First Out, Last In
on 05/04/2016 at 11:48 PM
Very cool. Shame they are of the leftist persuasion today. Are they as bad as others in that area?
Very cool. Shame they are of the leftist persuasion today. Are they as bad as others in that area?
So RI is the place where Slavery was a common thing and no one cared. Fuck them and the road they paved with the trade they made,,,,Assholes.
Worse than that Rich; they were total hypocrites. Slavery was outlawed in 1652, in 1774 a non-importation law was passed, in 1784 an emancipation law was passed. They ignored their own laws and had twice as many slaves as any other NE colony, and became the dominant slave trading center. Although Wiki says it all petered out by 1770, other sources claim that they were hard at it until 1807. Once the Industrial Revolution got going, RI made at least half the clothing for southern slaves right up until the Civil War.
None of the colonies was pure, not even Vermont which banned slavery in it’s constitution years before joining the new nation. Folks were experts at looking the other way and not seeing what was in front of them. Granted that Vermont had only a couple dozen slaves at any given moment in the period; they still had them.
Actually Rich, slavery was an accepted thing everywhere, whether it was rare, common, or ubiquitous. It’s how the world was, from Canada down to Argentina. Nor was it limited only to Africans. Many native tribal cultures practiced hereditary slavery, especially those tribes up in the British Columbia area. Look into the press gangs that violently dragged 12,000 white Americans into bondage.
Yes I know and your right, I forgot about seeing Press gangs as slaves. As Carl Sagan said long ago on his show on PBS, the primary reason for the slow growth of technology in most societies was Slavery and it’s effect on those who had no resources to expound on simple ideas that could grow into big ones. I’m paraphrasing that quote but it rings true doesn’t it. Look what happened to Hitlers nuclear program without the talented Jews in the field.
Ah, recall, the official name of the state is State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, which is derived from the merger of two settlements. They have, in a way, enshrined the Plantation for good.
