by Paul Craig Roberts, Paul Craig Roberts:
The South is blamed for slavery. One encounters this false association, the product of decades of demonization of the South, everywhere, even in books about the assassination of President McKinley in 1901 in Buffalo, New York by a Polish-American, Leon Czolgosz, who was born in Detroit.
Nothing in McKinley’s presidency or in Czolgosz’s life has anything to do with the South or slavery. Yet the author of the book, Eric Rauchway, manages to use the fact that northern whites wanted to lynch Czolgosz, a white man, to pull the South into the story. “White men of the South practiced lynching to terrify black men into submission,” and blacks fled the South because of “the growing number of blacks lynched in the slow-burning race war of the late-nineteenth century South.” These are blanket and unsupported statements.
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In fact, lynching was a form of community justice. There are instances of blacks lynching blacks and instances of lynchings far outside the South. On the Western frontier lynching was the punishment for horse thieves. As the author is described as a teacher at the University of California, Davis, and the book was published in 2003, perhaps the explanation is the author is protecting himself against the rising power of the university left and the doctrine of “aversive racism.”
I don’t mean to single out this particular book. It just happens to be lying at hand. The point is that no matter how remote a book’s topic is from the South, such as President McKinley’s assassination, writers establish their moral credentials with potshots at the South.
Demonizing the South has become a way for northerners and university professors to demonstrate their moral standing, but it doesn’t stop them from immigrating to the South and destroying Southern communities with their lack of graciousness,
The South has no responsibility for slavery. Nor were blacks the only people enslaved. It was not whites who enslaved blacks. Blacks were enslaved by the black Kings of Dahomey in their slave wars. Dahomey sold the blacks it enslaved to Arabs and to British, Spanish, and Portuguese who shipped them to the New World that offered resources to exploit but had no labor force. Blacks enslaved by the King of Dahomey became the labor force for colonial rice, sugar, cotton, and tobacco plantations. I do not know of any incidence of a black enslaved by a white. White colonists purchased already enslaved blacks. In the US free blacks also owned black slaves
Blacks were the agricultural work force in the New World long before the United States existed. For the South slavery was an inherited institution, not one created by the South. There was no labor market in which agricultural labor could be hired. Immigrants to the British colonies simply moved westward, taking Indian land for their own.
When the United States became a country, it was a poor one in which government had scant sources of revenues and in which slavery was an established institution. One way of freeing slaves would have been to confiscate them from those who purchased them. This would have collapsed the agricultural sector of the economy and eliminated the few export revenues the nation had. Another way, if revenues had been available, would have been for the federal government to purchase and release the slaves. But thrown on their own, where was their employment? And where was the agricultural work force?
The un-enslaved blacks would have to have gone to work for the plantations where they were formerly slaves. Only now, they would be responsible for their own housing, clothes, medical care, food, and what if the wage earner drank his wage away?
It wasn’t the South that did not face these issues. It was the self-righteous North, essentially a barbaric people whose culture was the pursuit of wealth at the expense of the South and the American Indians, the native inhabitants, both of which were destroyed by violence in pursuit of wealth.
Independent scholarly investigations, without an axe to grind, have established beyond question that there were more white slaves than black ones. Arabs raided the seacoast towns of Mediterranean Europe for slaves. Arabs took American citizens off of intercepted ships and sold them as slaves, prompting President Thomas Jefferson to send the US Navy and troops to “the shores of Tripoli” as the US Marine Corps anthem reflects in order to halt the practice of enslaving American white citizens.
We have before us the total abject failure of American Universities and intellectuals, who do not warrant the name and should be known as propagandists, to provide any semblance in their histories to actual facts.
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