I was having a conversation with two co-workers yesterday. They were complaining about how the the government was interfering in everyone’s life, about how unfair affirmative action was, about how the Civil War was about state’s rights not slavery, about how the South should have won, etc. Everytime one of them would say something stupid the other would agree and the first would say “see, he agrees with me” as if the fact there were two idiots in the room proved anything.
The conversation wound up to its inevitable point when one of them said “Hell, I wish we still had slavery. If I owned a slave, I wouldn’t have to mow my own lawn.” While the two of them were chuckling at the droll wit, I surprised them by saying I thought we should have slavery again. “Sure, why not?” I said, “I’ve heard lots of people saying they’d like to see slavery back. So why don’t we take all the names of people who believe in slavery and put them in a big barrel. Then we’ll draw out half the names and they can be the slaves. We’ll draw out the other half, and they get to own the others.”
This apparently took the fun out of the conversation because neither of them had anything to respond. But we can take up the discussion from there. What do you think of the idea? Would you put your name in the barrel?
Let’s see now, I’ll bet a nickel one of them looked at you incredulously and sneered, “Geez, what’s YOUR problem, ennyway?” And the other one called you a “bleeding heart liberal”? Or a “partypooper” at the very least?
“Killjoy”?
All I’ll say is that down through history, as soon as a group of people gets a chance to get out of being slaves, they don’t generally want go back, not for a million dollars (the Russians don’t count, because they’ve never had any actual experience yet at being free. And they are definitely giving it the old college try.)
For the last 10,000 years or so, the only people who ever enjoyed slavery are the slaveowners, and I never saw any of them volunteering to join up. Generally they had to lose a war and be carried off as booty, before they’d become slaves.
Heck, no, I wouldn’t put my name in the barrel! Do I LOOK stupid? Don’t answer that…
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!” - the White Queen
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Heck, guys, you have at least a 50% chance of “winning”. Better odds than you’d get in Vegas.
And no, neither of them said anything; not to my face anyway. One of the advantages of being the boss, I suppose.
One of them did however contribute the factoid that there were more blacks slaveowners in the ante-bellum South than there were black slaves. Or maybe his point was that there were more black slaveowners than white slaveowners. I’m not really sure what he was saying and neither was he. When I pointed out the absurdity of his claim and asked where he got it, his response was “I heard it somewhere.”
I guess my whole point (other than racists are idjits) is that I’ve heard people argue that slavery wasn’t such a bad institution. But pointedly, none of them are ready to revive it, unless they get to pick what side of it they’re on.
Morally Slavery in the south was a horrible horrible instituation. However, it was required for the ecomonic system of the south. Without slavery all that cottom planting that fueled the industrial revolution of the world would have died out. In fact slavery was dying out until Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin and made cotton planting profitable again. His invention sped up the process of seeding cotton and allowed for 50x the production that was possible before. Personally I still belive that Slavery was horrible and even if it did help lead to the industrial revolution that it should have been stamped out anyway.
Why would anyone want to go back to slavery when sharecropping is more lucrative and legal? Hmm. Pay for a slave, pay for their housing, food, medical, general upkeep, or, hire sharecroppers, pay them just enough to keep them from starving, rent them a tiny shack, and still get your cotton picked?
Slavery is bad. But, working conditions for other folks in company towns (mining, cotton, textiles) in the old days weren’t too peachy, either. Freedom is a term used by people that can afford it, IMHO. I don’t know about y’all, but I work 40 hours a week for the priviledge of having a place to sleep so I can come back and work another 40 hours…add, rinse, repeat until dead.
Inasfar as putting my name in the hat, heck no. My luck, I’d get ‘won’ by some trailer-parker, and I’d have to change the oil in the Camaro every week…
-sb
“This is going to take a special blend of psychology and extreme violence.”
Really! Do you honestly believe that slave-owners would treat slaves any better than sharecroppers ,that they would pay for all that stuff you mentioned? :rolleyes
Yup you might have a job you don’t like but that just has to be better than the experience of having your children taken from you and sold. Even the most poverty stricken of Americans always had that over slaves.
Um, Casdave? I kind of had the impression that Spankboy was speaking with tongue firmly in cheek, comparing slavery with sharecropping.
