina regiments; however we have not been able to prove service in these units at this time.

This information was put on his findagrave site:

John Wilson Buckner was born in Sumter County. Buckner joined the 1st South Carolina Artillery on March 27. 1863. He served in the company of Captains P.P. Galliard and Alexander Hamilton Boykin, local men who knew that Buckner was a Negro. Although it was illegal at the time for a Negro to formally join the Confederate forces, the Ellison family's prestige nullified the law in the minds of Buckner's comrades. Buckner was wounded at Fort Wagner on July 12, 1863, in the battle against the 54th Massachusetts Regiment. After recovering, he was a regular in Capt. P.O. Gaillard’s company and later became a scout in Capt. Boykin’s company, both South Carolina regiments. When John Wilson Bucker died in August, 1895, at his funeral, he was praised by his officers as being a faithful soldier.

1953 case of Hood v Sumter SC School District...Woodrow Hood (a descendant of Scotts and Oxendines who migrated down to Sumter from Robeson around 1805) sued to allow children of the Dalzell 'Turk' school to attend Sumter white schools. Two included as plaintiffs in this case were Henry Lowery and Ruth Lowery. While the Indian descent of their Scott and Oxendine ancestors were conceeded, it was the postion of the Sumter School Board that the plaintiffs were also descendants of the BUCKNER'S and Benehaleys who were believed to be part black. Woodrow Hood, the filier of the complaint, responded by testifying regarding the geneaology of the 'Turk' community, however his visceral response to the 'black descent' line of questioning was to adamantly claim that every single line of his ancestry was white, excepting one small line of Benenhaley's who were claiming to be part-Arab.No Proff. (John Buckner, the first Buckner to intermarry among the Scott/Oxendine/Benehaley's was described by an elderly Sumter resident in the late 1880's as "nearly full-blooded Indian") Regarding the Lowery family he states "I am informed that Lum Lowery, whose first name was possibly Columbus, and who was a white man who was not a member of our group, and whose geographical origin is unknown to me, came to our community many years ago, and married one Alice Benenhaley, and they settled in our community."

Family links:

 Parents:

  Willis Wilson Buckner (1809 - 1831)

  Aliza Ann Ellison Buckner Johnson (1811 - 1820)

 Spouses:

  Jane Johnson Buckner (1830 - 1860)

  Sarah Oxendine Buckner (1835 - 1919)

 Children:

  Henrietta Ann Buckner (1858 - 1918)*

  Infant Boy Buckner (1860 - 1860)*

  John William Buckner (1863 - 1881)*

  Henry Ellison Buckner (1865 - 1963)*

  Sam Buckner (1870 - 1925)*

  Charles Wilson Buckner (1873 - 1920)*

  Daniel Buckner (1875 - 1949)*

Information on his two wives:

Jane "Janie" Johnson Buckner

Janie Johnson was daughter of James Drayton Johnson and Delia and a sister to Charley and James Marsh Johnson. She married her Step nephew John Wilson Buckner  and had two children. Henrietta Ann "Harriett" and unamed infant son. Janie died suddenly and unexpectedly,  James Johnson was sure that she would receive God's condescending Love & Mercy and that her soul would be saved. He said her death was God's will. And we dare not to murmur. The family were members of the Holy Cross Church. Buckner's lived at Drayton Hall With the Johnson's.

Family links:

 Spouse:

  John Wilson Buckner (1831 - 1895)*

 Children:

  Henrietta Ann Buckner (1858 - 1918)*

  Infant Boy Buckner (1860 - 1860)*

Sarah Oxendine Buckner

Birth: Feb., 1835

Stateburg

Sumter County

South Carolina, USA

Death:             Jun. 16, 1919

Stateburg

Sumter County

South Carolina, USA

Sarah Oxendine is the daughter of Aaron Oxendine and Jane Scott.Wife of John Wilson Buckner. According to the book Black Slave Masters and Fire in the Charott Below. Also On one of the kids death record they had her name as being Sarah Benenhaley.

Family links:

 Spouse:

  John Wilson Buckner (1831 - 1895)*

 Children:

  John William Buckner (1863 - 1881)*

  Henry Ellison Buckner (1865 - 1963)*

  Sam Buckner (1870 - 1925)*

  Charles Wilson Buckner (1873 - 1920)*

  Daniel Buckner (1875 - 1949)*

"William Holmes Ellison " April" sons invested heavily in Confederate war bonds, and his grandson John Wilson Buckner was allowed to enlist in the South Carolina Artillery because of "personal associations and a sterling family reputation...." [pp. 305-307]

Source: Michael P. Johnson and James L. Roark, Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1984)

(CSR, CWS&S)

Another of Ruben's children by his slave mistress, John, later took the last name of Harrison, which was his father Ruben's middle name; and styled himself as John McKinsey Harrison.  His story follows, taken from "History of the American Negro" by A.B. Caldwell, 1919.

Improved Cotton Gins, Sumter Banner, 13 December 1848. Newspapers on Microfilm, Published Materials Division. South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina.

William Ellison to Henry Ellison, 26 March 1857. Ellison Family Papers, 1845-1870. Manuscripts Division, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina.

Bill from Ellison to Waites, Thomas Waites Papers, 1733- 1838. Manuscripts Division, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina

1850 U.S. Census- Slave Schedule. Available from the South Carolina Department of Archives and History, Microfilm collection. Columbia, South Carolina. Accessed 17 February 2009.

