The slavery they didn't tell us about

History is trickier than it looks...

I have been a docent at the Harriet Beecher Stowe house in Cincinnati for about two years, now.  (Yes, there’s also a Harriet Beecher Stowe house in Hartford, CT.) Harriet wrote ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ and, before eyes glaze over and you click to something else, pay a little attention:  I already knew a fair amount about the nineteenth century, slavery, and the civil war.  In the last two years, I’ve learned a lot more.

Living in Cincinnati is significant in that regard.  Few people, even in Cincinnati, know that Cincinnati was the sixth largest city in the USA at the time of the civil war. It was the first major inland city in the USA, all the others being on the Atlantic coast. The state of Ohio was partitioned out of the Northwest Territory, which had been chartered in the very late eighteenth century as non-slave.  That means that the states partitioned, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota were all free (non-slave) states.  That means that Cincinnati was a free city.

But right across the river from Cincinnati is Kentucky, which WAS a slave state. And all states going south from there were slave.  Cincinnati was an important trading city, importing and exporting between north and south.  It was arguably more important in that regard than any of those cities on the Atlantic coast.

While slavery was initially legal in all states, it had little popularity in the northern states or in cities such as Boston, New York, and Philadelphia.  But slavery became entrenched in Southern cities such as Charleston, New Orleans, Memphis and Atlanta. With slavery in all the states, why have a civil war over slavery? Because the north was driving slavery out of existence in all of the northern states, while the southern states were entrenching themselves more and more in a slave economy.

Few people seem to realize that, early on, slavery was THE point of contention facing the recently formed federal government. No, it was not some afterthought that people sort-of forgot to think about. THE point of contention.

Harriet’s father was originally from Hartford. Her father, Lyman Beecher moved with his family to Cincinnati to take the position of president at the newly formed Lane Seminary. That was in 1832. The entire Beecher family, men and women, were abolitionist/anti-slave activists.  Most were prolific writers.

Now, imagine you’re Harriet.  You’ve grown up in Harford, which was a very old, established city.  Slavery is legal in name only, there.  Chances are, Harriet never saw a slave in Hartford. Connecticut outlawed slavery in 1848. Yes, the Beecher family is abolitionist/anti-slave, but what slaves were they going to free?  There were nearly none in Connecticut.

Then the family moved to Cincinnati.  Talk about culture shock! Cincinnati was a thriving, raucous young city, growing by leaps and bounds. And there were slaves.  How are slaves possible in a free city in a free state? Because it was common for Kentucky slaves to cross the river, either with their master, or even sent separately to do the master’s business. Federal law had established that slaves were still slaves in a free state, if they were owned by a master in a slave state.

Cincinnati was at least somewhat violent.  It was a clash of cultures, in which many were supportive of slavery, and many were abolitionists.  Cincinnati had perhaps more race riots than any other city of the nineteenth century.

There were free blacks in Cincinnati.  They had their own neighborhoods, poor though they were.  They had no equivalent of that in Hartford.  Harriet got an education, and not just in school. She crossed into Kentucky and saw a slave auction. She interacted with both slaves and their masters.  She interacted with abolitionists. She interacted with free blacks.

Harriet published ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ in 1852, initially serialize in an abolitionist newspaper.

And here’s what all this is getting to:  The common mythology of today is that whites were all racist bigots and slave owners.  We seldom hear different. The civil war, the deadliest war in American history, is all but ignored. We are, frankly, being lied to, misled.  Many teachers are disseminating disinformation and misinformation.  Did you think that only ‘conservatives’ do that?

Here’s something to consider. ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ put human faces on the slaves.  Northerners in those northern cities on the Atlantic coast were opposed to slavery, but it was all academic.  Harriet made it visceral.  Harriet made it real, and ugly, and intolerable to people who previously had opposed slavery only in a passive way. There became a groundswell of vocal opposition to slavery, and it would not die down.

For those who think that nineteenth century Americans were stodgy, racist slave owners, consider this: ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ was the best selling book, after the Bible, of the ENTIRE CENTURY. It sold around the world, in multiple languages.

The concept of individual freedom, the right of a person to claim liberty in its own right, hasn’t been a fact of life forever.  The concept developed as part of the Age of Enlightenment, starting perhaps a hundred years before “Uncle Tom’s Cabin’.  In times before, when individual liberty and self-determination was essentially unheard of, slavery was more acceptable. Harriet wrote the right book at the right time.  She rode a wave of feeling that Divine Right of Kings was bullshit, and that citizens have a right to dominion over our own lives. The nineteenth century was good for that. And that meant people were ready for ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ and a rejection of the millennia-old custom of slavery. There is quite a history to slavery.  It’s not as simple as you think.

But while northerners were ready to take on the scourge of slavery, southerners, not so much.  Why? Culturally it’s quite complex.  In the simplest terms I can think of, southerners adhered to the age-old aristocratic practices of feudalism.  Slavery fit right in. Northerners are the ones who rejected every bit of the practice of feudalism, not just slavery.  And the rest, as they say, is history.

Are there parallels today? Are we divided into freedom loving, self-determining enlightened individuals on the one hand, and aristocratic feudalists on the other hand?  Hell, yes! There are those of us who insist on enlightened self-determination, and there are those of us who believe in top-down feudalism.  There are those of us who follow no one, and there are those of us who ‘know their place’, submitting unquestioningly to the people who claim dominion over them.

The KKK effectively disappeared over a century ago.  But what happened to its members? They couldn’t have just disappeared.  Democrat history teachers say they became republicans, as part of Nixon’s ‘Southern Strategy’.  And yet, the KKK is gone.  Its leaders stayed democrat, with the one exception of Strom Thurmond. David Duke switched parties, but the republican party wanted nothing to do with him.

No, the KKK never became republican.  The KKK became progressives.  The KKK is still democrat, but with a different name and a revised strategy. Progressives, like the KKK before them, are feudalists at heart.  They reject individual self-determination in favor of lock-step servitude to their masters.

Don’t think so? Consider.  Who are the progressives?  Are they not the ones who are entirely dependent on government for their livelihood, just as slaves and serfs were in the past?  Are progressives not the ones who never develop a thought from their individual minds; who ’think’ whatever they’re told to think?  Who hate whoever they’re told to hate, and revere whoever they’re told to revere? Who staunchly support whatever they’re told to support, even to the point of absurdity?

If you are a progressive, do you not believe that essentially ALL whites are irrepressible bigots, essentially unable to break themselves of the habit? Do you not think that blacks are victims, hopelessly unable to act individually?! Do you not hate Clarence Thomas for not thinking the way he’s been told to think?  How DARE he be his own man?!

My ancestors, and my wife’s ancestors, fought to FREE the slaves. How bigoted is that?  My great great grandfather took a bullet through his hand at Bull Run, fighting to free the slaves.  My wife’s great great grandfather was killed at Antietam, fighting to free the slaves.

Slavery did not die a natural death.  It was exterminated at the point of a gun. People, my ancestors for instance, paid with their bodies and their lives the cost of eliminating slavery.

There’s a lot of history after the civil war.  There is continued strife between essentially the same parties as before the war. It is not over. But I will not have my name, and the names of my wife’s and my ancestors besmirched as racist because some people can’t be bothered to learn some of the most significant history of this nation.

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