Cleveland American Quotes
We are credibly informed that a natural son of Jefferson by the celebrated ‘Black Sal,’ a person of no little renown in the politics of 1800 and thereafter, is now living in a central county of Ohio. We shall endeavor to get at the truth of the matter and make public the result of our inquiries.
Cleveland American, Editorial about the Son of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings, one of his Black slaves, ~1845
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
The Supreme Court had ruled that the Constitution prohibited the Federal Government from regulating conditions of child labor. A Constitutional amendment was passed by Congress and submitted to the States for ratification. That amendment is still the legal basis for all the Federal involvement in child labor. However there were many opponents. The idea of telling an employer that he could not work an 8 year old child for 14 hours a day was actually considered Communistic by some right wing elements. This quotation is famous for two reasons: First, it illustrates the extreme view against any kind of regulation of business that a strong minority held at the time. Second, this was a statement by a Roman Catholic Cardinal. The Catholic has generally been one of the progressive forces for labor reform (with the exception of racial discrimination and slavery) in the United States. Most modern Catholics are very surprised that a Cardinal actually issued such a Pastoral Letter—especially since he had been progressive on other issues {627510}.
It was not uncommon for free Blacks to purchase slaves, marry them and set them free.
Anti-slavery opponents had cited the equality argument of the Declaration of Independence to buttress their argument.
Miscegenation was very common between Blacks and whites throughout American history. Even though it was a taboo subject in “polite society” white women marrying or cohabiting with Negro men was so common in Colonial America that the State of Maryland had to pass a law making the children slaves to further discourage the white women. This violated the long held tradition that the slave status of children followed the status of the mothers. The law backfired as Maryland colonists encouraged their white female indentured servants to interbreed with Black slaves so that the children would also become their property as slaves as even slave children were very valuable. The law was then repealed after only 20 years.
Parker and other escaped slaves in Christiana fought off slave catchers and killed the slave owner leading them. Charged with treason, he escaped to Canada with his family and lived there the rest of his life. While not a polished writer, after he himself had escaped and went to Christiana and leaned to read and write. He wrote this narrative of his life as a slave—one of the few written works we have from slaves.
In the Jim Crow era and well into the 20th century, many school books and historians, wanting to minimize the enmity between North and South, tended to a historical revisionism where the real brutal and immoral edge of slavery was minimized and slave owners were depicted as being in error by modern standards but well-meaning and paternalistic. Foner, with this famous quotation, put the lie to the false image of paternalistic slavery. By the beginning of the 21st century, there were very few serious historians who still tried to characterize slavery in the South as “paternalistic” otherwise humane. See {584014} for another of Foner’s famous quotes regarding slavery
Sexual abuse of female slaves was very common in the American South. See {642027} and {642028}. In the 1930s over 2,300 formerly enslaved African Americans were interviewed by members of the Federal Writers' Project, a New Deal agency in the Works Progress Administration (WPA) during the Great Depression. This particular abuse was one of the most common reported. Ironically, the Southern justification for segregation and prohibition of inter-marriage even through the 1950s, was to prevent the great “crime” of miscegenation which white slave owners and their male friends committed by raping and sexually exploiting the female slaves. Today, as DNA analysis shows, most traditional Southern “white” families have recent Negroes in their ancestry.
Negro Chattel Slavery was not the only disgraceful practice in early America. The “Debt” was the money owed to the Company with the franchise for the colony. The company paid for the passage from England and some necessities for the colonists. The parents had various ways of repaying the debt when they settled in America. However if the parents died, the children would be indentured to pay the debt of the parents.
