What I ask for the Negro is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice. The American people have always…asked the question, and they learned to ask it early of the abolitionists, “What shall we do with the Negro?” I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us!... All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone!
Frederick Douglass, What the Black Man Wants.
American abolitionists held from the beginning that slavery was a destructive force. That is true, so far as it goes and in the context of its use. It certainly was not true in the great civilizations of Egypt, Babylon, Greece, or Rome whose empires stood for centuries with approximately a third of their population as slaves. Slavery will not destroy tyrannical empires.
Slavery is, however, destructive of a republic founded on the proposition that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights. The evidence of this existed before our War Between the States. The antebellum South was not republican in nature; it was an oligarchy of rich planters.
The poor and middle-class whites were effectively disenfranchised as the slaves. The press was censored, the mail subject to being searched and read for anti-slavery literature, and people beaten and killed for expressing views against slavery. I’m not talking about Yankees—I mean southern whites. Any and every voice that hinted at the evil of slavery was silenced. Southern whites lived in a police state. That they fought to support it is a reflection of what generations subjected to the whims of an elite ruling class become.
If you take the time to read John C. Calhoun and those who followed his discourses on civil rights, you will find that to make their argument in favor of slavery, they flat out denied the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Calhoun and his ilk insisted that the State and society, not God, were the source of American civil rights. Thus the State and society could make rights whatever they chose them to be.
This is important to us today because this is the very same argument used by American Progressives since 1900. They assert that the Declaration and the Constitution are outdated, a utopian dream of the Founders, and impractical in our modern world. Today we need the experts in the government to rescue us. Government, like the slaveholders, is the true source of right and good. In exchange for compliance, it will provide for the good of all.
We no longer need small business—we have giants who know what we need. We don’t need to vote—we have election officials to see the proper results are achieved. We don’t need to leave our homes, gathering is dangerous—we have the media to tell us what we need to know.
Americans of all colors, genders, and religious preferences, need no government benevolence, no aid, no instruction, so safeguarding…we need the government to Do Nothing with Us! Leave us alone to make up our own minds, crave out our own futures, order our own lives, and even to make our own mistakes. We are human beings, not automatons to serve Uncle Sam and make millionaires of our supposed representatives.
Which republic do you pledge allegiance to—the Progressive State that dispenses rights as it sees fit or the old republic of God-given rights?
Maranatha
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