Thomas Jefferson referred to the institution of slavery as “A disease in the public mind,” Probably no subject in our country’s history has been more clouded, many times intentionally, than has been the plight of the Black Race.

The following is an excerpt taken from an interview of Anne Farrow of Connecticut, co-author of a must read book titled Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged and Profited from Slavery by National Public Radio interviewer Farai Chideya.

CHIDEYA: “Let me ask you a little bit about what lessons we need to draw specifically about slavery in the North. There has been a lot of talk recently; Ruth Simmons, the president of Brown University, has been doing an extensive amount of research into her university’s history of profiting from the slave trade. She, of course, is African-American. What happened in Rhode Island? What kind of plantation system existed?”

Ms. FARROW: “Tiny Rhode Island, later the Ocean State, was the epicenter of the Colonial slave trade in America. Of the documented voyages, slaving voyages that left from the American Colonies and went to Africa, Rhode Islanders were at the helm of almost 90 percent of them. And one of the things that we learned in doing our research is every place you see a port with deep connections to the Caribbean and to the slave trade, you also see elevated populations of captive people. And that’s what was going on in Rhode Island. Coastal Rhode Island–Bristol, Newport, the cities in between–were so heavily involved in the slaving trade; they were also bringing many people back to Rhode Island to do work.”

The Cultural Marxists who dominate the political climate in this country realize the greatest threat to their continued dominance is the truth. They depend on their lackeys in the media, academia and government to perpetuate the lies that lead to the removal of symbols of the Confederacy, desecration of the graves of Confederate soldiers and the possible removal of symbols such as those at Stone Mountain in Georgia.

But, truth be told, this fanaticism which the Cultural Marxists promote and encourage consists of out and out lies and distortions. A great example which leads to questions that must be answered in the minds of the true historian is exactly what did the powers present in 1865-1872 do to help the Black Race integrate into society as a people who were now free?

Did the victors in the War to Prevent Southern Independence have a moral obligation to the millions of Blacks who now were called free? Robert L. Dabney, Presbyterian Minister, Confederate States Army Chaplain, author and confidant of Thomas J. Jackson (Stonewall), believed that they did and transmitted his beliefs, by letter, to Union General Oliver O. Howard, himself a professed Christian, who had been named Chief Commissioner of the Freedman’s Bureau in May of 1865. I will not present the entire letter from Dabney to Howard, due to its overall length, but highly recommend it be read for those who truly care about the truths of our history. I believe the following excerpts from that open letter to be most interesting.

“At the beginning of the late war there were in the South nearly four millions of Africans. All these, a nation in numbers, now taken from their former guardians, are laid upon the hands of that government of which you are the special agent for their protection and guidance. To this nation of black people you are virtually father and king; your powers for their management are unlimited, and for assisting their needs you have the resources of the “greatest people on earth.” Your action for the freedmen’s good is restrained by no constitution or precedents, but the powers you exercise for them are as full as your office is novel. We see evidence of this in the fact that your agents, acting for the good of your charge, can seize by military arrest any one of their fellow-citizens of African descent, for no other offense than being unemployed, convey him without his consent, and without the company of his wife and family, to a distant field of industry, where he is compelled to wholesome labor for such remuneration as you may be pleased to assign. Another evidence is seen in your late order, transferring all causes and indictments in which a freedman is a party, from the courts of law of the Southern States to the bar of your own commissioners and sub-commissioners for adjudication.”

I am hoping that some vastly intellectually superior Yankee can explain for me how trading one master (plantation owner) for another; a Union General who could have a person arrested and separated from their family for being without a job, take them wherever he decides and force them to work, and pays for that work whatever he deems appropriate, somehow makes one less of a slave.

