The Great Emancipator Abraham Lincoln and the Issue of Race

pretty astonishing read for the civil war and equal rights buffs out there.

I didn't get that lesson in HS, but I did in college. There's a lot of interesting facts from that era.

1. Almost zero "White" people, no matter how much that were against slavery, considered Black people their equals. Ditto for Native Americans and Mexicans. People were judged by how "advanced" their civilization was. Most abolitionists wouldn't have sat down to diner with a Black man.

2. In college, in my class, there were a lot of people born & raised up North. The professor asked the class some interesting questions, like how many of you think most Southerners back then owed at least a few slaves. ALL of the Northerners raised their hands. I don't remember the exact statistics, but many Southerners owned zero slaves (They couldn't afford to keep them up or to buy them for that matter), most who had any only had a small number & VERY FEW plantations existed where a hundred or more slaves lived & worked. There is a reason why you keep seeing the same pictures over & over again from this era showing dozens of slaves in a field & it's not because cameras were hard to come by.

I remember that we were given ranges and corresponding percentages, which I don't remember, except that they were very interesting. It went something like (They have fairly good records from back then):

Slaves Owned ; Percentage of Southerners owning
0-2; XX %
3-5; xx %
all the way up to covering 100+ slaves

I might see if I can find the numbers by goggling later & come back & fill them in

Carolina Riot
www.carolinariot.com

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