Link is broken for me, but I’m assuming it’s going to an article talking about Sherman’s order that granted emancipated slaves forty acres and a mule. While it wasn’t a bad idea, they never were legally granted the acreage, Sherman didn’t have anymore legal authority than you or I to randomly grant land to people and had exceeded the parameters of his command in doing so.
FWIW at that point in time in the United States there was actually enough land that basically anyone could go lay claim to it where no one had already made claim, and many many people did that through Homesteading. But it was a hard life and you needed resources and a large skill set to make it work.
I was very surprised to find out recently that 95% of the African slave trade was not to the United States. It was to the Caribbean and Central and South America, mostly to work in the sugarcane fields. These slaves were almost always men only, because they couldn’t get enough work out of the women to justify having them around, and they didn’t breed fast enough to replace all the people who died doing this work. Women may have been cooks or housekeepers, but didn’t work in the fields.
I also recently read a book that was a big best-seller in the late 1930s and until I read a certain chapter, was surprised that it was long out of print. That book is “Shadow on the Land” by Dr. Thomas Parran, who was a major mover and shaker in the early treatment and control of syphilis. The chapter about treatment protocols for blacks in the Deep South was absolutely horrifying. The emphasis was not on keeping them healthy for their own sakes, but on doing so in order for them to produce the maximum income for the plantation owner. And the book was published in 1937! :eek:
ETA: Almost all of the sugarcane was made into rum.
Hereis a map of the black proportion of the population in 1890. It shows that black people were concentrated in the South, but some had moved into most of the rest of America. Here is a good resource to learn more about what happened to freed slave, a website for the PBS documentary about Reconstruction.
Slavery was somewhat different in different locales and times. IIRC one item I read said that slaves in Brazil, for example, were allowed to own their own property - so they could accumulate savings to buy their way out of servitude. This is somewhat similar to the Roman Empire attitude toward sales as prisoners or captives or servants, rather than the eventual American model that treated them as no better than cattle.
(Of course, slavery in the West Indies in some cases simply meant working the slaves as hard as they could until they eventually, fairly quickly, died. That model probably stopped being viable when the resupply chain ended. I imagine the bit about “no women” was not 100% accurate considering there is a large African population to this day in most of South and Central America.)
I didn’t say that it wasn’t. I was referring to the fact that some Americans seem to believe that slavery was forced onto the freedom-loving of peoples of north America by the dastardly English.
It wasn’t. Apart from a handful of rich Englishmen who owned properties in the Americas and profited from slavery, the great majority of English people were always against slavery, and eventually the public opposition to slavery forced the gov’t of the UK to ban it both within the UK and (eventually) in the colonies.
As it happened, the only effective force fighting the slave trade between the end of the American Revolution in the 1780s and the American Civil war in the 1860s was the Royal Navy. The English (and the Scots, the Welsh, and (in that era) the Irish) were, as a people, not responsible for slavery as practised in the American colonies. Slavery in what became the USA was almost entirely an American enterprise.
I’ve run into plenty of Americans who had some crazy ideas about slavery. “It’s a good thing those Africans were made slaves because they couldn’t have gotten by in America. They didn’t even speak English!” Or, my personal favorite, “They were enslaving their own people over there” as if that was some sort of justification for the use of slave labor in the New World. But I have never encountered an American who argued that the British forced the freedom-loving colonist to become slave owners. But given that some people think the reptoids are secretly controlling world governments I’ve got to acknowledge that some Americans probably think the British forced slavery on the colonies.
I can assure you, I’ve encountered Americans online who do apparently believe that the British forced slavery onto the American colonies. I’ve never got one to attempt to explain the 80 years of slavery between the American Revolution and the American Civil War, or, for that matter, the Civil War itself. But, yeah, slavery was all because of “the English”, not freedum-loving ammurkins.
And I never implied that the English should have the majority of the blame either. What was started in an English colony was continued enthusiastically in what became an independent country. I’m thinking it was much harder to give up something that was making so much money for them.
That doesn’t really explain why most trans-Atlantic shipped slaves ended up in South America (specifically Brazil.) It was mostly a function of timing and demand. The United States ended the slave trade in 1820, after that point any slaves coming in to the United States from overseas could only come in through illegal smuggling. This means by and large the slave population that developed from the 1820s-1860s had to develop organically, and thus the slaves were thought of similar to a livestock herd as opposed to being thought of solely as cheap labor. The 1800s was a time of population explosion all over the world, and thus Brazil which still had a legal slave trade was able to import tons of slaves. The United States did not, and thus was not able to do so.
