First and foremost: It still exists today, even in the United States and other “enlightened” countries. Whether it is sex slaves held by criminal gangs or illegal immigrant laborers forced to pay off their passage into the US (and other countries), involuntary servitude exists.
That is what slavery is: INVOLUNTARY SERVITUDE. Now, you can parse that to say that indentured slavery is not as bad as chattel slavery or forced labor from prisoners sold into servitude is not as bad as chattel slavery but you are only deluding yourself.
Indentured servants, white or black, in the 17th Century had no rights and the first Africans to arrive in the English colonies were exactly that: indentured servants. Don’t try to parse it or excuse it, because that is the truth. However, it didn’t last long before English planters changed the contract for Africans to what people now associate with true slavery.
But you all have to understand, slavery has been endemic in every culture on the planet, white, black, yellow, red or tan; Europe, Africa, Asia, Polynesia, the Americas. Again, if you don’t realize that and try to deny it and claim that in the Americas it was uniquely a European practice, then you truly are ignorant of history.
Native American tribes from the Incas to the Mayas to Aztecs to the Apaches (and all the other plains Indians) to the Cherokee to the Iroquois all practiced slavery. If you don’t want to admit that, then you have a major problem.
So, African-Americans, you are not unique … especially today’s African-Americans, many of whom, like a lot of the other immigrants in the US, can’t trace their lineage back to the time of slavery in the US.
So, when the “liberals” and “progressives” in this country try it to drive more wedges between the various ethnic communities in the US, the slavery gambit is false, or at least should be discarded.
Yes, the American Civil War was fought pretty much on the basis of whether the nation would remain half slave and half free, BUT that was not the only issue. The right of secession was hotly debated and many states – North and South – had threatened to secede in the four-score years that led up to the war. The Civil War ended not only the debate over slavery but also over the right of secession. The Federal Government said, by force of arms, neither was going happen. There was a host of other issues that divided the regions and created tensions, and all of those also contributed. So, yes, the war was about slavery, but, no, that was not the only issue.
Yes, African-Americans have faced centuries of discrimination based on race in North America, but then so have other ethnicities … if you don’t know and understand that, then you are part of the problem today, where people are hyperventilating over all things Confederate. Don’t believe me? Do a little research about the Chinese imported to build the West, or the Irish prisoners sold to English plantations in the Caribbean and the East Coast of what now is the U.S. and Canada in the 1600s. Research the lives of Irish immigrants in the early 19th Century. Don’t pooh-pooh it as something different, it wasn’t … for most of them it was involuntary servitude, and that means slavery. I supposedly had an ancestor who was one of those Irish slaves sent to Massachusetts when he was only 15. He would later win his freedom fighting against the natives and lost his life finally in one battle in the 1690s.
Sorry, folks, this is the 21st Century and people left and right, black and white, North and South have got to understand that the Civil War IS OVER. GET OVER IT.
As for the Confederacy … have we lost our freaking minds? What is all this hyperventilating about the Confederate flags and monuments, etc.? Good grief, people, when the soldiers who actually fought in the bloody campaigns – brother against brother, life-long friend against life-long friend, American against American – were able to reconcile and come to grips with the fact that we are all Americans, are we unable to the same?
The Union and Confederate veterans long ago made peace with one another, with respect and dignity and honor for each other’s valor, sacrifice and honor. Can we do no less?
So stop these silly vendettas against all things Confederate. It is unbecoming of Americans to allow ourselves to be played like marionettes to divide us and set us against ourselves.
Slavery is over. Jim Crow is over. Racism always will exist as long as we sub-divide ourselves into separate ethnic or religious identities. The only way that will stop is when we realize that we are all Americans … and we share that and the fact that we are all humans. At least do that to pay homage to those brave men who sacrificed so much to give us our liberties and freedoms.
