# More evil: American chattel slavery, or the Nazi Holocaust? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [April 10, 2010, 8:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/more-evil-american-chattel-slavery-or-the-nazi-holocaust/535669 "2010-04-10T20:48:37Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skald_the_Rhymer)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2010, 8:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/more-evil-american-chattel-slavery-or-the-nazi-holocaust/535669/1 "2010-04-10T20:48:37Z")
[Suggested by a discussion in this thread.](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=558938) Please explain your reasons. ---
**Author:** ![NinetyWt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/cc9497/32.png) [@NinetyWt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/NinetyWt)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2010, 8:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/more-evil-american-chattel-slavery-or-the-nazi-holocaust/535669/2 "2010-04-10T20:55:20Z")
How in the world can you compare them? Two totally different, separate things. I hate this argument. ---
**Author:** ![AClockworkMelon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aclockworkmelon/32/10803_2.png) [@AClockworkMelon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AClockworkMelon)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2010, 8:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/more-evil-american-chattel-slavery-or-the-nazi-holocaust/535669/3 "2010-04-10T20:57:43Z")
When I first saw the poll options it seemed like an easy choice. “The Holocaust was far worse, of course!” On further reflection, it was a bit harder to pick. But only a bit. The Jews, the Roma, the gay and the infirm were rounded up to be cleansed. That’s really fucking bad. Slavery in the United States was really bad. I mean _really_ bad. But they weren’t rounded up specifically to be killed, they were enslaved. Slavery is horrible and both groups suffered through it, but the Nazis did a little bit extra to their victims. ---
**Author:** ![Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skald_the_Rhymer)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2010, 8:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/more-evil-american-chattel-slavery-or-the-nazi-holocaust/535669/4 "2010-04-10T20:58:20Z")
NM ---
**Author:** ![silenus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/silenus/32/166_2.png) [@silenus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/silenus)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2010, 9:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/more-evil-american-chattel-slavery-or-the-nazi-holocaust/535669/5 "2010-04-10T21:05:32Z")
Holocaust by far. Active extermination beats civil rights abuse by light years. ---
**Author:** ![RealityChuck](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/realitychuck/32/195_2.png) [@RealityChuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityChuck)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2010, 9:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/more-evil-american-chattel-slavery-or-the-nazi-holocaust/535669/6 "2010-04-10T21:07:40Z")
Holocaust. Not just the Jews, but the others the Nazis exterminated. Slavery, at least, had a history (Rome, etc.) and, though depriving the victim of his rights, usually didn’t kill him (once the slaves got to the US, they were too valuable – though the slave trade was willing to). ---
**Author:** ![ShibbOleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/848f3c/32.png) [@ShibbOleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ShibbOleth)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2010, 9:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/more-evil-american-chattel-slavery-or-the-nazi-holocaust/535669/7 "2010-04-10T21:19:47Z")
A hell of a lot more than six million people died in the Holocaust. Why do we only count the Jews? Actual toll was more on the order of 10-15 million or more. And that was only during a period of maybe 7 years. If they’d been able to keep it up for longer - damn, I don’t even want to go there. ---
**Author:** ![Oldeb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/ea666f/32.png) [@Oldeb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Oldeb)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2010, 9:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/more-evil-american-chattel-slavery-or-the-nazi-holocaust/535669/8 "2010-04-10T21:20:02Z")
The Holocaust. Your number in the poll is just for the number of Jews killed. Including non-Jews the number is estimated at 11-17 million people. From the 16th century to the 19th century the Atlantic Slave Trade is estimated to have transplanted between 9.4-12 million Africans to the Americas, with another 1.2-2.4 million dying in transit. So between 1938 and 1945 Hitler had more people systematically killed then the entire 300 year history of African slaving. I’m not saying that there was anything good about chattel slavery, but it’s just not in the same league as Hitler. Honestly, until you get to Pol Pot I’m not sure anyone is in the same league as Hitler. ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2010, 9:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/more-evil-american-chattel-slavery-or-the-nazi-holocaust/535669/9 "2010-04-10T21:27:32Z")
Slavery, because it lasted far longer. Bad as the Holocaust was most of the victims died, and at that point the suffering stopped. With slavery, the suffering went on and on and on for generations. The Nazis didn’t have the time to reach that level of cruelty. They simply didn’t have the opportunity to torture people for entire lifetimes, much less generations. ---
**Author:** ![Kyla](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/eada6e/32.png) [@Kyla](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kyla)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2010, 9:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/more-evil-american-chattel-slavery-or-the-nazi-holocaust/535669/10 "2010-04-10T21:29:09Z")
I voted for equally evil, but upon reflection, I don’t think you can really compare them. It’s a pointless exercise. ---