Secondary Sources

Ellison Family Graveyard.  Available from the Internet, Palmetto State Roots Web Sites, Accessed 20 January 2009.

“Student Activity Packet, Activity #2: Fixing a Gin: Math and History at Your Desk”. The Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation. Available from the Internet,  National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. Accessed 24 July 2008.

Johnson, Michael P.  and James L. Roark. Black masters: a free family of color in the old South. New York: Norton, 1984.

Koger, Larry. Black Slaveowners : Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790- 1860. Jefferson: McFarland, 1985.

It is unfortunate that many are ignorant of our American history.  A careful examination of the historical facts of our nation prior to and during the War Between the States might have tempered this year's dust up in Charlottesville and New Orleans, which was filled with racist rhetoric.

The 1850 Census clearly reveals that 98.8% of people living in the North before the War Between the States were White.  And if you add in the border/slave-holding states that stayed with the Union during that war, the percentage is still 96.5% White.

Many will find to their dismay and shatter their sensibilities, is that these Northerners were "racist."  Any desire for Northern whites in the 1850s to end slavery did not equate with a belief in racial equality.  The Blacks might be freed, eventually, but they would not be welcome to remain.

From my college courses in Colonial and Revolutionary America, which covered Indentured Servants and early forms of slavery in what was called the "Upper South," I discovered the North's profit from, indeed, dependence on, slavery, has mostly been a shameful and well-kept secret.  The "devil is definitely in the details" of this story about the lucrative Triangle Trade of molasses, rum, and slaves that linked the North to the West Indies, and Africa.  The reality is that Northern empires were built on tainted profits, run in some cases, by abolitionists, and thousand-acre plantations (yes, plantations in the North) that existed in towns such as Salem, Connecticut.

And what happened in the North after federal law banned the importation of African slaves took effect on January 1, 1808?  By 1860, the importation of slaves was alive and well.  New York was the hub of an international illegal slave trade that, like the latter-day traffic in drugs, was too lucrative and too corrupt to stop.  Ships were still being built and sold in New York to carry slaves, while customs agents, uncaring or bribed, looked the other way, as these slave ships sailed from New York harbor under thin disguises.  Fake owners, fake and forged documents, use of the American flag with it's guarantee of immunity from seizure by foreign nations, completed the modus operandi.

It was a virtual shell game: from voyage  to voyage, ship might switch from legitimate merchant vessel to slave ship and back again.  While crossing the Atlantic, slavers would carry duplicate sets of ownership papers, duplicate captains and crews, one American and one foreign.

So often Northerners liked to believe slavery in America was strictly a Southern sin, to which Yankees rarely yielded.

What school children are taught is the South's story is set on a plantation in Mississippi, South Carolina, or some other Southern state, where, with stories embellished and magnified 10-fold, of overseers brandishing whips over slaves picking cotton. 

By contrast, the North's story is thought to be heroic, filled with abolitionists running that Underground Railroad Train.  The few slaves who may have lived in the North, it has been believed, were treated like members of the family.  And, of course, the Northerners were the good guys in the War Between the States.  They freed the slaves.  That's not all mythology, but it is a convenient and whitewashed shorthand.

That's where most readers of history go wrong: trying to read the story backward; explaining to our current generation how their country grew to be the way it is.   In such a story, slavery is a single chapter in a history book; a background event limited to one region of the country and overwhelmed by the more recent events of Western Expansion, etc.

People who read the military history of the War Between the States, often have what we historians call the "Appomattox Syndrome."  They start at the end, thinking, "OK, now we know the South surrendered in April 1865, so those folks simply had to live with the outcome they knew was coming."  No.  The South had a very good chance to have won their independence on two occasions: one in 1862 and late 1864; and Gettysburg, contrary to what you may have been taught, was NOT the turning point of the war.

A history told forward; you always read in the evidence forward, not backward; which pushes slavery into the foreground, inserting it into nearly every chapter.  The truth is that slavery was a national phenomenon.

Slavery has long been identified in the national consciousness as a Southern institution.  The time to bury that myth is overdue.

Slavery is a story about all of America:  the nation’s wealth, from the very beginning, depended upon the exploitation of black people on three continents.  Together, over the lives of enslaved men and women, Northerners and Southerners shook hands and made a country.  Keep in mind: the Constitution protected slavery.

Before the War Between the States, the North grew rich with slavery:

1.    In the 18^th Century after the Revolutionary War, thousands of black people were enslaved in the North.  In fact, they made up nearly 1/5 of the population of New York City.

2.    Two major slave revolts occurred in New York City.

3.    The North sold food and other supplies to sugar plantations in the Caribbean.  Thousands of acres of Connecticut, New York, and Rhode Island had plantations that used slave labor.

4.    Rhode Island was America’s leader in the transatlantic trade: almost 1,000 voyages to Africa, carrying at least 100,000 captives back across the Atlantic.

5.    New York City was the seaport hub of a lucrative illegal slave trade.  Manhattan shipyards built ships to carry to carry captive Africans with these ships outfitted with crates of shackles and huge water tanks needed for their human cargo.  During the peak years between 1859 and 1860, at least 2 slave ships, each built to hold between 600-1,000 slaves, left lower Manhattan every month!

A central fact obscured by post-Civil War mythologies is that the northern U.S. states were deeply implicated in slavery and the slave trade right up to the war.

