Let us all reflect and embrace the posting that got us here on this special day.
EDIT: Apparently the prior portrait was not of Nat Turner, despite what Google and some other websites said.
The Counter Revolution of 1776 was a wild book. Early Amerikan settlers were absolutely terrified of slave revolts, to the point of daily cold sweats, but the only solution they found was to pass yet more draconian slave revolt laws. Chattel slavery seems to do something to the victim, like one is willing to risk death and torture in a slim hope of rebellion or revenge.
Lots (but not entirely all) of abolitionist sentiment was just a self-preserving fear of slave revolts that the slave states were dealing with on the regular.
Something that doesn't get talked about enough is just how racist the Union was during the Civil War. Some of the first segregation laws were passed in the north before the war and more after. They weren't abolitionists because they thought slavery was morally wrong. They were abolitionists because they didn't want their jobs taken over by large operations who could afford to buy thousands of slaves to work in factories.
The west coast became a white supremacist paradise because they banned slavery and also banned non-whites from living there.
Radio War Nerd did a good Civil War series in which they dispelled a lot myths that a lot of prominent historians still talk about as if they were true. One of them was the extent to which the Northern bourgeoisie was essentially in cahoots with the South because the primarily northern industry was textile manufacturing, and how they essentially tried to prevent a Union victory for a long time. I remember John Dolan saying that a number of northern bourgeois and early Union generals should have been hung for treason.
Nat Turner didn't go far enough, and neither did John Brown.
1778, Nat Turner was born in 1800
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Singleton_Copley#Selected_worksthank you, so it's not Turner at all! I thought it didn't look like his other depictions. 😏
