The Slavery Museum?

Question

How is it that Governor Wallace of Virginia along with others can promote and advocate the building of the Slave Museum? When in the same breath they DEMAND that the Confederate Battle Flag not be allowed to be seen because it reminds them of slavery? It seems the Museum would remind them of slavery, what do you think?

Answer 1

I agree discrimination is still alive and well it is sad it is against Southerners for them doing the same thing Blacks have been complaining about for quite some time. For these and perhaps other reasons, James Buchanan by 1857 had thoroughly identified himself emotionally with the South and its fears and ambitions. He occasionally expressed a dislike for slavery, but at no time did he publicly oppose its expansion or express any repugnance against such a possibility. In 1826 he denounced slavery as a political and moral evil that could not be remedied without the "introduction of evils infinitely greater." Emancipation, he opined, would turn the slaves into masters, and "who could for a moment indulge in the horrible idea of abolishing slavery by the massacre of the high-minded, and the chivalrous race of men in the South? . . . For my own part I would, without hesitation, buckle on my knapsack, and march . . . in defense of their cause."
In 1850 Buchanan supported the Compromise and condemned the Wilmot Proviso, which would have forbidden slavery in the territories taken from Mexico. Serving as minister to England from 1853 to 1857, he avoided the bitter debates over the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which repealed the Missouri Compromise ban on slavery north of 36°30'. With the U.S. ministers to France and Spain (both southerners), however, he co-authored the Ostend Manifesto, which urged the annexation of Cuba by force if necessary to protect American slavery against the threat of abolition in Cuba. In 1856 Buchanan won the Democratic nomination in a grueling convention that rejected its more popular and more controversial candidates. He was elected president with only 45 percent of the popular vote and carried only four of the fourteen northern states. The Republican Frémont had won a northern majority, but Buchanan and the Democrats had won a slim national victory, greatly helped by the Know-Nothing candidacy of Millard Fillmore. Any further defection to the Republicans by northern Democrats in 1860 could easily elect a Republican president and make secession likely. Thus, Buchanan's goal of sectional peace would require first the reunification of the Democratic party.
Party unity would demand of Buchanan a harmonious relationship with Senator Stephen A. Douglas, the party's most popular northwestern leader. Douglas had authored the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which repealed the Missouri Compromise barrier against western slavery and decreed that territorial citizens themselves could decide for or against slavery. Douglas was still popular in the South and had contributed much time and, by his own account, $40,000 to Buchanan's election. Buchanan, however, envied, resented, and disliked Douglas, and southern radicals considered the senator a threat to their ambitions. After thanking the famous senator in a letter addressed to "Samuel A. Douglas," the president awarded the northwestern political patronage, including cabinet posts, to Douglas' most bitter enemies.
To the end of his life, Buchanan blamed the Civil War primarily on the work of a few misguided northern fanatics. The massive northern vote for Frémont in 1856 and for Lincoln in 1860 apparently escaped his attention. Preparing his inaugural address, Buchanan faced a serious dilemma. His platform had endorsed popular sovereignty but had conveniently left unspecified the point at which the decision on slavery would be made. Southerners insisted that the matter could be decided only at the point of statehood, after slavery had had at least a chance and when a rejection could be attributed to climate, geography, or other impersonal forces. Northerners, including Douglas, would have the decision made by the territorial constitution before any significant number of slaves could arrive and before the accompanying racial prejudice could work to preserve even a minimal development of the institution. A rejection at this point would deny slavery any chance at all and could be based only on moral grounds insulting to proud southern sensibilities. Buchanan shared the southern view, but saw an opportunity to shift the decision to a case pending before the Supreme Court. A slave, Dred Scott, had sued for freedom in Missouri on the grounds that he had lived with his late owner, an army officer, for several years in Illinois and Wisconsin, areas free under the Missouri Compromise. By the time the case worked its way through the lower courts, the officer's widow had married an abolitionist. Scott's freedom was assured, but all concerned insisted upon a judicial ruling against Scott for the sake of principle and politics. In response to Buchanan's inquiry, Justice John Catron had informed the president-elect that the five southern justices would probably allow the Missouri court's ruling to stand and would avoid a broad pro-southern statement of principle limited only to themselves. Catron also suggested, however, that if Justice Robert Grier of Pennsylvania would support their position, the southerners might change their minds and deal with the general questions related to territorial slavery. Quite improperly, Buchanan wrote Grier a strong request that he join the southerners. In his inaugural address, Buchanan announced that the Court would soon settle the issue of territorial slavery and predicted that sectional peace would result.
