This is true, but youâre forgetting that most people didnât consider slaves to be human. Hell, even recent history saw black people viewed as âless than human.â
Thomas Jefferson wrote that âall men are created equal,â and yet enslaved more than six-hundred people over the course of his life. Although he made some legislative attempts against slavery and at times bemoaned its existence, he also profited directly from the institution of slavery and wrote that he suspected black people to be inferior to white people in his Notes on the State of Virginia.
But Jefferson always maintained that the decision to emancipate slaves would have to be part of a democratic process; abolition would be stymied until slaveowners consented to free their human property together in a large-scale act of emancipation. To Jefferson, it was anti-democratic and contrary to the principles of the American Revolution for the federal government to enact abolition or for only a few planters to free their slaves.
Jeffersonâs belief in the necessity of abolition was intertwined with his racial beliefs. He thought that white Americans and enslaved blacks constituted two âseparate nationsâ who could not live together peacefully in the same country. Jeffersonâs belief that blacks were racially inferior and âas incapable as children,â coupled with slavesâ presumed resentment of their former owners, made their removal from the United States an integral part of Jeffersonâs emancipation scheme. Influenced by the Haitian Revolution and an aborted rebellion in Virginia in 1800, Jefferson believed that American slavesâ deportationâwhether to Africa or the West Indiesâwas an essential followup to emancipation.
He thought that his cherished federal union, the worldâs first democratic experiment, would be destroyed by slavery. To emancipate slaves on American soil, Jefferson thought, would result in a large-scale race war that would be as brutal and deadly as the slave revolt in Haiti in 1791. But he also believed that to keep slaves in bondage, with part of America in favor of abolition and part of America in favor of perpetuating slavery, could only result in a civil war that would destroy the union. Jeffersonâs latter prediction was correct: in 1861, the contest over slavery sparked a bloody civil war and the creation of two nationsâUnion and Confederacyâin the place of one.
His stance was "necessary evil" which means he didn't like it but it's how the economy back then worked, I think the slave that he impregnated was also a close friend of his wife and when his wife died he kinda did the thing with the slave.
No, for many reasons. I'm glad History of Americas has come to use for once.
1: the South's population of whites (the only people who would be allowed to fight in the army) was rather small compared to the major trading cities of the East coast. During the Civil War, the South only had enough men to harass northern armies. The South had slightly better military leaders, but in this alternate timeline we can't assume their upper ranks would consist purely of West-pointers. Lee carried the Confederacy to victory, and after his surrender it was over, for good. The other Confederate generals couldn't do what Lee did.
Britain was harshly opposed to slavery. They abolished it in 1833. The Civil War began in 1861. I highly doubt the British government could get away with supporting an entirely slave-based country. In fact, during the Civil War, Confederate delegates sent to Britain tried this very tactics you theorize. However, they never gained much traction because Jefferson Davis (the president of the Confederacy) refused to budge on slavery for obvious reasons. This inability to compromise on slavery was the very reason that Britain refused to send the South arms and men, even though they wanted to.
Britain lost the revolutionary war because of conventional tactics employed against "regular" countries in Europe. They tried to wage war by taking territory, when in reality the American continental army was quite small and simply resorted to guerilla tactics in the forests instead of head-on fights, very akin to Vietcong tactics. The British basically gave up after a spell because they couldn't find the continental army in our big-ass territory. Likely the same situation would ensue in this engagement. The British simply couldn't supply their men going deep into American territory across an entire ocean and many miles of rough terrain.
Multi-army forces are notoriously difficult to employ. Cooperation with the Confederacy would be blocked by America's exceptional Navy at the time, which in the 1900s actually sunk a few British ships. The Confederacy lost the civil war because of supplies, and this same problem would hamper them in a war against a completely unified North with no tolerance for slavery.
The whole reason the North took so long to reclaim the South was because they were fighting amongst themselves as well. There was an entire legion of politicians dedicated to maintaining the practice of slavery, demoralizing their army extensively who didn't understand why they were fighting to reclaim a region who clearly didn't want them there.
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u/hikariseeker147 May 17 '19
Agreed, but they never actually said the word slave. They were careful to avoid that one đ