Virginia apologizes for slavery

TragicMonkey said:
Well, for all those who don't think Virginia needed to apologize for slavery, I ask you: honestly, now, how do you feel about Japan's take on the Rape of Nanking? They're still calling it an "incident". Do they owe an apology? Should they issue one, whether owed or not? How about a statement of regret? Or even an acknowledgment of what happened?
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What about Pearl Harbor? The Japanese textbooks still talk about their heroic bombing against the evil dog-faced U.S. soldiers. (Someone I know in Singapore talked about her problems with that...)
 
TragicMonkey said:
Well, for all those who don't think Virginia needed to apologize for slavery, I ask you: honestly, now, how do you feel about Japan's take on the Rape of Nanking? They're still calling it an "incident". Do they owe an apology? Should they issue one, whether owed or not? How about a statement of regret? Or even an acknowledgment of what happened?
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Ok. Get the Japs to apologise for Nanking, Singapore, the "camp prostitutes and Pearl Harbour. Then USA can apologise for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. USA can also apologise for the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII.

Once that's taken care of, Japan and Russia can apologise to each other for the 1904/5 war. Russia can also apologise for Stalin and Lenin, then Germany can apologise for Marx, who gave them the ideas to begin with. Then Greece had better apologise to everyone for giving the world the philosophers which inspired Marx. The Greeks will be expecting an apology from the Ethiopians, where the first human remains were found, as those humans clearly started a civilisation which has committed atrocities everywhere.
 
luchog said:
I'm not sure a simple apology is sufficient for that.
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Hey, we've got Mike Cross, John Coltrane, Charlie Daniels, Ben Folds, and T. Monk. Doesn't that make up for it (James Taylor notwithstanding)?
 
shanek said:
Actually, slaves were considered valuable property, so there was an incentive to treat them nicely.

...snip...
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Perhaps that was the case for the slaves once they were purchased (but I doubt it) but certainly an individual slave was not considered valuable to slave traders - from one of the greatest parliamentary speeches of all time:

.... William Wilberforce - 1789
Death, at least, is a sure ground of evidence, and the proportion of deaths will not only confirm, but if possible will even aggravate our suspicion of their misery in the transit. It will be found, upon an average of all the ships of which evidence has been given at the privy council, that exclusive of those who perish before they sail, not less than 12½ per cent. perish in the passage. Besides these, the Jamaica report tells you, that not less than 4½ per cent. die on shore before the day of sale, which is only a week or two from the time of landing. One third more die in the seasoning, and this in a country exactly like their own, where they are healthy and happy as some of the evidences would pretend. The diseases, however, which they contract on shipboard, the astringent washes which are to hide their wounds, and the mischievous tricks used to make them up for sale, are, as the Jamaica report says, (a most precious and valuable report, which I shall often have to advert to) one principle cause of this mortality. Upon the whole, however, here is a mortality of about 50 per cent.

...

Slavery was such a profitable business and the "product" so cheap that it wasn't worthwhile ensuring they didn't lose 50% of their "product" in transit.
 
Darat said:
Perhaps that was the case for the slaves once they were purchased (but I doubt it) but certainly an individual slave was not considered valuable to slave traders
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You are absolutely correct. The mistreatment they received on the plantations pales to the mistreatment they received being literally stuffed and crammed in ships, and sometimes even just thrown overboard as supplies became limited, is just mind-blowing.

And then they'd take the survivors and auction them off at a hefty price. Molasses to rum to slaves...
 
After reading about this period because of a couple of threads in the History section of the forum -- I think both were true. Slaves were both valuable and treated extremely cruelly, not in spite of their being valuable but as a necessary way of keeping them so.

The slavers and the plantation owners wanted broken-in slaves -- not slaves that would revolt.

It was apparently common practice for slaves to go to a "seasoning camp" for additional "breaking-in" (torture) once they completed their Atlantic voyage.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade#Seasoning_camps

With that in mind -- the hellish conditions of the slave ships along with the high death rates were probably considered part of the "breaking-in" process.

The high death rate was probably considered a necessary part of the process. AFAIK, it was common practice for the slave traders to insure their "cargo", so this was would be another reason for them not to care about the high death rate.
http://www.insurancejournal.com/magazines/southcentral/2000/05/15/legalbeat/21120.htm

The fact that slavery is an unnatural condition explains why "valuable" slaves would be treated so cruelly. People treated kindly would not stay enslaved.

As a side note: It's interesting that some people have theorized that a major reason that the States banned the slave trade after 1807 was because of the successful Haiti revolt a few years prior to that. Many people were interested in preventing something similar happening in the States, and one way of doing that was to prevent more free born Africans from being relocated as slaves to the States. Also its believed that President Jefferson decided to ban trade with Haiti to help prevent the news from traveling to the slaves in the Southern USA.
 