On 6 March 1857 the Court announced two basic principles: First, no ***** could be a citizen, and Scott's suit was therefore invalid. Second, slaves were property protected by the Constitution in all territories; therefore, neither the federal government nor any territorial government could bar slavery from any territory, and the Missouri Compromise therefore had always been unconstitutional.. Nothing could have helped the Free-Soil Republican party more. Buchanan correctly believed that the Dred Scott decision would not expand slavery anywhere, but he promptly rejected an ideal opportunity to prove this to his northern critics. Kansas already had a large antislavery majority and was ready to become a free state whenever a free and fair election could be achieved. Instead, a convention at Lecompton, Kansas, elected by a small fraction of the eligible voters, wrote a proslavery state constitution and ruled that Kansas could vote for it with or without slavery but could not vote against the constitution itself. Only a handful voted in the December 1857 referendum, and the result was an overwhelming victory for slavery. With incontrovertible evidence that the Lecompton Constitution was acceptable only to a small minority of Kansans, Buchanan ignored the pleas of his own appointed Kansas governor and asked Congress to admit Kansas as a slave state. Kansas, he announced, was "as much a slave state as Georgia or South Carolina."
To southerners, Kansas was a slave state won in a fair contest. To northerners, the administration and its Kansas allies had violated the sacred democratic precept that the people of any state should be allowed to accept or reject any constitution in a fair election. In the Senate, Douglas increased Buchanan's hatred and damaged permanently his own presidential chances in the South by opposing the Lecompton Constitution as a fraud. Nonetheless, the administration and the southern leadership mustered enough votes in the Senate to approve the admission of Kansas under the Lecompton Constitution by a vote of thirty-three to twenty-five. In the House, a long and bitter debate punctuated by a free-for-all fistfight on the floor ended in a compromise that ultimately returned the constitution to Kansas for another vote. On 2 August 1858 the people of Kansas rejected the Lecompton Constitution by a six-to-one margin. Buchanan responded to Douglas' apostasy on Kansas by using every power at his command against the senator's reelection in 1858. In Illinois, civil servants and newspapers dependent on federal contracts were ordered to oppose Douglas, and an administration Democrat became a third candidate. The contest featured the Lincoln-Douglas debates, which overnight made Abraham Lincoln a national figure but weakened Douglas still further in the South. Lincoln announced a formula on slavery that inspired moral comfort without imposing any disturbing sense of obligation. Slavery, he said, should be left alone in the South, but its containment should be firmly established to put it on the road to "ultimate extinction." This, he argued, would put the northern mind at ease and stop the antislavery agitation, which in turn would stop the southern demands and threats of secession. Douglas in his so-called Freeport Doctrine sought to reconcile popular sovereignty with the Dred Scott decision. Even though the Court had forbidden government action against territorial slavery, he said, a territorial legislature could effectively bar slavery by refusing to pass laws for its protection. Douglas was reelected, but President Buchanan had played a major role in promoting Lincoln's future and weakening the hopes of Douglas for the presidency. Meanwhile, the country had slipped into a brief economic recession in 1857–1858, and in the North new demands for tariffs, homesteads, a more effective banking system, and internal improvements at federal expense had been renewed. Most of these efforts were defeated in Congress, and Buchanan vetoed those that escaped. His solution to the recession was to deliver lectures on the virtues of thrift and the sinfulness of speculation. Thus, the midterm elections of 1858, which produced Republican landslide victories throughout the North, were probably a referendum on the economy and on James Buchanan as much as a vote against slavery, but many southerners thought otherwise. Also, Senator William H. Seward of New York, in response to northern Democratic efforts to minimize the party differences on slavery, cited an "irrepressible conflict" between freedom and slavery in which only the Republicans supported freedom. Seward, a moderate prone to indulge in reckless language just for effect, promptly denied the implications of his words, but the South was not mollified. In the background throughout the Buchanan administration a "cold war" of symbolic situations and events also developed. The actual number of runaway slaves was slight, and most were returned without incident; but many northern states still maintained laws in opposition to federal fugitive-slave laws. Several runaways were helped to escape under dramatic and well-publicized circumstances, and the Wisconsin legislature actually passed an ordinance of nullification against the federal law of 1850. The border states, from which most runaways escaped, were relatively quiet, but the Deep South, which rarely lost a slave, was in constant turmoil. The corollary northern grievance was the refusal of southern federal juries to convict slave traders caught importing slaves in violation of federal law. Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) continued to circulate widely, and Hinton Rowan Helper of North Carolina published The Impending Crisis (1857), a devastating attack on slavery for its crushing effects on nonslaveholding southern whites and a call for violent revolution. Frederick Law Olmsted proposed no action, but his essentially friendly volumes describing his southern travels were an equally severe indictment of the overall effects of slavery. On the southern side, George Fitzhugh offered two books on the humane and paternalistic characteristics of slavery as opposed to the vicious cruelties of northern capitalistic free labor. Fitzhugh was certain the North would ultimately see the light and adopt a modified version of southern slavery for its own white labor. In other books and newspapers, southerners were told that the North was siphoning off a major portion of the wealth produced by their work and talent. Northerners wrote of southern backwardness. Southerners denounced northern industrialism and its accompanying reform movements as fountains of socialism and atheism. Most of the Protestant churches painfully split into northern and southern divisions. Still, the common bonds of language, tradition, patriotism, economic interdependence, and religion appeared to be holding firm until October 1859, when the fiery abolitionist John Brown invaded Harpers Ferry, Virginia, with 22 men and some 950 iron-tipped spears. The effort was promptly crushed, but Brown had clearly intended to rouse the slaves to revolt, arm them with guns and spears, and begin an all-out war against the whites. Governor Henry A. Wise of Virginia refused to have Brown examined for insanity, and Brown insisted on the martyrdom Wise was eager to confer. Still suffering from wounds, Brown was carried into the courtroom on a cot, and he flatly denied any purpose beyond helping slaves to escape. He lied with magnificent eloquence and dignity, and the circumstances of his trial, along with his courage on the scaffold, helped mitigate the initial northern feeling that he was a monster and a madman. The abolitionists promptly canonized him. Thoreau compared his execution to the crucifixion of Christ, and others took up the comparison. More important, because Brown had been financed by a handful of rich northerners, southern radicals emphasized the intent, rather than the result, to convince perhaps hundreds of thousands of previously moderate southerners that the North really did intend to invade the South and start a horrible race war similar to that in Haiti from 1791 to 1804. The Election of 1860
No one was more shaken by Brown's raid than James Buchanan. In his memoirs he listed Seward, Helper, John Brown, and the Republican party generally as the chief authors of the Civil War, and 1860 found him and his White House family still convinced that they were an island of sanity and justice in a cruel and unfair world. Thus, when southern Democrats demanded a southern presidential nominee and a presidential platform guaranteeing federal protection for slavery in all territories regardless of majority public sentiment within such territories, Buchanan lost touch with reality and agreed. Some of his closest friends warned that the election of a Republican president in 1860 would bring secession, and Buchanan should have believed them. While a moderate southern Democratic candidate might gain a significant northern vote, he could not possibly do so on a platform including a federal slave code for the territories, and under any circumstances he would need the support of Stephen A. Douglas. Indeed, the election of Douglas seemed to many the best possible hope for peace. He was pledged to allow the people of any territory to have slavery if they wanted it, and he had studiously refrained from any moral condemnation of the institution. He had also, however, refused to help Buchanan and the South saddle antislavery Kansas with a proslavery constitution, and Buchanan's personal hatred for him had become a mania. Buchanan had vowed publicly in 1856 that he would serve only one term, but he probably resented the total absence of any requests that he break his pledge. He knew that like his predecessor, Franklin Pierce, he could not be re-nominated, but he was determined to play a vital role in the immediate future of the Democratic party. As a reward for southern good behavior at the Democratic convention of 1856, Charleston, South Carolina, had been selected for the convention of 1860. Radical southerners, led by William Lowndes Yancey of Alabama, were determined to split the Democratic party by demanding federal protection for territorial slavery, and they were shrewd enough to know that the northern Democratic delegates could not accept such a platform and still hope to win the federal and state offices for which many of them were candidates. But the "Fire-Eaters," as extreme advocates of southern interests were known, needed at least some northern support to prevent a reasonable platform and the nomination of Douglas, and this was provided by James Buchanan. Much of the Northeast had already fallen to the Republicans, and most of the delegates from this region, therefore, were federal officeholders beholden to the Buchanan administration. Also, it should be remembered, a considerable residue of southern support existed in numerous northern cities, where working people feared the possible competition of both foreign immigrants and newly freed slaves. Thus, the convention was essentially managed by friends of the president, for whom the defeat of Douglas was the primary object and a territorial slave code was entirely acceptable. In the spring of 1860 the Democratic delegates arriving by sea, coach, and train found Charleston a beautiful city graced by blooming flowers and lovely young women in from the plantations to enjoy the social season, attend the convention, and supply adrenaline to the more eloquent radical orators. Southerners and northerners of the Buchanan camp met gracious hospitality everywhere, while the Douglas supporters were housed in a hot, uncomfortable dormitory. Tempers were shredded, and reason gave way to emotion almost immediately. The so-called Buchaneers and the southerners delayed the selection of a candidate until the adoption of the platform, and the platform committee recommended the southern program. In the ensuing debate, the great southern orator William L. Yancey roused the convention and galleries to a fever pitch by a long recitation of northern aggressions and by accusing northern Democrats of supporting slavery for constitutional rather than moral reasons. If northern Democrats would not make a moral commitment to slavery by supporting his platform, said Yancey, they would deserve even greater condemnation than the hated Republicans. Senator