Some people promote the idea that the slaves had better lives as slaves here than they would have as free people in their homelands. First of all, how do we know they were free in their homelands (let’s face it, many slavers worked in cahoots with tribal leaders who enslaved their own people, or those from rival tribes) and c’mon. It’s the whole idea of the thing.
It’s the notion of a gilded cage. It is a generally rejected notion (although doubtless there are some who would choose it).
I didn’t know until very recently that between the world wars, California had segregated schools for Chinese and Japanese students.
And to those people I say, go harvest my crops or I’ll whip you. You think being a slave is so great? Fine, your wish is granted.
Indeed. If being a slave is a net benefit then sign-up!
Not always true. Google “involuntary apprenticeship” for how it was applied to post Civil War blacks, and to indigenous people as well. Also dip into apprenticeship’s history over the centuries since medieval times in Europe and you’ll see that apprentices often were essentially enslaved; bound to their masters for a given term with no recourse for maltreatment and no right to leave.
So…slavery by a different name?
Yeh, pretty much for the outgroups that were the worst affected by it. Hell, look at prison chain gangs for not that long ago examples of modern exploitation of involuntary labor.
“Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.”
-Abraham Lincoln
I agree and that’s the point I was making. I feel it’s not enough to just say slavery is different from other forms of servitude; it’s important to be able to explain what the difference is and what the effects caused by that difference were.
No surprise but racism rears its head in those arguments. People who argue that slavery wasn’t that bad mean that it wasn’t that bad for “those people”. Slaves came from a primitive tribal society and had no work ethic unless it was imposed upon them by outsiders. But Europeans? They came from an advanced society and their descendants were self-starters who could handle freedom.
Obviously, this argument is self-serving racist bullshit. But we can see traces of this mentality in the Florida program.
The counterargument to this nonsense is that it’s reversing cause and effect. If slaves didn’t show initiative and motivation - if they were “shiftless” - it wasn’t because of their ethnic background. It was because being denied the rewards that could be gained from initiative and motivation, they had no reason to demonstrate those traits. A hard-working slave was a fool; he would do the work and somebody else would collect the rewards that work had provided. In a situation like that, a smart person did as little work as he or she could get away with.
Especially given the additional facts that the work involved was often intrinsically dangerous and that the food provided to the workers was sometimes nutritionally inadequate for the amount of effort they were expending.
In a situation where the work itself is not only functionally useless for your purposes but often is actively destroying you, being a hard worker is not at all in your best interests.
Well, I guess “not getting the crap beat out of you and not getting killed” qualify as "for one’s personal benefit. So, there’s that.
The fact that these scum are pulling thtis stunt and still being supported for and voted into office tells you all you need to know about the state of that particular state, doesn’t it?
No shit. Sigh.
As to the question, the supposed ‘correct’ answer is that the slaves could gain experience and skills in {insert something, no idea, underwater basket weaving?} that while yes Massa would have them weaving them baskets underwater, they could accept and keep tips from the people massa farmed them out to work for [in many cases slaves would be owned by Massa Smith living in town, and rented out to Massa Jones who ran a delivery service - so when James made a delivery of a load of lumber, then Massa Doolittle would conceivably tip James for being so polite and delivering quickly. ]
I seriously doubt that normally the slaves saving their tips would have enough to buy themselves free though there was a class of ‘free persons of color’ in New Orleans [digging back into distant memory from living there for a short while] that came about in the 1700s and diminishing in the 1800s from slaves that did manage to buy themselves free, slaves freed through the death of their owners and given themselves in the will [I have no idea how else to describe it] and the assorted partial coloreds [mulatto, octaroon, quadroon, there are a number of various descriptives based upon how much white to black there was ] and also children of white slave owners and black slaves that were freed. It is an unholy tangle.
The house slaves were also given things like older worn or damaged clothing they could remove trim and embroidery from and resell, women would have skills at needlework and be rented out to tailor shops, seamstress shops, hatmakers, or tipped by visitors to the house.
So in theory a slave could ‘better’ themself by learning a valuable skill. Psh, what crap.
My bold - that is the difference between slavery and apprenticeship/indentured servitude - there was a end date to the abuse.
There were also a few actual virtuous whites in that era who, on finding themselves with ownership of slaves (such as from an inheritance) did the moral thing and promptly freed them. Or, if they lived in a state where that wasn’t permitted, enabled their slaves to escape to a more civilized place.
Which is, of course, key to any discussion of “learning a useful skill”. The benefit of an apprenticeship to an apprentice came once the apprenticeship was over: At that point, the former apprentice now had a marketable skill, and could go into business using that skill, and do what they wished with the proceeds of that business. But that didn’t apply for a slave: Even if they developed the same level of skill as the apprentice, the “apprenticeship” never ended, and no matter what they did with those skills, it was still their master who had the right to all of their proceeds.
Maybe the next curriculum change will be to say rape gives women practical education in reproductive biology.
There’s also the question we have to ask: How many slaves were permitted to learn these skills and use them for their benefit?
There’s plenty of examples of such arrangements, but they were only ever a small percentage of all the slaves. Sure, there may have been one guy at a plantation trained as a blacksmith, but that doesn’t change the fact that there were also a few hundred people out in the fields doing back-breaking manual labor every day of their lives.
The bitter irony of saying that slaves “earned new skills that might hekp them” is stated pretty starkly in Frederick Douglas’ first autobiography: He became a skilled caulker for ships, and was well paid. But…