If you ever read anything about how the USA was formed, you might notice that even 300 years ago, people had lots of concern about race. Only then it was slavery, because, due to a law established in the Colonie of Virginia in the 1600s, a line was drawn separating white indentured labor from black slaves. The main difference was that the indentures could eventually be free, while blacks were slaves forever. Matriarchal bloodlines determined if you were black or white. That is, if your mom was a black slave, or your dad's mom was a black slave, you were black and a slave.
One thing behind this was that Virginia, among other southern colonies, was founded through land grants from the British monarch. Guys like Sir Walter Raleigh were paid for their service to the Crown with huge tracts of land that they could cultivate or whatever. And some say Raleigh got land in North America to actually exile him in one way or another from the court. Sorta like being "kicked upstairs."
At any rate, making this land profitable required lots and lots of labor. Some early settlers tried to harness the North American Indian tribes as labor. Well, that didn't work. First of all, the Indians knew the land a whole lot better than the colonists did. Second, there were a thousands more Indians here than there were European settlers, even if the settlers had guns.
Indentures were generally whites who were in debt for one reason or another. Either their debtors sold them for the money owed, or they could even sell themselves, for a period usually of about seven or eight years. Very often, their masters found excuses for not freeing them, "You broke a rake. Two more years of labor," and stuff like that. And word got back to Europe, so indenture ended up being more or less an act of desperation. Like, a lot of Irish sold themselves to a ship's captain for passage to the New World, and when they arrived here, the captain sold this "bond" to someone here who needed a hired hand. Things were pretty bad in Ireland if indenture was regarded as a positive way out.
Black Africans didn't have friends and family back in Europe or in England to stick up for them. They were sold outright as property, not as indentured labor. Slave buyers also claimed that since blacks were from Africa, they were physically more capable than whites of laboring 12 hours a day in miserable, humid heat. The slave owners had lots of excuses and justifications like that.
Slavery existed in the northern colonies, too, to some extent, but the northern colonies had been established more along the lines of self-exiled religious communites or as trade centers, rather than as plantations supporting the Empire, and they didn't have quite the same demand for a huge and always available labor pool as the southern colonies did.
At the time of the troubles with England, mid-1700s, a lot of colonists wanted to eliminate slavery. Thomas Jefferson even wrote a few lines into the Declaration of Independence about how the British had brought the scourge of human bondage and black slavery to North America. Much of this was struck out of the final document, however -- they couldn't get a majority vote on it. And this failure was due as much to Yankee slave traders as it was to southern slave owners. Most of the Founding Fathers were against slavery on moral grounds, but they also felt compelled to respect the needs of the few who claimed to need slavery. And they all tended to agree that slavery was pretty much on its way out in the USA. It would simply wither away.
Later still, when the Constitution was being written, the Framers actually established 1808 as the time the slave trade would be prohibited. That is, as of 1808, US citizens wouldn't be allowed to import slaves into the US, and merchants ships flying under the USA flag weren't allowed to trade in slaves. Violations did happen, but generally, people did obey the law.
However, at almost this same time, the cotton gin was invented. Cotton had been a difficult crop. It needs special types of soil to thrive, needs constant attention and lots of labor to grow, and then the final, harvested product was full of tiny seeds that had to be pulled out before it could be spun into fiber and woven into textiles. The whole process was extremely time-consuming and expensive. The cotton gin, which quickly extracts the seeds, made cotton a very useful and practical fiber.
And over the next 30 years or so after the gin was invented, slavery suddenly took on a different allure to plantation owners. It wasn't immoral anymore; rather slave owners were "lifting" ignorant savages into Christian civilization. The white owners were the noble and self-sacrificing shepherds of their flocks of unruly and incorrigible black slaves. Because slaves could no longer be imported legally, some places, like Virginia, where the land was largely depleted and played out, became "breeders" of slaves. They supplied the growing demand for slavery in the newly-opened lands in Alabama, Mississippi, and so forth.
The slave owners actually convinced themselves they were doing some kind of "noblesse oblige" thing by keeping slaves. They preached this from their pulpits, taught it to their children, and crowed about it to the Yankees, who were still shaking their heads (and righteous forefingers) at slave owners. But the subject of slavery remained controversial. For example, until about 1820, there was a more or less unwritten gag rule in the US congress that forbade any mention of slavery, pro or con, in those hallowed chambers.
