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[a1s]

I was recently reading an article about the american civil war, and I started wondering:
1)could the black people be free? and if so what right did they have?
2)could white people be slaves to someone?
3)how did hybrids (sambos, or whatever they are called) and indians fit into the picture?

[Quintopotere]

I'm not sure to understand the reason of this topic, but to answer to your second question:
there are many white girls used as slaves to do the prostitutes...

[Sebatianos]

Well, officially you were not allowed to enslave people! So you were either born into slavery (a child of a slave) or you were officially free. But some things were so unclear (and most people didn't care to clarify them) that there were numerous possibilities.

If you bought a slave - that person (it had to be black) was your slave. The person selling it to you didn't have to prove that he himself did not inslave the person. So if I was to hunt people and selling them as slaves - you'd bought slaves from me (even if I hadn't the right to inslave them in the first place) and they'd be legaly your slaves. This usually happened in Africa and slaves were brought over the sea.

Indians were a different category. They simply had no rights.

A slave on the other hand was a property of the master and it fell in the same category as tools owned by men. An owner could decide to protect his tool. So if the master was very respectable, the society would probably treat his slaves better then poor free white men (because the master could hurt people for hurting his property). This was not a rule though.

Indians hadn't even had such protection. They were not considered to be American citizents until the 60s. So if you mistreated an Indian there was nothing that could really be used against you (they weren't even at the mercy of somebody else). But Indians were free. So if they didn't come in contact with the wrong kind of white people (which was usuall the kind that was after new land and profit) they could live quite well (untill the army would chase them futher away).

[Sebatianos]

Originally posted by Quintopotere@Jan 26 2006, 09:25 PM
I'm not sure to understand the reason of this topic, but to answer to your second question:
there are many white girls used as slaves to do the prostitutes...

Ah, but that's not the same. They are not slaves. They are victims.

Slave is a legal category. If you were a slave, your owner could do whatever he'd want to you and it would be legal. He'd own you.
If a young white girl is abused to be a prostitue that's not legal. Unfortunately that doesn't stop it from happening, but at least there are laws against it. So she is treated as a slave, but is not one (which is even worse actually, because there is no - may it be so wrong - justification for it).

[omg]

Originally posted by Sebatianos@Jan 26 2006, 07:32 PM

If you bought a slave - that person (it had to black)

actually that is a common misunderstanding scottish slaves
the chieften had the rights to sell members of his clan, and many did , particurly in the isle of skye. whole clans were decemated so the laird could buy himself a nice house with curtains and a shrubbery with a nice white fence. it is why black gospel music follows the same chord progressions of gailic christian songs. just the gospel version is faster.

citation to prove point... (only saying that becuse its a copywrited site. however i belive it is legal to cite stuff, cant remeber the exact term just came across it in a sceintology court case)

It was not until the English and French offered to help the South, that Abraham Lincoln, in order to keep them out of the war and especially in helping the south, declared it was a war against Slavery. It started out as "no such thing", and many men left and went home when they found that out. Calloused? Yes, but after all they had been lied to and they were now asked again to lay down their lives for the betterment of the Nation. This did not set well, as it brought back memories of how they were forced out of their own country, because they were Highlanders, and for some reason which no one could explain, they had become less valuable than sheep, and they resented it.

The Revolutionary War, and later the War of 1811, when once again England attacked, tested the mettle of this country and its people. There were many Scots here, and many had been sent as slaves.

[Sebatianos]

Originally posted by omg+Jan 27 2006, 07:18 PM--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (omg @ Jan 27 2006, 07:18 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> <!--QuoteBegin-Sebatianos@Jan 26 2006, 07:32 PM

If you bought a slave - that person (it had to black)

actually that is a common misunderstanding scottish slaves [/b][/quote]
If you haven't read the initial question post - the inqury was about the American Civil War (so the laws in Scotland wouldn't apply.
But yes, there were white slaves as well (just look at ancient Greece or Rome) and even later on people could fall in slavery by acumulating too much dept.

