Oh Crap, Am I Pro-Slavery?
And why you might be, too.
When I was a teenager, for reasons I didn’t grasp at the time, I became obsessed with researching U.S. slave insurrections and escapes. I read oral histories, narratives, and academic works, and made a timeline of what I learned. I read some about white abolitionists, about John Brown and the Quakers, and such, but mainly I read about slaves themselves who escaped, agitated, or organized rebellions.
A couple of years later, I was living in the South for the first time. I was having lunch with co-workers, including four or five white native Southerners about my age, and four people of varying ages who had immigrated to the U.S. from far and wide.
A man who was studying for his naturalization exam asked, “Who was the worst president?” Three of the native Southerners immediately answered, “Abraham Lincoln.” My jaw dropped open, and then I laughed — I couldn’t help it, I had never been exposed to anyone who thought of Lincoln as anything other than a noble hero.
I was young and hadn’t often had the assumptions acquired from my West Coast education challenged. A discussion ensued about whether the Civil War was actually about slavery. This led me to study more about the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln, though far more cursorily than I had delved into insurrections.
