Why would he need to read that? After all, he has been to Mount Vernon - twice! and he’s seen Roots. He knows everything about slavery he needs to know.
I keep getting the feeling that aceplace is trying to make the same point Clarence Thomas did in his dissent - that slavery did not “strip away” the dignity of the enslaved, that human dignity cannot be taken away, nor given. But that slaves found a way to endure being legally and morally viewed as subhuman does not all them colored folks were just fiiiinnnneee working hard and going home to be with their families. Slavery does not work that way.
I suspect that if anything, he needs to go take as many tours of historic homes as possible and allow himself to be educated.
Holee shit. I didn’t know slavery was just such a blissful existence. Color me educated!
I’m sure it’s totally fine, guys! After all, put aceplace in chains and he might protest, but his daughters and their daughters, why they’d be just fine! They’d have been born into slavery, so they would know no other existence, and would be happy, singing, and making little vegetable gardens, raising their little babies.
It would be no problem when one of his little granddaughters was sold because the kindly plantation owner just couldn’t afford to keep her anymore. And she might get sold downriver. And oh, she’s pretty, so her new owner decides to take an extra special interest in her.
And his grandson, oh, he can’t stand the whole institution, and he vaguely remembers some story about grandpa being free, so he’s sullen and angry and refuses to work. But oh, the plantation owner beats him, and it’s for his own good, right? He should be thoroughly cowed by now!
I had about six long paragraphs going into detail onto why historically this wasn’t necessarily so, with some concrete examples. It was always dollars and cents, not productivity per se. But I just lost them while rushing to cut and paste a url. So since it almost certainly wasn’t worth the effort in the first place, let alone going through the trouble of recreating it - screw it.
I’ll just leave it at the fact that you are guilty of the sin of historical myopia. Educate yourself better.
Maybe you can’t. Do remember this came up talking about educating 21rst century tourists. Seems like 21rst century values would be rather apropos.
Even looking at it from your unique (I devoutly hope) perspective, the best that can be said of slaveowners is that they treated human beings abominably for reasons other than that they were fundamentally bad people with twisted malevolent souls.
And sure, I’ll agree with that. I can accept that at most a tiny handful of slaveowners woke up in the morning and thought “gosh, I sure do hate black people. I think I’ll dehumanize and torture a few today, because I’m so very, very wicked.”
And some were kind, relatively speaking. Their spiritual descendants are the people today who never yell at their computers or kick their cars. Those people never for a moment think their cars or computers aren’t there to serve them, or are entitled to autonomy.
Another thing to note is that the cruelty is documented. You can explain until you turn blue that abusing and torturing slaves was not necessary, was not justified, may have been counterproductive – it still happened, and it was still widespread, however inconvenient that may be for the picture you want to paint.
[QUOTE=aceplace57]
Slavery is morally wrong. But we can’t apply our 21st century values to this situation. We’re talking about an entirely different time and place. People with life experiences totally foreign to us.
[/QUOTE]
I’m always of two minds about statements like this.
The analogy I tend to draw is the germ theory of disease. At one time, doctors who embraced germ theory were considered quacks, or deluded. For a doctor at that time to accept germ theory would mean going against everything he’d been taught, everything the medical community as it then was assured him was true. Can we really blame a doctor at that time for not attributing disease to germs? Can we really condemn him as we would a germ theory denialist today? And yet germs most assuredly exist and cause disease, and that was just as true when the theory was first promulgated, and the ten millennia and more before that.
Similarly, slavery is cruel. It didn’t become cruel as humanity (mostly) got more enlightened about it. It was always cruel. “21st-century values” doesn’t mean regarding slavery as cruel, it means caring that it’s cruel. But just because no one (who mattered) cared doesn’t mean the cruelty was any less present.
I ordered a copy of 12 Years a Slave from Amazon and will read it.
I see now this book and movie resulted in part of the confusion with my posts. I mentioned several times that I was referencing 2nd, 3rd generation slaves. Men and women that grew up on the plantation. They were conditioned for a life as a slave from birth. They saw their parents and how they reacted to slavery. They would be more compliant and more easily controlled. Harsh treatment wouldn’t be needed. Importing slaves was banned at some point prior to the Civil War. The only slaves that could be bought were ones that were already here. I can’t recall when the ban took effect but we covered it in my history class.
The character in 12 Years a Slave was an unjustly kidnapped free man. He would have fought strongly against being a slave. Anybody would in that situation. I certainly would have. Anybody with his free background would never fit in with slaves that grew up on the plantations. It would be two polar opposites. Completely different views and expectations of life.
I still want to read the book. Wikipedia indicates its been researched to confirm the events and historical accuracy. It does reveal the darker and more violent side to the slavery system.
Again. Torture, and the terror induced by the threat of terror, were the foundation of slavery.
You can get someone to work for you by saying, “Look, if you come work for me, I’ll make it worth your while.” Not a single slavemaster did that, by definition.
Or you can get someone to work for you by saying, “Look, if you don’t work for me and work hard, I’ll make your life terrible.” Again, by definition, that’s how slavery worked.
The default threat was whipping. It may be true that some slavemasters never beat their slaves; but if they did not, the people they enslaved still knew that the threat was there. They still knew the rules of the game, namely, if they did not work to their slavemaster’s satisfaction, they could be tortured.
There is no getting around this. A slavemaster kind enough not to use the threat of torture to enforce compliance would be a slavemaster whose slaves wouldn’t work.
