Revisionist theory.
SoreShoulder
Member Posts: 3,148 ✭✭✭
I believe I brought this up last time it came up.
What if some of the Underground Railroad was smuggling people through rather than from the South? i.e. from Africa or the emancipated British empire.
Why would they go through the South? 1. They would emerge with a ready made back story. 2. The South had much more coast line and much fewer people, so it was easier to enter unnoticed.
Why would they want to come? Many Africans definitely would have preferred to stay in their homeland but I bet you could find a sizable minority who would love to try to emigrate both in and out of areas controlled by European colonizers, maybe because for one reason or another they had been displaced off their land. Maybe there just wasn't any land for some of them to inherit.
Perhaps they were importing guano like everyone else and experiencing a population explosion.
White Americans aren't the only people capable of inflicting oppression. The Hutus killed a million Tutsis in 1994. That sort of thing probably happened in Africa in the 19th century too. So maybe they were fleeing oppression or even genocidal war. It could have come from European colonizers or rival African nations.
There may have been disease and food insecurity and overcrowding in parts of Africa at the time. There was malaria and yellow fever and other diseases in the US too, but probably not as much as in a tropical climate. I don't know about Africa per se, but some parts of the globe are prone to weather fluctuations and pests that cause a famine every few years or decades.
Come to think of it, maybe the Fugitive Slave Act was meant to round up illegal African aliens without having to prove they didn't belong.
Liberians may have been deciding they made a mistake and wanted to return. I read the main part of their diets even today is rice. Also, Liberians could have sold their services in Africa as dialect coaches to other Africans who wanted to emigrate.
Comments
Recall that sometimes people protest the violence in the inner city by saying they'd love to come to nice neighborhoods and just camp out on somebody's lawn so they could live where there's no bullets whizzing around.
They may say the Underground Railroad is thoroughly archaeologically researched but some of the "evidence" would look the same whether or not the trip originated in the South or Africa. All the same things would be there.
Surely this constituted so little of the purpose and intent that it is merely incidental to the story line, and further it's, at worst, a distinction of purpose with little to no difference for any one to care.
And fiery auto crashes
Some will die in hot pursuit
While sifting through my ashes
Some will fall in love with life
And drink it from a fountain
That is pouring like an avalanche
Coming down the mountain
Maybe you're thinking there was no free territory in Africa and for sure the European powers had carved it up into areas of influence. But there were definitely independent caliphates and the areas claimed by Europe were not necessarily controlled by Europe.
Some maps of Africa in 1850 seem to show the European powers only controlled a few small areas on the coast, though they may well have claimed the whole continent.
Europe was probably not able to truly control large inland areas of Africa until the widespread adoption of breechloaders. There may have been more Africans than there had been Native Americans in the American colonies. There was less hope of offsetting their numbers with settlers than there had been in North America because Europeans had less resistance to tropical diseases and rainforest often makes poor farmland, so the European powers would have had to project force from Europe via sailing ship. Africa also had Christianity and Islam.
Plus don't forget some people seem more than ready to burn their city down because they feel owed. Maybe we don't really owe all of them.
"Maybe we don't really owe all of them."
I can guarandamntee you that I don't owe any of them!
Then again it could be the very people who were displaced by Europeans that wanted to buy passage to the US because there was land.
The main issue in their lives could have been that they had been forced off their land and could not move inland because other people held the land. So they had no place to go and there was not at the time a need for extra workers in 1840s-50s coastal Africa.
It could even be that the genocide in the Belgian Congo and German Angola were somewhat overstated and the people found a way to come here. The South could have sold a fair proportion of its slaves in South America for weapon money. They would have been easier to smuggle out through the blockade than cotton or tobacco because they didn't need to leave from a port or sail in a tall ship which was visible from miles away. Those people could have been replaced by people from Africa just after the war. The country may not have had the money or spare manpower to stop the influx. Someone may have told the Africans when they had replaced about the same number of people who had been here before the war and then they would start to resist further immigration from Africa because it would give the game away if someone had noticed there were too many people, and there would not have been enough land or jobs for everyone.
Perhaps the US tried to expatriate its former slaves but found them coming back because there really wasn't any room for them anymore. Perhaps no one had the courage to resist them coming back because it was kind of wrong to just dump them on Africa with no place to go, after guano had started to revolutionize agriculture. Perhaps it wasn't talked much about because it was embarrassing to us as a nation to have tried to get rid of them, then to not be able to resist their return partly because it was immoral to just dump them overseas, partly because the C. War had left the US without enough funding and no way to raise money once the income tax ended.
Africans have/were/are fighting/warring amongst themselves. It's the way of life there, as it HAS been for thousands of years..
To the winner goes the spoils. The loser gets killed, enslaved, sold into slavery or eaten. The loser does NOT simply get to
walk away. Putting it plainly, slavery is/was the ONLY emancipation.. With slavery you got to LIVE
I don't know about that. I would guess there were people who wound up losing their land or kicked out of the home village or otherwise marginalized without actually winding up being sold overseas.