FROM SLAVE TO SEPARATE BUT EQUAL is an interesting analysis of the institution of Protestant slavery in the United States of America and probes the cause of the Civil War from a fresh angle.
The book turns upside down the theory that the Civil War was fought to free the slaves and tries to show how it was actually a war of divided interests between the two economic classes among the whites ‑ slaveholders and the non‑slaveholders.
The history of Slavery is dealt in three parts here; the origin of slavery from 1619 to 1697, the growth of slavery from 1697 to 1776 and its final stage until abolition from 1776 to 1865. Each separate chapter deals with different aspects of the problem the issues of economic class system, law and order, family values, human rights, civil rights, educational opportunity and the war as such.
The author takes the economic class system into consideration and analyses how the system of black slavery in the Southern states and white wage slavery in the Northern states made the war inevitable as both systems could not exist simultaneously and how the southern and the northern states were each competing for its own system to be confined in the respective geographical territories. Here the problem of slavery is dealt as a national one in which the northern states held equal responsibility with their southern counterparts.
In this context the uniqueness of American Protestant Slavery is explored and it is discussed how freeing black slaves by the Southern states were impractical as Protestant Slavery denied the basic humanity of the blacks as opposed to Catholic Slavery and how this got indoctrinated into the Constitution and legal infrastructure of the United States.
In illuminating the outcome of the Civil War the book finally tries to demystify concepts of racism and political control ‑ that freedom to slaves after the War gave them literally the freedom to starve, as systematic segregation ensured their position in Society only as underlings with even guaranteed food and shelter coming to an end with the blacks’ loss of status as slaves. The blacks were forced into one phase of darkness from another contrary to the commonly held belief of “darkness to light”, concludes the author.