I don’t think the confusion is arising from the book and movie, or even from what generation of slave we’re talking about. You seem to think that 2nd or 3rd generation slaves were compliant and had no thought of rebelling, and that’snot so bad, right? Probably not beaten all that often, had a chance to live in a little house and raise veggies and have pets, and raise a family. We are trying to point out that even if you had a “kind” master, you only had the chance to do things like that if your master allowed you to. A slave was livestock. It may not make good financial sense to randomly abuse the livestock, but if making an example out of a slave once in a while kept all the others’ spirits broken, then it might make sense to abuse the slaves that step out of line, or don’t pick cotton fast enough, or look disrespectfully at a white person. Any wrongdoing could - and usually was - be punished harshly. Do you honestly believe even 2nd or 3rd generation slaves were just too stupid to know that they were considered property? Even if they had never personally known freedom, do you believe that they couldn’t figure out that they were considered property and not people?
The human spirit is a rebellious one; to keep order masters would have had to be willing to enforce the law. Even kind masters often viewed slaves as childlike at best; if a child breaks the rules, they get corrected. The men and women you seem to think were pretty happy overall still knew that they were always subject to someone’s else’s whims and decisions.
ETA: What cnfuses ME is that you said that the book revealed the darker and more violent side of the slavery system, as if there is a light and happy side as well.
And incidentally, the life expectancywas considerably higher for whites than it was for slaves.
“Slaves suffered extremely high mortality. Half of all slave infants died during their first year of life, twice the rate of white babies. And while the death rate declined for those who survived their first year, it remained twice the white rate through age 14. As a result of this high infant and childhood death rate, the average life expectancy of a slave at birth was just 21 or 22 years, compared to 40 to 43 years for antebellum whites. Compared to whites, relatively few slaves lived into old age.”
Do you seriously believe that all slaves who attempted to run away to freedom were not born to the life of slavery? Do you think that the concentrated effort to prevent slaves from learning had nothing to do with the idea that slaves would try to leave if they could read and write? Do you seriously think that slaveowners did not physically and sexually abuse their slaves? That masters did not regularly rape slave women, who then bore mixed-race children, and then sold them away? Do you believe that slaves who were born into and brought up into slavery would just shrug and believe themselves to be lesser humans? So all those spirituals referencing a better life were just…for what, to amuse the white folks with the singing?
Here is some light reading that you don’t even have to wait for Amazon to bring you. The National Humanities Center on sexual abuse of slaves. This is a collection of actual ex-slaves giving their actual words regarding their actual treatment on plantations.
But right. Tell us more about how slaves lived these happy little lives, with little families in nice cabins and gardens and pets (!!!). Please take thirty full minutes to educate yourself. There are a few thousand slave narratives available online, for free, that you can read at your leisure, that will tell you in more and better detail.
God what nonsense. Do you think that 2nd and 3rd generation slaves liked to be raped? Because if they were attractive young women, they were raped. Was life good for them aside from the raping? How about their husbands/brothers/fathers/sons who complained about the rape, or tried to protect them? Do you think their concerns were addressed respectfully, or were they beaten or threatened to keep quiet? Which do you think is more likely?
What about the parents whose children were sold? What if they complained, or tried to go find them? What about a slave who has a really, really bad day and cusses at a white person? Or a slave who grumbles in the slave-quarters about the master, and another slaves tells on them? Or a slave with a chronic injury or illness?
What do you think it was really like? Do you really think 2nd and 3rd generation slaves heard nothing of freedmen and escaped slaves? Do you really think they never thought about running?
This is infantile thinking – nothing more than the fantasy South, with very little to do with reality. The reality was rape and terror and brutality. Why do you think most black people in America have a significant amount of European ancestry? Was there a lot of love matches? Interracial weddings, with much joy and happiness? Or rapes?
Seriously. Imagine you, a white kid in his teens, taught all his life that blacks are subservient to you and barely above the level of animals. That it didn’t matter what they said – they couldn’t really think, and just needed to be beaten until they obeyed. Kids then were as horny as kids now. Imagine that most of your friends, and most of the overseers and maybe even your dad and your brothers have boasted about having sex with slave girls. Do you really think that you wouldn’t have done it? Sure, you might have thought the slave girl was willing… but how could she not act so? How could she act any other way, when white people literally had the power of life and death over them?
That’s the system – endless rape, with a requirement of endless brutality and terror to maintain. There’s no other way for it to have existed for so many generations.
Millions of people raped near-daily, terrorized continuously, and brutalized casually, for centuries. That was the reality of slavery in the South.
What was the reality of slavery in the North? That’s my one of my particular historical pet peeves, that slavery (which was unquestionably as brutal and horrible as has been described in this thread) is assumed to have been an exclusively Southern phenomenon. Plantation agriculture, yes, since that type of agriculture did not work in the North and Midwest; but slavery certainly existed in the North. And the majority of enslaved Africans came to this continent in New England-owned ships. But popular history seems only to encompass slavery in the South.
None of this, of course, means that Southerners don’t need to squarely face up to the horrors of our past, and the legacy of racism, hatred, terrorism and violence that it left us. We do, and we need to stop glamourizing the Old South (and get rid of that damned flag). But slavery is a stain on America’s history - not just the Confederacy’s.
I want to apologize for monopolizing the thread. I’m going to read further on the subject and get up to date. A lot has changed since my early 80’s history classes in college. The historical perspective and emphasis on slavery’s inherent violence is much different. It’s going to take time for me to read,research, and then reflect on this. There’s no point in me posting further on this subject until I’m better informed.
I have read the posts in this thread and take them seriously. thanks
It was a mostly Southern phenomenon, but it was certainly bad (and probably as bad) in those places in the North that had it.
The reason it’s not harped on nearly as much is because the descendants of those Northern slave-holding states typically don’t display symbols honoring such a past, or argue that it wasn’t so bad for black people, or argue that the Confederate cause was just and honorable, or similar sorts of ridiculous (and often offensive) historical falsehoods, as so many white Southerners (but not all, obviously) do.