African Slavery and the Civil War

7/28/2019 African Slavery and the Civil War

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African Slavery and the Civil War: There aretwo sides to the StoryPosted by fahim knight at 00:22, 08 Dec 2012African Slavery and the Civil War: There are two sides to the Story; Here is a Black

mans perspective

By Fahim A. Knight-El

I was looking for a way and entry into writing and presenting this Blog in order to paint

a historical picture about my views on African Slavery and the Civil War. This article

sprung from two prior articles that I had recently written dealing with the States

petitioning the United States Government for the right to secede from the Unionthose

articles can be linked athttp://fahimknightsworld.blogspot.com/20...and the second

article can be linked at:http://fahimknightsworld.blogspot.com/20.... And I then

looked to the right of my computer and in my home I have this really nice portrait of

Fredrick Douglass and simanteously one of his most memorable and controversial

speeches came to mind: What to the Slave is the Fourth of July; so I only find it

fitting to open this discussion with a quote from that speech by Douglass delivered over

160 years ago.

I have read many mind altering and life changing speeches by Marcus Garvey, Booker

T. Washington, Elijah Muhammad, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Minister Louis Farrakhan,

Huey P. Newton, Minister Malcolm X, Kwame Ture, and any other great black orator

that you could ever think of; nevertheless, Douglass speech on the meaning of the 4th

of July is unmatched by any of them. Just keep this in mind, Douglass was saying what

Minister Louis Farrakhan is saying in 2012; he was speaking these decisive political and

social views in 1852. Here is a small segment of Douglass speech:

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him,

more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelly to which he is the

constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholylicense; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty

and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of

liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and

thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere

bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisya thin veil to cover up crimes which
http://www.dailygrail.com/blogs/fahim-knight/2012/12/African-Slavery-and-the-Civil-War-There-are-two-sides-the-Storyhttp://www.dailygrail.com/blogs/fahim-knight/2012/12/African-Slavery-and-the-Civil-War-There-are-two-sides-the-Storyhttp://fahimknightsworld.blogspot.com/2012/11/seceding-from-union-how-dothe.htmlhttp://fahimknightsworld.blogspot.com/2012/11/seceding-from-union-how-dothe.htmlhttp://fahimknightsworld.blogspot.com/2012/11/seceding-from-union-how-dothe.htmlhttp://fahimknightsworld.blogspot.com/2012/11/forty-states-desire-to-secede-from.htmlhttp://fahimknightsworld.blogspot.com/2012/11/forty-states-desire-to-secede-from.htmlhttp://fahimknightsworld.blogspot.com/2012/11/forty-states-desire-to-secede-from.htmlhttp://fahimknightsworld.blogspot.com/2012/11/forty-states-desire-to-secede-from.htmlhttp://fahimknightsworld.blogspot.com/2012/11/seceding-from-union-how-dothe.htmlhttp://www.dailygrail.com/blogs/fahim-knight/2012/12/African-Slavery-and-the-Civil-War-There-are-two-sides-the-Storyhttp://www.dailygrail.com/blogs/fahim-knight/2012/12/African-Slavery-and-the-Civil-War-There-are-two-sides-the-Story


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would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of

practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this

very hour.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies anddespotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and

when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of

this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless

hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.

Let me first make the most important premise in which we must first understand that

Chattel Slavery was evil and an immoral institution and even in 2012, we still cannot

fully assess the inhumanness and the wealth this illegal cargo accumulative for the

wicked profiteers. Most American historians begin slavery with the date of 1619 whenthe Dutch initially imported African slaves to the English colony of Jamestown, Virginia

(but what they do not tell you that it was this 64 year period that made dignified

Africans into Negroes). But the first African slaves actually arrived to the Americas and

the United States in 1555 on a slave ship named Jesus of Lubeck also known as the

'good ship Jesus' piloted by Sir John Hawkins (Some have traced this interchangeable

name to John Hopkins; the name of John Hopkins University in Baltimore). The slave

ship Jesus was a 700-ton ship purchased by King Henry VIII from the Hanseatic

League, a merchant alliance between the cities of Hamburg and Lubeck in Germany.

Twenty years after its purchase the ship, in disrepair, was leant to Sir John Hawkins by

Queen Elizabeth. Yisraylite stated: Hawkins, a cousin of Sir Francis Drake, was granted

permission from Queen Elizabeth for his first voyage in 1562. He was allowed to carry

Africans to the Americas "with their own free consent" and he agreed to this condition.

