The Unknown Truth About the Slave Owners of 1860
The slave owners of South Carolina had a real problem with the election of Abraham Lincoln. On December 20, 1860, South Carolina was the first state to secede from the Union and they did it in such a way as to reveal their true reasons for secession and eventually the Civil War. Just before the official act to secede, South Carolina slave owners banded together to start the “1860 Association” which printed tens of thousands of brochures with the title being “The Doom of Slavery.” Rare copies and reprints of this horrid material still exist and point to the belief that the slave owners were deathly afraid that Lincoln was going to abolish slavery in the South. This would have ended their exploitative capitalist system and placed Black people in a position to enjoy freedom so long promised. In an eerie replication of history, the insurrectionists of the modern-day riot at the Capitol on January 6th were attempting this just like in 1860. This seems to be where Trump got his criminal idea of overthrowing the government with his racist minions.
John Townsend was a South Carolina state senator and owner of a large cotton plantation, known as Bleak Hall near Charleston, and was one of the authors of this racist document. He went on to say, “Abolitionism, as we have said, governed by moral frenzy and religious fanaticism, has no stopping point; and Black Republicanism, in the hands of the abolition leaders . . . . On one point alone, is there absolute agreement between the two, and that is the ultimate property robbery of the South in respect to both real and personal estate; and even here the means the one would resort to are different from those the other would pursue, as will presently appear.” The “robbery” that Senator Townsend speaks of is the freedom of Black People and the fact that they would no longer be able to hold people in bondage without pay. Blacks were considered property and were protected by “Toxic religion” as practiced by fake white Christians in churches that were segregated. Senator Townsend and his racist sidekicks, in all of the southern slave owning states, agreed with his white supremacist thoughts when he said, “But the abolition of slavery means, further, that the negro is not only to be made free, but equal also to his former master, in political and civil rights.”
Before this trash was written, Senator Townsend reported that Black enslaved people set fire to Dallas which echoed the fake news reports of Charles Pryor, the editor of a Dallas newspaper, who hoped to incite the southern states to violent rebellion. Sound familiar to the Trump big lie? The racists in Texas used this incident to follow the lead of South Carolina by claiming that Blacks and abolitionists were secretly hiding “300 revolvers” in Fort Worth, Texas to use against the slave owners. This is reminiscent of the bald-faced liars of the Trump fascist slogan of “stop the steal” that they injected into the minds of the easily fooled. One must keep in mind that all of the southern slave owners were in close contact with one another spreading lies and inciting violence which eventually led to the Civil War. We already know about the articles of secession that each of the southern states wrote admitting to the world that their war was to protect slavery and white supremacy. This pamphlet was one of the main incitements that led to all of the horror to follow.