Darth Rotor said:
Who is this "we," Roadtoad? Are you referring to your family alone, or some chimerical collective guilt?

My grandma came over on a boat.

DR
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My grandparents did too. ;)

I think instead of playing the "whose history sucks worse" game we should all just try to learn from it and do better now and in the future.
 
Shera said:
After reading about this period because of a couple of threads in the History section of the forum -- I think both were true. Slaves were both valuable and treated extremely cruelly, not in spite of their being valuable but as a necessary way of keeping them so.

The slavers and the plantation owners wanted broken-in slaves -- not slaves that would revolt.
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This is another good point. The slaves that were "good" and "behaved" (i.e., didn't complain about the fact that they were enslaved) were much more valuable than slaves that would "stir up trouble" (i.e., actually want to be free).

As a side note: It's interesting that some people have theorized that a major reason that the States banned the slave trade after 1807 was because of the successful Haiti revolt a few years prior to that.
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It probably had more to do with the fact that the Constitution didn't allow them to do so until 1808. When the US Congress convened for the first time under the Articles of Confederation, one of the first bills, introduced by Thomas Jefferson, was a law ending slavery in America. It failed by just a single vote.
 
Prior to the Civil War, the census had to count the number of "negroes" separately since, for enumeration purposes, they counted 4/5ths towards the number of representatives a state had in Congress. So it's pretty easy to go back and see if a particular household had any slaves. Each entry had the head of household, other people in the house (wives, children, etc.), and the number of slaves.

I've traced four lines of my family back to the 1700s. I found all the census records back to 1810. In each household of my direct ancestors, none of the census records listed any slaves (the number of "negroes" was 0). There was a brother here and there who had one.

Looking over the records in general really tells the story. Most households had 0 slaves. A few had 1 or 2, and only a rare household had several or more slaves. Slavery was the mark of the elite. They were like Beemers. If you had a slave, you were somebody.
 
well no doubt there will be a call for reparations since the state admitted guilt by apologizing, so I doubt the other states will follow. What a huge, stupid mistake. Because they are going to have to say "oh, we ARE sorry, just not THAT sorry" and look like idiots for apologizing in the first place.
 
shanek said:
Uh-huh. And does anyone think this is anything but a political move? I mean, it's not like any white people alive today enslaved any black people alive today, so there's no one left from whom an apology would matter.

So, what's next, Brits apologizing for George III and Oliver Cromwell? Italians apologizing for the destruction of the Library at Alexandria? Men apologizing to women for cavemen hitting them on the head and dragging them home by their hair?
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Actually, yes it is purely political, and is important for that reason. A few years back the Catholic church admitted it was wrong and apologized for putting Galileo on house arrest. It makes a difference not for the past or present so much as mainly for the future, in the hopes that other governments will see and not do such bad things anymore.

A big hope to be sure, but it's welcome in my opinion.
 
shanek said:
Shera said:
As a side note: It's interesting that some people have theorized that a major reason that the States banned the slave trade after 1807 was because of the successful Haiti revolt a few years prior to that.
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It probably had more to do with the fact that the Constitution didn't allow them to do so until 1808. When the US Congress convened for the first time under the Articles of Confederation, one of the first bills, introduced by Thomas Jefferson, was a law ending slavery in America. It failed by just a single vote.
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That's interesting. I didn't realize that vote had occurred and that fact that it failed by only one vote is surprising.

Still, I think there is often more than one reason why people agree to pass a particular law at a particular time in history, and stopping the slave trade in more than one nation in the early 1800s probably had more than one reason also. I also don't recall learning that any of the slave holding slaves were adamantly opposed to this law yet later in history they got very upset each time a state was admitted into the union as a free state. This supports the idea that even as slave owners not interested in the eventual goal of emancipaiton, they still thought there were good reasons for stopping the slave trade.

The same Wiki article I quoted in my previous post has some interesting things to say about why England banned the slave trade for GB and her colonies in 1807 and why over the next 50 years she took steps to make sure that other countries banned the slave trade also. In the 1850s England went as far as to block Brazil's ports over the issue.

I think part of the reason England did this was because there was a strong abolitionist movement in that country. But I think the author/s of the Wiki article wrote an interesting article and makes a good case for other reasons such as military (prevent successful rebellion in their Caribbean holdings) and competitive trade (prevent other nations from taking economic advantage of their abandoning the slave trade) reasons.

Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade#British_influence
Virtually every major reform pertaining to the abolition of the slave trade and slavery took place in the immediate aftermath of a major armed rebellion and/or victory by enslaved or formerly enslaved Africans. Although in Britain, the U.S. and in other parts of Europe, moral, economic and political opposition developed against the slave trade, this was largely ineffective unless combined with the political factor of African rebellions. The single most significant event in the history of the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery was the Haitian Revolution,[citation needed] (1791-1804), led by Toussaint L'Ouverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines (later Jacques I). Prior to the Haitian Revolution there were no major reversals in the almost three-hundred-year-old trend of an increasing abduction of Africans across the Atlantic. After the Haitian Revolution, there was an immediate, terminal and rapid decline. This is because the Haitian Revolution and other uprisings created such significant military and political fears and costs for the European/American colonial powers that the continued importation of an African population became unsustainable, as the fears and costs outweighed stability and profitability.
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In Europe, led by the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and establishment Evangelicals such as William Wilberforce, the Abolitionist movement was joined by many and began to protest against the trade, but until the Haitian revolution, they were successfully opposed by the owners of the colonial holdings. Denmark, which had been very active in the slave trade, was the first country to ban the trade through legislation in 1792 - one year after the start of the victorious insurrection in Saint-Domingue (modern day Haiti). Denmark's legislation only took effect in 1803, as the Haitian Revolution moved towards its final victory. Britain banned the slave trade in 1807], imposing stiff fines for any slave found aboard a British ship, just three years after the final victory of the slave rebellion in Haiti. The Royal Navy, which then controlled the world's seas, moved to stop other nations from filling Britain's place in the slave trade and declared that slaving was equal to piracy and was punishable by death.
….

After the total victory of the Haitian Revolution in 1804, the British realised it was a military necessity to prevent the importation of potential African insurgents into the Caribbean. However, in order to maintain the economic competitiveness of their colonies, they were also compelled to induce other colonial and slave-trading powers to do the same. Therefore, the British campaign against the slave trade by other nations was an unprecedented foreign policy effort.
…
By 1853, the British government had paid Portugal over three million pounds and Spain over one million pounds in order to end the slave trade.
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Brazil, however, even after its independence, did not agree to stop trading in slaves until Britain took military action against its coastal areas and threatened a permanent blockade of the nation's ports in 1852.
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bolding mine
 
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shanek said:
Prior to the Civil War, the census had to count the number of "negroes" separately since, for enumeration purposes, they counted 4/5ths towards the number of representatives a state had in Congress. So it's pretty easy to go back and see if a particular household had any slaves. Each entry had the head of household, other people in the house (wives, children, etc.), and the number of slaves.

I've traced four lines of my family back to the 1700s. I found all the census records back to 1810. In each household of my direct ancestors, none of the census records listed any slaves (the number of "negroes" was 0). There was a brother here and there who had one.

Looking over the records in general really tells the story. Most households had 0 slaves. A few had 1 or 2, and only a rare household had several or more slaves. Slavery was the mark of the elite. They were like Beemers. If you had a slave, you were somebody.
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Interesting post Shanek. I was going to post this earlier today, but I needed time to remember where the link was:
http://www.sparknotes.com/history/am...section7.rhtml
Southern Social Hierarchy
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As the North became increasingly democratic, the South continued to adhere to the old, almost feudal social order. At the top were a select few, extremely wealthy, white plantation owners who controlled the southern legislatures and represented the South in Congress. Then came the farmers who owned one or two slaves, followed by the poor and sometimes landless whites. Black slaves were confined to the bottom of the social hierarchy.

Though slaves did the bulk of the manual labor on the largest cotton plantations, not all whites owned slaves. In fact, only about one in four southern males owned slaves in the 1850s, and those men usually owned only one or two slaves. Most southern whites were poor subsistence farmers who grew food only for their own use.
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So basically this article backs up your independent research (except the ratio in the Constitution was slightly different, 3/5).

I've personally always found it incomprehensible how the Southern elite managed to get the rest of their countrymen to support them in a war that was against their interests. People that work for wages or trade would find their earnings depressed and perhaps even their ability to work eliminated in a slave economy. Not all slaves worked in the field. Some worked in trade and were hired out by their owners.

And people were sophisticated enough about economics by that time to realize this also. For example, many British factory workers supported the North in the Civil War even though it meant that they often had no work because they could not get access to Southern cotton. There is at least one story how British factory workers closed down a plant instead of work with smuggled in cotton from the South.

ETA: Hmmm. I don't always express myself in a tactful way and I just realized that my post probably could have been written more diplomatically considering that you said you traced your family roots back to the 1700s and that chances are high, that even though they didn't own slaves, they still fought for the Confederacy.

In my next life I will write more eloquently and diplomatically. A psychic told me so. :p ;)

I personally don't feel responsible for anything my family did or didn't do over 200 years ago, but don't know you well and I realize you may have a different reaction. No personal slight was intended -- but for the record I still don't understand the mind set of most Southerners back in the late 1800s.

I do think its just one good example of how large groups of people can be socialized and indoctrinated to believe in something that is not in their interest without their realizing it, and sometimes I wonder which groups in our society today are "brainwashed" over which issues without realizing it.
 
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