Conscious Choice

Robert Zimmerman

Description

Robert Zubrin: "Zimmerman's ground-breaking history provides every future generation the basic framework for establishing new societies on other worlds. We would be wise to heed what he says."

The human race is about to go to the stars. Big rockets are being built, and nations and private citizens worldwide are planning the first permanent settlements in space.

When we get there, will we know what to do to make those first colonies just and prosperous places for all humans?

Conscious Choice answers this question, by telling a riveting and accurate history of the first century of British settlement in North America. That was when those settlers were building their own new colonies, and had to decide whether to include slaves from Africa.

In New England slavery was vigorously rejected. The Puritans wanted nothing to do with this institution, desiring instead to form a society of free religious families, a society that became the foundation of the United States of American, dedicated to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.

In Virginia however slavery was gladly embraced, resulting in a corrupt social order built on power, rule, and oppression.

Why the New England citizens were able to reject slavery, and Virginians were not, is the story that Conscious Choice tells, a story with direct implications for all human societies, whether they are here on Earth or on the farflung planets across the universe.

What others are saying:

Rand Simberg:
"In its '1619 Project,' a false and libelous narrative of America's past has recently been promoted by the New York Times. In a useful corrective, Zimmerman's book provides well-documented and new historical insights into the true history of slavery in colonial English America, with a cautionary warning for future settlers off the planet."

Douglas Mackinnon
"When humankind finally does venture forth to colonize the moon, Mars, and beyond, it is essential that each colonist have this book downloaded onto their tablet. It will guide them and most likely save them."

James Bennett:
"How was slavery born in the deep south of the United States? Robert Zimmerman's book Conscious Choice provides the answer, in a well-researched, detailed, but readable book free of academic jargon. He shows that slavery was not predetermined but was instead a series of conscious choices made by key individuals of that day. He also shows that it was not necessary, as demonstrated by the decision of the northern British colonies to reject it.

"Zimmerman then uses this history to show how it provides lessons to future explorers when they found their own new colonies in space."

Sujets

• Histoire
• Colonial Period
• United States
• History
• US

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 30 juin 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781456637385
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 12 Mo

Extrait

Conscious Choice:
 
 
 
The origins of slavery in America and why it matters today
and for our future in outer space
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
by
 
Robert Zimmerman
©2021 copyright Robert Zimmerman
 
All rights reserved. Except for the inclusion of brief excerpts for use in a review, no part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any other information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author.
 
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
http://www.eBookIt.com
 
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-3738-5
 
Cover background: Taken by the rover Curiosity in Gale Crater on Mars, looking towards Mount Sharp.
The ways of man are passing strange,
He buys his freedom and he counts his change,
Then he lets the wind his days arrange,
And he calls the tide his master.
—Fisherman's shanty, as sung by
Gordon Bok, Ann Muir, Ed Trickett
Table of Contents
DEDICATION
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1
THE FIRST THIRTY-FIVE YEARS
CHAPTER 2
THE WORLD OF WILLIAM BERKELEY
CHAPTER 3
ENGLAND'S FIRST PREMISE
CHAPTER 4
BERKELEY'S FIRST TERM
CHAPTER 5
A ROYALIST SAFE HAVEN
CHAPTER 6
VIRGINIA UNDER THE COMMONWEALTH
CHAPTER 7
A ROYALIST RESURGENCE
CHAPTER 8
THE CONSEQUENCE OF FAMILY
CHAPTER 9
THE RESTORATION ASSEMBLY
CHAPTER 10
THE CHOICE OF THE ELECTORATE
CHAPTER 11
THE LONG ASSEMBLY
CHAPTER 12
BACON'S REBELLION
CHAPTER 13
A MATTER OF CHOICE
CHAPTER 14
A PROCLAMATION FOR CIVILIZATION IN THE FAR FUTURE
APPENDIX A
ADDITIONAL TABLES
Return to Chapter 11.
APPENDIX B
SOURCE INFORMATION FOR TABLES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
DEDICATION
 
 
This book is dedicated to Elon Musk,
who has done more than any other person
in the last half century to make possible
the eventual exploration and settlement
of the solar system.
 
I offer this book to him as a guide for
when he builds those first colonies on Mars.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
 
The publication of this book would not have happened without the help and assistance of David Vidonic, Rand Simberg, and Dave Truesdale. Their support and advice helped me improve the book immeasurably, while forcing me to finally get it finished and in print.
I must also thank John Batchelor, David Livingston, Sarah Hoyt, and Robert Pratt for their years of support. Their willingness to share my work with their audiences and readerships has been one of the main reasons my work has reached a wider audience, something for which I am endlessly grateful.
INTRODUCTION
 
There is one calamity which penetrated furtively into the world, and which was at first scarcely distinguishable amid the ordinary abuses of power: it originated with an individual whose name history has not preserved; it was wafted like some accursed germ upon a portion of the soil; but afterwards nurtured itself, grew without effort, and spread naturally with the society to which it belonged. This calamity is slavery.
—Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America . 1
 