What I mean is, cheap labor is disposable after a certain point, livestock typically is not. Also, plenty of American slaves could accumulate wealth and buy themselves out of slavery. Slaves had no right to property, so their ability to do so was based on 1) their master’s willingness to let them keep wages they earned, 2) their master’s willingness to let them work at things during their free time for which others would pay them. Slavery is always bad wherever it happens, but there’s always clear differences. Serfdom was true slavery, just not chattel slavery. It was generally better because you did have certain guaranteed rights, were entitled to protection, could not be sold etc. You also in many parts of Europe had to the ability to “legally escape” if you could hide in a town for a year and a day without getting caught by the serf-catcher.
Roman slavery was unequivocally worse for the slave than American slavery. Slavery was something that “happened to you” in Roman society, you typically were not born into it nor could Roman slave practices have produced a sustainable slave population. So while the Romans didn’t have the horrors of born-into-slavery chattel slavery the actual practices were far worse than anything you’d see in the antebellum South. While a small percentage of Roman slaves were educated individuals who went into debt, and who had prestigious and important positions of relative comfort and power, the vast majority of Roman slaves were captured peoples sent to work in mines and on farms and who were basically worked to death.
While there was a thin layer of “comfortable” slaves in Roman society, as with many things in history their existence is exaggerated. They were the ones interacting directly with the Patricians and thus the most likely to be remembered. But in the 80-120m person Roman Empire they were the vast minority of slaves, slavery was key to the economy of Rome in the mines, mills, and farms and those slaves (the vast majority of Roman slaves) were not treated under the “livestock” model of the antebellum South but the “disposable, replaceable labor” model of the Caribbean colonies in which they were seen as assets that would depreciate and fail relatively shortly and need to be replaced.
Mm, “always” against slavery? Cite for that? Considering England and after 1707 the UK was a fundamentally undemocratic State until the 1800s I don’t know how you could possibly know what “the great majority of English people” thought about slavery. Considering the low levels of education especially prior to the 1700s I’d assume most Englishmen had no opinion on overseas slavery at all. These weren’t Enlightened people but people who lived in a society that had some 300+ offenses punishable by death. I find it a little surprising someone is advocating that pre-modern, illiterate Europeans as a people would have been morally opposed to slavery.
Now yes, in the 1800s slavery was an issue of public morality, but prior to that (when the English actually founded the Thirteen Colonies) slavery over there would have (and was) seen as a reasonable and logical behavior. If instead of “always” you just meant, “since the 1800s” that’s fine. But your post came off to me as thought you were implying since “time immemorial” all Englishmen abhorred slavery and were opposed to it. Facetious in the extreme considering it was indeed Englishmen that setup slavery in the American colonies and their Caribbean colonies as well.
The slave trade fighting is true, but the United States did not participate in the slave trade during the time you indicate–it was illegal here. And when smugglers were caught by the United States they were punished.
Jefferson was unambiguously correct. When colonial legislatures passed laws, they had to receive Royal Assent for the laws to take effect. During the late colonial period slavery was seen even in the South as a dying institution because of a dwindling economic need for slaves. (This changed later with cotton cultivation.) Slaveholders like Jefferson had no intention of freeing their slaves, but many of them did intend to free them in their wills. It was basically seen as an ugly thing whose time was coming to an end. For that reason many colonial legislatures had passed laws banning the importation of slaves, because they did not see the need nor want more slaves coming into the country (especially because of the dwindling need for them there were concerns about what they’d do with these people once slavery no longer existed and their descendants were still here.) The King never approved these laws, and withheld his assent–that is the specific ill Jefferson is arguing about and he is 100% correct, that did happen.
Several colonies did try to end the slave trade and were blocked by the British monarch.
Now where I’ve pointed out Jefferson’s hypocrisy on this issue is that while he morally condemned the slave trade he had no qualms about holding his current slaves. He didn’t even plan to free his slaves in his will like many of the Founding Fathers (Washington for example), although in part I don’t know if he even could have because of his extreme indebtedness his creditors probably would have had a claim to them anyway. Well, it’s maybe unfair to say Jefferson had no qualms about his personal slaveholding–he did have qualms, just not enough to actually do anything about it. But his argument about the slave trade was valid, even slaveholding Americans had some level of opposition to the slave trade and their legislatures had tried to end it.
John McCoy
Freedom wasn’t no difference I knew of. I worked for Marse John just the same for a long time. He said one morning, “John, you can go out in the field if you want to, or you can get out if you want to, cause the government says you are free. If you want to work I’ll feed you and give you clothes but can’t give you any money. I haven’t got any.” Humph, I didn’t know what money was, anyhow, but I knew I’d get plenty of victuals, so I stayed till old marse died and old miss got shut off the place.
This is the last entry in the book Slave Narratives of Texas, edited by Ron Tyler and Lawrence R. Murphy.
