On this 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War, the Adventist Review is examining the history of the fiercest conflict ever on American soil. In light of the modern human trafficking that most people are only now becoming aware of, Ellen White’s article originally published during the Civil War is worth re-reading.
EXCERPT:
The North have had no just idea of the strength of the accursed system of slavery. It is this, and this alone, which lies at the foundation of the war. The South have been more and more exacting. They consider it perfectly right to engage in human traffic, to deal in slaves and the souls of men. They are annoyed and become perfectly exasperated if they cannot claim all the territory they desire. They would tear down the boundaries and bring their slaves to any spot they please, and curse the soil with slave labor. The language of the South has been imperious, and the North have not taken suitable measures to silence it. . . .
Read the full article in the July 21, 2011 issue of the Adventist Review.
I have been doing genealogy on my ancestors for several years. I have many stories of the “greats’ -grandfather, uncles, many cousins that were in the Civil War fighting in such places as Pea Ridge, Ark. Of my mother’s great grandfather in Noel, Mo being scalped by Bushwackers and on my father’s side his grandparents invaded and burned out by Bushwackers in Tennessee. My father’s mother was born in 1855 and her grandfather was a large planter with many slaves in Tennessee. She died when I was 2 (1942) years old. So you see that slavery in my family doesn’t reach too far back in time.
A distant cousin just this week sent me a copy of Harper’s Weekly March 29, 1862. There is a column written by “The Lounger” about “Agitation”. It starts out: ” ‘It is very easy to say that slavery caused the rebellion. But why didn’t you let slavery alone? Why were you always agitating ? Why were you forever roaring and raving about slavery, which was none of your business?’
Such is the secret question of many honest minds. But if they were as intelligent as they are honest they would not ask it. For slavery would always have been let alone by the country if it had let the country alone. If it had been content with its own proposition, that it was a local and a State institution, the country, confident that the Slave States would gradually be compelled to provide for its peaceful extinction, would have pitied and deplored, but it would not have divided politically upon the question. ”
It was because slavery would not let the country alone, but was forever agitating it by frantic efforts to expand beyond its State limits, that the nation could not let it alone. …..then you may look to see a free people letting slavery alone when it is trying to take the bread out of their mouths, as well as to deprive them of political rights. For you will observe that the same party which supports the universal despotism of slavery, and its right to go wherever it chooses, is the same party which tries to show the great superiority of the condition of the slave to that of the free black at the North, or the white laborer in England, in order to establish its logical premise that capital ought to own labor.
Let it be fairly understood, then, that if slavery had not agitated there would have been no agitation. The sufferings of black men and the injustice of the system in any State of the Union would have neen tolerated by the people of the other States, so long as they were not implicated, and so long as their rights were not threatened, as polygamy is tolerated in Turkey, or cannibalism in the Feejee Islands. But when the system struck at the rights, at the labor, at the very existence of free citizens beyond the limits of those States, they did just what they would do if the Turks should try to marry their sisters as collateral wives, or Feejee savages to eat their children for dessert. Slavery had stealthily struck at the country for years. In 1856 the country saw it clearly. In a860 it put its heel upon it. In 1870 slavery will be a dried relic.” —( Harper’s Weekly can be found on Ancestry and copies purchased.)
The North woke up to the dangers to the vast numbers of the working class when the South was pushing towards the West. The South would control the country by the gains in Congress. At that time Washington DC was really in control of men who sympathized with the South and slavery.
I have been so in awe of what God showed Ellen White during this time. The more I have learned about that period of our history the more I realize that God in his mercy was trying to inform and turn the Adventist believers far away from sympathy for slavery. What she wrote was in insight that historians have only been catching up with.
We have had those agitating for “States Rights” all along and it is gaining ground today. Ellen White wrote about slaves at the Close of Time and many discounted her because of it thinking that this matter was settled during the Civil War. Our land is full of slaves! Today! And all over the world. There will be slaves up to the End. Capitalism with a Capital C is alive and well and gorging on the labor of millions all over the world that cannot defend themselves.
God’s people need to wake up! There is more going on than the Pope proclaiming a Sunday Law. That will come later… now is the time for justice and mercy.