All the recent scholarship I've read on slavery such as Walter
Johnson' s *River
of Dark Dreams *and Sydney Nathan's *To Free a Family* as well as earlier
work by Ira Berlin and James Oakes supports the point made by Paul and the
numbers given by Kevin. The movement of probably a million enslaved persons
from the seaboard states, especially Maryland, Virginia, and North
Carolina, was one of the defining aspects of African American and American
History before the Civil War. The legal premise of American slavery--that
people were owned as private property with no rights--was a moral horror.
It was complicated by the fact that slaveholders lived among the enslaved
and there was a kind of paternalism, that is that not all relationships
between white and black were brutal--as long as the system was not
challenged. Make no mistake, however, slavery rested on violence and the
threat of sale South overshadowed the lives of all slaves. Others, if not
sold, were forced marched, often in chains, by their owners to the new
cotton lands in the Lower South. Slave traders, like the Franklin &
Armfield firm in Alexandria, did a booming business carrying slaves by
water or overland to the slave market in New Orleans. The Hairston family
who owned more slaves than any other in the nation had a string of
plantations running from Henry County, Virginia to Mississippi and there
were others like them (such as the Cameron family in Nathan's book).
Virginia was probably the chief state in providing slaves but it was not
alone. As a footnote to this, the Free Black population also had a modest
reduction due to emigration, mostly to Liberia (estimates for VA and
Maryland run about 4000).
All best,
Jim Hershman
On Tue, Sep 9, 2014 at 10:47 AM, Hardwick, Kevin R - hardwikr <
[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I think there is a relatively simple test to get at at least some of the
> dimensions emergent in this conversation. I wish for my daughter to live a
> rich, fulfilling, decent, and good life. I hope she will experience, in
> the deepest sense, her human potential. I can imagine various careers she
> might pursue that would enable or assist her to do that. She could do
> that, for example, as an engineer, or a lawyer, or a soldier, or a
> politician, or a hair dresser, or a plumber. Some of those strike me as
> giving her greater latitude to experience the good, and some less, but I
> can imagine her achieving the aspirations I have for her in all of them.
>
> But in no possible universe would I wish for her to experience the kind of
> slavery that slaves endured in Virginia in the 19th century. This is so
> for large plantations and small, owned by benign masters or malevolent. I
> suspect that no one on this list would disagree with me here--I suspect
> that not one of us would claim, even for purpose of argument, that they
> would entertain the thought, "you know, come the end of the day, I would be
> ok with it, if my daughter were to wind up living her life as a chattel
> slave on a Virginia plantation."
>
> The moral question then is why this is so. What is it about the
> institution of slavery that not just hindered but came close to prohibiting
> outright pursuit of the good, of the life lived to its fullest and richest
> human potential? What is it about chattel slavery as a human relationship
> that stunted the human lives of the persons subject to it?
>
> Some of the answers to this question are obvious, and some less so.
>
> I find these to be interesting questions. But even more interesting is
> the claim, advanced by thinkers like Sarah and Angelina Grimke, and before
> them astute men like Thomas Jefferson and George Mason, that the
> relationships entailed by slavery stunted the human potential not just of
> the slave, but also of the owners of slaves as well. If this is so, then
> the civilization created by slave owners was less than it could have been.
> Slavery, in other words, stunted and corrupted the entire society organized
> to sustain it. Everyone who lived in such societies then, if the
> observations of these thinkers are correct, lived lives that were less than
> they could have been, or at the very least faced serious obstacles to
> living good, full, complete, decent, and fulfilling lives.
>
> So that raises then the possibility that not only would I not wish my
> daughter to be a slave, but also, I would not wish for her even to have
> lived in a society organized to enable possession of slaves.
>
> All best wishes,
> Kevin
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
> > On Sep 9, 2014, at 10:08 AM, "Finkelman, Paul" <
> [log in to unmask]> wrote:
> >
> > Not really; the average small slaveowner wanted to become a larger
> slaveholder
> >
> >
> >
> > *************************************************
> > Paul Finkelman
> > Senior Fellow
> > Penn Program on Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism
> > University of Pennsylvania
> >
> > President William McKinley Distinguished Professor of Law, Emeritus
> > Albany Law School
> >
> > 518-439-7296 (p)
> > 518-605-0296 (c)
> >
> > [log in to unmask]
> > www.paulfinkelman.com
> > *************************************************
> >
> >
> > ________________________________________
> > From: Discussion of research and writing about Virginia history [
> [log in to unmask]] on behalf of Paul Heinegg [
> [log in to unmask]]
> > Sent: Monday, September 08, 2014 9:39 PM
> > To: [log in to unmask]
> > Subject: Re: [VA-HIST] Out-migration from Virginia early 1810-1840
> >
> > Is there evidence that a significant number of small slave owners
> considered
> > their slaves to be something other than property?
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > ______________________________________
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