Daughter: “Daddy, if having slaves was so evil, why do you say we should love and honor our ancestors who had slaves?”

Father: “Who told you having slaves was evil?”

Daughter: “Mrs. S. was talking about it in history class at school today. She said that Southerners who owned slaves a long time ago must have been evil people, or they wouldn’t have had slaves.”

Father: “What do you think about that?”

Daughter: “I don’t know; I think she might be right; it does seem pretty horrible to steal people from another part of the world and bring them here to be slaves.”

Father: “Yes, that does seem pretty horrible. Who do you think stole them and brought them here to be slaves?”

Daughter: “Mrs. S. told us in class that Southern people brought them here and made them slaves.”

Father: “Did she, now? Mrs. S. is not a stupid person, but she is certainly an ignorant one if that is what she said. She isn’t alone in that belief, though.”

Daughter: “I thought ignorant was the same thing as stupid, but why do you say that about her anyway? I like Mrs. S. She’s nice!”

Father: “Yes, she is nice, and I like her too, but our liking her for her good qualities is beside the point of what she knows and doesn’t know of certain subjects. A person is said to be ‘ignorant’ of a thing when his or her knowledge of that subject is lacking or deficient. It doesn’t mean she is a bad person or that I think she is a bad person. One can be a good person and still be ignorant of facts and therefore wrong.”

Daughter: “Yes, I guess that’s true. But Mrs. S. has been a teacher for a long time; she has to know what she’s talking about, doesn’t she?”

Father: “Not necessarily. I don’t know for sure where she got the information she told y’all in class about slavery, but I do know it isn’t true and that she is either misinformed and/or making wrong assumptions. Probably both.”

Daughter: “Wrong assumptions? What does that mean?”

Father: “People make assumptions about things they tend not to know much about. A wrong assumption is simply an assumption that is not true.

Daughter: “Then what is the truth? About how the slaves got here, I mean.”

Father: “The truth is, first, that they were not brought here by our Southern ancestors.”

Daughter: “But if Southerners didn’t bring them here, who did?”

Father: “That’s what I’m about to tell you. You know that what we call ‘America’ was first settled or ‘colonized’ by white people from ‘Mother England’ over four hundred years ago, in the early 1600s, right?”

Daughter: “Yeah, we learned about that in history, too.”

Father: “Has Mrs. S. told y’all anything about the Declaration of Independence (DoI)?”

Daughter: “Yes, she has; we read it and talked about it in class last semester, and we had a test about it later.”

Father: “Very good. Did she tell y’all anything about those parts of the DoI that were taken out by the committee whose job it was to oversee the drafting of that document?”

Daughter: “No?”

Father: “Perhaps she should have. You see, one part that was taken out ‘tells the tale’ of who brought African slaves to America to begin with; it helps explain why the transatlantic slave trade was one of many reasons those men we call the ‘Founders’ of America decided it was time for the colonies to ‘dissolve the political bands’ which connected them to the ‘Mother Country,’ and to become independent nations.”

Daughter: “That part they took out – what did it say?”

Father: “It condemned the King of Great Britain for taking black people from their native continent and forcing them on the American colonies against the collective will of the colonists.”

Daughter: “I wonder why they took that part out?”

Father: “That’s a good question, and one that Thomas Jefferson himself wrote about and answered decades later. He wrote that one main reason they decided to take that part out is because a couple of the men on the committee were New Englanders, and, by that time, New England ship owners had become, in Jefferson’s words, ‘pretty considerable carriers’ of African slaves themselves. Do you know who New Englanders are?”

Daughter: “No, I don’t think so.”

Father: “New Englanders were and are people who live(d) in states like Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, etc. They are Northerners; we sometimes call them ‘Yankees.’”

Daughter: “So, Northern people brought the slaves here on Northern ships?”

Father: “Yes, Northerners brought a lot of them here. They traded kegs of New England rum to other Africans for their slaves, then brought them to the Southern states to sell to our people for money.”

Daughter: “But if Southerners did not want the slaves, then why did they buy them?”

Father: “Well, like I said before, while the colonies were British colonies and their people British subjects, they had to obey the King or else. Later, when New England shippers got into the transatlantic slave trade, our people sometimes bought them because they felt sorry for them, all chained up, sick and hungry as they were when they arrived at our ports.”

Daughter: “Why did Southerners not want them here?”

Father: “Because they were non-Christian heathens and uncivilized, and were therefore as out of place here as we would be in the jungles of Africa or in China.”

Daughter: “But, why didn’t Southerners give them their freedom once they got here?”

Father: “Because they couldn’t have survived on this continent on their own to start with; they would have all died of malnutrition and disease, or have been killed by white people or Indians. Another reason is because our people had to pay a lot of money for each slave, to say nothing of the expense of nursing them back to health, and the only way to recover those expenses was for the slaves to work it off and earn their keep. Which most of them would not have done given the choice.”

Daughter: “Yeah, I guess that makes sense. Can we talk about this again sometime? I think I want to think about everything we’ve talked about some more.”

Father: “Of course. Ask about it again when you’re ready and you have more questions. But, before you go, let’s discuss the answer to the question you asked when we first started this conversation: you want to honor God and obey His commandments, don’t you?”

Daughter: “Yes, I do!”

Father: “Very good! You realize that when God commands us to honor our fathers and mothers in the Ten Commandments and elsewhere, He doesn’t make exceptions and say, for example, that we needn’t obey that command if our fathers and mothers were slave owners, right?”

Daughter: “Hmm. I never thought of it that way before.”

Father: “Lots of people go their whole lives without thinking about it that way. But I deny that slavery was evil to start with, and our ancestors who owned slaves were certainly not evil people simply because they owned slaves. That’s ridiculous. They were good, God-fearing people who did the best they could by their slaves. But we love and honor our ancestors because they are our fathers and mothers, and because God commands us to love and honor them, whether they were slave owners or not.

Daughter: “Thank you for talking to me about this, daddy! You gave me a lot to think about!”

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