Say what?

Submitted by dennis middlebrooks (United States), Feb 23, 2008 at 12:10

Cher, My ancestors had "servants" also. They owned a large plantation in Alabama, worked by "servants". For some reason, my late grandmother referred to them as "slaves". None of the four million "servants" in the South had the right to quit and seek a better life not "serving" someone else."Servants" who ran off were hunted down like animals and horse-whipped if caught. Their children were born "servants" with no other option in life.

It was a capital offense in many parts of the South, and illegal everywhere, to teach "servants" how to read and write. During the Civil War, hundreds of thousand of these "servants" ran off to the Union armies, and 180,000 fought aganist their former providers of food, shelter and religious indoctrination. What ingrates they must have been! Union soldiers who escaped from Confederate prisons knew that the "servants" would assist them and Union armies used the "servants" as scouts to help put an end to the Confederacy. Shame on you, and anyone else, who trivializes the evils of Antebellum slavery by resorting to the euphemism of "servant". Hazel and Jeeves were servants. The blacks of the South were slaves. And all were held in chains under the most Christian society in the world at the time.

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