The big G.W. is on a six-day African tour, during which he'll visit a number of countries, including Benin, Liberia, and Ghana. Edward Ball from The Root writes that now is as good of a time as any for Bush to speak about slavery, particularly given his personal history with America's "peculiar institution." Plus, you know, Black History Month and all.
A new book by Jacob Weisberg, The Bush Tragedy, mentions in passing that at one time some of the president's family owned slaves. Weisberg doesn't dwell on the links between the White House and the antebellum past except to say the Bush clan's story is a long-held "family secret…"
The skeletal facts surfaced in April 2007, when an amateur historian named Robert Hughes published his research in the IllinoisTimes, a small paper out of Springfield. Hughes found census records showing that during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, in Cecil County, Maryland, five households of the Walker family, the president's ancestors via his father's mother, Dorothy Walker Bush, had been slaveholding farmers. The evidence is simple but persuasive: genealogies of the Bush family match up with census data that counted farmers who used enslaved workers. With this, the president joins perhaps fifteen million living white Americans who trace their roots to the long-gone master class.
Bush has to talk about slavery now? I feel like it already took so much for him to mention that it's not nice to hang nooses.
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Maybe Bush can start the conversation by speaking with this young lady:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTosQerWBzU
Clearly she needs some guidance.
WOW.
That was scary.
It is true that for a period in our early history, America had slaves. But I am a little bit more than tired of constantly hearing about how "Americans stole/bought slaves from Africa". Please, everyone, remember our history: we were colonized by THE BRITISH. That is how American came to be after the land was discovered (and then ignored) by the Spanish. It was THE BRITISH who bought slaves from Africa and used them to build "the new world" (America) for "the honor and glory of His Majesty, the King of England". Slavery continued as a BRITISH money-making scheme until the now-budding young Americans (headed by General George Washington) fought for–and won–our independence from THE BRITISH. Once we won the war for independence and were established as an independent nation–the United States of America–THEN the issue of slavery becomes a TRULY "American travesty". I just get frustrated by the ignorance (or whatever it is, I'm willing to be diplomatic) that Americans have regarding the history of the founding of our nation. Americans didn't bring slaves here–THE BRITISH did. Once we became an independent nation we should have rightfully done away with slavery but we did not. No, that wouldn't happen until we fought a bloody civil war. But the slaves were finally free. America did the right thing in the end. Why can't we still move forward 3 hundred years later??
Actually the British form of colonization for America was a very liberal one, that allowed Americans to determine their own destiny as long as they paid taxes and pledge allegiance to the crown.
The British Empire abolished slavery 1807 - America resisted for 70 years, even though there was a British naval blockade to stop American slave traders.
Prior to the independence war Britain gave America the option to abolish slavery and the then Americans said no, in fact the British and French had a strong abolitionist movement in their respective Parliaments, imploring America to end slavery, then what really turned to corner on slavery was the European merchants were unable to compete with America's slave labor, in the manufacturing of goods petitioned their respective Parliaments to have an embargo on American goods if slave labor wasn't ended.
Even when Jefferson was in Paris, the French asked him to make a promise he would support abolishing slavery.
The majority of the immigrants were British and dutch and as per British law then the offsprings of those immigrants were Americans, so you can't separate American from slavery ownership. Sorry.
Let me add one other point:
The 13th-14th. amendment, was/is such a very bad idea, instead of bringing Blacks into the Constitutional fold, it created an exception for Blacks, whereas they the amendment drafters should have extended the law to actually give Blacks the inalienable rights, all other Americans enjoy.
This legal loophole needs to be fixed.
In what way do you think that the 13th and 14th amendments established a constitutional exception for blacks, and failed to give them the inalienable rights enjoyed by all other Americans?
The 13th Amendment simply abolishes slavery, while the 14th establishes equality without even referring to blacks.