On Friday, September 5, 2014, Craig Kilby <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>
> I also have to take exception to the term "forced migration" of those
> slaves who went with the thousands of small slave-holding white families
> westward. This was not the Batan death march. These family units lived and
> worked together and, I would hazard, talked about the move, its pros and
> cons, before just taking a whip to their few slaves and ordering them to
> get a move on.
>
> I fully understand that many modern historians make a good living
> reminding us of the evils of slavery, but sometimes I wish they would take
> a look at the broader picture of humanity in general, and go beyond the
> borders of the Old Dominion in doing
>

Obviously the range of experiences among both enslaved people and their
owners was broad, but it's hard to get around the fact that enslaved people
were legally required to go, if their owners wanted them to, so any input
they had was only as much as their owners granted. Appropriately enough,
another such category was children, and the paternal view of slavery has
long been a popular one, especially in the antebellum and reconstruction
eras, but still sometimes today among those who want a counterpoint to
slavery being all evil (and often by extension their ancestors, region or
culture being all evil too).

Society makes the assumption that parents have the best interests of their
children in mind unless proven otherwise, so it's okay for parents to force
them to move if the children are offered input and ask not to go, but it's
harder for most people today to assume similarity that owners had the best
interests of their slaves in mind and therefore it was okay for owners to
have the final legal word, regardless of the slaves' wishes.  It worked
better when paired with the antebellum argument that African-Americans were
intrinsically childlike, needing the supervision of whites to teach them
industriousness, etc.

Some enslaved people were surely offered genuine input on the move, but I
suspect their numbers were only significant when looked at from whites'
point of view. In other words, a higher proportion of whites may have lived
with a family unit who granted input to their few slaves, but a higher
proportion of enslaved people experienced the move as part of a trader's
coffle or as one of many slaves simply moved by the owner with no input.
Still, even then, there was some self-interest in buying or selling to keep
families together before going on the road, as it made slaves more
cooperative. It's a complex topic, that is too often generalized into evil
vs benign. But there's a lot of pressure and emotional baggage on both
sides, not just on the "slavery is evil" side.

Hank Trent
Hanktrent@gmail

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