[those benevolent Christian slave owners]
The Christians didn't bring the slaves here, but once they were here, somebody had to take them in.
Naturally, good Christians treated slaves better than bad Christians.
They were making the best of a bad situation.
You have to think.
If the slaves went free, then where would they go? To the North, heaven forbid?
It was bad for blacks anywhere in America.
Still, many Christians assisted slaves in becoming literate, in buying their freedom, and in being able to support themselves in the New World.
Regarding the North and other solutions...
Christian Southerners reacted to the African immigrants on a human level.
Southerners shared resources and depended on each other for survival.
The African immigrants also understood family, tribes, bonding, and kinship.
Northerners, however, turned to money as the solution, in a very unChristian manner.
Northerners expected everyone to open a bank account or withdraw some insurance money to solve their problems.
12 comments
Somebody "had to take them in," meaning had to purchase them, force them to work for life, flog them if they didn't work hard enough, sell their children, and murder them for trying to escape? They had to do that?
They couldn't, for instance, buy them and then immediately free them? Or, free them after some time, free their children, let them keep their children, not flog them, not murder them, pay them money, etc.?
Who was holding a gun to their heads?
" The Christians didn't bring the slaves here, but once they were here, somebody had to take them in. "
Huh.
When the discussion is about the laws of the land, this is a Christain nation, founded on Christain principles, predominantly Christain citizens.
Somehow, then, Atheists, deists, or maybe Mormons made Slavery the law of the land, set up the slave trade, slipped it into the Constitution, configured the whole economy of the South around it, and the CHRISTAINS of this CHRISTAIN NATION were completely uninvolved, and unable to stop it.
Sure. Makes sense.
Nope, that's just straight up historical revisionism at its worst. The Confederacy actually used religious reasons to argue for slavery. And it wasn't for nothing that so many former slaves fled to the "oh-so-evil-and-unchristian" north. Oh and what about the freaking war that broke out because CHRISTIAN slave owners didn't want to lose their "god-given" right to their slaves? Sure, there were also christians who helped former slaves (mostly in the northern states), but denying that christians were only ever "benevolent slave owners" is dumb at best and maliciously untrue at worst. Saying that as a christian myself.
If the slaves went free, then where would they go? To the North, heaven forbid?
What do you think they did, where did they go, when they escaped???
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_Railroad
Holy shit, this is either a Poe, or the person who's the most ignorant of basic US history I've ever seen.
The Christians didn't bring the slaves here, but once they were here, somebody had to take them in.
Naturally, good Christians treated slaves better than bad Christians.
They were making the best of a bad situation.
Are you kidding me? This makes it sound like they took them in, cared for them, and in return had them do a few chores around the farm. Nobody would have been capturing slaves and shipping them across an ocean if there weren't a market for them.
If the slaves went free, then where would they go? To the North, heaven forbid?
It was bad for blacks anywhere in America.
Then why did all the escaped slaves want to go North?
Christian Southerners reacted to the African immigrants on a human level.
Except for, you know, actually owning them and forming the Confederacy with a constitution which outright stated that blacks were inferior.
The African immigrants also understood family, tribes, bonding, and kinship.
Which is why they really hated it when their spouses or children were taken from them and sold to another plantation owner.
Northerners, however, turned to money as the solution, in a very unChristian manner.
Northerners expected everyone to open a bank account or withdraw some insurance money to solve their problems.
Not even sure what this has to do with slavery other than trying to say, "Owning people as property wasn't as bad as raising taxes on people."
If you want to read something really disgusting, take a look at this Civil War era pamphlet "proving" that Negroes are not human and were created to be slaves:
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage
This is an old, tired argument. Southerners have been creating a moral equivalency between Northern "wage slavery" and the "more humane" patriarchal practices of the South for centuries. Westerners sometimes use a modified version of the same argument to demonize the "big city civilization" they ran away from.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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