Contrary to popular belief:

• Slavery was a northern institution
• The North held slaves for over two centuries
• The North abolished slavery only just before the Civil War
• The North dominated the slave trade
• The North built its economy around slavery
• The North industrialized with slave-picked cotton and the profits from slavery

• Slavery was a national institution
• Slavery was practiced by all thirteen colonies
• Slavery was enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and practiced by all thirteen original states
• The slave trade was permitted by the federal government until 1808
• Federal laws protected slavery and assisted slave owners in retrieving runaway slaves
• The Union was deeply divided over slavery until the end of the Civil War

• Slavery benefited middle-class families
• Slavery dominated the northern and southern economies during the colonial era and up to the Civil War
• Ordinary people built ships, produced trade goods, and invested in shares of slave voyages
• Workers in all regions benefited economically from slavery and slavery-related businesses
• Consumers bought and benefited from lower prices on goods like coffee, sugar, tobacco, and cotton

• Slavery benefited immigrant families
• Immigrants who arrived after the Civil War still benefited from slavery and its aftermath
• Immigrants flocked to the “land of opportunity” made possible by the unpaid labor of enslaved people
• Immigrants found routes to prosperity which were closed to the families of former slaves
• Federal programs in the 20^th century provided white families with aid for education, home ownership, and small businesses

Following the abolition of slavery in New England, white citizens seemed to forget that it had ever existed there. Drawing on a wide array of primary sources—from slaveowners' diaries to children's daybooks to racist broadsides—Joanne Pope Melish reveals not only how northern society changed but how its perceptions changed as well. Melish explores the origins of racial thinking and practices to show how ill-prepared the region was to accept a population of free people of color in its midst. Because emancipation was gradual, whites transferred prejudices shaped by slavery to their relations with free people of color, and their attitudes were buttressed by abolitionist rhetoric which seemed to promise riddance of slaves as much as slavery.

Melish tells how whites came to blame the impoverished condition of people of color on their innate inferiority, how racialization became an important component of New England ante-bellum nationalism, and how former slaves actively participated in this discourse by emphasizing their African identity. Placing race at the center of New England history, she contends that slavery was important not only as a labor system but also as an institutionalized set of relations. The collective amnesia about local slavery's existence became a significant component of New England regional identity.

In the long and rich historiography of North American slavery, relatively few scholars have explored the subject of slavery in New England or the impact of slavery and emancipation in the region on the racial attitudes of New Englanders. Joanne Pope Melish's book Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and "Race" in New England, 1780-1860 seeks, in her words, to put "slavery and the painful process of gradual emancipation back into the history of New England (p. 200)." Melish views as a blind spot the assumption by previous scholars that slavery in New England was peripheral to the economic, social, or political development of the region. She argues that New England slavery had a far more powerful impact on the thinking of New Englanders than they wanted to believe, and their longstanding view of the region as "free and white" has been a kind of historical amnesia, an effort to erase slavery and black people from the history of the region. That erasure of black people, she argues, resulted directly from white anxiety and confusion about how to view free blacks

in their midst and what to do with or about them.

Melish maintains that white New Englanders' views of black people emerged directly from their experiences with blacks living in bondage and from their association of blackness with slavery. She writes that the unsettling process of gradual emancipation in the region after the American Revolution stirred white fears that disorderly blacks would threaten the new republic. Whereas blacks assumed that they would become free and independent citizens, whites assumed that blacks still needed to be controlled. She also argues that white people experienced anxiety about racial identity, freedom, and servitude, wondering if freedom would turn black people white and if white people could become slaves.

Beginning in the late eighteenth century, Melish writes, New England whites gradually resolved these questions by coming to regard blacks as inherently inferior and in need of control. She argues that a clear ideology of race thus first emerged in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century New England, in response to gradual emancipation. New Englanders, she argues, gradually came to view "racial" characteristics as immutable, inherited, and located in the body, and to view the black and white "races" as hierarchical and largely opposite in nature. Such a view permitted white New Englanders to seek to expell or erase black people, both literally and figuratively, from their region.

Melish's book makes an important contribution to the literature on slavery and abolition and fills a significant gap in our understanding of how slavery in New England affected both that region and the nation. Through her use of various local sources including town records, court records, slaveholders' diaries, and the letters, narratives, and freedom petitions of slaves, Melish brings the reader into the world of Revolutionary-era New England masters and slaves. She illuminates their daily interactions and offers insightful interpretations of how masters and slaves each understood the meaning of slavery and emancipation. She makes a compelling case that slavery was indeed significant in the New England economy and society. Using, among other evidence, racist broadsides from the region, she also illustrates clearly the willingness of many white New Englanders to denigrate, harass, and seek to erase black people in the decades after

the Revolution.

While Melish is right that most white New Englanders probably did wish black people would go away in the years of the early republic, she may overstate the extent to which New England whites were in agreement on this. She correctly observes that many white New Englanders supported the movement to colonize blacks outside the United States, particularly in Africa. But New England also produced a movement for immediate abolition that was explicitly opposed to colonization and demanded the right of free blacks to live as free and equal citizens of the United States. William Lloyd Garrison of Boston was probably the best-known white abolitionist in the country after 1830, and he was also a passionate opponent of colonization and a strong champion of the rights of free blacks in North America. Free blacks loved Garrison. A host of other New England activists stood with him, demanding the inclusion of free blacks as equal citizens. If most New Englanders sought to expell or eliminate blacks from their midst, these radical abolitionists often embraced the freed slaves, sought to educate them, published their narratives, and even, as in the case of Frederick Douglass, hired them as abolitionist speakers. One goal of the abolitionist efforts was to show the public that black people were fully human, able to be educated, and deserving of all the rights that whites had. Thus, well into the nineteenth century, a segment of white New Englanders actively resisted the view that blacks were inherently inferior and different from whites, and they fought to educate blacks for life as full American citizens. If, as Melish argues, New England whites sought to eradicate blacks, this process was contested by some whites as well as blacks.