Hawkins had a reputation for being a religious man who required his crew to "serve God

daily" and to love one another. Sir Francis Drake accompanied Hawkins on this voyage

and subsequent others. Drake, was himself, devoutly religious. Services were held on

board twice a day.

The Portuguese prior to Great Britain getting involved in the African slave trade were

the first maritime slavers who took a very small number of West African slaves to

Lisbon, Portugal and introduced African slaves as a commodity (but more like

Indentured Servants in which the Portuguese were amazed by their physical

endurance). The Catholic Church under Pope Alexander VI (1493) and later Bishop


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Bartholomew Las Casas (1517) religiously blessed and sanctioned slavery in which the

Spanish and Portuguese were initially at the forefront of the African Slave trade.

They also signed the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 legally sanctioning the greatest

strategy designed to carryout Western imperialismliterally believing that they had thepower and authority and most of the divine right to divide the world up between two

white European nations. Spain and Portugal in addition, signed the Papal Bull of

Demarcation where these two nations drew and imaginary line dividing the world

between these two European powers. Spain was awarded all the territories in the so-

called "New World" interpreted to meaning all the lands in the Caribbean, Central and

South America with the exception of Brazil were awarded to Spain under King

Ferninand V and Queen Isabella 1 rule.

I purchased a small book over ten years ago titled: "Slavery and Catholicism" authoredby Richard Roscoe Miller, which was ironically published by North State Publishers in

Durham, Carolina in 1957. This publishing company is probably defunct, but this was

one of the best sources on the Catholic Church role in slavery that I have ever read.

These signings led to the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the Middle Passage where

anywhere between 15 million to 100 million Africans were transferred (as human cargo)

by force to the Western Hemisphere (Minister Khallid Abdul Muhammad and Dr. John

Henrik Clarke would often referred to it as the 'black holocaust'); Dr. Clarke documents

this in his book titled: "Christopher Columbus and the African Holocaust". Dr. W.E.B.

Dubois in his monumental book titled, "The suppression of the African slave-trade to

the United States of America, 1638-1870" estimated that 7-9 million Africans (most

Afrocentric historians would view Dubois numbers as being conservative) were sold into

bondage in which this research served as Dubois PH.d dissertation and for those who

might not know that Dubois was the first African American to earn a PH.d from Harvard

University in 1895.

Yet, even prior to slavery in the Antebellum South it was the MassachusettsPlymouth

Rock (remember the famous slogan of Minister Malcolm X who said we did not land on

Plymouth Rock, But Plymouth Rock landed on us) in around the Boston area where

Chattel Slavery begin to flourish (so initially slavery was a Northern institution before

the Mason-Dixon line was drawn; I am referencing the early 1600s) and although

slavery was a primary southern institution, but many northern slave investors, brokers

and financers were heavily involved in the business side of slavery. Historian C. Vann

Woodard in 1955 wrote an interesting book titled: "The Strange Career of Jim Crow"


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where he maintained that Jim Crow was more of a northern phenomenon, than a

southern institution (Woodard was challenging the notion that the north was more

liberal and less racist towards black people). Also, J.A. Rogers in his book titled,

"Africa's Gift to America" maintained that before Abraham Lincoln passed the

Emancipation Proclamation in 1862; blacks had already started to rebel against the

institution of slavery, thus, there were internal tension festering between white slave

plantation owners and black slaves who desired to be free.

Perhaps one of the most famous slave rebellions took place in 1831, in SouthHampton

County Virginia under the leadership of Nat Turner in which Turner believed that God

had spoken to him in which he was given the mission and vision to liberate the slaves

and he and some other slaves went on killing spree to free themselves from the yoke of

slavery; killing slave masters, plantation owners and their families indiscriminately.

Turner and his men were eventually subdued, but not after they had killed hundreds of

white plantation owners. Turner was eventually caught and hung. And there were other

prior rebellions such as in 1739 the Stono (named after the Stono River) Rebellion near

Charleston, South Carolina led by a slave named Cato or Jemmy this was supposed to

have been one of the largest organized slave insurrections in American history. Thus,

after the Stono rebellion was squashed by a white militia which led to the hanging and

decapitation of many of the slaves who participated in the Stono Rebellion.