**Author:** ![Sage\_Rat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sage_rat/32/399_2.png) [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2010, 9:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/more-evil-american-chattel-slavery-or-the-nazi-holocaust/535669/11 "2010-04-10T21:55:07Z")
Slavery mostly sucked because you had no say in it. Some owners were, almost certainly, cruel but probably most were perfectly fine. You had guaranteed shelter and food, meaningful labor, and no other major worries in life beyond how to make massa happy. By some accounts, that’s better than most have it. Probably the largest cruelty of slavery was when families were split up. While that sucks, you would still know that your family was alive and well with guaranteed shelter and food. With the Holocaust, you cannot say the same. And whereas nearly all families were split up during the Holocaust, I think that most slave family units were able to stay together (though I’m not certain of that). When they were split up, it was generally just the father. The mother and her children were left together. Getting lashed because you didn’t work was something that men in the military or anyone on a ship would have experienced at the time. If you were born on a farm and didn’t do your part, I suspect that your parents had decently strict measures to correct your attitude. If you were in school and you misbehaved, you’d almost certainly be paddled or have a stick brought down on your knuckles. Overall, in the past, there wasn’t a great tolerance for laziness or misbehavior, so regardless of whether you were a slave or a free man, it’s pretty likely that you’d suffer for the transgression physically. (Of these, lashing is probably at the higher end of the pain scale of these, though still below keelhauling.) Life as a slave was, almost certainly, one of the less enviable stations in life, but the big issue at the time was whether human ownership was moral, not whether or not the conditions were all that bad. The conditions were, most likely, fairly good by the standards of the day and given the social position that the slaves were in. The people who bought slaves considered them to be cheap labor, not torture subjects, and deserving of the smallest possible wages. That’s not appreciably different from illegal aliens in the modern day except that instead of providing a hovel-like barracks and slop, a pittance salary is given with which the worker can go out and find his own dilapidated lodging to share with his fellows, and eat inexpensive food. If we don’t consider this to a horror on par with the Holocaust, comparing chattel slavery to it is foolish as well. It’s also worth noting that the [total number of people to ever live in the US](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=487521) by the end of the Civil War was probably no more than ~50 million. Since only a minority of the population was ever slaves, I suspect that the number of slaves was probably similar to or less than the number of people killed in the Holocaust. ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2010, 10:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/more-evil-american-chattel-slavery-or-the-nazi-holocaust/535669/12 "2010-04-10T22:01:47Z")
Can’t answer it as worded. More evil _to have done_, or more evil _to have had it done unto_? Being enslaved and seeing one’s lover and one’s children enslaved is probably worse than being killed, although if the killing-process were long drawn-out and involved lots of horrid indignities (and seeing them done to one’s loved ones) that might not be the case. The horrible moral distortions and dehumanizations wrought upon the DOERS is, I think, significantly worse for those who committed the genocide. ---
**Author:** ![Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skald_the_Rhymer)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2010, 10:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/more-evil-american-chattel-slavery-or-the-nazi-holocaust/535669/13 "2010-04-10T22:03:04Z")
> [@ShibbOleth](#): > > A hell of a lot more than six million people died in the Holocaust. Why do we only count the Jews? Actual toll was more on the order of 10-15 million or more. And that was only during a period of maybe 7 years. If they’d been able to keep it up for longer - damn, I don’t even want to go there. I knew that both Jews & Gentiles got massacred. I started to write 12 million, then I thought, “Wait…was it 6 million Jews & 6 million other, or 3 million Jews & 3 million other,” and as you know I am terribly lazy. ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2010, 10:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/more-evil-american-chattel-slavery-or-the-nazi-holocaust/535669/14 "2010-04-10T22:05:58Z")
> [@Sage\_Rat](#): > > Slavery mostly sucked because you had no say in it. Some owners were, almost certainly, cruel but probably most were perfectly fine. Yeah, sure. The constant beatings (gotta keep those slaves in their place), the rapes, the mutilations, the constant degradation, the forced ignorance were all peachy keen. ---
**Author:** ![Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skald_the_Rhymer)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2010, 10:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/more-evil-american-chattel-slavery-or-the-nazi-holocaust/535669/15 "2010-04-10T22:11:51Z")
> [@Der\_Trihs](#): > > Yeah, sure. The constant beatings (gotta keep those slaves in their place), the rapes, the mutilations, the constant degradation, the forced ignorance were all peachy keen. Please define “constant.” Please then cite that the majority of slaves received “constant beatings.” I am not defending slavery. I’d hate to have been a slave; I hate that many of my ancestors were slaves; I hate the legacy that slavery has left our (America’s!) culture. But somehow it seems less evil than a deliberate and conscious attempt to exterminate an entire ethnic group and 6 million other persons while the Nazis were at it. ---
