Daughter: “Daddy, if having slaves was so evil, why do you say we should love and honor our ancestors who had slaves?”
Father: “Who told you having slaves was evil?”
Daughter: “Mrs. S. was talking about it in history class at school today. She said that Southerners who owned slaves a long time ago must have been evil people, or they wouldn’t have had slaves.”
Father: “What do you think about that?”
Daughter: “I don’t know; I think she might be right; it does seem pretty horrible to steal people from another part of the world and bring them here to be slaves.”
Father: “Yes, that does seem pretty horrible. Who do you think stole them and brought them here to be slaves?”
Daughter: “Mrs. S. told us in class that Southern people brought them here and made them slaves.”
Father: “Did she, now? Mrs. S. is not a stupid person, but she is certainly an ignorant one if that is what she said. She isn’t alone in that belief, though.”
Daughter: “I thought ignorant was the same thing as stupid, but why do you say that about her anyway? I like Mrs. S. She’s nice!”
Father: “Yes, she is nice, and I like her too, but our liking her for her good qualities is beside the point of what she knows and doesn’t know of certain subjects. A person is said to be ‘ignorant’ of a thing when his or her knowledge of that subject is lacking or deficient. It doesn’t mean she is a bad person or that I think she is a bad person. One can be a good person and still be ignorant of facts and therefore wrong.”
Daughter: “Yes, I guess that’s true. But Mrs. S. has been a teacher for a long time; she has to know what she’s talking about, doesn’t she?”
Father: “Not necessarily. I don’t know for sure where she got the information she told y’all in class about slavery, but I do know it isn’t true and that she is either misinformed and/or making wrong assumptions. Probably both.”
Daughter: “Wrong assumptions? What does that mean?”
Father: “People make assumptions about things they tend not to know much about. A wrong assumption is simply an assumption that is not true.
Daughter: “Then what is the truth? About how the slaves got here, I mean.”
Father: “The truth is, first, that they were not brought here by our Southern ancestors.”
Daughter: “But if Southerners didn’t bring them here, who did?”
Father: “That’s what I’m about to tell you. You know that what we call ‘America’ was first settled or ‘colonized’ by white people from ‘Mother England’ over four hundred years ago, in the early 1600s, right?”
Daughter: “Yeah, we learned about that in history, too.”
Father: “Has Mrs. S. told y’all anything about the Declaration of Independence (DoI)?”
Daughter: “Yes, she has; we read it and talked about it in class last semester, and we had a test about it later.”
Father: “Very good. Did she tell y’all anything about those parts of the DoI that were taken out by the committee whose job it was to oversee the drafting of that document?”
Daughter: “No?”
Father: “Perhaps she should have. You see, one part that was taken out ‘tells the tale’ of who brought African slaves to America to begin with; it helps explain why the transatlantic slave trade was one of many reasons those men we call the ‘Founders’ of America decided it was time for the colonies to ‘dissolve the political bands’ which connected them to the ‘Mother Country,’ and to become independent nations.”
Daughter: “That part they took out – what did it say?”
Father: “It condemned the King of Great Britain for taking black people from their native continent and forcing them on the American colonies against the collective will of the colonists.”
Daughter: “I wonder why they took that part out?”
Father: “That’s a good question, and one that Thomas Jefferson himself wrote about and answered decades later. He wrote that one main reason they decided to take that part out is because a couple of the men on the committee were New Englanders, and, by that time, New England ship owners had become, in Jefferson’s words, ‘pretty considerable carriers’ of African slaves themselves. Do you know who New Englanders are?”
Daughter: “No, I don’t think so.”
Father: “New Englanders were and are people who live(d) in states like Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, etc. They are Northerners; we sometimes call them ‘Yankees.’”
Daughter: “So, Northern people brought the slaves here on Northern ships?”
Father: “Yes, Northerners brought a lot of them here. They traded kegs of New England rum to other Africans for their slaves, then brought them to the Southern states to sell to our people for money.”
Daughter: “But if Southerners did not want the slaves, then why did they buy them?”
Father: “Well, like I said before, while the colonies were British colonies and their people British subjects, they had to obey the King or else. Later, when New England shippers got into the transatlantic slave trade, our people sometimes bought them because they felt sorry for them, all chained up, sick and hungry as they were when they arrived at our ports.”
Daughter: “Why did Southerners not want them here?”