I was given a book titled, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America it

literally brought tears to my eyes as I surveyed these pictures of blacks who were

lynched in the United States. The events of the Stono Rebellion led to 1740 passing of

the Negro Act which essentially prohibited Africans from being imported directly from

Africa into South Carolina because the white plantation owners and slave masters

believed that during this time period of the African slave trade that many would be

African slaves had military training due to the many internal civil wars on the continent

and this posed a threat to their rule based on these slaves fighting ability who were

being transported to southern slave ports. Historian Herbert Aptheker In his book

American Negro Slave Revolts (1943), estimates that over 250 slave rebellionsoccurred in the United States between 1619 and 1865.

Many do not know that there was only one successful slave revolt that took place in the

Western Hemisphere and that took place in Haiti which 1804 this black island nation

became sovereign and independent of white rule. The Africans of Haiti fought the

French and became the first black independent Republic in the Western Hemisphere;


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thanks to great generals and military tacticians such as: Toussaint L'Ouverture, Jean-

Jacques Dessalines, Henri Christophe, Alexandre Petiongreat Black Haitian

revolutionaries. I am a constant visitor to the historic District Savannah, Georgia (one

of the largest slave ports on the eastern seaboard, perhaps where my African ancestors

were kidnapped and sold as slaves in the United States. But a few years ago my sister-

in-law Benita Gamble and Brother Jabari Moketsi was spearheading my wife's side of

the family reunion, which was the Dunlaps in which the venue took place in Beaufort,

South Carolina Low Country. It was by far one of the best family reunions that I had

ever attendedrelative to my wifes side of the family; I do not eat shell fish, as far as

crabs, shrimp, oysters, lobsters, scallops, crow fish and frogmore stew, etc., (this was

one of the main delicacy in South Carolina Low Country). My sister-in-law had brought

this brother in from Savannah, Georgia named Brother Jamal Toure (Savannah is about

45 miles from Beaufort) as a presenter to do a retracing of their family genealogy (itwas a beautiful thing to hear and seethis was show and prove at its best.

Brother Toure owns and operates Day Cleaning Touring Company and he specializes in

African American (although I use this ethnic term and racial classification he and I know

this to be a misnomer because we are not African American, but we are still in search of

a nationality) tours in Savannah (Do not go to Savannah unless you look up Brother

Jamal Amir Toure his tour is worth the price of admission). Nevertheless, it is often the

ties of relationships that has the potential to expand our horizon and at times helps us

to further connect the dots. Brother Toure as our tour guide took us to Franklin Squarewhere there is a beautiful royal bronze monument which is dedicated to the free Haitian

soldiers in which in 1779 according to historical records 500 of them joined the

American colonist in an unsuccessful attempt to drive the British from Savannah in

coastal Georgia.

Writer Russ Bynum a writer for South Florida Times in an online article titled,

Monument Dedicated to Haitian Soldiers in the American Revolution quoted Daniel

Fils-Aime as stating: This is a testimony to tell people we Haitians didn't come from

the boat, said Daniel Fils-Aime, chairman of the Miami-based Haitian AmericanHistorical Society, one of many Haitian Americans who came to Savannah for the

dedication. We were here in 1779 to help America win independence. That recognition

is overdue. America not only owes black folk a debt of gratitude, but the Island nation

of Haiti should be treated with the utmost political dignity and diplomacy, as opposed to

with contempt by the United States Governmentthey are still punishing Haiti for


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defeating Napoleon Bonaparte and this is why Haiti has remained the poorest country in

the Western Hemisphere.

The bronze monument depicting black patriotism and heroism is a testimony of loyalty

and bravery that is often overlooked in these racist discussions of patriotism and libertydiscussionthat is now rooted in the recent secession debates. I do know that the

Confederate and Unionist, perhaps viewed the history of the Civil War entirely different

yesterday and today. Randall Robinson former head of TransAfrica authored three very

good books titled, An "Unbroken Agony: Haiti, from Revolution to the Kidnapping of a

President", "The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks" and "Quitting America" all three

are must reads and 1829 David Walker wrote his "Walker's Appeal, in Four Articles;

Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and

Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America, Written in Boston, State of

Massachusetts, September 28, 1829" .

