RE DK 1619 PROJECT PASSAGE

"...As it happens, the suggested reading list cited by Silverstein includes a chapter from a 1961 book by Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution, which also. “In the thirteen colonies neither governors, legislatures nor the courts took official notice of the Mansfield decision, but it was not without influence on American thinking. The decision confirmed the abolitionist views expressed by reformers; it stimulated requests for legislative action against slavery, and hastened its downfall in New England.”  In the next few years, before the revolution, several Massachusetts slaves sued for and won their freedom in court, despite the opposition of the royal governor, Thomas Hutchinson, who also stopped the colonial legislature from outlawing the slave trade, as was done in Connecticut and Massachusetts. In 1774-5, Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia also stopped the importation of slaves. Quarles adds that the revolution, far from reflecting pro-slavery sentiment, stimulated a great deal of anti-slavery thinking, and led when the war was over to the abolition of slavery in the New England states and in Pennsylvania.  Nikole-Jones has the impact of the decision backwards...." DK

Several points need to be made about this discussion:

' "...race prejudice seems stronger in those states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists, and nowhere is it more intolerant than in states where slavery was never known."(A Tocqueville)  Even in the northern states where black citizens theoretically enjoyed equal rights, he reported, they were too afraid to assert them.  Those states that had abolished slavery had done so not to help the black man, but to help the white, both by leaving free labor without the competition of slaves and by eliminating the corrupting influence of owning slaves upon the whites.' DK, 2016 

I will just add a footnote here, to this prior post passage reprinted above. 

Those Northern states that had abolished slavery had done so not only not to help the black man, and to help the white, and not only by leaving free white labor without slave competition, and not only by eliminating the corrupting influence of owning slaves upon whites, but, much more importantly, they did not want negroes around, free or slave, in the North or anywhere else in America.

That is really what Tocqueville had meant in 1830, in the passage DK quoted. (It applies, mutatis mutandis, to circa 1775 and before and after.)

Another point is that we are not talking merely about anti slavery but also more importantly about anti negro or coolie immigration, free or slave. 

One big reason for this is of course racism, which was, is, and will remain endemic. 

With the onset of helter skelter race and civilizational globalization, it is likely in fact to seriously worsen, as we have now already started to see.

Another big reason was and is the threat of labor competition from importation of indigenous, slave, indenture, or free cheap foreign colored labor. 

California barely staved off a huge avalanche of Chinese coolie labor around the time of the Civil War.

Lincoln wasn't kidding when he discussed frankly, as the NYT article recounts only in part, transporting negroes, slave or free elsewhere at Congress' expense, and gave his very valid reasons for so suggesting.