Father: “Because they were non-Christian heathens and uncivilized, and were therefore as out of place here as we would be in the jungles of Africa or in China.”
Daughter: “But, why didn’t Southerners give them their freedom once they got here?”
Father: “Because they couldn’t have survived on this continent on their own to start with; they would have all died of malnutrition and disease, or have been killed by white people or Indians. Another reason is because our people had to pay a lot of money for each slave, to say nothing of the expense of nursing them back to health, and the only way to recover those expenses was for the slaves to work it off and earn their keep. Which most of them would not have done given the choice.”
Daughter: “Yeah, I guess that makes sense. Can we talk about this again sometime? I think I want to think about everything we’ve talked about some more.”
Father: “Of course. Ask about it again when you’re ready and you have more questions. But, before you go, let’s discuss the answer to the question you asked when we first started this conversation: you want to honor God and obey His commandments, don’t you?”
Daughter: “Yes, I do!”
Father: “Very good! You realize that when God commands us to honor our fathers and mothers in the Ten Commandments and elsewhere, He doesn’t make exceptions and say, for example, that we needn’t obey that command if our fathers and mothers were slave owners, right?”
Daughter: “Hmm. I never thought of it that way before.”
Father: “Lots of people go their whole lives without thinking about it that way. But I deny that slavery was evil to start with, and our ancestors who owned slaves were certainly not evil people simply because they owned slaves. That’s ridiculous. They were good, God-fearing people who did the best they could by their slaves. But we love and honor our ancestors because they are our fathers and mothers, and because God commands us to love and honor them, whether they were slave owners or not.
Daughter: “Thank you for talking to me about this, daddy! You gave me a lot to think about!”
Good one Mr. Morris.
Sorry kids today get subjected to this stuff. When I was a child, I learned one of my ancestors had a plantation with 150 slaves. I felt/feel zero guilt about this. Have a good day.
Yes, several of my ancestors were slave holders, and, like you, I feel zero guilt about this. In point of fact, and as I’ve argued before, that they were slave holders demands my admiration and respect for them all the more, in my humble estimation.
Incidentally, one of my nieces was taking online college classes several years back, when she consulted yours truly about an essay assignment she was given in her American History course in which she and her “classmates” were encouraged to write about why they were ashamed of their ancestors because of slavery. Obviously I counseled her against doing so unless she truly was ashamed of our ancestors for that reason, but asked her to explain to me why she was ashamed if indeed that was the case. She said she was not ashamed, and the main reason she consulted my opinion on the matter was that she needed that ‘propping up’ of her position that she knew she would likely not get elsewhere, and that would help embolden her to write what she really felt, rather than to be bullied into writing that which she did not feel about the subject. She got an A on the paper, btw.
Thanks for the comment, sir.
Hello Mr. Morris, I have a question for you.
Did our southern ancestors deny the African slaves the Love and faith of Jesus Christ? You say they looked sickly and Southerners felt pity for them, wasn’t there also an element of Christian Love for them? I have always assumed that the Christian South before the WBTS had in fact a Christian Love for these people and had no Malice towards them or their futures, eventually freeing many. Is there any truth to what I suppose?
Yes, of course there is a great deal of truth to what you wrote. Indeed, I pulled up a couple of excerpts in corroboration of the fact. The first is from Dr. Dabney’s Oct. 21, 1865 letter to Major General Howard, Chief of the Freedman’s Bureau; the second is from Dr. John Henry Hopkins’s book, A Scriptural, Ecclesiastical, and Historical View of Slavery in which the writer calls attention to abolitionist misapplication of the so called “Golden Rule.”
Dr. Dabney wrote:
Dr. Hopkins writes:
Such quotations could be multiplied profusely, of course. Thanks for the question and the comments!
Mr. Morris
I want to Thank you for that response. I thought I might have tripped you up with that question, you sure know your stuff. Your answer just cements in my mind that the Christian Reformation was ended with the Honorable Southern people in the so called “American civil war”.
Thank you again Sir and may God see us all to his Victory.
Interesting take. And likely not far off the mark, I might add. I have a Dabney quote relevant to just about everything one can throw at me, since of course he was such a prolific writer on so many important subjects and I’ve read just about everything he ever wrote that is still extant. Your point above is no exception to that rule. To wit:
-R.L. Dabney, Women’s Rights Women
Mr. Morris must be an extremely intelligent, or at least mentally adroit person-he managed to write a lengthy dissertation about how black slaves came to North America and not once used the word “Jews”!
