#Did francis scott key own slaves free

Just after the First World War, when honorable service brought blacks no bettered status and little relief from violently enforced prejudices, a black messiah, Marcus Aurelius Garvey, arose with ambitious plans for building an African empire with black Americans. The quarter century after Reconstruction, for example, a particularly desperate era for American blacks, saw the creation of such enterprises as the Liberian Exodus Joint Stock Steamship Company, the United Transatlantic Society, and the International Migration Society. Such fears and attitudes have been most evident in periods of heightened racial tension, and it is at those times that Negro emigration has appeared to many to be a reasonable, perhaps the only, solution. The presumed inevitability and incurable nature of race prejudice have likewise been advanced to justify total separation. The fear of a genocidal blood bath has been a persistent argument in favor of an absolute separation of the black and white races-a proposal that has surfaced repeatedly in the nation’s history. Yet deeper than his abhorrence of the institution was his fear that American freed Negroes would become so -numerous that race war would be inevitable. Jefferson believed slavery was evil, both morally and politically.

Having been trained in various useful arts, they would be sent to a distant colony. Thomas Jefferson, in the Virginia Assembly, put forward a program that would emancipate the slaves as they became adults. Serious discussion of that prospect began as early as the 1770’s with Samuel Hopkins, a Rhode Island Congregational minister Hopkins proposed training black missionaries to begin a Negro return to Africa. He was by no means the first, nor the last, to nourish such a solution to an agonizing American racial problem. Thus did the Great Emancipator propose voluntary exile for the nation’s blacks. But still you are attached to them at all events.” So he had in mind the possibility of a colony in Central America, and he asked for “a hundred tolerably intelligent men, with their wives and children,” to be the pioneer colonists there, although he admitted he would be satisfied with a quarter that number. It does not strike me that you have the greatest reason to love them. I do not know how much attachment you may have toward our race. Perhaps, he suggested, that was too far away: “… some of you would rather remain within reach of the country of your nativity. He ruminated aloud about their going to Liberia, in Africa. The aspiration of men is to enjoy equality with the best when free, but on this broad continent, not a single man of your race is made the equal of a single man of ours.” He felt it was “better for us both … to be separated,” that is, that the Negroes of America go elsewhere-all of them. “You are cut off,” he reminded his visitors, “from many of the advantages which the other race enjoy. Instead, he proposed to them the resettling of American blacks, either in Africa or in Central or South America. The President, however, gave them no heartening affirmations of their equality.

#Did francis scott key own slaves free

The “colored men” whom Lincoln addressed were free already some of them had been free all their lives. Slavery was toppling under the blows of war, and in just another month the President would issue the preliminary version of the Emancipation Proclamation. When, on August 14, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln spoke to a visiting “committee of colored men” at the White House, it was already becoming clear that one result of the War Between the States would be the freeing of millions of slaves.