So there was growing social tension amongst some of the slaves who desired to be free

by any means necessary. Most of this has been documented by American historian

Kenneth Stamp in his book titled, "Peculiar Institution" and Stanely Elkins' book titled,

"Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life". So I believe the

Civil War (1861-1865) was inevitable and it was going to happen whether it was Lincoln

or some other social or political phenomenon (the quest for black freedom was starting

to rise as a social antagonistic contradiction). However, Lincoln was extremely

intelligent, he knew that if he so-called freed slaves in the South this would serve as a

strategic and tactical political maneuver employed as an objective of weakening the

South; although the South in theory had already succeeded from the Union and Lincoln

had no jurisdiction and/or power and authority over the governance of Southyet both

sides, the North and South used the black slave as a political football.

I think many black and white historians have depicted President Abraham Lincoln as

this great emancipator, philanthropist and humanitarian who passed what appeared on

the surface to be positive slave legislation, but in reality, Lincoln's motive was to cripple

the South economically and incite blacks to become disrupted, which would ultimately

affect an agriculture economy that functioned off slave labor. The Aristocratic white

property owners incited poor white Confederates by imparting a false sense of white

pride, which was rooted in the ideology of white supremacy and they had a mandate

from god to ensure that Black slaves remained their property who was considered


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unequal to whites and according to the language in the U.S. Constitution; blacks were

considered 3/5 of a human being.

The Confederates built a racist patriotic theme of why they were going to warto so-

called defend their sovereignty, but beneath this argument and rationale was tomaintain slavery which was rooted in racism and economicsthis part of the equation

even in contemporary debates is often overlooked (out of so-called political

correctness) about the Confederacy, Civil War and States sovereignty and even in this

present day secession movement debate, it is shrouded in constitutionalism and

inalienable right to exercise liberty by choosing to secede from the United States and

covertly hide behind the U.S. Constitution. Also the argument yesterday was not totally

about States sovereignty, but this was the only route left to challenging the federal

government, which was by breaking away and declaring themselves free of federal laws

and legal restraints and continue to keep slavery intact as the economic lifeblood of the

southern plantation system.

The wealthy white property owners financed and used the poor white Confederate

soldiers as mere cannon fodder. It would actually become the 13th Amendment to the

United States Constitution that freed the slaves in 1865 and not the Emancipation

Proclamation as many have come to accept. I think one must come to the realization

that slavery was wrong and evil; it was justified based on theology and the American

jurisprudence system (law and God). There is no other way to look at the peculiar

institution; moreover, it was this compromised labor force that propelled the United

States and the South in particular, to becoming extremely economically prosperous to

the detriment of the African slaves who were victims of systematic brutality. Slavery

gave the United States as a nation a 300 year economic advantage and made them into

a superpower nation, but no retribution has ever been made to the ex-slaves

(Reference: Ida Hakim, Dorothy Blake Fardan, Jamil Hakeem and Len Moritz;

Reparations:The Cure for Americas Race Problem).

The Civil War (1861-1865) was fought to maintain this economic interest and the

Confederate system would have been debunked years before the Civil War was fought,

but the dehumanization process was the foundation and driving entity that kept those

who did not see blacks/Africans as human beings during the de jure and de facto time

periods of empowerment and it was this psychology that was so entrenched and the

glue that held the Confederate ideology together by depicting white skin as superior

and black skin as inferior. How could one ignore that racism and the Confederacy


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ideology were equally tied and yoked?there was an interest to keep this system of

inequality in place because it allowed for a set of norms to go unabated and the

beneficiaries would always be the wealthy white plantation owners. It was a vicious

system of control and people of African descent will never see any humanity in the

Confederate justification of fighting the Civil War other than the understanding that

racism undergirded this historical reality at that time in history in which America was a

racially divided nation. The foremost State rights that the Confederate South wanted

was to maintain slavery and having a free labor force to sustain a cash crop economy.

The right to keep on enslaving black people was part of this priority. Thus, one must

also understand that right after the Civil War, we ventured into the Reconstruction

period from 1865-1877 what W.E.B. Dubois referred to it as "Black Reconstruction".

Blacks gain an enormous amount of economic and political power in former Confederate

States during this twelve year period only to see the hands of time set backed bypolitical betrayal.

