Re: Dr. Albert Schweitzer

 
<snip>


What I wonder is, why do you think that motorcyclists or Nascar fans care?

 
Ironically, NASCAR is fodder for at least one black comedian.

His routine went something like this:

"I always wondered how people could be fascinated with cars going round and
round and round and round.  Then I met some NASCAR fans, and I understood."

Datesfat

 wismel@yahoo.com wrote:


In _Gone With the Wind_ Margaret Mitchell wrote:

   the former field hands ... ran wild -- either from perverse pleasure
   in destruction or simply because of their ignorance.

   freedom became a never-ending picnic, a barbecue every day
   of the week, a carnival of idleness and theft and insolence.
   Country negroes flocked into the cities, leaving the rural districts
   without labor to make the crops. Atlanta was crowded with them
   and still they came by the hundreds, lazy and dangerous as a result
   of the new doctrines being taught them.

   For the first time in their lives the negroes were able to get
   all the whiskey they might want. In slave days, it was something
   they never tasted except at Christmas, when each one received
   a "drap" along with his gift. Now they had not only the Bureau
   agitators and the Carpetbaggers urging them on, but the incitement
   of whiskey as well, and outrages were inevitable. Neither life nor
   property was safe from them and the white people, unprotected by law,
   were terrorized. Men were insulted on the streets by drunken blacks,
   houses and barns were burned at night, horses and cattle and
   chickens stolen in broad daylight, crimes of all varieties were
   committed...

Well what a surprise to learn that the negroes were subject to the same
vices and corruption as white people! I am shocked and amazed.

So then Wismel's quote goes on to say:
 > Never fraternize with them as equals, never accept them as your social
 > equals; or they will devour you; they will destroy you."

It seems to me Wismel forgets that it was *white folks* who dragged
millions of these unwilling people to American shores -- and it wasn't
the Dark Ages, either, it was the Renaissance, supposedly a time
of "enlightenment" and new ideas about freedom, etc. Surely someone
back then was enlightened enough to realize that slavery would become
obsolete sooner or later and then America would have to come to terms
with 4 (now 12) million people who couldn't be denied human rights
indefinitely.

If they were really hurting for farm labour why didn't they just bring
over more draft animals; after all donkeys and oxen bed down quietly
in the barn at night, they don't sneak over to other plantations
or crack corn when the Massa's gone away; and when the first quail calls
they don't run off for Canada by following the Drinking Gourd either.

SQ

 

As I recall, king Louis 14th outlawed slavery in France during his
reign, but when the former slaves in Haiti demanded their rights under
the French Revolution document of The Rights of Man, they were opposed
by the French government.

Napoleon even considered reinstituting slavery...

Surely someone

On the American shores, the Founding Fathers realized that they were
making a "deal with the Devil" when they compromised with the South
over slavery to get them to join the union.

The half dozen northern colonies desperately *needed* the South to be
in the Union for mutual defense, as the British could have easily
reconquered the South.

James Michener wrote an excellent popularization of the evolution of
the Constitution of the US, it's called "Legacy".

The institution of slavery in America probably could have been ended
without a
disastrous civil war. It probably could have been peacefully ended by,
say, 1880.

Brazil had a similar history with ending slavery, and it was over by
about 1880.

 ¿ wrote:


I'd like to know more about this quote from John J. Chapman; what work
it's from or what the occasion was when he said it: "There was never
a moment in our history when slavery was not a sleeping serpent. It was
coiled up under the table in the deliberations of the Constitutional
Convention. Owing to the cotton gin it was more than half awake.
Thereafter, slavery was on everyone's mind though not always on his
tongue."


They also needed a few other things, like a year-round growing season.


"Easily"??? The Yanks didn't find it all that easy.


I believe a peaceful secession was more likely than a peaceful
emancipation. If the Montgomery gov't hadn't fired on the fort
they'd have had their Confederacy by a _fait accomplis_.

SQ