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Re: Black slave owner an 'untold part' of history
As to non-white slave owners in the antebellum South constituting an 'unknown story', it was featured in the last two books I've read, to wit: Freehling's two volume tome "The Road to Disunion" and Foner's "Reconstruction 1863 - 1877". I've learned about it from numerous sources. No one seems to me to be hiding the fact. It's not taught in schools, if that's the case (I've been out of school for a few decades) likely because it is a fact without meaningful historical significance. It constitutes a statistically tiny perversion within a perversion. It being so and being numerically insignificant, what does one want to make of it?
In the last Military Book Club monthly selection there was offered a biography of a German Jew who served as an officer in Hitler's Wehrmacht. Now THAT'S really bizarre. However, fact or not, only to someone straining to evidence some obscure, perhaps antisemitic belief, would it merit a scholarly mention other than as an historical quirk. That Blacks would own blacks isn't all that unusual, anyway; it's a thousands-year-old institution surviving today, regrettably, in Africa. That black or Indian slave owners existed in North America prior to 1866, though true, is an insignificant detail that only an obsessive teacher with a luxury of more than ample time would be justified in mooting to a high school class for whom the entire Civil War itself is the merest footnote.
As to non-white slave owners in the antebellum South constituting an 'unknown story', it was featured in the last two books I've read, to wit: Freehling's two volume tome "The Road to Disunion" and Foner's "Reconstruction 1863 - 1877". I've learned about it from numerous sources. No one seems to me to be hiding the fact. It's not taught in schools, if that's the case (I've been out of school for a few decades) likely because it is a fact without meaningful historical significance. It constitutes a statistically tiny perversion within a perversion. It being so and being numerically insignificant, what does one want to make of it?
In the last Military Book Club monthly selection there was offered a biography of a German Jew who served as an officer in Hitler's Wehrmacht. Now THAT'S really bizarre. However, fact or not, only to someone straining to evidence some obscure, perhaps antisemitic belief, would it merit a scholarly mention other than as an historical quirk. That Blacks would own blacks isn't all that unusual, anyway; it's a thousands-year-old institution surviving today, regrettably, in Africa. That black or Indian slave owners existed in North America prior to 1866, though true, is an insignificant detail that only an obsessive teacher with a luxury of more than ample time would be justified in mooting to a high school class for whom the entire Civil War itself is the merest footnote.
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