 
This is the story of a failed effort to make a new society where none had existed before, a story that has direct bearing on the future effort of humans to establish colonies in space.
The establishment of the North American English colonies in the 1600s was a tale that involved individual sacrifice, courage, a great deal of foolhardiness, and, most importantly, some inspired social experimentation. In the north, first the Pilgrims and then the Puritans attempted to establish small, democratic, self-governing religious communities in Massachusetts. In Pennsylvania the Quakers attempted their own religious variation, while the Catholics did the same in Maryland. In New York the English found themselves learning to live with many other cultures. And in Virginia, the first British colony on the North American continent, the leadership formed a secular and centralized social order, centered on individual personal gain and governed firmly by the governor and legislature in Jamestown.
From these various social experiments developed many complicated and sophisticated ideas about creating new societies in a wilderness, including the government's role within that new social order. Issues ranging from religious freedom to taxation were passionately debated for more than a century, and from those debates eventually came the birth of the United States, a nation formed on what at the time was the startling premise "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
Yet, in Virginia, home to the man who wrote these words, the social experiment to create a new society ultimately failed, and it failed very badly. From 1607 to 1690, the British colony of Virginia degenerated from a culture that opposed slavery and honored respect for the individual and individual freedom to a culture that eagerly and cruelly imposed slavery on a certain portion of its population for the benefit of everyone else. By the middle of the eighteenth century almost half the population of Virginia was permanently enslaved, more than 140,000 people working in perpetual and unrelenting servitude. Even now, more than a century and a half after the abolishment of slavery, American society is still torn asunder by the terrible aftermath of what was decided by a select group of men in a small brick statehouse in swampy Jamestown between the years 1642 and 1677.
Future space colonists trying to create their own new societies on other worlds would be wise to pay attention to this history.
This book has literally taken decades to write. I first took up this subject in the 1990s as a filmmaker who was interested in writing a screenplay. It had occurred to me that I had never been taught anything about the very beginnings of slavery in America, despite the fact that for slavery to flourish in a British society seemed at first glance to be a very strange paradox. I knew that the colony of Virginia had had a democratic legislature, and that the colony had formed from the same legislative ideals that had established both the English parliamentary system as well as the other northern colonies. Furthermore, slavery had not existed in British culture for centuries. That a group of British citizens in a British colony were able to buy slaves and legalize the custom seemed to me to be a strange mystery, and hence fertile ground for some crackling good drama.
So I went to the library, assuming that there would be numerous books written on the men and women who first brought slaves to Virginia. Much to my surprise, I could find almost nothing. In fact, considering the significance of slavery to American history, it was astonishing how little had been written about the individuals who made these early, seventeenth-century events happen.
I found that prior to the twentieth century, few historians were interested in the subject. Though a handful made an attempt after the Civil War to describe the origins of slavery, most ignored the subject, influenced as they were by regional roots and the lingering emotions of the Civil War. The only ones really interested in studying the south, southern historians, focused their efforts to proudly describing how the early southern pioneers settled Virginia, pretending that the growing dominance of slavery was only a minor and inconsequential part of that history.
After World War II a new wave of historians tackled the problem, wielding with great skill the modern research tools available since the invention of the computer. Yet, even their work I found unsatisfying, as it only partially revealed the story of slavery's beginning in America. These twentieth century historians, under the new concept of social history, focused on issues of racism, economics, and culture as the causes for slavery, and therefore had little to say about the individuals who actually made slavery a legal and popular custom in Virginia. History was defined by the general sweep of mass movements and large populations, the specific actions of individuals being generally ignored.
To my dismay and frustration, I discovered that in the more than three hundred years since the birth of American slavery, no historian has ever been willing to name names. Studies of slavery would not discuss who established it. Studies of who established Virginia would not discuss slavery. My fundamental question, who first sanctioned American slavery and how it was possible in a democracy for them to do it, had never been addressed.
Therefore I felt compelled to try to answer the question myself. In the process I learned that this story about distant past events in colonial Virginia has a significant and direct relationship to both our society today as well as the future establishment of colonies in space. All the issues of right and wrong, of individual freedom, of government corruption, of high taxation, of racial friction and harmony, of economic trouble, and of religious belief and toleration that were being argued in colonial America have the same direct bearing on the present and the future. The creation of the British colonies in North America, beginning with Virginia, were test cases on how humans establish new societies in an untamed wilderness. When humans begin to establish colonies on Mars, on the Moon, on the asteroids, they will be faced with exactly the same issues that colonial Virginians and New Englanders faced. What the British learned in trying to create their colonies in North America were fundamental lessons. They will apply to future space colonists, and by drawing on those lessons, those future space-farers will increase the chances they will build healthy and vibrant societies, while avoiding evils such as slavery.
These lessons are also applicable to present day America, where we are now trag