"How should we teach young kids about slavery?" Topic

I like to make sure that kids understand that they have 2 parents, four grandparents, 8 greatgrandparents, and going back a mere ten generations, 1000+ ancestors. Name any category of human and there is a decent chance you are descended from one.

Yes, and perhaps it wouldn't hurt for modern Americans of African descent to remember that most (probably all) of them are also descendants of the white men who owned their black ancestors. Is guilt inheritable? As I said above, none of us alive today are responsible for what our ancestors did or failed to do. We are responsible for our own actions, and not those of others.

African-Americans are VASTLY better off than Africans, by any measure: health, wealth, opportunity, freedom.

Unfortunately, the measure used by African Americans, are comparators with in American society which, given that's where they actually live, doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

Regardless of the lands of their increasingly distant origin, the here and now matters to those who, live in the here and now.

When I was a child, it was a common thing to scold children for not finishing up their meals by reminding them that people in Africa were starving. I ate and they still are.

Meanwhile, allow me to quote Thomas Jefferson, who apparently wrote "all men are created equal" somewhere, or the other.

"Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry. -- Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry. Love is the peculiar rostrum of the poet. Their love is ardent, but it kindles the senses only, not the imagination. Religion indeed has produced a Phyllis Whately; but it could not produce a poet. The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism.

Trajanus, I had not seen that TJ quote about PW; thanks. I'm not sure I trust Sally Heming's baby daddy for poetry criticism, though.

As to which is the best benchmark for comparison, it is of course both, along th elines of "is the glass half empty or half full"? Which depends on whether the glass is being filled or emptied. I think African-Americans will continue to narrow whatever gaps exist, far sooner than Africans' living standards rise.

Personally, I would not trust Mr Jefferson as far as I could throw Monticello.

My PhD in history is from Mr. Jefferson's University, and I took a seminar on Jefferson taught by one of his principle biographers (Merrill Peterson). And I studied his tenure as governor of Virginia (1779-1781) VERY closely.He was a brilliant man, but sometimes brilliantly wrong, and his ethical standards could be, shall we say, flexible.

link

Peterson was certainly the leading Jefferson scholar at the time.

+1: Trajanus.

While slavery wasn't popular in Europe, serfdom was and it processed similar characteristics.

Right. The old understanding was that an advanced civilization HAD to have a class of unfree workers, whether called slaves or serfs or peons or whatever. What changed that was, essentially, Cyrus McCormick and Eli Whitney, e.g. the industrial revolution. Machines can replace slaves. I do not believe in economic determinism as the Marxists do, but fundamental economics sets limits within which a society must operate. The Southern position (slavery is bad but necessary) was far more defensible in 1700 than it had become by 1850. Of course when everyone changes, somebody will always be last.

Just a poijnt of order – Whitney's Cotton Gin only dealt with removal of the sticky seeds from the raw cotton. Physical picking of the cotton balls in the field remained a manual task which did not become successfully mechanized until the 1920s.

With respect to Great Britain, he Empire and Slavery – here is an interesting link – link

B

He was a brilliant man, but sometimes brilliantly wrong, and his ethical standards could be, shall we say, flexible.

Just like any other politician in the past, present, or future.

Wolfhag

Just a poijnt of order – Whitney's Cotton Gin only dealt with removal of the sticky seeds from the raw cotton. Physical picking of the cotton balls in the field remained a manual task which did not become successfully mechanized until the 1920s.

Yes, but it made cotton-growing a profitable enterprise, and, ironically, made slave labor profitable, because slaves (and lots of them) were needed to pick the cotton (back-breaking stoop labor that you could not pay enough to get free people to do).

Incidentally, most slave-owners in the South were all for ending the importation of slaves from Africa, as it made the slaves they already had (or could "produce") more valuable. Supply and demand works in any economic equation.

Why teach about slavery in the Ancient World, in Africa and in the Bible? The reasons obvious:

(1) Well everybody was doing, so it can't be all bad.
(2) 'Murican slaves were treated better than other slaves, (so three chees for Brother Jonathan!)

