Black Slave Owner an 'Untold Part' of History

Like many wealthy landowners of the pre-Civil War South, Sherrod Bryant owned slaves. They probably worked much of Bryant's 700 acres in Middle Tennessee, an area larger than that of Andrew Jackson's Hermitage plantation.

The slaves under Bryant helped raise hogs for their owner, who had a large family and was always looking to buy more property. Unlike many slave owners, however, Sherrod Bryant was black.

Today, the notion of a black man owning black slaves seems contradictory — Bryant himself was a free black — and perhaps even hypocritical. According to Bryant's descendants, however, their ancestor, who was never a slave, was simply following the normal pattern of life for a rich landowner in the Upper South. more...

 

Dixie's Censored Subject: Black Slaveowners

In an 1856 letter to his wife Mary Custis Lee, Robert E. Lee called slavery "a moral and political evil." Yet he concluded that black slaves were immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially and physically.

The leftists who predominate in the mass media and the world of academe have refashioned the by gone world of slavery and black life in the Old South. Their agenda does not allow for a balanced view of a world they never knew.

In a society molded by highly skewed and agenda-selective presentations of history, the tightest censorship involves the fact that large numbers of free Negroes owned black slaves; in fact, in numbers disproportionate to their representation in society at large. In 1860 only a small minority of whites owned slaves. According to the U.S. census report for that last year before the Civil War, there were nearly 27 million whites in the country. Some eight million of them lived in the slaveholding states.

The census also determined that there were fewer than 385,000 individuals who owned slaves. Even if all slaveholders had been white, that would amount to only 1.4 percent of whites in the country (or 4.8 percent of southern whites owning one or more slaves).

In the rare instances when the ownership of slaves by free Negroes is acknowledged in the history books, justification centers on the claim that black slave masters were simply individuals who purchased the freedom of a spouse or child from a white slaveholder and had been unable to legally manumit them. Although this did indeed happen at times, it is a misrepresentation of the majority of instances, one which is debunked by records of the period on blacks who owned slaves. These include individuals such as Justus Angel and Mistress L. Horry, of Colleton District, South Carolina, who each owned 84 slaves in 1830. In fact, in 1830 a fourth of the free Negro slave masters in South Carolina owned 10 or more slaves; eight owning 30 or more. more...

 

The Forgotten Slaves: Whites in Servitude in Early America and Industrial Britain

When White servitude is acknowledged as having existed in America, it is almost always termed as temporary "indentured servitude" or part of the convict trade, which, after the Revolution of 1776, centered on Australia instead of America. The "convicts" transported to America under the 1723 Waltham Act, perhaps numbered 100,000.

The indentured servants who served a tidy little period of 4 to 7 years polishing the master's silver and china and then taking their place in colonial high society, were a minuscule fraction of the great unsung hundreds of thousands of White slaves who were worked to death in this country from the early l7th century onward.

Up to one-half of all the arrivals in the American colonies were Whites slaves and they were America's first slaves. These Whites were slaves for life, long before Blacks ever were. This slavery was even hereditary. White children born to White slaves were enslaved too.

Whites were auctioned on the block with children sold and separated from their parents and wives sold and separated from their husbands. Free Black property owners strutted the streets of northern and southern American cities while White slaves were worked to death in the sugar mills of Barbados and Jamaica and the plantations of Virginia. more...

 

Victimhood as a Business

There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs -- partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs. - Booker T. Washington

 

Slavery Reparations Gaining Momentum

Advocates who say black Americans should be compensated for slavery and its Jim Crow aftermath are quietly chalking up victories and gaining momentum.

Fueled by the work of scholars and lawyers, their campaign has morphed in recent years from a fringe-group rallying cry into sophisticated, mainstream movement. Most recently, a pair of churches apologized for their part in the slave trade, and one is studying ways to repay black church members.

The overall issue is hardly settled, even among black Americans: Some say that focusing on slavery shouldn't be a top priority or that it doesn't make sense to compensate people generations after a historical wrong.

Yet reparations efforts have led a number of cities and states to approve measures that force businesses to publicize their historical ties to slavery. Several reparations court cases are in progress, and international human rights officials are increasingly spotlighting the issue. more...

 

Film describes Northern Family’s Role in Promoting and Profiting From Slavery

Northerners like to think they bear less guilt than Southerners for our nation’s history with slavery and the slave trade. They are dead wrong, according to Katrina Browne, a committed Episcopalian from Boston.
Browne learned that the hard way. Now she’s spreading the word to compatriots, North and South, in a manner she hopes will help to heal what she describes as our country’s greatest wound.

Brown, 37, has created a documentary film to tell the story of her ancestors from New England, to spell out the legacy white Americans have inherited from the history of slavery.

The DeWolf family of Rhode Island was the largest slave-trading family in early America. More than 10,000 Africans – kidnapped, chained, beaten – made the hellish middle passage across the Atlantic in the holds of DeWolf-owned ships. Over the course of three generations, from 1769 to 1820, 47 of these ships made runs, building trade and the family’s fortune.

Katrina Browne is refusing to side-step that unsavory history. Instead she is facing it head on in a very public way … with her 80-minute feature film, five years in the making. She hopes Traces of the Trade eventually will be seen on PBS television. more...

 

Congressional Resolution Apologizing For Slavery Being Considered

(NBNJ) There is reportedly a move afoot in the United States Congress to come up with a Congressional resolution apologizing for slavery. The driving forces appear to be Congressional Black Caucus member and civil rights veteran John Lewis of Georgia and Senator George Allen - A Republican from Virginia.

Questioned about the proposed resolution recently, Allen said, "We want this to be a meaningful resolution that is adopted. John Lewis and I are going to get together and determine how to move forward." Ironically, Allen has been criticized for wearing a Confederate flag pen when he was a teenager.

Critics have charged that an apology without some type of financial reparations would be an empty gesture. But there has been no indication from either Allen or Lewis that their proposed resolution would call for reparations. Further, it is highly unlikely that a resolution calling for reparations would be passed by a Republican controlled Congress. Source

 

The Corwin Amendment: Promise of Perpetual Slavery

Lincoln made a comment in his inauguration address, the meaning of which might escape the casual student of history. The comment was:

"I understand a proposed amendment to the Constitution which amendment, however, I have not seen has passed Congress, to the effect that the Federal Government shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the States, including that of persons held to service [slaves].

"To avoid misconstruction of what I have said, I depart from my purpose not to speak of particular amendments so far as to say that, holding such a provision to now be implied constitutional law, I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable."

Lincoln was speaking of the proposed 13th Amendment to the Constitution. Written by northern Republicans in Congress, it also was called the Corwin Amendment, after Rep. Thomas Corwin of Ohio who introduced it in the House.

This proposed 13th Amendment read: "No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State."

The Southern states were practically handed a constitutional concession agreed to by the northern controlled congress, making slavery a permanent institution in the U.S. So, if slavery was truly the primary issue in secession, why didn't the Confederate government accept this offering instead of choosing to dig in its heels and fight for its independence?

This exposes claims that the Union went to war in 1861 to free the slaves to be historically untrue. It also undermines claims that the South seceded solely to preserve the institution of slavery. If that had been the South's goal, what better guarantee did it need than an unrepealable amendment to the Constitution to protect slavery, as it then existed? more...