The Aspen Beat Their first migration was great not for its goodness but for its enormity. It was of course the capture, enslavement and diaspora of black Africans. They were stacked like cargo aboard slave ships bound for America and elsewhere and then auctioned and owned like cattle. Slavery was common throughout the world and had been for thousands of years, but American slavery was notable for its sheer scale. By the mid-1800s, between 30% and nearly 60% of the population of southern states were slaves. In abolishing slavery, colonials should have led the world, not lagged it. They were destined to found a nation, said Abraham Lincoln years later, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Slavery was beneath them. And many of them knew it. In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson — a slave owner but a brilliant visionary — foreshadowed the years of reckoning ahead. The product of that reckoning was the next great black migration, when they left the southern plantations after the Civil War. It took 80-some years, but Lincoln started to make good on Jefferson’s promise. It was costly. Apart from Lincoln, more than 600,000 […]

Click here to view original web page at www.aspentimes.com