Are you going to teach that America could have abolished slavery during the Constitutional Convention but chose not to?

Are you going to teach that Jean Lafitte, a hero of New Orleans (three chees for Brother Jonathan!) received a presidential pardon for his involvement in piracy and the slave trade and that he continued to trade in slave after being pardoned?

Are you also going to teach Mexico abolished slavery in 1824 and Sam Houston lobbied hard of over a year to allow Americans to bring slaves in to the province of Texas? Indeed the whole establishment of Texas as an independent Republic is inexorably linked to slavery. Oh wait, 'Merica's children will be saved from that lie (three cheers for Brother Jonathan!)

link

Are you going to teach that American Navy contributed to the West African anti-slavery patrols (three chees for Brother Jonathan!) and forget to mention that in 16 years they captured only 19 ships. The owners of these ships were either acquitted by Southern courts or only lightly fined?

This is a good study on the British role in ending the transatlantic slave trade.

YouTube link

DonLowry, yes.

138, no, they didn't "choose not to" abolish slavery. Politics is the art of the possible. They chose to have a union. And to kick the slavery can down the road, which is standard (though deplorable) political practice. The south would not have joined, otherwise. It is highly unhistorical to impose our current views on them, the more so as our relatively enlightened views (on that subject, anyway) are partly a result of THEIR bad experiences.

As to comparable treatment, it may have more to do with climate, but it is simply a fact that slaves in the southern US lived longer (long enoughh to reproduce) compared to slaves in latin America.

And you are being highly selective in your muster of facts about Texas. There's a good bit more to it. Including the intense interest in and support of Texan independence by Great Britain, which wanted a ready access to cotton (grown by slave labor) that was not behind the United States' tariff wall. :)

But we are certainly glad that we are independent of Britain.

138,, with all due respect, I think we are not going to teach any of your points to an 8 year old. When kids get older they will be exposed to all kinds of info . Hopefully they will have learned how to assess and understand points of view as well as facts and opinions. But at 8 years old, this discussion is dark and inexplicable for most. This speak to the OP.

Those here who desire to compare the institution of slavery as practiced and experienced in the United States against that of the British Empire should go here – link

Once again, those who cast judgments and indictments to the effect that slavery in the United States somehow stood alone on some uniquely evil pedestal of inhumanity to man should start from the whole truth of the matter. Here is a more "candid" presentation of the British approach to ending slavery within the Empire -

> The Emancipation Act of 1833 was for a gradual process of emancipation over time. But protests, often violent in the West Indies, resulted in freedom in 1838. The slave-owners were granted �20 million (about 1 billion today) compensation; all the freed received was the opportunity to labour for the paltry wages that had now to be offered.

> This Act only freed the enslaved in the West Indies, Cape Town, Mauritius and Canada.

> Slavery continued in the rest of the British Empire. The importation of slaves into the British colony of Mauritius, obtained from the French after the Napoleonic Wars, was not stopped until about 1820.

> Emancipation in Britain – The famous decision by Chief Justice Lord Mansfield in 1772 in the case of James Somerset, taken to court by activist Granville Sharp, merely stated that Africans could not be exported from the UK to the West Indies as slaves. There was no consistency in the many court judgments on the legality of slavery in Great Britain.

> The efficacy of the Acts – As there was almost nothing done to ensure that the Acts were obeyed, slave traders continued their activities, as did the shipbuilders. Information about this was sent to Parliament by the abolitionists, some of the captains in the Anti-Slavery Squadrons and British consular officials in slave-worked Cuba and Brazil. Investigations were held, more Acts were passed, but all to no avail, as no means of enforcement was put in place in Britain. All the government did was to set up the Anti-Slavery Squadron – at first comprised of old, semi-derelict naval vessels, unfit for the coastal conditions. To enable them to stop slavers of other nationalities, Britain entered into treaties with other slaving countries. But these were also ignored. The slave trade continued, unabated.

> Britain not only continued to build slaving vessels, but it financed the trade, insured it, crewed some of it and probably even created the many national flags carried by the vessels to avoid condemnation. Britain also manufactured about 80 per cent of the goods traded for slaves on the Coast.

