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Don't understand what you mean here.  The Dred Scott case had nothing to do with social equlaity-matters like that weren't brought to the supreme court.  The Dred Scott case was about setting a man free, not making him a social equal.

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Careful.  You don't know where my info comes from, so please don't assume.  I've been a civil war buff since I was ten-and we don't "sit through lectures" in school, we actively investigate the matters for ourselves.  The majority of the  information I presented here I learned at a lecture at Haverford college.

I've been to Gettysburg (three times) and a reenactment of Bull Run, where have you been to? (I mean this as a genuine question, not an attack)

And Ritter, only about 25% of white southerners owned slaves-it is indeed a very important distinction to make.

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Perhaps you should study up some more about the Dred Scot case.  Then centeral argument was about whether Dred Scott was a citizen or not, and if proven so, is eligible to file suit in court for his freedom.  And in order to prove his lack of citizenship, therefore status being as property, part of the findings that went into the ruling was that Dred Scott was "biologically" proven to be 3/5th of a man.  It was all about his status of being an equal or not.


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I'm still not impressed.  But we should not make this personal, so you refrain from suggesting my arguments are folly, and I'll keep my posts impersonal as well.

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Lexington, Chicamaga.

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But is has no bearing on the debate, nobody's arguing that fact.

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When has it been any different? Compare a modern dictionary to one published a century ago and see what's happened to meanings; often to compensate for changing social attitudes so that certain actions were "morally" acceptable amongst the masses. Sometimes one doesn't even know why the word offends, to begin with. To speak of derogatory, throughout my life I've heard, "Sure, hire the handicapped!" when something was done wrong; never did I hear, "Hire the crippled!" (although it may have been said ???). I have a cousin who's lost the use of his legs so now it's mandatory to derogatively label him handicapped -- and I don't think he ever played golf! His sister is blind: everyone is black to her, not just her husband. All I care is that he treats her well no matter who in the family may wish to 'disown' her for it (like, for why?). Mentioning that, how many blacks are actually black -- or whites, white?
What this little rant refers to is that, for whatever purpose a person wants to proliferate, they'll not only use whatever they can as excuses but make excuses for the excuses, altering accordlingly. Then there are the many who just take up a cause just to be a part (as they say, doing their part), never really comprehending its true reality. This also applies to the 19th century United States.
Due to my time of birth, I was short on people at hand who had lived through WW1, let alone the Spanish-American War and say nothing of the Civil War, so this was hand me down information. However, I've distant relatives in the south (some were shooting at each other back then) and most in these parts (NH) were known to be fighting against slavery, not a personal family feud. True, there were very few blacks at the dinner table -- but, if anything, that only added to the fact there were few to vie for slavery or that blacks were some subhuman race. The Mason-Dixon line was a long ways off -- if those south of it didn't want to be part of the Union, so be it, but we didn't need slave trade next door. Neither did we need our ships being used for it or British (et. al.) slavers stopping at our ports. I'll make a little insertion here that many slaves were 'acquired' out of Africa via other blacks and shipped over by various nations. You're right, we had no tarriffs to gain by this trade; it doesn't mean we had no one here involved in it but relatively few to gain by such commerce.

Although it appears to have wandered off-topic this has turned into a very interesting discussion. Maybe I missed the significance of a seemingly innocent piece of superstitious nonsense & it has some deeper meaning for the average American.

Several very good points have been made & the British slave traders are often blamed for the predicament of the black slaves in America & the social problems this caused. While I find the whole concept of slavery abhorrent it should be remembered that this was common in some parts of the world like Africa where the slave traders were themselves black & the slaves came from different tribes. It seems human nature to treat anyone different with suspicion & sometimes regard them as being subhuman purely on the basis of their physical appearance. I'm sure this discrimination applies to people of a similar ethnic background as much as Europeans or whites towards African & Asian races. Slavery is still gong on today & while I'm not trying to defend them the white slave traders in the 18th Century were simply taking advantage of it.

I don't know if this was so blatant until recently but history now seems to be regularly rewritten to suit various agendas. While some of this might be done with the best of intentions it often gives a distorted view of the actual events, especially when taught in schools. It seems to me that this is designed to give the younger generation a feeling of guilt & they are expected to feel ashamed of what their ancestors & countrymen did in the past. Unless you try to look at this from how things actually were at the time it seems completely wrong to me to judge it by current moral & social standards which are often very different to how they were only a comparatively short time ago.

I was around in the 1960s when the events that dcunning mentions were taking place. I think that like most people in my country we couldn't believe what we were seeing on our TV screens & how terribly black people were being treated in a great & supposedly democratic country like America in the Swinging Sixties. This was comparable with the Apartheid regime in South Africa which was at the same time being condemned by the international community - including the US! You only have to read the biographies of world-famous black musicians like Louis Armstrong & Nat King Cole (to mention only two examples) to realise just how bad things were until only recently. It seemed the old attitudes were still very much alive & I suspect are still alive & well in some parts of the US today. This is one reason people try to change it by teaching distorted history to their children but I feel it's not the right way of going about it. I won't pretend we never had racial discrimination in Britain but it was never anything like as bad as it was in some parts of the US. I've found a complete change of attitude when meeting black people in the US when they realise I'm British.

I could go on but I'll leave it there.

This rather interesting list of similarities/coincidences has one error:  from Wikipedia and several other googled sources: John Wilkes Booth was born on May 10, 1838, not in 1939.  The other dates given throughout check out, and the other coincidences (most, anyway), are easily verifiable.