But, I would leave my objections to this form of “governance” to Robert L. Dabney himself:

“My purpose is not to urge with them that there is no law by which a free citizen can be rightfully abridged of his liberty of enjoying the otium cum dignitate [leisure with dignity] so long as he abstains from crime or misdemeanor therein, merely because he wears a black skin, while the same government does not presume to interfere with the exercise of this privilege by his white fellow-citizens, even though they be those lately in rebellion against it; that this military arrest and transference to the useful though distant scene of compulsory labor, is precisely that penalty of “transportation” which Southern laws never inflicted, even on the slave, except for crime and after judicial investigation; that these commissioners for adjudicating cases to which freedmen are parties, are in reality judges at law, appointed by you, for every city and county in eleven States, and empowered to sit without jury, and to decide without regard to the precedents or statutes of the States; which would exhibit your bureau as not only an executive, but a judicial branch of the government, established without constitutional authority, and that a hundred fold more pervasive in its jurisdiction than the Supreme Court itself; and that this “order” has, by one stroke of your potent pen, deprived eight millions of white people of the right of a trial by jury, guaranteed to them by the sixth and seventh additional articles of the United States Constitution, in every case where a freedman happens to be a party against them.”

Correct me if I am wrong, but didn’t the Reverend Dabney just indict as unconstitutional the Republican reconstruction government in the South for both Whites and Blacks?

Next, Dabney states most eloquently why the North must provide for the Blacks based on the North’s claims of righteousness of purpose and its expenditures of money and blood to achieve freedom for that race:

“I cannot believe that means will be lacking to you any more than powers. At your back stands the great, the powerful, the rich, the prosperous, the philanthropic, the Christian North, friend and liberator of the black man. It must be assumed that the zeal which waged a gigantic war for four years, which expended three thousand million of dollars, and one million of lives, in large part to free the African, will be willing to lavish anything else which may be needed for his welfare. And if the will be present, the ability is no less abundant among a people so wealthy and powerful, who exhibit the unprecedented spectacle of an emersion from a war which would have been exhausting to any other people with resources larger than when they began it, and who have found out (what all previous statesmen deemed an impossibility), that the public wealth may be actually increased by unproductive consumption. With full powers and means to do everything for the African, what may he not expect from your guardianship?”

Now, Dabney makes what must be a most valid point; if the North has expended all this wealth and treasure (5 actual billion in 1860’s dollars) not to mention a million lives, it is absolutely incumbent on them to at least improve the lives of those they claim they fought to liberate.

“The answer which a generous and humane heart would make to this question, must of course be this: that it would seek to do for the good of its charge everything which is possible. But more definitely I wish to remind you that there is a minimum limit, which the circumstances of the case forbid you to touch. Common sense, common justice says: that the very least you can do for them must be more than the South has accomplished, from whose tutelage they have been taken. To this measure, at least, if not to some higher, your country, posterity, fame, and the righteous heavens, will rigidly hold you. The reason is almost too plain to be explained. If a change procured for the Africans at such a cost brings them no actual benefit, then that cost is uncompensated, and the expenditure of human weal which has been made was a blunder and a crime. Thus it becomes manifest that the measure for the task which you have before you, is the work which the South accomplished for the negro while he was a slave. The question, how much was this? is a vital one for you; it gives you your starting point from which you must advance in your career of progressive philanthropy.”

As one might expect in today’s politically correct, Marxist dominated social atmosphere, Reverend Robert Lewis Dabney is called a “racist,” not for his appeal to Union General Oliver O. Howard for humane treatment of the Black Race, but for his defense of Virginia and his Southern home.

Could it possibly be because Dabney also said the following about the conquering government of the North (Radical Republicans) which is a perfect definition of those who today call themselves “conservatives” and many times refer to themselves as the saviors of the Black Race.

“… This [Northern Conservatism] is a party which never conserves anything. It’s history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution; to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American Conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward toward perdition…”

No organization of people has done more to betray the Black Race than those who claim to have killed almost a million people in order to set them free! The great Reverend Robert Lewis Dabney foresaw the inevitable and warned against it.

* In Defense of Virginia and the South by Robert L. Dabney

In Rightful Rebel Liberty…

November 11, 2019

~ The Author ~
Kettle Moraine Publications contributing columnist Michael Gaddy is a political activist, writer and teacher who defends and teaches the Constitution as ratified (originalist), our Bill of Rights and the tenets of our Declaration of Independence. He is constantly trying to understand why the great majority of people in this country are content being slaves to an unconstitutional, criminal government; a government that is systematically destroying the intent of the founders of this country and the culture that brought us Liberty and Individual Freedom.