This book explores white bondage and convict labor in colonial America, and to some extent in the West Indies.
This is a subject which almost no white Americans are even remotely aware of, as their collective ancestor heritage.
They think they were all free white Europeans, who emigrated here with money in their pockets and a twinkle in their eye!
Jefferson himself alluded to one of the best reasons why black slave labor supplanted white bondage: it was profitable. Slave offspring were property, whereas bond servants, if they survived, were eventually free, and their offspring, if any, during bondage, were not property of the master anyway.
See: Smithsonian Magazine, Henry Wiencek, "Unmasking Thomas Jefferson", October 2012, p. 40.
Another crucial reason why black slave labor gradually supplanted white bondage labor was also a reason based on profitability, or, in many cases, merely of survival of the master's own source of a meager rural living, hand to mouth in many cases.
That reason is survivability of black workers over white workers in coastal plantation conditions.
A third reason was that if a servant was misused, he might try to make his way to a magistrate to seek equitable rights he theoretically enjoyed as a subject of the Crown; this option was not open to slaves.
It had absolutely nothing to do with any theory of the white man's desire to enslave the black man, merely because he was a lower race. Although they fully believed he was a lower race, it was not their reason.
It also had nothing to do with qualms or reluctance on the part of whites to place as many fellow whites into bondage, and to work them as hard as slaves, as were needed at the time.
If it had been more profitable for white men to place more white men into servitude, rather than to enslave ever more blacks or to enslave fewer, do you think the American colonists, both planters and city dwellers, would have hesitated for a moment to do so?
LINCOLN, ALSO JEFFERSON MADISON CLAY, WAS AND REMAINED A COLONIZATIONIST
'In fact colonizationism took precedence over emancipation.' Gideon Welles on Lincoln, see Magness Page, p 108, 109.
As I have pointed out here, his whole political career resonated with this colonization theme.
Emancipation during the Civil War, without having first placed immediate colonization plans on a firm and agreed political footing, especially within his own party, was Lincoln's own special personal blunder, among other really big ones.
My suspicion is that the only way he might have gotten cooperation for such plans in our fragmented system, was to have threatened to halt the war, in its very midst, declare an armistice, treaty agreeing to secession, or something else, unless an agreed, firmly established, and multi year plan for colonization were first hammered out by Congress and agreed by him.
The other huge point to make (Clausewitz or whatever):
Why even embark on a war which, even if you quote ' win ', you cannot then achieve the outcome (colonization) which you most intended to achieve? See George Julian's remark, Magness and Page, p 109, re if he had known colonization would not work whether his preliminary notice to the rebels would have given.
After all, Lincoln had won the war, before he was killed, yet no colonization plan, whatsoever, worthy of the name had ever been firmly put in place and agreed by Congress.
In fact, the opposite was where it stood when he died.
Further, the decision to recruit blacks as Union soldiers violated Lincoln's own principles, and made the whole project for colonization difficult to carry forward. By the end of the war, there were about 100,000 of these, who had been armed.
Lincoln expressed concern that these freed trained and armed ex slaves might then go back into the south and commence a race war there. One wonders why he didn't think of these things before that time.
Nevertheless the Civil War outcome was nothing whatever like what he had hoped for:
"I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races,-- that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifyling them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality." Abraham Lincoln, 4th Debate.
"With no hope of making its views prevail through law, the South seceded...." DK
Looking again at his text, it seems to me that white southerners, hardly the only whites worried about negroes, either slave or free, would have been less worried about law, through which it seems to me that they had very well been able to make their views prevail by a majority in Congress, with for example the Kansas Nebraska Act, which overruled and supplanted the Missouri Compromise quite apart from Dred Scott also ruling it unconstitutional. It seems to me that that was plenty of law on their side.
They had certainly been able to make their views prevail, consistently with well founded judicial interpretation of the Constitution, in Dred Scott.
So what was it that caused them to secede, hardly out of legal or judicial hopelessness, but perhaps out of justifiable concern? It was the branch implacably, irrationally, against them, the one branch which they now could not control, Lincoln's.
Lincoln's new Republican Party was founded on a supposedly originalist basis, 'originalism on steroids', to use Professor Kaiser's term. See Douglas' quotation from the Second Resolution from the first Republican Mass State Convention in Illinois in 1854, Debates, p 48, ";to bring the administration of the government back to first principles;...".
What Lincoln's originalism on steroids actually is, in reality, however, is Butterfield's Whiggism on steroids.
The actual views of the founders regarding negroes as citizens or subjects were those summarized and expressed by Justice Taney, not by Lincoln and the Republican Party, as even someone like Bobbitt has readily acknowledged.
In a sense, then, Lincoln and Trump may turn out to be the two most momentous, and in some ways similar, presidencies, for analogous tragic, doctrinaire, and irrational reasons.
Maybe they each, in their way, are rather Alcibiades figures.
Make America One again. A house divided cannot stand....
Make America great again.
