New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America - Wendy Warren Audiobook

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• 
  dchant
  April 12th, 2022
  

  

  Thank you

  New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America - Wendy Warren
• 
  JustRandy
  April 12th, 2022
  

  

  Thank you.

  New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America - Wendy Warren
• 
  Jiminy Cricket
  April 18th, 2022
  

  I have no doubt that slavery was common, as a matter of fact, it was perhaps the most historically universal enterprise ever documented. What I’m interested in is why it came to an end, and what drove the United States into such a frenzy that they were willing to kill each other over it, while William Wilberforce was able to patiently spend his whole life’s work toward a peaceful solution that expressed dignity toward all mankind.

  New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America - Wendy Warren
• 
  NantanLupan
  May 18th, 2023
  

  

  Thank you!!!

  New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America - Wendy Warren
• 
  Malachie520
  November 23rd, 2023
  

  Slavery meant different things to different civilizations over the course of human history and even went by different names but all had the same common denominator: you were not person with agency or rights. For Native Americans, for instance, slavery was often a means of compensation wherein a battle occurs and someone’s son or brother or husband is killed and slaves are taken to “pay” the debt of their absence. It wasn’t unknown for a slave to become a formal part of the family, literally replacing that person. Serfs were never slaves-in-name but were essentially slaves to their masters. Indentured servants weren’t slaves but also belonged to their master until their debt was paid. The Pyramids and the Great Wall were all built with “slave” labor even while those laborers were likely being paid.

  What the United States did was take it up a notch and industrialized slavery instead of it being a spoil of war…at least, for the U.S. African tribes were constantly warring with each other and taking slaves or just plain capturing slaves without war to sell to anyone with enough money. The U.S. created quite a market for African slaves, people who were easily identifiable amongst the general White European population, and “primitive” enough to be less-than-human in their Enlightened eyes. That their physicality lent itself very well to the labor they were to endure (and, for the fetishists, the children they would bear) was an added bonus gifted by the Divine. Over two centuries were spent dehumanizing Black people, using pseudoscience (e.g. phrenology) and the Bible to prove the inferiority of the entire “race”. As race is a figment of primitive imaginations, it was remarkably easy to keep Black people as subhuman. There was always push-back but the South was built on slave labor and its economy depended on that slave labor so when the abolitionist movement came to a head, the Southern States seceded from the United States to protect their right to enslave other humans. Lincoln would not have the U.S. split apart and the newly-formed Confederacy attacked Fort Sumter to kick off the American Civil War. By this point, most other Western countries had abolished slavery on their own, the U.S. the holdout until 1865 when the Civil War ended and the 13th Amendment was ratified into the U.S. Constitution. Hundreds of thousands of Americans died to destroy slavery (among other reasons) and hundreds of thousands of traitors died in vain to protect it (their other reasons inconsequential).

  While I’m not familiar with William Wilberforce, the institution of Black slavery in the U.S. lasted over two centuries and so would have taken his life’s work, his child’s life’s work, their child’s and their child’s life’s work, their child’s and their child’s life’s work to see it from beginning to end. And there were those who patiently spent generations waiting for any solution, peaceful or not. Dignity toward all mankind never featured into abolition’s implementation and within a generation after the Civil War, Jim Crow was systemic in nearly every public system in the South (and in a lot of places in the North since they were keen on Black people not being slaves but not so much them living amongst them). It’s a struggle that continues today.

  New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America - Wendy Warren

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