The Civil War was not to end slavery, it and the War of 1812 were to re-establish Rothschild's Central Bank of America

[Ralph_Kirk]

Originally Posted by MelismaticEchoes

"Myth 5. Before the Civil War, all African Americans were slaves.*

You keep trotting this out.

A myth requires that people commonly believe it. There is no such myth that all blacks in America (or African Americans or whatever) were slaves prior to the Civil War. Nobody has ever written or taught such a thing. Any history of black people in America will point out, for instance, that there were black freedmen in the North who worked for abolition and even fought for the Union...obviously those people were not slaves at the time.

So this Confederacy-apologist Frank W Sweet invents a set of "myths" and declares himself a hero by knocking down the strawmen he himself stood up.

And you bought it and regugitate it.

—*"In fact, about half a million African Americans were free in 1860 and about four million were slaves. The myth supports the notion that African-American ethnic traditions descend from the slave experience. But most of today’s African-American ethnic traits descend from the literate, civically active free Black communities of antebellum Boston, New York, and Philadelphia.

This is a second made-up myth, believable only by someone who never had personal connection with the process. Much of what has been middle-class (or we should probably say, "aspiring middle class") African-American ethnic tradition has been the effort to move out of the slave experience. But to be sure, the slave experience is what gives those traditions their direction and impetus--and as well, some elements remain.

It makes no difference whether certain leaders were themselves slaves...the slave experience of the masses still formed the basis and it was with them that the leaders identified their own struggle. Call it, if you will, the "Moses Model" because Moses had been raised as the heir to a king, yet self-dentified as a slave with his people...and, yes, the free black leaders during those years were quite conscious of Moses as a role model.

Such traditions include the AME church, church-centered neighborhood communities, ethnic self-identity and pride, even the term “African American” and the principles of hypodescent and the earliest one-drop rule. Those traditions were forged by such men as: Paul Cuffee, Prince Hall, Richard Allen, Martin Delaney, and Frederick Douglass, of whom only the latter was ever a slave.

Glad he mentioned the AME Church, because that's a history that has been recorded in detail. The primary founder, Richard Allen, was formerly a slave--Sweet's facts are just wrong there on something so very easy to check (and Paul Curffee's father had been a slave).

Many families of the Black communities of the Northeast had no slave ancestry, descending from colonial African indentured servants before slavery (lifelong hereditary forced labor) was adopted in British North America.

The 500,000 freedmen in the north were certainly not all descents of the relatively small number of African indentured servants imported in the early 1600s. More like Richard Allen had purchased their own freedom, were manumitted, or had simply escaped. This is another strawman Sweet sets up himself to knock down.

In contrast, ethnic traditions in the Lower South, where most slaves were, resembled today’s Latin America, where most free citizens were mixed to some extent, almost everyone (slave or free) was of the same ethnic self-identity, and a single sharp color line did not exist."

This is simply silly. In "today's Latin America" there is no slavery, at least no de jure slavery, so even making the comparison is so shallow as to be disingenously committed. The tremendously vast majority of free citizens in the Lower South were white, and to claim that most of them were mixed (while at the same time arguing that only a very few white slaveholders even had contact with blacks) is simply absurd.

Let's see. A white male slaveholder begats a child from a black female. Even Sweet acknowledges that progeny will remain slaves (examples include the children Jefferson fathered from his slave Sally Hemmings). Let's say the wife of a male white slaveholder bears the child of a black male slave--Sweet apparently argues that her husband will adopt that mixed child and present that child to his social peers as his own. Is that reasonable? Even if there was no issue of color, is that reasonable?

It simply did not happen. Louisiana--based on French cultural standards--differed in the respect that they had a complicated social system based on differing rights commensurate with differing amounts of "blackness," but even there it's simply disingenous to claim that an Octaroon thought herself the same ethnic identity as a Quadroon.

The very reason they invented the social classes of "Octaroon" and "Quadroon" was to emphasize the social distinction.