OK, fast forward a bit to the opening of the Western Territories. Were they going to be slave or free? Much of the land in the West wasn't suitable for plantation agriculture, but the slave owners wanted new states in areas occupied by what's now Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, etc., to be admitted to the Union as slave states anyway. Why? To maintain the balance of power between free and slave in the Senate, in particular.
This is what brought the slavery controversy into focus and eventually caused the US Civil War.
The slave states seceded when Lincoln was elected, but they would have seceded had ANY Republican been elected. The Republican party was founded in 1848 largely by "westerners" (still east of the Rockies, though) who wanted to keep slavery out of the new states. Less than a month after the Republican victory in November, 1860, the slave states began their secession. Within three months, they had formed their own little country, the Confederate States of America.
Let's get this straight. "States' rights" as we regard this term today was not really an issue in secession. It was all about slavery. If you read the Congressional Globe, the Congressional Record of the day, references to "states rights" almost always were interchangeable with "slavery." Everybody knew and understood that at the time. Many churches, like the Baptists, even split into Northern and Southern conferences over the issue. Everyone understood it was all about slavery.
It was only after the CSA lost the Civil War that some people, lead in the main by Jubal Early, began serious work toward redeeming their nobility by claiming the war had been all about preserving "states rights" against an overweening federal government. It was their way of counteracting the Yankees "waving the bloody shirt" of the Civil War, which had become a political weapon and tactic. Former Confederates were among the first and most active historical revisionists in the USA, rewriting history to paint themselves as noble and stalwart, defending liberty against the evil Lincoln and the money-grubbing Republicans who only ever wanted to seize all the wealth of the slave south.
Blacks, of course, were stuck in the middle. They'd been not only enslaved by southern owners, but carefully and deliberately trained for a couple hundred years to submit to their condition and simply accept their status as inferiors. Many did take advantage of the freedoms they had gained at the end of the Civil War and through Reconstruction, but this window of opportunity was shut pretty quickly via Jim Crow laws and by what seems to be deliberately aggravated racial prejudice in many northern states. No one who knows history denies all this.
The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s put a legal end to Jim Crow and race-based discrimination. But that's on paper. I'm sure it still exists to some extent, but now it's an offense that can be prosecuted. And what happened? A sort of rejuvenated South, with all the energy, ideas, and determination of blacks, now free to vastly improve the economic and social development of the former slave states for themselves and everyone else. Even within my lifetime, the amorphous "South" was kinda regarded as backwards and retarded, full of toothless and cross-bred hillbillies, like something out of "Deliverance." That's not really true anymore.
I seriously believe it's people like the New (and old) Black Panthers and even Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson Sr. to a large extent who continue to perpetuate the myth of black inferiority. They're the ones who claim that blacks apparently can't make lives for themselves, are incapable of raising their own families, succeeding at business and other initiatives without the support and assistance of whites -- or of whatever "ruling class" straw man they create. These are the people who, nowadays, continue to teach blacks (and others) to accept their status as "victims" and petition to whites -- or someone -- for aid and mercy. It's people like the New Black Panthers, Al Sharpton, and Jesse Jackson Sr. who've made a profession for themselves by capitalizing on this msery.
Personally, I don't buy any sort of racism -- from whites or blacks or anyone else. The New Black Panthers -- according to that sociopath with the billy club in Philadelphia -- seem to believe that now, with a black man in the White House, it's time to enslave whites. But this only indicates that they want to perpetuate a slave system of some kind. They don't believe in individual freedom, they still want governmental oppression. They're only arguing about who gets to be in charge.
This is not an accusation against all black people. That would be ridiculous. I believe most black Americans would NOT stand with the New Black Panthers or other radical marxist groups. They're primarily Americans, though they probably do have special insights into the impacts of racial and other kinds of prejudice. However, because of the USA's history with slavery, I'm really afraid many blacks may feel compelled to take the part of the New Black Panthers, et. al., simply because they're black. And I keep recalling a scene from Richard Wright's novel, The Invisibile Man, where the main character, a young black man, draws a parallel between the communist recruiter on the street corner with the man on another block who's selling paper cut-outs of black minstrel dancers that dance on a string.
It's racism all over again. What we all must do instead of this is to work toward securing and ensuring the rights of all of us as Americans. Just because the Comrade is black, doesn't make him a Messiah, unless you believe marxism is somehow compatible with human freedom -- which is most emphatically is not. Electing a black man as President of the USA was a "historical moment." But what's more important is that that black man is a dangerous political radical, dead-set on destroying the liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. And it really doesn't matter what color he is. We all stand to lose our freedom and our human rights.
Save the republic.
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