Melish's most important contribution may be to the emerging body of literature on how North Americans constructed and made use of an ideology of race. Here she pushes to locate precisely when and how Americans racialized difference and came to define blackness and whiteness as fixed, immutable, biological categories. Her answer, that this process took place in New England during gradual emancipation, is new and surprising.

Melish suggests that New England was first in developing a new ideology of race because of its early experience with slave emancipation. However, the struggle to define the meaning of emancipation and the fundamental nature and place of blacks was also going on in the upper South. There, manumissions increased during and after the American Revolution, and the growing numbers of free blacks increased white anxiety. Indeed, anxiety there was more pronounced than in New England, because of the larger black population. Colonization was also very popular in the upper South, and much of the strongest and most persistent support for colonization came from that region. In contrast to New England, opponents of slavery in the upper South never embraced the idea that freed slaves ought to remain in the United States, and antislavery activists in the upper South always combined efforts at gradual emancipation with plans for colonization. The process that Melish describes of racializing identity and seeking to expell blacks may thus have been taking place simultaneously in New England and the upper South. A comparative study of emancipation efforts in the two regions would be illuminating. Of course, the upper South did not achieve gradual emancipation, and over time, antislavery activism and even voluntary manumission there were largely choked off.

Melish's book takes the reader through the process by which white New Englanders, through their responses to slavery, emancipation, and black people, created the myth of themselves and their region as free and white. Melish's angle of vision and her argument are both fresh, and she offers new insights and raises new questions about how the end of slavery led to a new construction of race in North America. This is a terrific book, one that all scholars of slavery, abolition, and the early republic absolutely must read. Enjoy this one; I certainly did.

-Reviewed by Vivien Sandlund (Hiram College)

Pot, meet kettle

-online amazon reviewer

By now, it should be general knowledge among anyone presuming to comment on American race relations and the Civil/War Between the States that the Northern states did not exactly have clean hands when it came to keeping African (and then African-American) slaves. Works like "Complicity" attest to the element of discovery that recent academic research and journalism have made possible. Nonetheless, it is taken as common knowledge that the Northern states achieved emancipation reasonably quickly after the Revolution, even if motivated chiefly by economics. It is still widely presumed that people in the Northern states, the New England states in particular, were particularly enlightened about slavery/emancipation and race, and therefore morally superior to Southerners.

For this reason, this book is shocking: while it delineates the gradual, compensated emancipation that was a feature of England's vaunted anti-slavery laws, and thus outlines an alternative method that could have been used to end slavery in all states, it demonstrates that this process coexisted with the kind of racism people routinely associate with the South and the South only. Dialect humor, "darkie" cartoons, and the lingering assumption that Black people owed labor to whites go against the cultivated image of enlightened New England. Even those already skeptical of such claims to Northern moral superiority cannot but find themselves taken aback by Melish's illustrations of Northern prejudice and dismissiveness. For one thing, she hauls a carefully cultivated image up short. For another, the attitudes she demonstrates among Northerners are those that give modern readers pause and cause them to react with distaste.

I sense that, down the road, there will or should be a national dialog about the received narrative of Northern clean hands/Southern dirty hands, based on the new expositions and explorations of the history of racial relations in America. This book should help facilitate that dialog.

DENYING the PAST

As the reality of slavery in the North faded, and a strident anti-Southern abolitionism arose there, the memory of Northern slaves, when it surfaced at all, tended to focus on how happy and well-treated they had been, in terms much reminiscent of the so-called "Lost Cause" literature that followed the fall of the Confederacy in 1865.

"The slaves in Massachusetts were treated with almost parental kindness. They were incorporated into the family, and each puritan household being a sort of religious structure, the relative duties of master and servant were clearly defined. No doubt the severest and longest task fell to the slave, but in the household of the farmer or artisan, the master and the mistress shared it, and when it was finished, the white and the black, like the feudal chief and his household servant, sat down to the same table, and shared the same viands." [Reminiscence by Catharine Sedgwick (1789-1867) of Stockbridge, Mass.]

Yet the petitions for freedom from New England and Mid-Atlantic blacks, and the numbers in which they ran off from their masters to the British during the Revolution, suggest rather a different picture.

Early 19th century New Englanders had real motives for forgetting their slave history, or, if they recalled it at all, for characterizing it as a brief period of mild servitude. This was partly a Puritan effort to absolve New England's ancestors of their guilt. The cleansing of history had a racist motive as well, denying blacks -- slave or free -- a legitimate place in New England history. But most importantly, the deliberate creation of a "mythology of a free New England" was a crucial event in the history of sectional conflict in America. The North, and New England in particular, sought to demonize the South through its institution of slavery; they did this in part by burying their own histories as slave-owners and slave-importers. At the same time, behind the potent rhetoric of Daniel Webster and others, they enshrined New England values as the essential ones of the Revolution, and the new nation. In so doing, they characterized Southern interests as purely sectional and selfish. In the rhetorical battle, New England backed the South right out of the American mainstream.

