Sonia Medvedeva Daugherty Quotes
In this beehive of industry no discord or revilings found entrance: there were no signs of discontent on the black shining faces as they worked under the direction of their master....The women sang at their tasks and the children old enough to work made nails leisurely, not too overworked for a prank now and then.
This quotation was a the description of the nail manufacturing operation using slave labor on Thomas Jefferson’s plantation, Monticello. Note the almost romantic scene that the author paints of slavery and forced child labor. That is why this is a very important quotation. This biography of Jefferson, written for a young audience, was typical of material written about the South and slavery from the late 19th century till the late 20th century. The South was still resentful about losing the war, and there was still, late in the 19th century, negative feelings in the rest of the nation about the South’s lack of patriotism and worse their basic morality of having not only supported but fought to maintain the cruel, evil institution of slavery. Many wanted to get these sectional feelings behind them and move forward. One way was to do much revisionist history about the institution of slavery and the reasons for the Civil war. Books, plays, and later films, and the school curricula, were designed to edit out or minimize the brutality and cruelty of slavery. And the reasons for the Southern rebellion was not any longer only to maintain slavery, but more palatable, almost noble reasons were substituted for the reality that slavery was the only major reason for the Southern rebellion. Maintaining a different culture and way of life, freedom from Federal intrusion in state and local affairs, honor and others were then new given reasons, and the problems of Reconstruction for the South exaggerated to justify the then Jim Crow American era of legal discrimination and lynching. This passage came from a book that was so popular with young people, that it was published again in a new edition as late as 1961. Most white Americans, growing up in the 20th century learned this version of events and many vestiges of it could be seen, even in the 21st century. In the 1970s, with an end to legal segregation, attention turned to the culturally and historically distorted views, and slowly schools began to change curricula. However, in the Southern States, in order to prevent the schools from departing from the false, romantic view of Southern Slavery, local schools where not allowed to select their own textbooks and in many cases even their own library books.
Sonia Medvedeva Daugherty, 1893-*, Historian & Children’s Book Author, The Way of an Eagle, 1941
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
The white skilled laborers of the North were not the only ones who found slavery deleterious to their economic well being. The complaints to the Carolina legislature produced a finding as early as 1744 that whites were adversely affected.
Miller was the first Black American admitted to a Graduate Program—Johns Hopkins—in Mathematics
Generally, Jefferson was not in favor of whipping slaves, but this quotation shows that he essentially accepted the basic principles of Southern Slavery—including the one that says if the person does not want to work for you, you may whip, beat, or torture him or her to produce “reasonable work.” This acceptance of slavery and profiting from it, is the terrible blot on the record of the man who otherwise was among the few greatest of Americans.
He was also himself a ship owner in the slave trade and he was the brother of the leading Rhode Island abolitionist, Moses Brown. See {585793}. Brown became the first American, prosecuted in federal court for illegal slave trading –-- a prosecution brought, in part, by his own brother. He was, however, acquitted.
In early New England the General Court served as both a legislature and a judiciary before separation of powers was introduced. 5 years later the Court banned importing African slaves at all. While slavery was not common in Rhode Island, the laws was not seriously enforced on those who would defy them. It does represent a public anti-slavery sentiment that existed in Early America. It would take 200 years for Rhode Island to finally eliminate all forms of slavery.
Contrast this view with that of Union General Ulysses S. Grant.
Ruffin is more widely known as the man who fired the first shot of the Civil War.
