[QUOTE=Left Hand of Dorkness]
Yeah–and plenty of others led a revolution. I wasn’t claiming that all slaves thought the system sucked. I was claiming that there was not “near-universal” approval for the system. Pointing out that some freed slaves went on to become slaveowners in no way indicates that no slaves objected to the system.
Martini, I think this addresses your point, with one addendum: the Romans didn’t practice chattel slavery, to the best of my knowledge. I restricted my discussion to chattel slavery specifically to avoid such side issues.
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I was talking primarily about “most of human history” not “the last 300 years.” I think John Mace was talking about the same period (as he more or less said.)
Prior to around 1600, the only places that didn’t practice slavery didn’t practice slavery because it wasn’t economically beneficial. For example feudal European lords found serfdom to be more beneficial within their political/economic system than outright slavery. Although many European serfs lived lives so marginally different from slaves that on an individual basis the distinctions could be almost non-existent.
Your point about the victims of slavery really only holds water after around 1750 or so and in relation to black slaves in the New World. Prior to that, around the world slavery was a fairly common thing to subject conquered peoples to; and in fact many of the earliest African slaves brought to the Americas were from tribes that would be just as willing to sell members of other tribes into slavery if they had simply been fortunate enough to win their battles.
Your comments do have merit in regard to race-based slavery after the mid 18th or late 18th century. Because then is when you start to enter into a fairly unique system of slavery not widely seen in the rest of world history. Slavery in the New World became based on race and lineage. It was considered “appropriate” to enslave blacks and only blacks, and it was considered logical that any children born of a slave, were themselves slaves.
Persons born into slavery are very different than people who are actually enslaved. Mainly because their voices were often never heard, we’ll never know if a large percentage of them would have bought into the slave-owning system, we do know that a small percentage of free blacks did, in fact, end up owning slaves for profit. However the majority of free black slave owners owned slaves for other reasons (often family members who they could not free because of laws in their state, and it was seen as beneficial to keep them enslaved and keep the family together rather than let them be owned by someone else.)
The history of political thought within the United States in regard to slavery is an interesting one. Most of the slave owning Founding Fathers had open reservations about slavery, and many, very gradually, came to the decision that slavery was in fact wrong. They all acted on that feeling in different ways, Washington was one of the few prominent Founding Fathers to free all of his slaves (although he could not free his dower slaves as legally those were considered the property of his wife), the aforementioned George Wythe freed his slaves as well.
We were definitely moving in the direction of deciding, morally, that slavery was wrong. To be honest America was one of the first countries to really have that sort of movement, albeit it a very marginal one. People often point to the early dates other countries abolished slavery, but most of those cases I don’t see much historical support for a great moral revolution against slavery, but rather a recognition that it wasn’t economically beneficial.
The British Empire went on to do a lot of pretty nasty things after they abolished slavery, I’m not really sure morality had much to do with them abolishing slavery at all.
What happened in America is the generation after the Founding Fathers in the South became reactionary, and we moved backwards, not forward, in the South. Part of it was fueled by the economic importance of cotton, the entrenched position of the Southern plantation owners, and general distaste for Northern attempts to legislate their morality onto the South.
I think after 1800, American society overall felt that slavery was wrong, but not worth doing anything serious about (until the mid 19th century.) In the American South, I think there was a portion of the population who felt it was wrong, but worth keeping around anyway, and there was a portion of the population who genuinely believed that slavery was good for the blacks and that freedom was injurious to them.
Also, the Romans practiced what would certainly be defined as chattel slavery for many hundreds of years. Roman slave owners could kill a slave for any reason whatsoever with impunity. Roman slave owners could sell slaves and buy slaves, like well, chattel. Because that is what they were.
Eventually Roman slaves achieved more rights, but not until the time of Augustus and later, and even then their lot wasn’t all that great. Roman slavery was however, indeed distinct from American slavery in that it wasn’t racially based whatsoever, nor was it strictly lineage based.