The attempt to force blame for all America's ills onto the South led the Northern leadership to extreme twists of logic. Abolitionist leaders in New England noted the "degraded" condition of the local black communities. Yet the common abolitionist explanation of this had nothing to do with northerners, black or white. Instead, they blamed it on the continuance of slavery in the South. "The toleration of slavery in the South," Garrison editorialized, "is the chief cause of the unfortunate situation of free colored persons in the North."[1]

"This argument, embraced almost universally by New England abolitionists, made good sense as part of a strategy to heap blame for everything wrong with American society on southern slavery, but it also had the advantage, to northern ears, of conveniently shifting accountability for a locally specific situation away from the indigenous institution from which it had evolved."[2]

Melish's perceptive book, "Disowning Slavery," argues that the North didn't simply forget that it ever had slaves. She makes a forceful case for a deliberate re-writing of the region's past, in the early 1800s. By the 1850s, Melish writes, "New England had become a region whose history had been re-visioned by whites as a triumphant narrative of free, white labor." And she adds that this "narrative of a historically free, white New England also advanced antebellum New England nationalism by supporting the region's claims to a superior moral identity that could be contrasted effectively with the 'Jacobinism' of a slave-holding, 'negroized' South." The demonizing adjective is one she borrows from Daniel Webster, who used it in the Webster-Hayne debate of 1830.

The word is well-chosen. Webster's "Second Reply," given in January 1830 during his debate with Robert Young Hayne of South Carolina -- the most famous speech in a famous clash of North and South -- shows the master orator of his time at the peak of his powers. In these speeches Webster compellingly turned New England sectional values into the supreme national values, while at the same time playing on the racist fears of the average Northerner, who loathed slavery less for its inherent injustice and more because it flooded the country with blacks.

Webster "articulated a clear and compelling vision of an American nation made up of the union of northern and western states, bonded by an interpretation of the origin and meaning of the union and the U.S. Constitution and reflecting the core values of New England political culture and history. Coded implicitly among those essential values were claims to historical freedom and whiteness, against which Webster could effectively contrast a South isolated by its historical commitment to slavery. Such an interpretation, appealing as it did to the widespread desire among northern states outside New England to eradicate their black populations and achieve a 'whiteness' like that of New England, could rally and solidify northern opposition to Slave Power."[3]

In the speech, Webster, like Pilate, washes his hands of anything to do with American slavery. "The domestic slavery of the Southern States I leave where I find it, -- in the hands of their own governments. It is their affair, not mine."

This allows him to keep within the frame of the Constitution, and at the same time cleverly disavow more than a century and a half of New England slavery and slave-trading, which had financed the first families and institutions of his home district.

After this contemptuous dismissal, he holds forth on the glories of pure Massachusetts, which he apotheosizes, above Philadelphia and Virginia, till it becomes the true genius of independence. "There is Boston, and Concord, and Lexington, and Bunker Hill; ... where American liberty raised its first voice, and where its youth was nurtured and sustained, there it still lives in the strength of its manhood and full of its original spirit."

This was the opening salvo. Within a few months, Webster's speech had been reprinted whole in newspapers across the country and published in pamphlets that ran through 20 editions. A single printing of it churned out 40,000 copies. Other Northern speakers and writers picked up the tone and carried it like a battle-flag down the years to the War Between the States.

"Indeed, by the outset of the actual war in 1861 the New England nationalist trope of virtuous, historical whiteness, clothed as it was in a distinctive set of cultural, moral, and political values associated with New England's Puritan mission and Revolutionary struggle, had come to define the Unionist North as a whole."[4]

Nothing illustrates this process better, perhaps, than the semantic development of the word "Yankee," which, in United States usage, always meant "a New Englander" before the Civil War. But within a decade of Appomattox, it was being used generically by Americans to mean "an American, regardless of place of residence."

1. "Liberation," Jan. 8, 1831.
2. Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and 'Race' in New England 1780-1860, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998, pp. 222-223.
3. ibid., p.230.
4. ibid., p.224.

Forgotten History: How The New England Colonists Embraced The Slave Trade

American slavery predates the founding of the United States. Wendy Warren, author of New England Bound, says the early colonists imported African slaves and enslaved and exported Native Americans.

The Secret History of New England’s Sundown Towns

(New England Historical Society)

"It’s not Dixie’s fault"

By Thomas J. Sugrue July 17, 2015

The Washington Post

The tragic Charleston, S.C., church shooting, in which nine black worshipers were killed, allegedly by a Confederate-flag-supporting white supremacist, has unleashed a new battle over Southern culture. Confederate monuments have been defaced; leaders have demanded that emblems of the Confederacy be erased from license plates and public parks; schools in Texas, Louisiana and Alabama are struggling to defend their “rebel” mascots. Most predictably, pundits have renewed their characterization of Southern states as the ball and chain of America. If all those backward rednecks weren’t pulling us down, the story goes, the United States would be a progressive utopia, a bastion of economic and racial equality. “Much of what sets the United States apart from other countries today is actually Southern exceptionalism,” Politico contributor Michael Lind wrote this month in an essay called “How the South Skews America.” “I don’t mean this in a good way.”