George E. Pugh of Ohio spoke for most northern Democrats when he replied bitterly that after years of losing elections at home by defending the South, northern Democrats were now being asked to avow publicly the righteousness of slavery to save the party. The Democratic party, shouted Pugh, would not be "dragged at the chariot wheel of 300,000 slave masters," and its leaders would not "put their hands on their mouths and their mouths in the dust." On 30 April 1860 the national Democratic party ran aground, having been steered onto the reef in large part by the party helmsman, James Buchanan. The Charleston convention rejected Yancey's platform and voted for popular sovereignty. The delegates from eight southern states bolted the convention. Several weeks later, meeting in Baltimore, the northern Democrats nominated Douglas, while the southerners nominated Vice President John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky to run on their extremist platform. Buchanan and former president Pierce promptly endorsed Breckinridge, and the White House in effect became his campaign headquarters. Meanwhile, a collection of former Whigs and Unionist Democrats nominated John Bell of Tennessee on a brief platform that spoke only for sectional peace. During the election campaign, this Constitutional Union party circulated a pamphlet outlining the horrendous results that would follow a Lincoln victory and thereby contributed much to southern hysteria. The Republicans, almost certain of victory against their divided opponents, met in Chicago and rejected Seward, the conservative front-runner who had too often sounded like a dangerous radical, and turned instead to the moderate Abraham Lincoln, who had spoken only for containment of slavery and a hope for its ultimate extinction. With a candidate who fit almost every American stereotype of what a president should be and a platform that promised tariffs, homesteads, internal improvements, liberal immigration laws, and western railroads—something for almost everyone—the Republicans had an appeal far beyond the question of slavery, and their candidate could be reasonably presented as the one most likely to bring sectional peace. The platform did not even require Lincoln to oppose the expansion of slavery unless a specific situation should arise, and no such event was even on the horizon.
Only Douglas campaigned actively, and placing sectional peace above his ambitions, he assured southern listeners that the election of Lincoln would pose no threat to slavery and begged them to remain calm regardless of the result. When hecklers asked how Douglas would react to secession, the "Little Giant" shouted back that he would suppress it with military force.
Throughout the South the 1860 election campaign was one long rehearsal for secession. Politicians and editors filled the air with warnings of northern conspiracies, new John Brown invasions, slave rebellions, the burning of homes, and the murder of women and children. Congressman Lawrence Keitt of South Carolina would never "permit a party stained with treason, hideous with insurrection, and dripping with blood, to occupy the government." In Dalton, Georgia, thirty-six blacks were arrested and charged with a plot to burn the town and kill all the people. In Talladega, Alabama, two whites and eight blacks were arrested, and one white man was hanged. Rumors that the wells were being poisoned swept through Texas, and a moderate opponent of slavery was hanged. A vendor of Breckinridge campaign badges was almost hanged because a Lincoln button fell from his bag. The threat of mob violence shadowed local conservatives and Unionists who might be tempted to speak out for common sense. James Buchanan might have supported the contention of Douglas that a Lincoln victory would not justify secession, and he could have combined his support for Breckinridge with warnings that secession would be resisted. He considered the Breckin-ridge platform a reasonable solution and probably hoped the threats of disunion would do no more than force a northern surrender to southern demands. The administration newspaper, the Constitution, subject to Buchanan's orders under pain of immediate dismissal as the recipient of executive patronage, cooperated zealously with the disunionists. Lincoln's election, wrote editor William M. Browne, would put abolitionist officeholders in every community to spread antislavery ideas among whites and foment rebellion among slaves. Douglas feared a rumored southern plot to seize Washington if Breckinridge should carry the border states, and campaigned vigorously in those areas. In the end, Bell carried Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee, while Douglas himself took Missouri. Breckin-ridge carried Maryland by only 700 votes. The total vote apparently indicated that most southerners still hoped to remain in the Union. Lincoln received 1,866,452 votes; Douglas, 1,376,957; Breckinridge, 849,781; and Bell, 588,879. While Breckinridge carried eleven of the fifteen slave states, he won a majority in only seven of them. The majority in eight of the fifteen voted for Bell and Douglas. The combined slave-state vote was 570,000 for Breckinridge and 705,000 for Bell and Douglas. Even in the states that seceded almost immediately, Bell and Douglas won 48 percent of the vote.
Equally important, the Republicans did not win either house of Congress. As Douglas pointed out, if the southerners would stay in their seats, Lincoln, tied hand and foot by his opposition, would be "an object of pity and commiseration rather than of fear and apprehension by a brave and chivalrous people," and in four short years another election would quickly remedy any real grievances. Also, the Supreme Court remained under firm southern control. Whatever the long-range prospects for slavery, the southern states were clearly in no danger from either Lincoln or the Republican party in 1861 unless they should try to divide a nation that Lincoln and most northerners would be determined to preserve.

