We had a nice visit out at Fort Sumter. It is a half hour trip out and back, with an hour in the old fort. The first impression of the old fort is how small it was. The introductory comments by the Ranger was good and helpful.
My impression of how the "old South" is discussed seems to lack any sense of how the southern way of life before the Civil Was was a way of life premised on a system of gross exploitation of African entrapped in slavery. This was not a benign system of economics. It was an economic,, political and social system that thrived on the enslavement and dehumanization of others. From the white plantation owners, to the cotton and rice merchants, to the craftsmen, to the poor white -- to all who benefited from the slavery and it death offering system -- the whole system was corrupt because of slavery.
Seeing comments made by ministers of the gospel to support slavery is appalling. These arguments sound like the same stuff opponents of an open ordination -- exclusion and the diminution of others sounds the same no matter what age.
The comments that come across as objective recollections of the system if slavery seems so tame as to remove the horror of what happened to the African slaves. It is also, with a calm objectivity that the extinction of the coastal Native American tribes is reported. The cruelty of colonization was real and, again, the terror of this economic enterprise is just accepted as fact. Should the reporting of history that is so corrupt have no moral outrage in our reflections on the age and movements?
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