Category: Slavery

Jefferson-Jackson Day no more?

The Democratic and Republican Parties each hold annual fundraisers that, while they attract big names—including sitting presidents—go mostly under the public radar. The Republicans have Lincoln Day, and the Democrats have Jefferson-Jackson Day.

Each event is named for founders of each party. Clearly Lincoln was the first Republican president, but it’s harder to claim  that Jefferson was the first Democratic president. His party was called the Democratic-Republican party, but it did not have much in common with the modern Democratic Party, which didn’t really come into being until 1828, when supporters of Andrew Jackson who were enraged over his loss in the 1824 presidential campaign decided to scrap the Democratic-Republican Party and form a new party. It became an increasingly proslavery party during the 1830s and 40s, and was solidly proslavery by 1850.

And that’s the problem with Jefferson-Jackson Day and the J-J dinners held in every state in Spring or Fall: some people (including the NAACP) have begun to question the wisdom of continuing to associate the modern-day Democratic Party with two men who were unapologetic slaveholders, each of whom also did a lot to alienate and destroy American Indian populations. Connecticut, Florida, Iowa and others have already renamed their dinners, and other state Democratic parties are considering it. There has been predictable outrage over this from conservative spokespeople, who see it as political correctness gone wrong, and who urge us to remember that no one is perfect, and that our national history is filled with people who did good things for the nation while holding views that we can no longer accept.

When the “view” you’re holding is proslavery, it’s hard to defend this rationalist point of view. It posits the idea that there was ever a time when people did not know that enslaving human beings was very bad for the enslaved, did not know that it was always done sheerly to make money at any cost, did not understand that it was deliberately designed to destroy the humanity of the enslaved and turn them into animals bred and raised for stock.

There was never a time when slavery was not fully understood as a complete negative. This doesn’t mean there was never a time when people lied to themselves and others by claiming it had its good points, was bad but sadly necessary, was supported by religion, civilization, and tradition, etc. In fact, the present day is one of those times, as slavery is of course still going on unapologetically in many parts of the world and secretly in others.

We think it’s a good idea to rename the Jefferson-Jackson Day and Dinner in every state, and it would be wonderful if each state came up with different people to name them for, people whom we can celebrate without reservation. Each state has them—sometimes people say it’s impossible to find someone from “the past” who was fully honorable, but of course that’s not true. So get busy in your own state and nominate suitable heroes to name the Day and Dinner for!

Pro-Confederate is anti-American

No need to do much more than to point you to James Loewen’s frank article: Why do people believe myths about the Confederacy?

But we will go ahead and also point you to our own posts on this topic: Amazing Fact: The Civil War was fought over slavery, What made the north and south different before the Civil War?, and Slavery leads to secession, secession leads to war.

The Confederate States of America were founded with the sole purpose of perpetuating black slavery. There is nothing heroic in that. The men who created the Confederacy did not care about states’ rights—they had repeatedly demanded that states’ rights be trampled by forcing northern states that had abolished slavery to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act, by going into territories and voting that they enter the Union as slave states even though they were not residents of that territory, by terrorizing residents who wanted to vote anti-slavery, and by taking enslaved people into free states and forcing the free state residents to endure that slavery.

Soldiers of the Confederacy were not heroes. The old argument that most of them were poor and were not slaveholders is meaningless: they fought to protect their land and their governments, which meant protecting the slave system and the slave aristocracy that governed their land. If they won the war, those poor, non-slaveholding soldiers would have allowed slavery to keep going. They knew that. You can’t cherry-pick motives and focus on the heartwarming “they fought to keep their families safe” motive and ignore the chilling “the soldiers didn’t care if black Americans were enslaved as long as they kept their land” motive.

Secession was not allowed in the Constitution. There is no place in it that makes secession legal. So founding the Confederacy was the most anti-American action in our history.

It’s high time we became as tough on Confederacy worship as the Confederates were on America, democracy, and states’ rights.

The Atlantic Slave Trade in Two Minutes

We have to interrupt our series on the Bill of Rights to share this with you. This astounding animation by Andrew Kahn and Jamelle Bouie shows all of the slave ships that left Africa for the Americas between 1546 and 1860. Larger dots are larger ships.

You see that until about 1600, almost all of the ships went to the north coast of South America and the Caribbean islands. Then Brazil becomes a destination, and that’s really how it continues right through the end: Brazil and the Caribbean like some horrible magnets drawing slave ships. Conversely, from today’s Senegal to Angola, the west African coast literally has the life  sucked out of it as dots fly and fly for centuries from its shores.

Surprisingly, through the 1600s the main and almost only destination for slave ships going to today’s United States is what is now the Washington, DC/Chesapeake Bay area. Only a fraction head directly for the Carolinas. After 1750, the already heavy traffic picks up even more, and the Atlantic is almost blotted out by slave ships. Now slave ships are heading directly to the Carolinas, and, unexpectedly, the number of slave ships heading to French Canada picks up tremendously. The American Revolution slows things down remarkably—it was Britain running the bulk of the slave trade at this point, and its focus on the war meant a big loss in profits from the slave trade. But a thin stream of ships still heads relentlessly to the sugar islands of the Caribbean. As soon as the war ends, the traffic resumes at its original density.

Then it’s 1808, and the U.S. withdrawal from the slave trade shows in the complete lack of ships heading to the Atlantic seaboard. Even the number heading to the Caribbean falls, and Brazil is left as an insatiable market for the hundreds and hundreds of ships leaving Africa.

A lull in the 1820s is followed by an upswing in the 1830s and 40s, and then the traffic trails off to a few sporadic seasons, and then we end in 1860. Nearly 16,000 ships carrying human beings to slavery have crossed the ocean. Brazil would not abolish slavery until 1888, the last of the Latin American nations to do so.

Many, many thanks to Kahn and Bouie for doing this work and putting it in a form that is instantly clear and powerful. Viewing this resource leaves you with a sick feeling, and a strong sense of never being able to make up for all those lives lost. But we can and must work every day to undo the damage of black slavery in our own countries by ending the racism that is its strongest legacy. And we can work to end the slavery of Africans and Asians that is ongoing today.