New Hampshire lawmaker Werner Horn: 'Owning slaves doesn't make you racist'

[DonViejo]

Kristin Lam, USA TODAY Published 11:33 p.m. ET July 18, 2019 | Updated 12:13 a.m. ET July 19, 2019

A New Hampshire lawmaker came under fire this week for claiming American slavery was based on economics, not racism. Republican state Rep. Werner Horn stated his case in a now-deleted Facebook post, then reaffirmed his position in multiple interviews with media outlets.

Horn initially drew attention for his comments in a Facebook post by former state House member Dan Hynes, who posed the question: "If Trump is the most racist president in American history, what does that say about all of the other presidents who owned slaves?"

Horn responded, “Wait, owning slaves doesn’t make you racist..."

"I guess not," Hynes answered Tuesday. "Which is surprising since everything else makes someone a racist."

Horn then added, “It shouldn’t be surprising since owning slaves wasn’t a decision predicated on race but on economics. It’s a business decision.”

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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/07/18/new-hampshire-lawmaker-werner-horn-owning-slaves-racism-economics/1773670001/

[bobbieinok]

1. NH union soldiers must be spinning in their graves! GOP rewrites history!!!

[teamster633]

2. Further proof that NH does not deserve its prominent roll in selecting our Presidential candidates.

And I say this as a life-long resident.

[dalton99a]

4. +1. And Maine elected Paul LePage twice

And New York gave us Donald Trump

Nowadays the most virulent racists in the news or on social media are not from the South

[maxsolomon]

6. Anecdotal assertion.

Racists are everywhere ignorance is.

[brush]

8. trump lost New York decisively to Clinton. New Yorkers know trump and dislike his ass.

[Eugene]

9. To be fair to Maine, LePage won by pluralities, and the state has since enacted ranked choice voting

Yes, Trump came from New York, but he lost that state 59-37. Unfortunately, too many people failed to heed what Trump's fellow New Yorkers had to say about him.

[Wounded Bear]

3. Yeah, I'm sure all of those white slaves in the South would have agreed with him...

oh wait.

[DetlefK]

5. The Vice-President of the Confederacy literally said that the secession was about racism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornerstone_Speech

The Cornerstone Speech is so called because Stephens used the word "cornerstone" to describe the "great truth" of white supremacy and black subordination upon which secession and confederation were based:

ts foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.[2]

Using biblical imagery,[3] Stephens argued that divine laws consigned African Americans to slavery as the "substratum of our society" by saying:

Our confederacy is founded upon principles in strict conformity with these laws. This stone which was rejected by the first builders "is become the chief of the corner"—the real "corner-stone"—in our new edifice.[1]

[dalton99a]

7. +1. Texas Declaration of Causes of Secession, Feb. 2, 1861:

“We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.”

[Retrograde]

10. Maybe if you're an ancient Roman

they tended to enslave the peoples they conquered, usually Celts, Greeks, and Germans, among others. OTOH, their slave could be freed and get many of the benefits of Roman citizenship - and the freed slaves children could become citizens in a couple of generations.

What was particularly horrible about slavery in the US was that it was based entirely on color (yes, I'm ignoring British indentured servants because those were pretty much extinct by the mid 1750s). In other words, even if American slaves could get their freedom the color of their skins made it easy to single them out for sub-second-class citizenship, if that. And that continued even after Emancipation.

As for the founding fathers owning slaves, they did. And some of them were most likely racists. And yes, slavery existed in various guises since the dawn of civilization. But there was this revolution in thought in the late 1700s called "The Enlightenment", where people decided that maybe owning other people wasn't a good idea. Washington may have been leaning towards enlightenment: he at least made provisions for freeing his slaves after his death (or tried to).