Setanta wrote:
1) Your link does not address the topic of indentures, and certainly not of any indenture for 40 years. The reference to the different type of slavery in Missouri doesn't refer to the slaves there somehow being different slaves than those anywhere else in the south, it simply refers to different working conditions than were common elsewhere in the south.
2) There is simply no way that you can reasonably allege that Missouri was a "northern" state in the face of the fact that it was a slave state, and only entered the Union on the basis of a Congressional compromise which permitted slavery in that state.
1) yep, it sure does;
Quote:Slavery was not a "Southern" problem alone. Many northern states phased out slavery as late as the 1830s, and states such as Delaware and New Jersey still had slave-owning residents as late as 1860. On a local level, residents of Illinois owned slaves (under long-term indenture agreements of 40 years or longer) during the period of the Dred Scott trials, and a special provision in the Illinois constitution allowed slaves to work in the salt mines across the Mississippi from St. Louis as long as they were not held there for over one year at a stretch. Many people in southern Illinois supported slavery. No slaves in the St. Louis area picked cotton however, and few worked in farm fields. Most worked as stevedores and draymen on the riverfront, on riverboats, in the lead and salt mines, as handymen, janitors and porters (like Dred Scott), and as maids, nannies, and laundresses (like Harriet Scott).
it was across the river in illinois. so i was less than 100% accurate on that, but as you see, st. louis and illinois appear to have been sharing slaves.
www.nps.gov/jeff/planyourvisit/slavery.htm
2) okay, here's the deal on the mason dixon line. in terms of dividing the north from the south, it has always been excepted in my experience growing up in the south that the line conformed to the path of the ohio river to the mississippi.
Quote:Over fifty years later, the boundary between the two states came into the spotlight with the Missouri Compromise of 1820. The Compromise established a boundary between the slave states of the south and the free states of the north (however its separation of Maryland and Delaware is a bit confusing since Delaware was a slave state that stayed in the Union). This boundary became referred to as the Mason-Dixon line because it began in the east along the Mason-Dixon line and headed westward to the Ohio River and along the Ohio to its mouth at the Mississippi River and then west along 36 degrees 30 minutes North.
geography.about.com/od/politicalgeography
2) i concede that thier's more to the missouri question than i had considered. a couple of things though;
it looks like missouri contributed 110,000 men to the union while the contribution to the confederates is listed as "unknown", but seems to have been at least 40,000. evin at double that, it's still significantly lower than the union pick up.
if nothing else, you have to admit that at the very least, missouri was not part of the c.s.a. -
damn, you guys are making me work for this one aren't ya ?
