CELEBRATING EMANCIPATION DAY: AN ESSAY ON INTERCULTURAL
COHESION
Emancipation Day or more specifically the anniversary of Black American Emancipation should be an intercultural celebration. The freedom of American slaves was a landmark victory in the
difficult struggle to achieve universal civil rights for all peoples standing out along entire course of human history and therefore an historical event of global, not just national or ethical significance. The United States' early
role as a beacon in the experiment to realize the egalitarian ideals of the enlightenment found the American Civil War to be the first significant challenge to realize the freedoms implied but never carried out at the nations founding. The milestone for human justice achieved in
1776 had fallen lamentably short of attaining its full glory; it was a magnanimous but
much compromised victory that left millions of men and women and children enslaved and condemned many more millions to slavery. Congress and the enfranchised peoples of America endured the evil, hypocrisy of
slavery and even passed legislation to perpetuate it for nearly 98
years after the birth of the nation. Although
slavery was generally viewed as a common consequence of existence
in every corner of the world up until the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth
centuries for the vast majority of people who were poor and oppressed on this
planet the emancipation of black slaves in The United States
of America represented a decisive turning point for civil rights having the power to affect policy around the globe. In
the middle of the nineteenth century the eyes of all humanity were focused on a
new country called America and the battle between the north and south over the
divine right of one man to own another; The American Civil War more so even than the American Revolutionary War was an international
and intercultural phenomenon reaching many thousands more ears and eyes due to technologies such as the telegraph, the train and a thoroughly modern mechanized and automatic printing press.
The herculean task of keeping Emancipation Day culturally
relevant 150 years after it first touched the hearts of men, women and
children of all races continues to challenge us in the twenty-first
century. Heretofore, its offering has been
packaged mostly as a Black American holiday and every American city where black people lived celebrated with a grand parade and fanfare. When viewed from the eye of the historian, the humanitarian and the socio-cultural anthropologist's the emancipation of American slaves represents a fascinating point in
human evolution. The enslaved and oppressed had revolted to gain their freedom in dozens of other places around the world well before and after the American Civil War but what made The Emancipation Proclamation patently unique is that it was the product of the first nation founded upon the principles of egalitarianism. Looking at America from a global perspective
in the mid nineteenth century one would have seen a nation of growing political
and economic influence which much of the enlightened world nonetheless viewed
as fundamentally backward because it clung to the practise of slavery; it was
quite literally the great global enigma of the nineteenth century. The world was compelled to ask itself how a
nation founded upon egalitarianism could still support slavery. Other than the politically and economically powerful international lobby of Abolitionists slavery had little opposition domestically or abroad because of the vast profits it generated. England abolished slavery well before America but it was already wealthy beyond imagination from many centuries of imperialism and was in a better position to forego profit for the finer cause of morality. America's quick-found wealth was owed completely to slavery; it's free-labor, slave driven economy allowed it to compete with established nations less than 50 years after becoming a nation itself. The explosion of the American economy of 33 states by 1860 having been a loosely organized nation of 13 colonies rivaled any other economic model of the time. By today's standards a slave-driven plantation would be tantamount to company that did not have to pay its employees wages, providing only the barest sub-standard living accommodations operating on property it had been gifted and it would pay only the merest of taxes. Given these incredible incentives what company would not thrive? Even so, America's pockets were not nearly as deep and diversified as their European cousin's so to southern planters there were few viable options at the time other than the perpetuation of a slave-driven economy. Only the south failed to see its demise by the industrial revolution. On the one hand slave owners adapted a dispassionate reflex to the condition of human bondage and on the other they took slavery far too personal to suit the purposes of business; the fateful result was a blind attachment to the institution of slavery while the rest of the world had moved on... There is no romanticism in slavery, it was an evil and barbaric practise that should have been abolished in 1776. In 1860 America was well on its way to rectifying this 84 years old mistake; It became embroiled in the Civil War. The world knew full well why this war was being fought as did the men who lived and died, as did the slaves who watched; it was about freedom!
Technologically slavery was doomed for obsolescence, at
least in theory due to dozens of inventions patented as early as 1834, that
replaced the back breaking job of reaping and harvesting crops such as cotton,
tobacco, wheat and corn; the cash crops of the antebellum south. These inventions were most effective on large
plantations where horse drawn machines could significantly cut down man hours
spent laboring in the fields. Mechanized farming was not so practical on small farms where the cost of the machinery
would cut into the narrow profit margin a free labor source afforded but it was well-suited for large plantations. Many of these patented inventions were
designed and built by slaves in collaboration with their owners such as a
mechanical reaper designed and patented by Cyrus McCormick and his slave Jo
Anderson. On the average plantation slaves were the fix-it men, they were the carpenters, cabinetmakers, blacksmiths and masons. Equipped with a thorough knowledge of the building trades and of the agrarian processes they were far better equipped to invent faster, more efficient ways of planting and harvesting crops than the masters and overseers they served. As chattel owned by their masters their prototypical inventions were the legal property of their master and so the patent would not have been made in the slaves name but in that of his owner. It was in he slaves interest to create ways that would make their work less labor intensive and thus were born many of the farming tools and innovations of that time although credit has seldom been given to the slaves for their artifice. To the rest of the world the moral
and ethical issue of slavery appeared to be far more important now since
technologically there was no longer any real need for the huge numbers of
slaves traditionally needed to run the large plantations that drove the southern
American economy. It is conceivable that
the international community which had also been experimenting with the development
of agrarian technologies at the advent of the industrial revolution saw a new
and untapped market to sell their machinery; all that stood in the way were the
slaves who would no longer be needed in lieu of the new machines. The entire world was now invested in the ending
of slavery either for humanitarian reasons or because of potential
to import their agrarian technology to meet Americas growing economic consumerism.
Perhaps the missing cultural link between the emancipation
of slaves in America and the other cultures living in this
country is the understanding that Emancipation Day is the celebration of freedom itself! Every culture thriving in the United States and abroad owes its freedom, its ability to exist without fear of sudden and unjustified
enslavement to that glorious day in that wondrous chapter of human
socio-political evolution known affectionately as Emancipation Day personified in practical application as the
13th Amendment to the American Constitution ratified on April 8,
1864. At the end of the day regardless
of race, sex creed, religion or ethnicity not only all Americans but free peoples
everywhere are unified on a common front because of what happened on
Emancipation Day; it is the tie that binds us all…
Written by BIGDADDY BLUES
A GALLERY OF RELATED IMAGES
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