The Reality of Slavery in the South

By Grugyn Silverbristle

Excerpted from The Abolitionists and the Illuminati

From: http://thebirdman.org/Index/Others/Others-Blacks-Slavery-TheReality-Silverbristle.html

Completing our overview of the Illuminati involvement in the Civil War, an issue far too long unaddressed, we turn our attention to the Southern states. One must begin with an understanding of how slavery actually existed in the ante-bellum South, and how this was not nearly so bad a condition as it has been made to appear, by both the Abolitionist zealots at the time and modern liberal academicians.

When Thomas Jefferson made his first trip to France, just prior to the American Revolution, he was appalled by the conditions he saw in the ghettoes of Paris. The filth, squalor and depravity of working conditions among the poor went far beyond anything in the experience of genteel Southern plantation life, where the slaves were at least living in a physically healthy environment. In Europe, orphan children were regularly being abducted and sold into slavery, chimney-sweeps and coal miners often had to work naked, starvation and disease were rampant. There were no health and safety regulations in the factories and sweatshops, and industrial accidents, maimings and maulings were commonplace. An injured worker was simply thrown out to beg, steal or starve. Many laborers suffered from lead and mercury poisoning, black lung disease and tuberculosis. People were being forced to live like rats. These same conditions were already beginning to appear in the United States, where industrialization was taking place:

"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. According to the English Dictionary of the Underworld , under the heading kidnapper is the following definition: 'A stealer of human beings, esp. of children; originally for exportation to the plantations of North America.' The center of the trade in child-slaves was in the port cities of Britain and Scotland:

• 'Press gangs in the hire of local merchants roamed the streets, seizing "by force such boys as seemed proper subjects for the slave trade." Children were driven in flocks through the town and confined for shipment in barns ... So flagrant was the practice that people in the countryside about Aberdeen avoided bringing children into the city for fear they might be stole; and so widespread was the collusion of merchants, shippers, suppliers and even magistrates that the man who exposed it was forced to recant and run out of town.' (Van der Zee, Bound Over, p. 210).

"Little has changed since the early 1800s when the men of property and station of the English Parliament outlawed Black slavery throughout the Empire. While this Parliament was in session to enact this law, ragged five year old White orphan boys, beaten, starved and whipped, were being forced up the chimneys of the English parliament, to clean them. Sometimes the chimney masonry collapsed on these boys. Other times they suffocated to death inside their narrow smoke channels. Long after Blacks were free throughout the British Empire, the British House of Lords refused to abolish chimney-sweeping by White children under the age of ten. The Lords contended that to do so would interfere with 'property rights.' The lives of the White children were not worth a farthing and were considered no subject for humanitarian concern.

"Moreover, in the 18th century in Britain and America, the Industrial Revoution spawned the factory system whose first laborers were miserably oppressed White children as young as six years of age. They were locked in the factories for sixteen hours a day and mangled by the primitive machinery. Hands and arms were regularly ripped to pieces. Little girls often had their hair caught in the machinery and were scalped from their foreheads to the back of their necks.

"White Children wounded and crippled in the factories were turned out without compensation of any kind and left to die of their injuries. Children late to work or who fell asleep were beaten with iron bars. Lest we imagine these horrors were limited to only the early years of the Industrial Revolution, eight and ten year old White children throughout America were hard at work in miserable factories and mines as late as 1920.

"Because of the rank prostitution, stupidity and cowardice of America's teachers and educational system, White youth are taught that Black slaves, Mexican peons and Chinese coolies built this country while the vast majority of the Whites lorded it over them with a lash in one hand and a mint julep in the other.

