Herbert Albert Laurens Fisher Quotes
It is a terrible commentary on Christian civilization that the longest period of slave-raiding known to history was initiated by the action of Spain, Portugal, France, Holland and Britain, after the Christian faith had for more than a thousand years been the established religion of Europe.
Fisher, H. A. L. A History of Europe. Edward Arnold & Co., 1936.
Clinton was a founder of the society. Many sophisticated Americans were in despair about the consequence of White contact with the Indian, and this was even before the worst of the treatment which came later, beginning under the presidency of Andrew Jackson and continuing well into the 20th century. Of particular interest is Clinton’s prescient observations regarding Africa and Africans interacting with whites with slavery the overriding white motive. Clinton was one of the many Americans who were abolitionists from the beginning of the nation.
The colonists had united for a war against the Narraganset Indians. The Charter allowed them to keep captives as slaves.
Referring to the Arawak natives he found when he landed in the "new world—San Salvador:"
He was the last Pope to hold temporal power. This defense of slavery was all the more surprising because America was fighting about the issue in the Civil War and nations like England had abolished slavery. 99 years later Vatican II altered Pius IX’s statement forever. See {612715}.
The Spaniardes have executed most outragious and more then Turkishe cruelties in all the west Indies
He was one of the strongest English advocates of colonization of the New World. At that time this was as strong an epithet of cruelty as could be made by Europeans. It was an accurate assessment.
Most of us think the California was not a slave state, but in the early 1850s the California law (such as it was) allowed a slave owner to “sojourn” in California with his property that could include slaves. A number of Southern save owners took slaves to the California gold fields to do mining. There was a great deal of resentment on the part of the other miners and the free labor of the territory. In 1855, slavery in California was abolished.
Louisiana to this day has a different legal system from the rest of the United States as it was originally based on the French Napoleonic Code. Most people did not realize that Louisiana had strictures against breaking up families—even with slaves.
In the Jim Crow era and well into the 20th century, many school books and historians, wanting to minimize the enmity between North and South, tended to a historical revisionism where the real brutal and immoral edge of slavery was minimized and slave owners were depicted as being in error by modern standards but well-meaning and paternalistic. Foner, with this famous quotation, put the lie to the false image of paternalistic slavery. By the beginning of the 21st century, there were very few serious historians who still tried to characterize slavery in the South as “paternalistic” otherwise humane. See {584014} for another of Foner’s famous quotes regarding slavery
Herbert Albert Laurens Fisher OM PC FRS FBA was an English historian, educator, and Liberal politician. He served as President of the Board of Education in David Lloyd George's 1916 to 1922 coalition government.