God Bless You and Our Southern People.

Answer 2

Actually I get rather tired of all the bickering about something
that happened years ago. It is history. You can pretend it didn't
exist but that will never change it. You can tear it out of textbooks
and that won't change it.
If memory serves me correctly, the governor gave in to that sector of the people who demanded that the Confederate flag
be taken down...while it reminded some of slavery, the flag also
reminds me of my great-grandfather who served in that war.
I guess some people feel like the flag glorifies slavery and signifies to some that it is still approved of. Whether the governor
personally believed this I don't know.
As for the museum, it is like any other museum. It allows the
people of this generation and those to come to learn about history....both the good and the bad.
Perhaps the only way to avoid reminding people of the negative aspects of what took place in the past is to speak no more about it. Don't talk about the Great Depression. Don't talk about the
lives lost in WWI and WWII. Don't talk about Nixon. What about the present...we better clean up our newspapers..remove all the stuff about murders, drugs, rapes. Don't talk about it..it reminds
me of how imperfect our society is.

Answer 3

The museum isn't to remind, but to educate. People were robbed of their freedom in the name of profit.

( Remember, slavery still is alive and well in many parts of the world)

Answer 4

very simple. The falg does not put any money in his or the states pocket. the Slavery Museum does

Answer 5

It's more politically correct hypocrisy. Negroes have all the right, but White people who want to fly their flag proudly are viewed as "evil" and "wrong."

White heritage in America is under persecution.

Answer 6

Will the tour guides be dressed as slaves?

Answer 7

It's called pandering.

Answer 8

Vote on it. call your people you voted for. It's you fault