My fellow contributors and I generally follow an unwritten rule to never write the J-word in our posts in any negative connection whatsoever. We instead refer to the ethnicity as “people who hold religious services on Saturdays,” and who “control our economic system,” etc. See Shackleford in both of the foregoing examples. You undoubtedly noticed as well that I somehow managed to avoid even referring to them in those ‘stealthy’ ways in the O.P. Not that I was unconsciously or involuntarily doing so; after all, the O.P. is a sample conversation between a father and his adolescent daughter, wherein he (the father) offers his curious and comparatively innocent-minded daughter the ‘sincere milk’ of the subject without getting into the strong meat. That comes later.
Thanks for reading, and for commenting, sir.
This a very good way to articulate our message to our people. Well done, sir.
Thank you for the positive feedback, sir. I wasn’t sure how well this “catechismic” style would be received, but you and others have given me cause to choose from several other topics and to write about them in this style as well. Which style (of writing) is rather new to me, so, maybe I’ll get better at it with further practice.
Thanks for reading and for commenting.
Good article. I like how you mentioned the poor treatment of Negroes at the hand of Yankees. The further one delves into the historic racial relations in the South the more they’ll realize just how cruel Yankees could be to Blacks.
Quite so, sir! Although I deemed it outside the scope of my little “catechism” to make your point explicitly within while writing it, I am very gratified by the fact that you have made it explicit for me in your comment, Mr. Wasp. I have often said over the years that, ‘once one begins to travel down this road, there is literally no turning back.’ There is no turning back because of course reading original sources and true history is like a lightbulb, and once one emerges from the darkness and is in the light, (s)he can never return to the thick blackness that is the Yankee version of history, on this question of race relations in the South vs. the North, or any other. It occurs to me that I should post an extract or two in corroboration of your statement, and for the edification of other readers. “Georgia Girl,” Eliza Frances Andrews, wrote on pg. 278 of her wartime memoirs that:
A few pages on (pg. 283) Miss Andrews informs her readers of the following:
Both of the above quotations were written in the context and setting of the beginnings of “reconstruction” in Yankee occupied Washington, GA. I could quote in corroboration of the the same facts from other sources as well, but, as always, comboxes are not exactly suited for doing so, and I don’t have enough time available to me to look the tenth part of them up in any case. I quoted from Dr. Dabney’s letter to Gen. Howard above in answer to Outside Looking In’s question. Be it known that that letter is relevant to your point as well. Indeed, the whole tenor of the letter, start to finish, is advice for Gen. Howard & Co. to turn from their accustomed cruelty towards blacks and indifference towards their welfare, and to humble themselves and learn of Southerners to soften their hearts towards them, and to become their true benefactors.
Thank you for taking time to comment, sir.
Mr. Cisco’s book also provides some good source material on this subject.
https://www.amazon.com/War-Crimes-Against-Southern-Civilians/dp/1947660578
Thanks for mentioning Mr. Cisco’s book in these connections, German Confederate. I have it in my Kindle library, but never quote from it because I have not read it past the introduction and first chapter or two to date: “So much to read, so little time.” You might be interested in knowing that I have in fact been (sporadically) reading Mrs. Beers’s book per your recommendation. As I’m sure you know from that revelation, I was intrigued to learn from her first chapter that Mrs. Beers was an acquaintance of Commander Maury, and that along with him and another elder acquaintance, the trio would take nightly walks together through Richmond during the early days of the war. …
To Mr. T. Morris- Regarding your candid admission of a pact at this website not to “name the jew” collectively as a source of anything negative- such as New World slavery, for example, let me recommend for your private reading the latest article in Occidental Observer referencing a book entitled ‘The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews” which discusses a book of the same name that catalogs in great detail the involvement of worldwide Jewry and the importation of slaves to the New World.
Thanks for the article recommendation; I’ll take a look at it, even though I’m pretty sure it doesn’t contain any information regarding International Jewry and its involvement in the infamous transatlantic slave trade I’m not already aware of.
P.S.: I should clarify that there is no “pact” between the writers here to avoid using the “J-word” in a negative light. It is just that we all seem to have come to the same decision on the matter totally independently of one another. One could call it “synchronicity” I suppose.
