In the North, freedom from slavery was traded for no rights as free men.     The Abolitionists movement did not start to spread until the 1830s. All through the Civil War, Abolitionists were viewed as a loud and often extreme minority.  While Abolitionists fought to free the enslaved, most still thought blacks were an inferior race and should not have all the privileges of whites.  A good modern analogy might be PETA -People for Ethical Treatment of Animals—movement. Most people agree in general animals should not be treated cruelly, but few people even in PETA believe goats, snails, chimpanzees or gorillas should be given the right to vote or testify in court.  Negroes in Indiana September 12, 1858 Rising Sun Visitor newspaper              In the Floyd Circuit Court, recently, the Judge decided the law forbidding the introduction of Negroes in this State unconstitutional. The Judge of the Circuit is ...

                     Cherry Hill Plantation, Inez, North Carolina Old Times There Could be Rotten Southern Plantation Life Part 1 of Several Entries on Slavery The modern stereotype of a Southern plantation as an enormous “Tara” like mansion surrounded by groves of magnolia and oak set in endless fields of cotton is only partly accurate.   Admittedly, this writer’s 3 times great grandparents on my mother’s side did live such a life.   But they were a minority among the elite planters of Warren County, North Carolina.             The 1860 census found Warrenton, county seat of Warren County, to be home to 2,600 souls, black and white, a number the population has yet to reach again.   In contrast to the present, it was the richest place in the state, not, as now, one of the poorest. Now a red tin roof, originally, this was a veranda with a railing where ladies w...

                The Arsenic Waltz, 1862   In the gas light her green dress and blouse shimmered.  This sort of green would make any woman alluring--and deadly. She had about her enough poison to kill a dozen or more suitors.  There were thousands like her--every one of them poisonous. And every one of them dying.       And it was dye that led to their dying.      In the early 1820s, a German chemist invented a recipe to dye cloth a vivid, brilliant green. It shimmered, particularly in gas light which was becoming  more popular in homes.  In contrast to all the duller and less stable dyes of the era, "Emerald green" as we know it today, kept its color .  "Deadly green" would have been a more accurate name.  The secret to the dye was a combination of copper and arsenic trioxide.  As one chemist put it later, a woman's emerald green ballgo...