"The documentary record tells a very different story, however. When White Congressman David Wilmot authored the Wilmot Proviso to keep Black slaves out of the American West he did so, he said, to preserve that vast expanse of territory for 'the sons of toil, my own race color.' This is precisely what most White people in America were, 'sons of toil,' performing backbreaking labor such as few of us today can envision. They had no paternalistic welfare system; no Freedman's Bureau to coo sweet platitudes to them; no army of bleeding hearts to worry over their hardships. These Whites were the expendable frontline soldiers in the expansion of the American frontier. They won the country, felled the trees, cleared and planted the land. The wealthy, educated White elite in America are the sick heirs of what Charles Dickens in Bleak House termed 'telescopic philanthropy' -- the concern for the condition of distant peoples while the plight of kindred in one's own backyard are ignored."

Michael A. Hoffman II
The Forgotten Slaves: Whites in Servitude in Early America and Industrial Britain
http://www.hoffman-info.com/forgottenslaves.html (http://www.hoffman-info.com/forgottenslaves.html)

By way of contrast, the Southern task-system of slavery was almost idyllic, and this was the system that predominated until widespread use of the cotton gin finally led to the large-scale cultivation of cotton, by means of the gang-labor system, which constitutes our sole image of what slavery had been like. That was a late development. Under the long-established task-system, each slave was allotted a daily chore, and a "task" standard, as a unit of labor, had evolved that was remarkably consistent throughout the South. Typical "tasks" were to hoe and weed a half-acre of tobacco, or to split twenty-five logs into a hundred rails, or to harvest and mulch a half-acre of corn. The typical daily task could be completed by an industrious worker in about four hours, and any time left over was his own, to spend as he pleased. It was generally left to the slave to determine when, during the day, he would complete his allotted chore.

Under the task system, if a slave wanted to perform additional "tasks" for his own profit, it was customary for the master to provide him with the land and tools he required. It was not uncommon for a slave to accomplish one task a day for the master and one for himself; indeed, some slaves were able to do three tasks a day, and profit handsomely. In this way, some were able to amass considerable wealth, and it was not uncommon for slaves to own fine horses and several head of livestock. Many slaves were able to buy back their freedom, and some of these eventually became slaveowners themselves. Modern liberals may find it appalling, but there were negroes who owned slaves in the ante-bellum South, and a few owned plantations of significant size.

When the Northern carpetbaggers and industrialists began moving into the South during reconstruction, they found the negro labor force virtually unemployable. The former slaves were used to working only six or seven hours a day, and lackadaisically at that. They would lounge about whenever a foreman turned his back, because they could not comprehend why things were not getting easier for them after the Emancipation. A great deal of the negro dissatisfaction following the war was due to the fact that, for them, life had indeed become much more difficult.

The conditions of slavery have been grossly misrepresented to us from the time of Frederick Douglass (http://www.servtech.com/~grugyn/fdoug-1.htm) to the present day. By the time John Brown's raiding party had converged on the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry, they had concluded a sweep of the surrounding countryside, where he had expected several hundreds of slaves to join. They had, in fact, gathered less than a dozen. The following excerpt tells us a lot more about conditions in the South than Uncle Tom's Cabin :

"Many other outrages were perpetrated by members of the Union League and the Loyal League, which was a branch of the parent organization. The Union League was founded in Ohio [by the Cincinnati-Cleveland branch of the Illuminati, ed.] in 1862 to bolster the morale of the Union Army, which suffered several defeats during that time. The League sent agents into the South to distribute leaflets to Negroes with orders to molest women and children to the point that their Confederate soldiers would leave the army to protect them. Sue Davis recorded that a faithful slave, Alex, brought such a paper to her mother to read it to him [i.e. Alex couldn't read, ed.] . After he heard it, Alex declared that he would die before harming her or the children. Alex asked for a shotgun belonging to Davis, and sat at the front of the Davis house with the gun and an axe to guard the house during Davis' absence. Scenes like this were enacted all over the South."

Limestone County After Appomattox 1865-1870
Published Fall, 1985 by historian and genealogist Faye Acton Axford of Athens, Limestone Co. AL.
http://rentsv1.uokhsc.edu/bbonner/appomatto.htm (http://rentsv1.uokhsc.edu/bbonner/appomatto.htm)