April 7, 2014 (Monday )
A recent blog of mine highlighted the oldest newspapers in Texas, and included a footnote which featured a link to some old papers. The link led the reader to photographs of the old papers. I used the zoom feature on the page to enable reading of articles in an 1863 newspaper in Houston.
The article turned out to be a “letters to the editor” section and the topic was the Civil War. Specifically, the letters were about slaveholders volunteering their slaves to become Confederate soldiers. The letter I read was from a slave owner, written in Houston 151 years ago.
The Civil War presented a new situation for the owner of slaves. An argument continually raged about whether a man who literally owned human beings as property should volunteer his slaves to fight as soldiers for the South. I’ve seen movies about the Black regiments of the North, but I have never thought about the South having such. Turns out that much has been written about how both sides considered them expendable.
I cannot tell you how depressing it was to read words straight from the pen of a man who was writing about sending a slave to kill or be killed in defense of a cause that would preserve the system that maintained the monstrous institution of slavery. The situation just added more irony to a war which already was seeing family members on opposite sides shooting each other. Forcing a slave to put himself in harm’s way was one more mark against the institution of slavery, which in itself was horrible enough.
The slaves–men, women and children–were captured in their homeland, Africa, chained and forced aboard a slave ship bound for the Americas. If they survived the trip (and many did not), they were sold to the highest bidder and forced to work for their owners every day for the rest of their lives. Many of the social problems we have today have resulted, directly or indirectly, from this greed and inhumanity. We can rightfully make the Old Testament’s plaintive cry, “Our fathers have eaten sour grapes, and our teeth are set on edge.”