Location: [unknown]
Slavery, an Evil Institution
My great x 3 grandfather Jimmy Lowe, who had a trace of African ancestry himself, had six slaves at Conch Rocks, his plantation in Abaco, Bahamas. The Crown awarded him £69 compensation (equivalent to about $7,000 today) after slavery was abolished in British colonies in 1833. Yet slavery was still in effect in the U.S. for the next thirty years. Jimmy's relatives smuggled slaves out of the U.S. to the Bahamas, from their base, later called Lowesport, now Key Largo. Many of those runaway slaves were mixed-race people, some of them with our family surnames. Over half the Lowes in the South are African-American, mostly mixed race, of varying degrees. The U.S. considered smuggling runaway slaves to be conveying stolen property, an act of piracy. So even taking your own distant relatives (home folks, children of the plantation) out of the country to gain their freedom was considered an act of piracy. But I'm proud of my Lowe ancestors for doing this. Slavery was an evil institution, promulgated by the banking system at the time, that divided families. Slaves were considered collateral for mortgages and loans, so if you freed those slaves (even your own mixed-race children), the bank would "call" that loan and repossess ALL your property - land, crops, house, livestock and slaves. Even my own employer (in its early days before the Civil War) financed planters by collateralizing slaves. Fortunately, they got out of that dirty business as soon as possible. The British Crown was very far-sighted in abolishing slavery in their colonies in 1833. It was not easy to raise enough revenue to compensate slaveowners, but they managed to do it. If Abraham Lincoln had offered compensation to slaveowners for freed slaves, the Civil War might never have happened. All they wanted in many cases was enough money to pay off the bank. Many slaves were owned by bank trustees, not individual landowners.
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