I had a teacher who taught that indentured service was worse than slavery because a slave had to last a lifetime and an indentured servant could be used up in 7 years.
It was years later that I started to wonder what her agenda was.
“Forget it, Jake. It’s MAGAtown”
And the arrangement was not “for several years”. It was for life and the lives of one’s descendents. That’s a massive difference. Saying that people decided to be slaves in order to learn a skill appears to me to ignore that huge distinction. (Not to mention that there were rules about how apprentices and indentured servants were supposed to be treated – not always rules lived up to, but there in theory.)
In some ways I think we can date this whole mess to the case of John Punch – if he’d been treated like the other apprentices, and that precedent had held, things would have worked out quite differently. Because being an apprentice or an indentured servant, whether willingly or not, was most definitely not the same thing as being enslaved.
It looked a whole lot different because it was temporary and because it didn’t control the person’s later status in society. Let alone that of their children.
“The possibility of beatings” was to a point a part of a whole lot of people’s lives at that time. Schoolchildren. Children in general. Sailors. Members of the military. Wives. But there are beatings and beatings.
DeSantis you scamp! I didn’t know you posted here!
Agree with all of this. My point, badly put, was there were apprenticeships, which could be okay, and indentured service, which was often not okay. And in many places, Asian workers were brought over as technically “indentured servants” but worked in conditions more like slavery.
Interesting that some of the other benchmark clarifications concern indentured servitude, and include “Instruction includes the similarities and differences between serfdom and slavery”; " Instruction includes the method by which indentured servants were able to own private property, farm crops and make money, realizing the payout of property and supplies at the end of their contracts"; “Instruction includes the comparative treatment of indentured servants of European and African extraction”; and “Instruction includes the shift in attitude toward Africans as Colonial America transitioned from indentured servitude to race-based, hereditary slavery.”
Up Next: Florida Schools Will Teach How The Holocaust Brought ‘Personal Benefit’ to Jews Because They Got A Country.”
I don’t want to imply that anyone in this thread is supporting slavery. But the Florida law was enacted so there apparently are people in this country who do support feeding misleading information to children about slavery (or who believe that misleading information themselves). And I assume some of them will make or hear the argument I presented; that slavery was not that much different than other forms of servitude. So I think it’s important to rally the facts and prepare the counterarguments for when that argument when it gets made.
You may be right. I was looking for clarity and accuracy, and trrying to distinguish between what was actually said and what was implied or insinuated.
The actual phrase used, “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit,” raises several questions:
- Did slaves in fact develop useful skills and trades?
- Were they ever allowed to apply these for their own personal benefit?
- If so, when, where, and how often?
- If so, is it important that schoolkids be taught this?
- Did Black people benefit from being enslaved?
- Was slavery actually not as bad as it’s often made out to be?
Question 1: I think there’s plenty of evidence that the answer is YES.
Questions 2-4: I don’t have enough historical knowledge to address these questions, but they’re important questions that need to be addressed in defending or attacking these standards.
Questions 5-6: It’s clear to me that the answer is a resounding NO (except maybe in an “every cloud has a silver lining” sort of way that’s really a stretch), no matter what the answers are to the other questions. But the fear (which may well be justified) is that this will be taught in such a way as to implicitly or explicitly give YES answers to those last two questions.
This is part of a general strategy of teaching the exception.
Thudlow_Boink’s cite lists the “duties and trades performed by slaves” as:
agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation
Which is true as it is, generally, but it should be noted that out of 4 million people enslaved in the U.S. on the eve of the Civil War, 2.5 million were employed in the cultivation of cotton, and many of the rest in tobacco, rice and sugar. So while “agricultural work” is 1/7th of the list of “duties and trades” given, it was probably closer to 6/7th of the actual work done.
Now, even someone enslaved on a plantation didn’t only do field work - they typically had to tend their own food plots, build their own shelter, mend their own clothes, and rear their own children; all during what time their slaveholders did not have something else for them to work on.
Some slaves, in all this, managed to build some marketable skills. The slaveholder got to decide how those skills were used, and took the pecuniary benefit from them. Occasionally, a slaveholder might allow the enslaved to take some of them money themselves, as a way to encourage greater productivity. Even more rarely, an enslaved person in such a situation might be able to purchase their own freedom, if their slaveholder permitted it - and as a slaveholder might die before said freedom was purchased, any promises given to such an effect would die with him.
Now, to point out the “benefit to the slave” as a key takeaway for classroom instruction is pure folly. Any benefit the enslaved got out of their time enslaved was only due to the greater benefit it gave to the slaveholder, who would evaluate things on his terms. This is the central fact of the American system of chattel slavery, and any teaching of its history needs to put that front and center.
Agreed
I think it is distinctly different.
A slave is someone’s property. They are owned. They can be sold.
And the practice of letting slaves earn their own money was legally recognized nowhere, and legally prohibited in some states. If a master promised a slave freedom in exchange for more work, there was no recourse if the master broke that promise. Essentially, all the statement that “some slaves were able to work for their own benefit” boils down to, is that some slave-owners were only 90% assholes, not 100%.
Many who were brought over as adults or older children already HAD useful skills and trades. I would guess very nearly all of them. Does the Florida instruction consider their contribution of knowledge to American society?
Think about that over your barbecue this weekend.
And their skin looked great from all the fresh air, hard work, and sunshine.
Well … if you ignore all those suppurating welts on their backs, I suppose.
In recent years, the preferred term has changed from slaves to enslaved persons. While I think it’s a bit silly, the purpose of this change was to ephasize that they were people first and foremost and not just slaves. (I’m not really interested in debating the merit of slave versus enslaved.) I do think it’s important to teach kids that enslaved persons had their own lives, their own hobbies, dreams, desires, etc., etc. It doesn’t mean they were happy being slaves, but they weren’t just a bunch of sad sacks with no agency of their own.
I think I take your broader point, but I want to be careful not to lose sight of the camaraderie and unbelievable will to survive that took place in the WWII concentration camps.
The fact that people can dig unimaginably deeply and retain some measure of humanity in the most execrable of circumstances should never detract from those circumstances even a little bit.
That applies here, too.
ETA: “When you were slaves, you sang like birds.” --“Blazing Saddles”
[Moderating]
I merged iiandyiiii’s thread on basically the same subject with this one, and managed to make iiandyiiii’s OP the first post in Whack-a-Mole’s thread.
Sorry, Whack-a-Mole. Not sure how to fix it, but if it bothers you, let me know and I’ll figure out how.
[/Moderating]
Fine by me as it is now. No need to change it (unless @iiandyiiii has issue with it). Thanks!
Apparently now I’m the OP, but the thread title is from @Whack-a-Mole. For the record, my original thread title was “Modern Jim Crow in America”.