As soon as you admitted that “slavery is evil,” you lost the discussion. You should have said something like, “slavery was an economic arrangement of the time, neither good nor evil. Slaves were treated well, or poorly, but on average were treated better than Northern mill hands and factory workers who, at the time, were called ‘wage slaves.’ Our ideas have changed since those days, and nobody would want slavery today, just as nobody should want to force factory workers and coal miners to work for starvation wages today.”
Regarding the blacks, my Northern ancestors obviously didn’t treat them badly enough, because they are still around. If the glorious day of Southern independence ever arrives, you can have the blacks back and you can return the retirees, lefty college professors and Yankee busybodies to us.
Where have I “admitted” that “slavery is evil,” in this post or elsewhere? I challenge you to find a single instance where any author at this website has ever written such a thing. Try to pay more attention when you read, eh?
That is the plan. Sort of. If we do it right, we’ll make their lives so miserable and uncomfortable here in the Southland that they’ll gladly return themselves to you. What we like to call “voluntary out-migration,” with a little shove in your direction on our parts.
Dear Mr. Morris- Blacks are merely pawns used by others to divide and conquer Southerners. Black and White Southerners are known for getting along famously except when third party agent provocateurs from outside the South -the so-called “Outside Agitators”- come in to stir up trouble. In the First Reconstruction, these outsiders were Yankee Abolitionists. In the Second Reconstruction, known popularly as the Civil Rights Movement, the outsiders were Jewish Freedom Riders. They are the yeast that makes the dough rise- the active ingredient- in all radical egalitarian movements in America since WW2. Without them-and their money, media control and networking capabilities- none of these movements would have amounted to a hill of beans. I used to try to avoid mentioning this like you until i realized you can never hope to defeat an enemy that you can’t or won’t name. i guess it’s those damned Eskimos again! Good luck.
Blowtorch Mason:
Thank you for the history lesson. I trust that someone or other will glean something from it (s)he did not before know or realize. I’ll let you have the last word should you choose to reply to this comment. In the meantime, I hope to put your mind at ease with respect to what I know vs. what I do not know of the nefarious practices of Jews and how they use “freedom” and freedom’s institutions to undermine all that is good and righteous and holy, and to thereby demoralize our people.
Please keep in mind as well that Identity Dixie is not Culture Wars Magazine, nor do we aspire to be Culture Wars Magazine. On the other hand, NB that our admins have not in any way censored your comments explicitly naming the Jews and their nefarious practices. I’m not one of the admins here, but even if I were I wouldn’t censor your comments on this head either. Truth is truth and, contrary to what you seem to believe, I personally could give two hoots what the people group in question thinks about truth-telling/exposing their lies, and they for who they truly are. In other words, I’ve personally named them in these connections plenty of times, and will continue to do so at my will and pleasure. See the following linked item for one example among many I could cite:
https://orthosphere.wordpress.com/2018/01/04/islam-delendam-esse/#comment-112466
Thanks again for the comments, sir.
Mr. Morris-thanks for the reply- i guess that we’re both natural historians who like to give history lessons- yours was very good in this article. I have no doubt that you’re well versed in the ins and outs of Jewish Power and Influence.I realize that Identity Dixie is not and does not aspire to be “Culture Wars Magazine”, but does aspire, I assume, to educate White Southerners about how our people have been unfairly vilified and how to defend themselves against such vilification- that was the purpose of your article specifically and your organization generally, I assume, and I heartily support your efforts in this regard and those of Identity Dixie. White Southerners, in my experience, are among the most “Black-wise” people in the world, but many are among the least ‘Jew-wise”. In fact, many of our people, especially Christian Fundamentalists, have fallen under the spell of a particular heresy known as ‘Jewish Dispensationalism”(i.e. the Jews are God’s chosen people- “he who blesses Israel is blessed, and he who curses Israel is cursed”, etc.) , which makes your target audience (and mine) uniquely in need of information on the true nature of Jews and Jewish power and Influence. Everything that has bedeviled us as a people over my lifetime- the Civil Rights Movement, the Feminist movement, the Homosexual Rights Movement, the no-fault divorce initiative,- in fact, all left wing movements since WW2, are the brainchildren of Jewish Power and Influence, and are intended to destroy us in my opinion. The Bible says ‘My People shall perish through lack of knowledge” and our people need to know who the enemy is so they can better defend themselves. I believe that you are fully aware of the true nature of Jewish Power and influence and realize the danger it poses to our special people-White Southerners. Thanks for your efforts and those of Identity Dixie.