О том, что рабство и работорговля в африканских культурах свое время считались нормами, аз, многогрешный, уже писал. Однако недавно в беседе с уважаемым
mezeh'ом возникла другая тема: а что думали о рабовладении, и особенно о владении темнокожими рабами, тогдашние американские негры? Считали ли они это аморальным и недопустимым, или же придерживались каких-то иных взглядов.Найти ответ на этот вопрос оказалось удивительно просто. На портрете, помещенном выше, изображен некто Уильям (Эприл) Элиссон. По-русски никакой информации о нем я, увы, не нашел. Зато по-английский информация оказалась более чем исчерпывающей:
William Ellison Jr., born April Ellison (c. April 1790 – December 5, 1861), was a U.S. cotton gin maker and blacksmith in South Carolina, and former black slave who achieved considerable success in business before the American Civil War. He eventually became a major planter and one of the medium property owners, and the wealthiest black property owner in the state. According to the 1860 census (in which his surname was listed as “Ellerson”), he owned 53 black slaves, making him the largest of the 171 black slaveholders in South Carolina. He held 40 slaves at his death and more than 1,000 acres (400 ha) of land.
Tемнокожие рабовладельцы были не только в Южной Каролине:
Anna Madgigine Jai Kingsley (born Anta Madjiguene Ndiaye) (18 June 1793[1] – April or May 1870) was a West African from present-day Senegal who was enslaved and sold in Cuba. She became the wife of a plantation owner, and then a planter and slaveholder in her own right as a free black in early 19th-century Florida.
She was born in 1793 as a princess of the Wolof people. When she was 13 years old, she was captured and sent to Cuba, where she was purchased by, impregnated by, and married to Zephaniah Kingsley, a slave trader and plantation owner. They had four children together. Kingsley freed Anna Jai in 1811, when she turned 18, and gave her responsibilities for his plantations in East Florida, then under Spanish colonial rule. For 25 years, Kingsley's unusual family lived on Fort George Island (part of modern-day Jacksonville). Anna Jai managed a large and successful planting operation. After gaining freedom, she was given a Spanish land grant for 5 acres (20,000 m2) and held 12 slaves
Nicolas Augustin Metoyer of Louisiana owned 13 slaves in 1830. He and his 12 family members collectively owned 215 slaves.Free blacks owned slaves in Boston by 1724 and in Connecticut by 1783; by 1790, 48 black people in Maryland owned 143 slaves. One particularly notorious black Maryland farmer named Nat Butler "regularly purchased and sold Negroes for the Southern trade." (ИСТОЧНИК_
Николас Метойер
Есть даже целая книга на эту тему, но я про нее ничего не знаю.
Вывод, думаю, очевиден. Интересно, насколько широко соответствующие факты известны в современной Америке, школьникам и молодежи прежде всего?
Элиссон, кстати, дожил до гражданской войны. В ходе которой убедительно доказал правоту марксизма:
During the American Civil War, Ellison and his sons supported the Confederate States of America and gave the government substantial donations and aid. A grandson fought informally with the regular Confederate Army and survived the war.