[efthimios]

I just want to clarify one thing about slavery in ancient Greece. The slaves were slaves either by losing a battle or in some cases due to debt. There were no expeditions to say Africa to find slaves.

[omg]

i read the first post.
as the scottish were being used as slaves in the plantations on the run up to the civil war i think its valid. a tad more recent than the romans.
slavery was only finally made illigal in the british colonies in 1833 with the slavery abolition act. obviosly slavery wasnt abolished in america untill the civil war. which was initially purely about unionising america and bog all to do with slavery (1862-84?)
so white slaves from colony nations could have possibly continued to be sold to america (legally) up untill 1833 although fewer slaves would have been sold from england from 1807. (abolition of the slave trade act) altho the punishment for trading slaves was 100 pounds per slave. so captains would throw em overboard if they feared a raid. and i have read about illigal night time kidnapping raids on villages in the isles of skye in the late 18th century.
so altho slaves didnt tend to live very long, there would most likely have been some white slaves, or there children, still under bondage in america by the 1860's i suspect this to be a more than a few. when slaves had children they continued to work for the same master.
.
and its funny how whenever u see a movie set in a 17th - 18th century plantation u only ever see black slaves. its almost like they dont want us to know that scots and irish were sold into slavery. we all have the image of the black slave so firmly implanted in our heads. and i think thats intentionall. i only got interested in the scottish slaves when years ago i was in a museam in scotland.. (and the exhibit was tucked away as well) i remeber we did a bit about slavery at school, but nothing about white slaves..

[rlbell]

White slavery was virtually unknown, in the new world. After the rise of christianity in the fourth century, slavery became increasingly uncommon in the western world. The last vestige of slavery in Europe was serfdom, but that was mostly wiped out by the plague (once there became a shortage of serfs, runaway serfs would be welcome wherever they ended up working the land, and no lord would send them back). The scots who worked under the lairds were not slaves, in the traditional sense, but they were serfs.

It is hard to be a slave owner within christianity; unless, you could convince yourself that the slave was not made in God's image. That pretty much excludes any european from having european slaves. It was not that Saint Paul said that slavery was bad (Galatians III, verse 28), but that the duties of a slave owner to his slave became rather onerous. The difference between being a slave and being a 'wage slave' was that being a slave had better benefits. The slave had to work, but the slave had to be fed, sheltered, and given medical care. A freeman could not be forced to work, but looked after his own food, his own shelter, and his own medical care.

In the plantations of the new world, there was a labor shortage, as it was expensive to hire and transport europeans and the native americans were being killed by smallpox in job lots. Given what little was known about disease, at the time, and the trouble of importing slaves, I suspect that the european introduction of smallpox to the new world was not deliberate. The only way to get an economical workforce was to import labourers from Africa.

Aside: The one thing that tends to get left out of popular representation of the slave trade is that the european slave traders did not go raiding african villages for slaves. They went to the african slave markets and bought african slaves from african slave traders (unfettered by admonitions from Saint Paul, the slave trade continues in Africa).

Plantation owners of the new world did not see blacks as fully human, so they felt no obligation to treat them as dictated by the letters of Saint Paul, because the saint was not writing about africans, he was writing about mediterraineans. If it applied to africans, he would have said so. There was serious debate on whether blacks had souls.

Blacks were different enough from other people that you could pretend that they were not human. Or worse, as they share his mark, as children of Cain, they deserve what they get.

[Sebatianos]

Well the argument why they were not human was also the reason that churchmen (don't ask me exatly who, I'd have to look it up in the library) were claiming that there's no life on the other side of the Sahara, so the people who lived there could not be humen. The same applied for Indians (they were suposedly soulless).

But the point about people being made after god's image also meant that all who were cripled, deformed, different were not of god's image and could be enslaved (but they were usually just a handy target for casual agresion and sadism against another).

The debate on weather blacks and Indians had soul was started by Bartolomeo de las Casas (not sure on the spelling) in the early 16th century.