Thousands Of White People
Gave Their Lives
To Free Black People
(Quotes from "The Black and White of Racism"
by Waylon Allen)

 

“Actually there was never a time when Chattel Slavery was acceptable to many of the Colonists.

 

The Abolition movement began immediately with the implementation of legal chattel slavery. At a time when there was no way for Africans to effectively object to being enslaved, many people you would consider “White” adamantly objected to the practice and ultimately, in the Civil War, took up arms to abolish Slavery in the new American nation.

 

'The historian James M. McPherson defines an abolitionist "as one who before the Civil War had agitated for the immediate, unconditional, and total abolition of slavery in the United States." He does not include antislavery activists such as Abraham Lincoln or the Republican Party, which called for the gradual ending of slavery.

 

The first attempts to end slavery in the British/American colonies came from Thomas Jefferson and some of his contemporaries. Despite the fact that Jefferson was a lifelong slaveholder, he included strong anti-slavery language in the original draft of the Declaration of Independence, but other delegates took it out. Benjamin Franklin, also a slaveholder for most of his life, was a leading member of the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery, the first recognized organization for abolitionists in the United States. Following the Revolutionary War, Northern states abolished slavery, beginning with the 1777 constitution of Vermont, followed by Pennsylvania's gradual emancipation act in 1780. Other states with more of an economic interest in slaves, such as New York and New Jersey, also passed gradual emancipation laws, and by 1804, all the northern states had abolished it. Some slaves continued in servitude for two more decades but most were freed.

 

Also in the postwar years, individual slaveholders, particularly in the Upper South, manumitted slaves, sometimes in their wills. Many noted they had been moved by the revolutionary ideals of the equality of men. The number of free blacks as a proportion of the black population increased from less than one per cent to nearly ten per cent from 1790 to 1810 in the Upper South as a result of these actions.

 

As President, on 2 March 1807, Jefferson signed the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves and it took effect in 1808, which was the earliest allowed under the Constitution. In 1820 he privately supported the Missouri Compromise, believing it would help to end slavery. He left the anti-slavery struggle to younger men after that.'(28)

 

Ultimately over 600,000 lives, mostly what would now be called “White”, were lost in deciding the issue for our new Nation. An article titled Death and Dying, written by Drew Gilpin Faust for the National Park Service gives a dismal description of the carnage that resulted:

 

'In the middle of the 19th century, the United States entered into a civil war that proved bloodier than any other conflict in American history, a war that would presage the slaughter of World War I’s Western Front and the global carnage of the 20th century.  The number of soldiers who died between 1861 and 1865, generally estimated at 620,000, is approximately equal to the total of American fatalities in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish American War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War, combined.  The Civil War’s rate of death, its incidence in comparison with the size of the American population, was six times that of World War II. A similar rate, about two percent, in the United States today would mean six million fatalities.  As the new southern nation struggled for survival against a wealthier and more populous enemy, its death toll reflected the disproportionate strains on its human capital.  Confederate men died at a rate three times that of their Yankee counterparts; one in five white southern men of military age did not survive the Civil War.  Twice as many Civil War soldiers died from disease as from battle wounds, the result in considerable measure of poor sanitation in an era that created mass armies that did not yet understand the transmission of infectious diseases like typhoid, typhus, and dysentery.

 

These military statistics, however, tell only a part of the story.  The war also killed a significant number of civilians; battles raged across farm and field, encampments of troops spread epidemic disease, guerrillas ensnared women and children in violence and reprisals, draft rioters targeted innocent citizens, and shortages of food in parts of the South brought starvation.  No one sought to document these deaths systematically, and no one has devised a method of undertaking a retrospective count.  The distinguished Civil War historian James McPherson has estimated that there were 50,000 civilian deaths during the war, and has concluded that the overall mortality rate for the South exceeded that of any country in World War I and all but the region between the Rhine and the Volga in World War II.  The American Civil War produced carnage that was often thought to be reserved for the combination of technological proficiency and inhumanity characteristic of a later time." (29)

 

Slavery was finally abolished at a devastating cost for our new Nation.

 

Click Below
To Read Additional Excerpts

From the Book

 

Slavery in Early America:
The Untold Facts

 

White Slaves

 

The Founding Father of Slavery
in Colonial America

 

Black Slave Owners

 

Abolition

And the Cost of Human Lives

in the Civil War

 

REFERENCE

(28)  Abolitionism. Wikipedia. [Online] Wikipedia.org.

(29) Death and Dying by Drew Gilpin Faust. National Park Service. [Online] NPS.gov.

 

 

(The copyrighted text of this excerpt from “The Black and White of Racism” by Waylon Allen (Pages 52 - 55). This quote may be reprinted with an acknowledgement that the material is quoted from the book, The Black and White of Racism, by Waylon Allen)