On this day, it is a perfect occasion to think about what exactly slavery is, what men, women, and children did to resist slavery, and, above all, why people living today need to think about such matters.
Slavery, like all crimes, is a form of theft.
Burglary, robbery, fraud, vandalism, trespass, and arson are obviously forms of theft, to wit, the theft of real and personal property as well as their use and enjoyment.
Assault, battery, maiming, kidnapping, rape, and molestation, are forms of theft, to wit, the theft of liberty and of the property which is your own body.
Murder, of course, is the theft of one's very life.
But slavery is unique among the crimes that plague humanity because slavery combines all of these other crimes.
Slavery is a theft of real property and personal property. The person held in slavery produces goods and services, yet may not keep, use, sell, profit from, or enjoy those goods and services except at the whim of the master of the slavery arrangement, who may take those goods and services away at anytime. In slavery, the person held in slavery proposes, but the master disposes. Slavery violates the right to property by making human beings into property.
Slavery is a theft of the property which is your own body. The person held in slavery may not sleep, eat, drink, smoke, work, exercise, recreate, copulate, or procreate in any way except as the master dictates. In slavery, persons are no different than pets or livestock and are counted, fed, watered, worked, cleaned, bred, gelded, and dispatched as such.
And finally, slavery is perhaps the most insidious method of murder, because the victim is left alive for at least some time while the victim's life is stolen, fenced, and used to exhaustion. Slavery is nothing more nor less than a state of being which is living death.
Against this abominable crime of slavery, victims of slavery in the United States, like many victims of slavery everywhere, went to great lengths, and sometimes terrible depths, to resist and combat slavery.
According to Kenneth Stampp's work The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South
and Dr. Julius Lester's work To Be A Slave
, victims of slavery did all of the following, both alone and together, to foil slavery:* Although slavery took away almost everything that victims of slavery had, one thing slavery never took was the individual mind. People living in slavery used their minds in every conceivable way to fool and foil their masters, typically smiling in the faces of their masters, while retaining their own thoughts and their own plans for private consumption.
* People living in slavery shunned and shammed the work which their masters forced them to perform, by working slower, working without paying attention, working incompetently, wearing out and destroying tools, misusing livestock, and anything else to make work unproductive and unprofitable for the master.
* People living in slavery appropriated for themselves the wealth which their masters extracted from their forced labor. It was nothing for people living in slavery to take food, clothing, shoes, jewelry, anything which enabled them to both live and live comfortably despite the misery and horrors of slavery.
* People living in slavery appropriated themselves--"stole themselves away" as they put it--into the woods, the swamps, the mountains, and the deserts to get away from their masters. Sometimes it was only for a few hours to go to an encampment and worship in a manner not approved of by the master, sometimes it was for years of primitive living in hiding, sometimes it was en masse in entire secret settlements, sometimes it was permanent, either among Native American tribes, in non-slaveholding States, in Canada, or abroad.
* People who freed themselves from slavery, in combination with sympathetic free people called Abolitionists, formed an "Underground Railroad," a network to communicate with victims of slavery and to help victims of slavery take secret pathways to free territories in the United States and Canada. The Underground Railroad communicated in code by means of songs, symbols, hand signs, and even window quilts with particular designs which indicated safe houses for lodging. The Underground Railroad also transported escaped victims of slavery to free territory by means of covered wagons, trunks, plus disguises and fake identification worn and used in transit. In at least one instance, the Underground Railroad used the postal shipping services of the time to mail Henry "Box" Brown to freedom in a wooden crate.
* Abolitionists would not only publish literature and give speeches to oppose slavery, but also when called to serve on jury duty in fugitive slave cases, would refuse to convict fugitive slaves and those who harbored fugitive slaves. This practice, called jury nullification, enabled many a victim of slavery to escape from slave hunters and live in freedom elsewhere. For more information on the history and practice of jury nullification, contact The Fully Informed Jury Association (FIJA) at http://www.fija.org
* Victims of slavery used any chance they could to gather and conspire against their masters. While many times the fear of getting caught would keep these gatherings from being fruitful, they also led to many armed rebellions and uprisings which struck fear into the hearts and minds of slave-masters throughout the nation.
* Finally, as a testament to the utter evil of slavery, sometimes victims of slavery acted in complete desperation and wrong-headedness. Some victims of slavery betrayed and tattled on potential escapees from slavery, in order to curry favor with the slave-master and have some fleeting, temporary comfort. Some would commit suicide to avoid having or continuing a life of slavery. Some victims of slavery who rose up in rebellion against slavery murdered innocent parties who had nothing to do with slavery. Some mothers in slavery would even commit infanticide to keep their children from living in slavery.
* Despite some of the wrong things done in resisting slavery, however, most victims of slavery retained an extraordinary level of humanity and, both in slavery and in freedom, managed to find some form of joy in life. That ability to find joy in life, regardless of circumstance, is the ultimate triumph of freedom over slavery.
The reason we must remember all of these things on this day, even though slavery was officially ended 144 years ago, is because the ideals of "Life, Liberty, Property, and the Pursuit of Happiness" are frail flowers which have not always been with us and which need constant protection. Most of mankind throughout the world and throughout history has lived and mostly died without the benefit of these ideals. The very first nation founded upon these ideals still didn't get them right.
Even to this day, billions languish under either chattel slavery or systemic slavery, whether in the Islamic world in Asia and Africa, the Communist nations of Red China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Cuba, and Zimbabwe, or under sundry and various forms of tyranny throughout the Third World. And even we in the United States and people throughout Europe and Australia face the increasing danger of becoming victims of a new slavery of Nationalist and Transnationalist Socialism and Collectivism.
Juneteenth is as much a day to steel ourselves against present and future tyranny as it is to remember the horrors and the triumphs of the past. May we all use this day to remember that "Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
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