This argument recapitulates an old, tired motif in American journalism that the South is the source of our nation’s social ills. It has been blamed for our obesity problem (“Why Are Southerners So Fat? ” Time asked in 2009), persistent poverty (“The South Is Essentially A Solid, Grim Block Of Poverty,” the Huffington Post asserted in 2014) and general stupidity (“What’s Wrong with the South?” the Atlantic scoffed in 2009). This time, in the wake of the church shooting, the states of the old Confederacy have become a national scapegoat for the racism that underpinned the massacre. If only they would secede again, Lind and others suggest, the nation would largely be free from endemic prejudice, zealotry and racist violence.

Not even close. These crude regional stereotypes ignore the deep roots such social ills have in our shared national history and culture. If, somehow, the South became its own country, the Northeast would still be a hub of racially segregated housing and schooling, the West would still be a bastion of prejudicial laws that put immigrants and black residents behind bars at higher rates than their white neighbors and the Midwest would still be full of urban neighborhoods devastated by unemployment, poverty and crime. How our social problems manifest regionally is a matter of degree, not kind — they infect every region of the country.

In fact, many of the racial injustices we associate with the South are actually worse in the North. Housing segregation between black and white residents, for instance, is most pervasive above the Mason-Dixon line. Of America’s 25 most racially segregated metropolitan areas, just five are in the South; Northern cities — Detroit, Milwaukee and New York — top the list. Segregation in Northern metro areas has declined a bit since 1990, but an analysis of 2010 census data found that Detroit’s level of segregation, for instance, is nearly twice as high as Charleston’s.

The division between black and white neighborhoods in the North is a result of a poisonous mix of racist public policies and real estate practices that reigned unchecked for decades. Until the mid-20th century, federal homeownership programs made it difficult for black Americans to get mortgages and fueled the massive growth of whites-only suburbs. Real estate agents openly discriminated against black aspiring homeowners, refusing to show them houses in predominately white communities.

When all else failed, white Northerners attacked blacks who attempted to cross the color line, using tactics we typically associate with the Jim Crow South. They threw bricks through the windows of their black neighbors’ homes, firebombed an integrated apartment building and beat black residents in the streets. In Detroit, to name one example, whites launched more than 200 attacks on black homeowners between 1945 and 1965. In Levittown, Pa., hundreds of angry whites gathered in front of the home of the first black family to move there and threw rocks through the windows. Racists burned crosses in the yards of the few white neighbors who welcomed the new family. That violence occurred in 1957, the same year whites in Little Rock attacked black students integrating Central High School, yet it’s that story — of racial bias in the South — that dominates our narrative of America’s civil rights struggle.

Passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968 didn’t eliminate racist real estate practices. A recent National Fair Housing Alliance investigation found that in 87 percent of test cases, agents steered customers to neighborhoods where existing homeowners were predominantly of the customers’ own race. And while Southern states are home to a larger portion of the nation’s minority residents, nearly half of all fair-housing complaints during the 2012-2013 fiscal year were filed in the Northeast and the Midwest.

Economic segregation is most severe in America’s Northern metropolitan areas, as well, with Milwaukee; Hartford, Conn.; Philadelphia; and Detroit leading large cities nationwide, according to an analysis of 2010 census data by the Atlantic. White suburbanites across the North — even in Bill and Hillary Clinton’s adopted home town, Chappaqua, N.Y. — have fought the construction of affordable housing in their neighborhoods, trying to keep out “undesirables” who might threaten their children and undermine their property values. The effects of that segregation are devastating. Where you live in modern America determines your access to high-quality jobs (which are mostly in suburban places), healthy food (many urban areas are food deserts) and, perhaps most important, educational opportunities.

Education remains separate and unequal nearly everywhere in the United States, but Confederate-flag-waving Southerners aren’t responsible for the most racially divided schools. That title goes to New York, where 64 percent of black students attend schools with few, if any, white students, according to a recent report by the Civil Rights Project. In fact, the Northeast is the only region where the percentage of black students in extremely segregated schools — those where at least 90 percent of students are minorities — is higher than it was in the 1960s. Schools in the South, on the other hand, saw the segregation of black students drop 56 percent between 1968 and 2011.

White Southerners fought tooth and nail to prevent desegregation, using protests and violence to keep black children out of all-white schools. But federal courts came down hard on districts that had a history of mandated segregation, and federal troops and law enforcement officers escorted Little Rock and New Orleans students through angry white mobs in front of their new schools.

White parents in the North also fought desegregated schools but used weapons that seemed race-neutral. Black and white students above the Mason-Dixon line attended different schools not by law but simply by nature of where they lived. This de facto school segregation appeared untainted by racist intent, but, as noted earlier, housing practices in the North were fraught with conscious racial injustice. Further, metropolitan areas like Philadelphia and Detroit contained dozens of suburban school districts, making it easy for white families to jump across district boundaries when black neighbors moved in. (Often, Southern districts, as in Charlotte, encompassed the inner city, outlying suburbs and even some rural areas, making it more difficult to flee desegregation. As a result, Charlotte became one of the most racially integrated school districts in country.) Unlike in the South, it was nearly impossible for civil rights litigators to prove that all-white schools in the North were a result of intentional discriminatory policies.

