Judge Roy Moore and the Good Old Days of Slavery

TUESDAY, ALABAMA VOTERS will find themselves impaled on the horns of a dilemma. Do they send Doug Jones, an accused Democrat, to Washington, D.C. to fill a vacant U.S. Senate seat?

Or do they send Judge Roy Moore, a religious zealot and accused serial abuser of teenage girls?

Tough choice.

Polls indicate Moore will win a narrow victory. This has something to do with the fact Alabama is a deep red state. It’s a place where a Republican governor had to resign rather than face impeachment, where a Republican leader in the House of Representatives was convicted of a dozen felonies…but people still prefer Republicans to Democrats. Also, evangelical voters, a powerful voting bloc, love Roy Moore because, like President Trump, he wants to make America great again.

Now we learn that during a campaign rally Moore was asked what he thought it meant to “make America great again.” 

When was the country great, a black man in the audience wondered? Moore was ready with a nineteenth century kind of answer. “I think it was great at the time when families were united—even though we had slavery. They cared for one another. People were strong in the families. Our families were strong. Our country had a direction.”

WE HAD A DIRECTION, true. We were headed for a bloody Civil War.

Certainly, Moore loves his Bible. Indeed, he loves it more than he loves his U.S. Constitution. Moore wants to make America great again, as during the 1850s, when apologists argued, for example, that the Good Book trumped all articles of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights put together. 

On what basis did they claim the right to own slaves? Why, you could look it up in Leviticus (25:44-25:46):

Both thy bondmen, and thy bondmaids, which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids.

Moreover of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land: and they shall be your possession.

And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them for a possession; they shall be your bondmen for ever...

That’s when America was great! Ask Judge Moore.

And what about all those families sticking together, thick and thin, and in the case of black families despite the occasional whipping? Gustavus Vassa could tell us something about that. While a boy, Vassa was captured along the coast of Africa. Loaded on a ship by slave traders he never saw his family again.

But, hey! Didn’t all those slaves get a free ride to America! And if they survived everything was Jim dandy in the land of the free and the home of the brave, in an era when nobody knelt during the National Anthem. Captain Theophilus Conneau, who made several voyages in slavers, described the business. On one trip he carried 800 men, women and children, packed below decks. Midway across the Atlantic several showed signs of smallpox. The disease swept over his “cargo” and the dead had to be carried out and dumped overboard. “Our misfortune ended,” he said, “only when 497 living skeletons were left out of eight hundred prime Negroes shipped a few weeks before in good health.”

Families "stuck together." Well, since they were chained up, they didn't have much choice.

Yes, America was great  when you could buy and sell human beings like pigs and sheep! America was great when you could pick up a paper and see an ad offering bargain prices on “several small boys without their mothers.” America was great when a Lexington, Kentucky slave owner could post notice to be on lookout for his escaped slave: 

Ranaway from the subscriber, living in this city...a negro, named Dick, about 37 years of age. It is highly probable said boy will make for New Orleans, as he has a wife living in that city, and he has been heard to say frequently that he was determined to go to New Orleans.

How great was American? 

Solomon Northup, writing in the 1840s, was witness when his owner sold a boy named Randall. Randall’s mother tried to reason with the buyer and then her master without success: 

Over and over again she told them how she loved her boy. A great many times she repeated her former promises—how very faithful and obedient she would be; how hard she would labor day and night, to the last moment of her life, if he [the new owner] would only buy them together. But...the man could not afford it. The bargain was agreed upon, and Randall must go alone. Then Eliza ran to him; embraced him passionately; kissed him again and again; told him to remember her—all the while her tears falling in the boy’s face like rain.

Clearly, Judge Moore is exactly right! In slave days traditional values prevailed. Solid families all around. Mary Boykin Chesnut, wife of a slave owner, writing in her diary, noted that female slaves had little protection from lusty owners: “The slave woman was to be had for the taking. Boys on and about the plantation...learned to use her, and having acquired the habit, often continued it into manhood.”

Traveling in South Carolina, James Stuart fell in with a group of gentlemen drinking in a tavern. They freely admitted they used slave women for sex. With each tale told they carried on like teenage boys bragging about their exploits. Keep in mind, by law, that if a child resulted, that child was the slave of the father.

Think the Access Hollywood tape was bad!

One drunken lout informed Stuart that in his home he “was frequently waited on at table by his own children.” He then added, without shame, that he “had actually sent some of them to the public market to be sold as slaves.”

Finally, we might mention Frederick Douglas (and, no, President Trump, Douglas is not still alive). His father was his mother’s owner and they never met. Often, as a young boy, he was sad because his mother lived on a farm twelve miles away. Sometimes she walked over after work finished. As a treat she once brought the boy a sweet cake “in the shape of a heart, with a rich, dark ring glazed upon the edge.” It was a joyous moment and Frederick never forgot. But when he arose next morning his mother was gone, headed back to her master’s farm. In a sense, he once wrote, slavery made “strangers” of mother and son.

I do not recollect...ever seeing my mother by the light of day. She was with me in the night. She would lie down with me, and get me to sleep, but long before I waked she was gone. Very little communication ever took place between us. Death soon ended what little we could have while she lived, and with it her hardships and suffering.

So, the moral of this story is perfectly clear. If the people of Alabama want America to be great again, they must send a sexual predator to the Senate.

Once there, with luck, Judge Roy Moore will do his utmost to uphold old-fashioned values. With luck, he might delve deep in his Bible again and offer up a bill calling for burning witches, executing homosexuals and stoning adulterers.

He is that kind of guy.

Happy times in America!