For example, PBS Pinchback became Governor of Louisiana and Blanche K. Bruce

became a Senator of Mississippi and Hiram Revels also became a Senator from

Mississippi, Robert Small (a Black Civil War Hero) and a five term member of the House

of Representatives from the State of South Carolina became a powerful black political

personality (Reference: Russell L. Adams; "Great Negroes: Past and Present"). This was

proof positive that when the political and social playing field became equal African

Americans soared to great political heights. Also during this same time period in1866the Ku Klux Klan (White Knights) was founded in Pulaski, Tennessee to reset racial and

black social progress back to the old South concept. The U.S. Federal Government

betrayed the interest of Blacks by removing the Federal troops from the South and the

South after Reconstruction became even more repressive. I believe that after federal

government betrayed the gains of 'Black Reconstruction' it would not be until almost

one hundred later in 1967 when Senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts (Republican)

was elected to the Senate that another black man would serve in this august body

(Reference: W.E.B. Dubois; "Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880").

There were a lot of slavery Supreme Court decisions; the Missouri Compromise in 1850

and the Dred Scott Decision in 1857 declared the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional

in which Chief Justice Roger B. Taney decision declared that no black slave or free

person of African descent could ever be considered a citizen of the United States of

America. However, Judge Taney's legal decision was in support of the southern


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institution of slavery and thereby fueling white plantation owners to stand their ground

because according to them blacks had no legal rights and they would forever remain

Chattel (property). The framers of the Constitution wrote and believed that blacks "had

no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the Negro might justly

and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold and treated

as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever profit could be made by it."

The Fugitive Slave Act stated: "The 1793 act provided for an orderly return of runaway

slaves. Under this law a master or his agent was empowered to seize or arrest a

fugitive slave and take that fugitive before 'any judge of the circuit or district courts of

the United States, residing or being within the state, or before any magistrate of a

county, city or town' where the arrest took place. Upon satisfactory proof, the judge or

magistrate was to issue a certificate of removal, allowing the master to return home

with the slave" (Reference: Paul Finkelman; "Slavery in the Courtroom"; p. 59).

A white Abolitionist such as John Brown and Fredrick Douglass (1818-1895) was

fighting for abolishment of slavery writing, speaking out against the evils and just

outright agitating this system of injusticemany heard of the heroic and revolutionary

work of Harriet Tubman (1820-1913) with the underground railroad freeing slaves from

the United States up into Canada, she used to carry a 45 pistol and no slave was

allowed to turn around and if you did she would kill you on the spot thus, could not risk

a compromise in this freedom movement.

It was a racist fervor that was driving the southern Aristocratic plantation owners to

dupe the Confederate mindset into thinking that they had a divine right to keep blacks

in a lowly servitude position because in their mind the "Negro" was inferior. The poor

rank and file Confederate bought the second part of the argument (hook, line and

sinker) that it was a battle for States Rights and sovereignty (or Liberty and Freedom),

but in all reality the Civil War was about moneyan economic arrangement that had

made huge white plantation owners extremely wealthy, which was rooted in racism.

Thus, even President Lincoln stated that if he could preserve the Union and maintain

slavery he would have done just that. Lets not get it twisted blacks fought on both

sides of the Civil War. We will always see the Confederate as a racist American dilemma

in which people of African descent were forcibly worked for 310 years and no

reparations were ever made to the ex-slaves. I will always stand against American style

injustice and racism and to my last breath is taking to expose this human tragedy. I

have always argued the inhumanity and immorality of Chattel Slavery and from that


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vanish point it does not matter what the Confederate intentions were or were not. But

we do know there was a historical crime that had taken place and the inhumanness of

its affect was catastrophic, which devastated real people even to this very day. It is

extremely difficult to overlook the reality of this 310 year crime and nothing could ever

make African people whole again. I do not think the quest for States rights (sovereignty

or secession) during the Civil War era even came close to superseding the importance

of a segment of humanity enduring the tragedy of slavery. They were fighting for the

right to be considered human beings and free from the yoke of this evil institution.

Fahim A. Knight, Chief Researcher for keeping it Real Think Tank located in Durham,

NC; our mission is to inform African Americans and all people of goodwill, of the

pending dangers that lie ahead; as well as decode the symbolism and reinterpreted the

hidden meanings behind those who operate as invisible forces, but covertly rules the

world. We are of the belief that an enlightened world will be better prepared to throw

off the shackles of ignorance and not be willing participants for the slaughter. Our

MOTTO is speaking truth to power. Fahim A. Knight-EI can be reached at fahimknight@

yahoo.com.

Stay Awake Until We Meet Again,

Fahim A. Knight-El

Documents

African Slavery and the Civil War