Circa1865

During the mid-1700s, the legislatures of Virginia and North Carolina voted to restrict the slave trade into their colonies, only to be overruled by George III. Jefferson’s original Declaration draft included a detailed excoriation of England for the slave trade, though it was removed as New England had to share the blame of the mother country for transporting slaves to the South. A great irony of history was England prospering handsomely from the war between North and South, ostensibly excited by and fought over the existence of African slaves in their midst, and the slaves originally placed there by England itself. Counting the military and civilian deaths of nearly a million, and an ultimate cost of some $8 billion dollars, it is a wonder that England did not sense a responsibility for the carnage, 1861-1865.  A further irony is Lincoln, faced with the same potential loss of territory and people to rule over, duplicated the emancipation edicts of the British for the purpose of waging a cruel race war upon the South.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

Assigning Responsibility for Perpetuating African Slavery

“He [George III] waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people [Africans] who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of Infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain.

Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assembly of horrors might want no fact of distinguished dye, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.”

(Declaration of Independence as Drawn by Jefferson; The Jeffersonian Cyclopedia, A Comprehensive Collection of the Views of Thomas Jefferson, John P. Foley, editor, Funk and Wagnalls Company, 1900, pp. 813)