(May 8, 2019 at 11:39 pm)Amarok Wrote:(May 8, 2019 at 11:13 pm)Shell B Wrote: My point is that no one should blame black or white people. They should blame slavers.And the governments that legally allowed them to ply their trade
Been doing a little reading on this (I confess to not having known much about it). It seems that Thos. Jefferson had been pushing to abolish the slave trade since 1770 and managed to get the importation of slaves into the US banned in 1808. Sadly - as with most prohibitions - this Act may have actually increased the slave trade and consequent human smuggling (slavers would still ply this noxious trade, smuggling human cargo into the US via Florida, which wasn't a state at the time).
Slave trading became a capital offense in the US as early as the 1820s (when it was equated to piracy), but very few people were tried and only one executed.
While it is true that precious little was done about the issue of chattel slavery within the US itself, the idea that the US did nothing at all about slavery appears to be a false one.
Boru
‘I can’t be having with this.’ - Esmeralda Weatherwax


