A BOOK OF NUMBERS | 2006-02-11
The shortest Book in the Bible is the Book of Titus. It is just a little bit longer than you would tolerate for an entry in Bob's Blog.
It contains the phrase, "If you are a master, be a good master. If you are a slave, be a good slave."
So this little Book of Numbers will be shorter than Titus.
Numbers are very important to the place of women in our society. As I have said before, poor Good Queen Anne of England had twenty-one children, and not one of them survived. Clearly, this was not because she lacked the resources to feed them or to get good care.
Throughout almost all of history women spent their lives bearing children just to keep the population stable. It was a terrific burden.
Nobody who talks about the place of women today seems to take this into account.
Elizabeth and I had a dialogue about the fact that a woman who carried a noble name was NEVER alone during the years when she could conceive. When a queen bore a child, the room was FULL of witnesses.
It is a bit hard to discuss real history with someone who does empathize with past realities.
Back when Roots first came out as a TV docudrama, Pat Buchanan wrote a piece about it in TV Guide. He said that HIS Irish ancestors would LOVE to have had the little cabins the slaves lived in. They lived in tenements with a single toilet for dozens of families.
John Brown was financed by the Secret Six, "New England industrialists." So where did John Brown's money come from?
Those New England industrialists preferred to hire children. Their hands were smaller and they worked for half the price. They worked fourteen hour days.
Every one of the Secret Six regularly had exhausted children fall into the machines and become crippled.
Since the children were free, their disability was THEIR problem.
So the kids begged or starved.
Slaves always were their masters' problem in the South. So when railroads were built in the malarial marshes, the slaveholders NEVER had their slaves do it.
They hired Pat Buchanan's ancestors, Irishmen from the North. They were was to hire because even the fourteen hour a day factories in Abolitionist Boston had "Irish Need Not Apply" signs.
This is a matter of simple economics. Why risk a thousand-dollar fieldhand's life when an Irishman who died didn't cost you a dime?
Likewise, one of many routine lies the British tell about the South was on the series, "Connections." The narrator said we "kidnapped Africans as slaves."
Like using Irishmen for the life-threatening jobs, that just didn't make simple sense. No white man EVER "kidnapped a black" in Africa. We ALWAYS bought them from other blacks.
But a British lie against Southerners is considered to be pure morality in the British Establishment.
More numbers:
Ninty five percent ofthe slaves imported into America were imported into Latin America or the Carribbean. Kael Marx talks about the incredible death rate of slaves brought into Britain's Jamaica.
There was only one place where the black slave population showed a natural increase. That was the five percent who were lucky enough to be sold in the American South.
Blacks multiplied in the South. The day they were freed, their death rate doubled for decades afterward.
Numbers tell a story.
Paid historians tell an entirely different one.
And if you think Yankees lie, you really should listen to Canadians and Europeans.