None of this denies that the South is, in many ways, shaped by its unique history. It broke from the union over slavery, and its economy was indelibly shaped by that peculiar institution. After emancipation, it took a century of grass-roots activism and public policy to break down the legal barriers that limited Southern blacks’ economic opportunities. But the South is not timeless and unchanging. The region’s per capita income began to converge with the rest of the nation’s during World War II and accelerated in the decades after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, according to Stanford economist Gavin Wright. The South is still at the bottom economically, but the regional gaps have narrowed considerably, especially for African Americans. By the 1990s, Southern black men earned as much as their counterparts in other regions. Now, Northern blacks are migrating South in search of better economic opportunities, reversing historic trends.

The South has become an increasingly heterogeneous place, home to the fastest-growing immigrant populations in the country, led by North Carolina, Georgia, Arkansas and Tennessee. Immigration has remade Southern big cities and small towns alike: North Carolina chicken-processing centers have attracted Guatemalan immigrants. Suburban Atlanta is dotted with panaderias and taco shops catering to the rapidly growing Mexican population. And Vietnamese-born shrimpers are working the Gulf of Mexico’s shores in Texas and Louisiana. In the past decade, immigrants have accounted for half of the growth of country-music capital Nashville, with large numbers of Latinos as well as Kurds, Bosnians and Somalis.

It’s reassuring for Northerners to think that the country’s problems are rooted down South. But pointing our fingers at Dixie — and, by implication, reinforcing the myth of Northern innocence — comes at a cost. As federal troops and Supreme Court decisions forced social change in the states of the old Confederacy during the 20th century, injustices in the North were allowed to fester. That trend continues, as Northerners seek to absolve themselves of responsibility for their own sins by holding aloft an outdated and inaccurate caricature of a socially stunted South. In 1960, Martin Luther King Jr. said: “Another group with a vital role to play in the struggle for racial justice and equality is the white northern liberals. The racial issue that we confront in America is not a sectional but a national problem.” That holds true for most of America’s troubles today. Enough finger-wagging at Dixie. Change begins at home.

Jay Fayza uses facts and statistics to show that whites and western nations are the least racist and bigoted people on earth, contrary to lies told by liberal media and academia:

The Anti-Secessionist Jefferson Davis

(source: National Park Service, Boston, Mass.)

The senator from Mississippi stood in front of a crowd of Democrats in the "Cradle of Liberty" - Faneuil Hall. He was just starting his second term as a senator after completing a stint as Secretary of War. It was 1858 and the United States was tearing apart at the seams. The question of slavery had been an issue since 1787 when the United States Constitution was signed. In the 1850s, some called for the abolition of slavery while others began calling for secession. In front of a packed room he declared, "My friends, my brethren, my countrymen...I feel an ardent desire for the success of States' Rights Democracy...alone I rely for the preservation of the Constitution, to perpetuate the Union and to fulfill the purpose which it was ordained to establish and secure." Advocating for a States' Rights Democracy while disagreeing with the idea or need for secession in the same speech, Jefferson Davis sat down.

Born in what is now Todd County, Kentucky (and only about 100 miles from the birthplace of his famous contemporary, Abraham Lincoln), Jefferson Davis moved to Mississipi around 1810. He graduated from West Point Military Academy in 1828. By 1836 Davis was a plantation owner, and in the 1840s he owned over 70 slaves. He became involved in local Mississippi politics in the early 1830s, but really made a name for himself fighting in the Mexican-American War.

Using his new found fame, he was appointed a United States Senator from Mississippi in 1848, finishing out someone else's term. He used his new position to propose annexing more territoy from Mexico (which later became the Gadsden Purchase), as well as from Cuba for the expansion of "slaveholding constituencies." He resigned to run for governor of Mississippi on an anti- Compromise of 1850 platform and started to attend states' rights conventions. In 1853 he was appointed Secretary of War by President Franklin Pierce. His time during this appointment gave him a better perspective about the location of railway lines and the military strengths of the country - where the southern states were at a distinct disadvantage. Following his 4 years as Secretary of War, he was elected to a second term as senator for the state of Mississippi.

By this point, the country had nearly broken apart many times, mostly in 1850. The Compromise of 1820 and 1850 had put some Band-Aids on the wound, but like a virus the problems began to aggressively spread. The arguments between abolition vs. slave-holding, state's rights vs. a strong federal government were getting more frequent and more violent. These issues threatened to destroy the great experiment that was America. It is with this backdrop that Jefferson Davis spoke at a convention of Democrats in Faneuil Hall.

In choosing Boston, and more importantly Faneuil Hall, to give his speech, Davis drew comparisons between the founders of America and the struggle of his time. In his speech, he frequently made comparisons between the Founding Fathers and States Rights advocates, comparing the great voices that echo in Faneuil Hall to the disgruntled voices of his day. Simultaneously, while comparing his party to the revolutionaries of the previous generation, he stated the United States, unlike Britain and the colonies, needed to stay together. "...[Y]ou see agitation, tending slowly and steadily to that separation of the states, which, if you have any hope connected with the liberty of mankind... if you have any sacred regard for the obligation which the acts of your fathers entailed upon you,--by each and all of these motives you are prompted to united an earnest effort to promote the success of that great experiment which your fathers left it to you to conclude."

Davis, a Mississippian at heart, reminded Northerners that their economy relied on the South. "Your prosperity is to receive our staple and to manufacture it, and ours to sell it to you and buy the manufactured goods. This is an interweaving of interests, which makes us all the richer and all the happier." This interdependent relationship would be interrupted by the abolition of slavery. Even worse, this would be interrupted if the country split. The economy of both the North and South would suffer if this flow of trade were interrupted.

