How the ideas and attitudes of a handful of intellectuals and thinkers becomes, quite suddenly, a powerful social force, remains a mystery and is not well understood. The monumental social consequences in culture and belief are astonsihing in hindsight…
…The same is true of slavery. The surprising thing about slaveryis not its existence but its abolition. The origins of slavery are lost in time: all advanced societies after the neolithic revolution used it to a greater or lesser degree, and continued to use it. What is too often forgotten is that blacks were bought and sold in eighteenth-century England;Liverpool, indeed, had a lively market. And the majority of the literate population, as well as the illiterate, accepted the institution. From the ancient world onward, a few voices- of philosophers, of theologians, of literary men of compassion- had been raised against the practice, but to no avail.
—In Victorian England and 19th century USA, Canada, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, children were commonly used as cheap labor in mills, factories, mines, workshops and wealthy homes. The Factory Act(1883), The Mine Act(1842), The Factory Act(1867) took place in england and created rules that regulated working hours, protected the young children, and improved working conditions. Almost every country has laws that restrict child labor. However these laws are not always enforced and are often abused. Most children are sold now to work off their family debt. These parents willingly sign-off their children for slavery. They do not see it as slavery though. They see it as giving their children a better life because they are living in better conditions and in better places than their homes. Shyima Hall is a child slave who was a slave in the United States. Shyima is from Egypt and she is from a poor family. Her parents sold Shyima to a rich family in Egypt. She lived in their luxury apartment and worked for around $1 a day and barely got sleep or ate.—Read More:http://schmidtgs2.wikispaces.com/Child+Slavery
The social impact of these intellectuals was negligible. And yet, in the second half of the eighteenth century in Pennsylvania, in Lancashire and London, in Denmark and France, the arguments against slavery took root. They became a passionate conviction, and men like Granville Sharp, neither theologian nor philosopher, dedicated their lives to its suppression. And with extraordinary success. Within one hundred years slavery was abolished throughout Europe, America, the West Indies, and being assailed by crusading governments throughout the rest of the world. Because slavery is so repugnant to us, and the element of surprise in its abolition has been obliterated. It is a miracle it vanished.
—I challenge any researcher to study 17th century colonial America, sifting the documents, the jargon and the statutes on both sides of the Atlantic and one will discover that White slavery was a far more extensive operation than Black enslavement. It is when we come to the 18th century that one begins to encounter more “servitude” on the basis of a contract of indenture. But even in that period there was kidnapping of Anglo-Saxons into slavery as well as convict slavery.
In 1855, Frederic Law Olmsted, the landscape architect who designed New York’s Central Park, was in Alabama on a pleasure trip and saw bales of cotton being thrown from a considerable height into a cargo ship’s hold. The men tossing the bales somewhat recklessly into the hold were Negroes, the men in the hold were Irish.
Olmsted inquired about this to a shipworker. “Oh,” said the worker, “the niggers are worth too much to be risked here; if the Paddies are knocked overboard or get their backs broke, nobody loses anything.”
Before British slavers traveled to Africa’s western coast to buy Black slaves from African chieftains, they sold their own White working class kindred (“the surplus poor” as they were known) from the streets and towns of England, into slavery. Tens of thousands of these White slaves were kidnapped children. In fact the very origin of the word kidnapped is kid-nabbed, the stealing of White children for enslavement.—Read More:http://www.revisionisthistory.org/forgottenslaves.html image:http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/kuspit/kuspit8-16-06_detail.asp?picnum=8
Equally surprising for the historian of long view was the change in the last fifty years among the world’s statesmen, journalists, economists and publicists, in the concept of rich and poor nations. To statesmen and their commentators before the mid twentieth century, as with their ancestors down the corridors of time, rich and poor nations were as inevitable as they were acceptable. Without the poor, how could there be rich? But now, even though words rather than action tend to dominate, the idea of rich and poor nations as necessary paradigm is universally condemned. What is even more astonishing in the light of history is that billions of dollars are transferred by the rich nations to the poor, or rather “developing” nations; and although somewhat cynically and nuanced to be sure, it is a major shift from historical tendency to vampire these states dry.
—The appearance of the oil painting at the Royal Academy exhibition in May 1861 was marked by positive contemporary reviews. The reviewer in the Athenaeum of 11 May 1861 considered that ‘Mr. Eyre Crowe will advance his reputation considerably by No. 328, ‘Slaves waiting for Sale, Virginia’ [sic]… all [the figures are] remarkable for character and expression’.
The verdict of the Times (13 May 1861) was that ‘the stout, middle-aged negro to the right, looking eagerly, as if he scented a buyer in one of the loungers at the door, is particularly good in expression. These are truths of negro life’. The reaction of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (August 1861), was slightly less favourable: ‘Mr Crowe gives us another form of genre, capital in its way. “Slaves Waiting for Sale in Virginia”, broad in marked character, awkward in attitude, truth pushed to the verge of the grotesque.’ However, it was the Art Journal (New Series, Vol VII, 1861, p. 165) which gave greatest coverage to the painting:
An artist, hitherto comparatively unknown, has produced one of the most important pictures in the exhibition, and certainly the most promising work of the season, from among those that can be looked on as the apparently coming men of English Art. The subject of Mr. E. Crowe’s picture, No. 328, is ‘Slaves waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia’, and the appalling guilt of that accursed system was never more successfully depicted…Read More:http://www.oocities.org/eyre_crowe/art_slavery.html
ADDENDUM:
( see link at end)…Oscar Handlin says that “Through the first three-quarters of the 17th century, the Negroes, even in the South, were not numerous…They came into a society in which a large part of the White population was to some degree unfree…The Negroes lack of freedom was not unusual. These Black newcomers, like so many others, were accepted, bought and held, as kinds of servants.”
He goes on to say that the desire for cheap labor caused the elite m
ants and land owners to enslave not only the negroes but their own White kindred as well
—The Hunted Slaves, 1862 (oil on canvas) by Richard Ansdell (1815-85)—Read More:http://fineartamerica.com/featured/the-hunted-slaves-richard-ansdell.html
Blacks were much more expensive than Whites
Therefore, Whites were mistreated more often than blacks
During the Colonial period, Whites did the harder work, such as digging ditches, clearing land, and felling trees
The frontier demands for this kind of heavy manual labor was satisfied primarily by White slaves
As late as 1669 those who had large scale plantations were manning them with White slaves, not negroes
That’s the way it was done in the mother country, Great Britain!
In 1670 the Governor of Virginia said that he had 2000 Negro and 6000 White slaves
Hundreds of thousands of Whites in colonial America were owned outright by their masters and died in slavery
Even the blacks knew this. If they were made to work too hard they accused their masters of
“treating them like the Irish” Read More:http://www.saveyourheritage.com/white_slavery.htm
—“A Ride for Liberty—The Fugitive Slaves”, by Eastman Johnson, 1862, is among the paintings in the Dixon exhibit. —Read More:http://www.gomemphis.com/photos/2009/jul/02/121212/
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