> It was no more difficult to evade the Acts making it illegal for Britons to hold slaves than it was to circumvent the Abolition Act. In India where, according to Sir Bartle Frere (who sat on the Viceroy's Council), there were about 9 million slaves in 1841, slavery was not outlawed till 1868. In other British colonies emancipation was not granted until almost 100 years after the 1833 Emancipation Act: Malaya in 1915; Burma in 1926; Sierra Leone in 1927. The final slave emancipation colonial ordinance I have found is in the Gold Coast archives, and is dated 1928. Britons owned slave-worked mines and plantations and invested in countries which were dependent on slave labour until the 1880s when slavery was finally abolished in the Americas (i.e. Brazil 1888).

I recommend going to the above-reference website and reading the entire essay, as I have only presented the "high points".

Everyone needs to tell the TRUTH about the experience of slavery. Basking in self-serving, cherry-picked propagandized fairy tales while pointing fingers at other nations is a disservice to humanity and history.

- – -

BTW, +1 to Tortorella for his above post. I agree 100pct.

B

Blutarski, THANK YOU!!

Thank you, doc. It is an honor indeed for a Faber College dropout to receive such a compliment from a PhD.

B

If you stay in grad school long enough they sometimes give you one to make you go away.

Napoleon on the teaching of history, from The Mind of Napoleon by JC Herold, 61-62:

'Napoleon in 1807 dictated the following observations concerning a project for establishing a special school for literature and history in the College de France.'

'It is possible to relate history to those sciences which could be taught to good advantage in a specialized school. The way history should be read is, in itself, a real science. Everything has been said and said over again. Apocryphal historians have multiplied, and there is so great a difference between a history written at one period and another history written at a later period with the help of researches and insights of the earlier historians that a man who seeks solid information and who is suddenly put into a large historical library would feel caught in a veritable maze.'

'To know what remains extant of the ancient historians, what has been lost, how to distinguish original fragments from supplements written by good or bad commentators-these things alone almost constitute a science, or at least the object of important studies. Thus acquaintance with and the choice of good historians, reliable memoirs, or true contemporary chronicles form a useful and real branch of knowledge. If in a great capital like Paris there were a specialized school of history, beginning with a course in bibliography, a young man instead of wasting months getting lost in inadequate or unreliable literature would be guided toward the best works and would acquire sounder knowledge by an easier and shorter road.'

'There is, moreover, one section of history that cannot be learned in books-that of the most recent times. No historian ever reaches our times. For a young man of twenty-five, there always is a gap of the fifty years preceding his birth, on which there is no history. This gap creates many difficulties: linking the events of the past to those of the resent requires a great deal of invariably imperfect and sometimes fruitless labor. To bridge this gap would be an important task of the professors in the special school of history.'

'It is easy to guess at my secret intention, which is to bring together scholars who will continue not the history of philosophy, not the history of religion, but the history of facts and who will carry that history down to our times. It is easier for out young people to learn about the Punic Wars than to know something of the American Revolution, which took place in 1783.'

Napoleon on the writing of history, from The Mind of Napoleon by JC Herold, 62-63:

'In 1808 the minister of the interior, Count Cretet, refused subsidies to a historian who wanted to continue the Histoire de France by Velly and others. He justified his refusal on the ground that it was not up to the government to subsidize such private pursuits. Napoleon reversed the decision by the following Note, which he himself dictated.'

'His Majesty does not approve the principles stated by the minister of the interior in his Note. They were true twenty years ago, they will be true again sixty years from now, but they are false today…It is of the utmost importance to make sure that the continuation be written in the right spirit. Youth can judge facts only according to the manner in which they are presented. To deceive it by recalling memories means to lead it into future errors…'

'The writers to whom this project is the be entrusted must possess true talent, to be sure, but they also must be loyal men who will present facts in their true light and who will lay the groundwork for a sound education by continuing these historians from the point where they had stopped and by bringing the history up the the Year VIII [1799-1800].'