If you must jump on him, jump lightly.
I agree, there doesn’t seem to be much to actually debate, but I’d love to hear more about the cretinous oafs with whom Little Nemo has to work. Are they named “Bubba” and “Joe Bob”? Do they they chaw, and spit t’bacca all over the floor? Or I am indulging in non-PC stereotyping?
I’ve heard that particular racist factoid, too, but I have no idea where it came from, either. It sounds like a UL, except that it isn’t urban.
One of those things that “everybody knows…”
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!” - the White Queen
Just a note: The ancient Greeks and Romans are often mentioned as having particularly “fair” slavery, in that the slaves had rights, there were laws governing the separation of mother and child, feeding, cruel and unusual punishment, but you get the feeling that this was more because a slave was valuable property. The slave laws were property rights laws, not civil rights laws.
And no matter how luxurious the accommodation or how easy the duties, you still weren’t free to go where you wanted and do what you wanted.
Most slaves in ancient Greece and Rome were either war booty (the families of the losing side), or were simply kidnapped by slave dealers, out in the fringes of civilization. Very big business.
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!” - the White Queen
In the ancient Celtic lands, they had possibly the fairest system of slavery yet.
There were only 2 ways of becoming a slave: 1. being a warrior, and captured in battle, and being unable to pay a ransom.
2. Being sentenced to slavery because of certain non-capital crimes.
A slave had certain rights, amoung which was buying himself (almost all slaves were male), and most importantly, the children of slaves were freeborn.
In my mind, the worst part of slavery was the “you’re black, thus you’re a slave”, as if blacks were “born to be slaves”.
We could empty many of our prisons of whitecollar, property and drug crimes, by “selling” these prisoners as “slaves” (oops,I mean “indentured servants”). The “servants” would be given only half their terms, and the “purchasers” would assume the costs. Of course, if incentives were paid, the servants would work harder.
(1) Israel in Old Testament times had a form of voluntary slavery.
(2) The Constitution of the United States of America (as currently amended) explicitly allows for “slavery or forced servitude” when it’s a punishment for a crime.
So I guess there are two examples for you of “fair slavery.”
This conversation took place in New York, lest anyone think that white trash is only endemic to the South. But I do think one of them chews tobacco.
Several posters have said there’s no debatable point here. So how about this. Everyone apparently agrees that traditional slavery was immoral (Confederate, Greek, Chinese, or Turkish style). But would the slavery I proposed be immoral? Everyone involved, including the slaves, understood the rules and volunteered.
Regarding the post about the economic justification for slavery in the antebellum south: If slavery was “necessary”, why did cotton continue to be cultivated after the slaves were freed? If cotton was so worthless a crop that you couldn’t turn a profit on it unless you used slave labor, why didn’t land owners grow something else?
The problem is that slavery is ultimately about exploiting people. There’s no “fair” way to do it, because inevitably those that benefit by slavery will guarantee that some people become and remain slaves, whether they “deserve” it or not.
If you think that working 40 hours a week is comporable to slavery, you’re incredibly spoiled. Slaves often had to work more than twice that amount. And unlike you, they didn’t do it so that they could have an apartment, TV, etc. They did it to stay alive.
Monty:
I don’t think that’s quite accurrate. The 13th amendment explicitly excludes punishment from the prohibition against slavery, but that’s not quite the same as allowing it.
Little Nemo:
Would the status of slavery be inheritable? Would minors be allowed to particpate? If not, I suppose it would be borderline moral. But it should still be illegal. The idea of any contract lasting more than say a decade disturbs me.
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Interesting notion, Little Nemo. (Or, as my brother-in-law would say, “wacked.”) How about a twist to make it a tad more interesting? (Or, as my brother-in-law would say, “wacked.”) Set up the experiment in ten-year blocks. At the end of five years, you shout “Okay, everybody SWITCH!” This would necessitate a one-slave per owner rule, of course (unless somebody wanted to buy multiple slaves, and deal with the consequences of being owned by all of them after five years). At the end of ten years, people could have the choice of 1.) opting out of the experiment entirely, 2.) putting in for another ten-year cycle, or 3.) putting in for permanent membership in the arrangement (with or without periodic swapping of roles).