In the end, Davis made a passionate plea for unity. "[W]e should increase in fraternity; and it would be no longer a wonder to see a man coming from a southern state to address a Democratic audience in Boston." While Boston did have a Democratic Faction, it was also the heart of the abolition movement in America (coincidentally, Faneuil Hall was used by abolitionists as well). After all, everyone belonged to the great experiment that was the United States. Both sides wanted to continue what the Founding Fathers had started.

At the heart of this debate over slavery and state's rights was the idea of property. Can a human being be someone else's property? To Democrats, that's what the slaves were, and as such they had rights as slave owners. "The Constitution recognizes the property in many forms, and imposes obligations in connection with that recognition." It was not the right of any other person, despite political party, to take away someone's personal property. These were the very values that were fought for in Faneuil Hall itself during the Revolutionary era, according to Davis.

Davis may have had practical reasons for arguing against secession and preservation of the union. He would have known as a result of his term as Secretary of War that the South was ill equipped to fight a war against the North. The weapons manufacturing was in the north as were most of the railroad lines and the majority of the male population. While he knew the people he represented were passionate, they were also unprepared. It's possible that his passionate pleas to save the union may have been an effort to peacefully save the South. Either way, in the building where America began he argued for its preservation.

That was Jefferson Davis's last trip to Boston. Following his speech, which was received with great reception by Massachusetts Democrats, Davis returned to the United States Senate where he continued to be a proponent of state's rights. Following the election of Abraham Lincoln, many in the South had had enough. South Carolina seceded from the union on December 20, 1860 and other states soon followed. Mississippi followed suit on January 9, 1861. Davis resigned his senate seat twelve days later, reportedly "the saddest day of [his] life." On February 18, 1861, Jefferson Davis was sworn in as the President of the Confederate States of America.

Reference:

Rice University. "The Papers of Jefferson Davis." © 2011

The admitted anti-White, Wes Bellamy, Vice Mayor of Charlottesville, Virginia,

has been THE long-standing proponent of taking down monuments, not only Confederate, but also any statues of Thomas Jefferson. 

This man was on the Virginia State Board of Education and was fired from that job; he had been a Albemarle High School teacher, but was suspended from that job; and then forced to resign.

He is discussed in this telling interview which reveals what the college students in Charlottesville really think about the situation. 

Documentation is presented that proves that

Wes Bellamy was racially biased and anti-white.

Wes Bellamy, the racist and anti-White Vice-Mayor of Charlottesville, wore a Black Panther backpack on the way to closed door meeting on Unite The Right rally:

Should monuments to the U.S. Confederacy be destroyed or removed to museums? It’s a question cities and towns across the South are now faced with. A question perpetrated by liberal and in some cases, racist politicians, who have sub rosa agendas.

Two City Councilors in Charlottesville, Virginia have called for the removal of a statue to Robert E. Lee from a downtown park. Award-winning journalist Coy Barefoot explores the debate with preeminent Civil War Historian Gary Gallagher of the University of Virginia.

Professor Gary Gallagher, Professor of Civil War History at the University of Virginia, correctly assesses the Confederate monument removal controversy in Charlottesville and elsewhere.  He made a presentation to City Council.....but his advice was ignored.

(Reported by Warner Todd Houston, March 2017)

Early in February, the City of Charlottesville, Virginia voted to remove several statues commemorating Confederate generals Lee and Jackson that stood in the town for nearly 100 years. Now the town is being sued to prevent the removal.

In a three to two vote on February 6, the Charlottesville City Council moved to eliminate the equestrian statue memorializing Confederate General Robert E. Lee that was first erected 93 years ago in the city’s Lee Park. After the vote, city leaders also vowed to erase Lee’s name from the park.

The decision sparked several weeks of protests and meetings of those both in favor of and in opposition to the plan that the city said would cost up to $300,000 to complete.

Now two organizations and 11 local citizens have joined together to file a lawsuit against the city to stop the removal of the statues, according to The Cavalier Daily of the University of Virginia.

The plaintiffs, including the Virginia Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, Inc. and the Monument Fund, Inc., cited a number of reasons for filing the lawsuit. Chief among those reasons is their contention that the city is in violation of a state law preventing alteration of such monuments.

According to state law, it is illegal for local officials to tear down memorials to war veterans.

Virginia code 15.2-1812 reads, “If such [memorials for war veterans] are erected, it shall be unlawful for the authorities of the locality, or any other person or persons, to disturb or interfere with any monuments or memorials so erected, or to prevent its citizens from taking proper measures and exercising proper means for the protection, preservation, and care of same.”

In addition, the lawsuit claims that the city is violating the deed written in 1918 by the McIntire family granting permission to create Lee Park.

620,000 people (Americans) died in the War Between the States. Roughly 2% of the population. No matter which version of history you have been taught, the bottom line is these soldier's were your average man. On either side of the war these men were still Americans and should have their memories honored. This hysteria of removing monuments, digging up graves, not allowing flags on graves is sad. It was a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight. Just as most Northerners did not fight to end slavery, most Southerners did not fight to preserve it.

In 1904, the Confederate monument in Gainesville, Georgia was erected. In attendance were UNION and Confederate Veterans who both supported the monument. They showed each other respect as fellow Americans. They honored each other’s dead. Now there is a media fueled history witch-hunt to remove historical monuments. Removing monuments does not end racism; it only dishonors the American soldier’s who died. We can learn a lot from history and learn nothing by erasing it.