Delaware a Slave State? Well ...
By Leverkuhn Comments (5) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
This from an interview Senator Joe Biden of Delaware gave to Fox News:
WALLACE: And, finally, Senator Biden — finally, we've got about 30 seconds left, but I can't let you go without some politics. As we've mentioned, you're in South Carolina right now, on the campaign trial. Thirty seconds or less, what kind of a chance would a Northeastern liberal like Joe Biden stand in the South if you were running in Democratic primaries against southerners like Mark Warner and John Edwards.
BIDEN: Better than anybody else. You don't know my state. My state was a slave state. My state is a border state. My state has the eighth-largest black population in the country. My state is anything from a Northeast liberal state.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,210668,00.html
I know that there are some people in the right-wing blogosphere mocking Biden's assertion that his state was ever a "slave state." Well, unfortunately my friends, this time Biden is right. At one point in our nation's history every state was a slave state. The Northern states simply abolished slavery sooner than did the Southern states. And some northern states did so far later than we think. Delaware is such a state.
While Delaware did take the important step of abolishing the slave trade in its state constitution in 1776, the ban was not enforced until after the American Revolution. The state continued to have a very large black slave population well into the nineteenth century. Anti-slavery forces tried to outlaw slavery several times from during roughly the next seven decades, but each time they failed. The last serious effort to abolish slavery within the state itself occurred in 1847. The abolition bill passed in the state House of Representatives but failed in the Senate.
During the Civil War Delaware remained in the Union but it also remained a slave state. Although Lincoln appealed to the people of Delaware to abolish slavery, the state government harshly repudiated his entreaties. Delaware even refused to ratify the 13th Amendment when it was submitted to the states for a vote. In fact, white citizens of Delaware continued to own slaves until 1865 when the 13th Amendment was implemented nationally, which was after Lee's surrender, and long after the slave system had effectively ceased to exist in most of the South.
All this is not to say that Biden’s apparent boast that his state used to tolerate slavery seems a little odd, even bizarre. But as a matter of plain historical fact he is right.
That is exactly how I interpreted Biden's remarks.
We all know that all states were once slave states, but the question was "Why would Southerners vote for you?" His response was, "My state was a slave state."
I get the point. It was a dumb thing to say, and probably indicative of his view of the South. However, I've also heard it said that Biden was factually wrong by saying that Delaware was a slave state, and that's simply not true. Facts matter, and that's why I wrote this diary.
A precedent embalms a principle.
- Disraeli
I was asking where you had gone only yesterday.
Quentin Langley
Editor of http://www.quentinlangley.net
The point is that this is another moment like Howard Dean's of a couple years ago. In his calls for the Democratic party to reach out to the south, he associated southern religious rightists as confederate flag wavers.
And now, when Biden is asked if he can reach out to the same people, he implicitly portrays them as the ideological successors of the slave holders.
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If you're seeing shades of gray, it's because you're not looking close enough to see the black and white dots.