(Article by Onar Åm republished from LibertyNation.com)
Slavery And Immigration
Some Founding Fathers from the southern states owned slaves, but let us put that aside for a moment and consider only their opinions. Most of them, Thomas Jefferson included, expressed a moral aversion to the practice of slavery, driven by their Christian faith.
But at the same time, there was a near unanimous agreement of senators and representatives of the first Congress that immigration should be limited to “free white persons of good character,” as espoused in the Naturalization Act of 1790, which stayed in effect until after the Civil War.
Today, anyone who expresses such an opinion, at the time held by most citizens and statesmen, quickly will be branded as a “white supremacist” and banned from social media.
By modern standards, that view sounds blatantly racist, but it needs to be understood in context. There were no airplanes or internet back then, and global trade had latencies of years. The world they knew was fiercely tribal.
The newly formed United States was still at war with native Indian tribes, and American trade ships were plundered regularly by Islamic pirates from the Barbary states in North Africa. The explorers that went to Africa found no written languages, two-story buildings, roads, wheels, or machinery. They did, however, find hostile tribes who either tried to kill them or to sell them slaves from other tribes.
In this historically hostile world, where all cultures were at war, and tribal allegiances were paramount, from where would it be natural to allow immigration? Your ancestral lands, of course. The presumption is that people who share your culture, religion, civilizational values, and ethnicity are more likely to be compatible than people from hostile countries.
Notice, however, that not all white people could immigrate to America. Only free persons of good character. “Free” and “good character” meant they were not slaves or convicts, were financially independent, did not have a criminal record, and shared the ideals of the Constitution. They had to sustain themselves and abide by the laws for two years before they could apply for citizenship.
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