**Author:** ![AClockworkMelon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aclockworkmelon/32/10803_2.png) [@AClockworkMelon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AClockworkMelon)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2010, 10:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/more-evil-american-chattel-slavery-or-the-nazi-holocaust/535669/16 "2010-04-10T22:22:01Z")
Yeah. Slavery is basically one of the worst things that can happen to you. I don’t disagree that slaves were beaten, mutilated and degraded. But to suggest that all slaves lived in an environment of constant torture is disingenuous. ---
**Author:** ![you\_with\_the\_face](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/ecccb3/32.png) [@you\_with\_the\_face](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/you_with_the_face)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2010, 10:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/more-evil-american-chattel-slavery-or-the-nazi-holocaust/535669/17 "2010-04-10T22:45:01Z")
How do you grade an “evil” act? The number of people affected? The number of years it went on? The magnitude of its ramifications? The loss of life? The loss of potential? It makes as much as sense as asking what is more evil, machete-raping a bunch of people or A-bombing that same bunch of people. Pretty much both suck so much that there is not enough daylight between them to really answer the question. We could always say it’s worse to kill people if we put top premium on being alive, but machete-rape doesn’t sound like a whole lot of fun to endure. Neither does chattle slavery. Quality of life is just as important, if not moreso, than being alive to me. A slave that has no options in life except to be someone else’s pack animal or concubine may be alive, but they aren’t really living. One other thing: The word “evil” is a loaded term, as it implies that the thing it describes is so bad that its unnatural. But there is nothing unnatural about genocide or slavery. Both are going on today. Both have been going on since prehistory. ---
**Author:** ![Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skald_the_Rhymer)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2010, 11:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/more-evil-american-chattel-slavery-or-the-nazi-holocaust/535669/18 "2010-04-10T23:05:35Z")
> [@you\_with\_the\_face](#): > > One other thing: The word “evil” is a loaded term, as it implies that the thing it describes is so bad that its unnatural. But there is nothing unnatural about genocide or slavery. Both are going on today. Both have been going on since prehistory. I would argue that genocide has not been going on since pre-history, as for it to be a meaningful term, there must be a consciousness of large-scale group identity that would have been lacking in pre-agrarian cultures. (And by large-scale, I mean bigger than a village.) Anyway, evil is hardly unnatural in my POV. Rape and murder are both entirely natural behaviors, and, for humans, both entirely wrong. ---
**Author:** ![AClockworkMelon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aclockworkmelon/32/10803_2.png) [@AClockworkMelon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AClockworkMelon)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2010, 11:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/more-evil-american-chattel-slavery-or-the-nazi-holocaust/535669/19 "2010-04-10T23:05:41Z")
> [@you\_with\_the\_face](#): > > How do you grade an “evil” act? The number of people affected? The number of years it went on? The magnitude of its ramifications? The loss of life? The loss of potential? Whichever makes you feel worse thinking about. I feel a little bad when I hear that someone had their wallet stolen. I feel horrible when I hear that someone got hit by a car. This isn’t hard. > [@](#): > > It makes as much as sense as asking what is more evil, machete-raping a bunch of people or A-bombing that same bunch of people. Pretty much both suck so much that there is not enough daylight between them to really answer the question. We could always say it’s worse to kill people if we put top premium on being alive, but machete-rape doesn’t sound like a whole lot of fun to endure. Neither does chattle slavery. I’d say that machete rape is worse. I don’t like your analogy. 😛 > [@](#): > > Quality of life is just as important, if not moreso, than being alive to me. A slave that has no options in life except to be someone else’s pack animal or concubine may be alive, but they aren’t really living. I think the slaves of the southern United States had it A LOT better, quality of life wise, than the poor bastards in the death camps. It isn’t obvious to you? > [@](#): > > One other thing: The word “evil” is a loaded term, as it implies that the thing it describes is so bad that its unnatural. But there is nothing unnatural about genocide or slavery. Both are going on today. Both have been going on since prehistory. Evil does not imply unnatural. Edit: Skald beat me to it. Darn. ---
**Author:** ![Spice\_Weasel](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spice_weasel/32/5435_2.png) [@Spice\_Weasel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spice_Weasel)\ **Post date:** [April 10, 2010, 11:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/more-evil-american-chattel-slavery-or-the-nazi-holocaust/535669/20 "2010-04-10T23:08:29Z")
> [@AClockworkMelon](#): > > Yeah. Slavery is basically one of the worst things that can happen to you. I don’t disagree that slaves were beaten, mutilated and degraded. > > But to suggest that all slaves lived in an environment of constant torture is disingenuous. I think people tend to grossly underestimate just how awful the American brand of slavery was. All historical accounts indicate that they were pretty much constantly tortured, starved, beaten and worse. Women were commonly used as breeders which means they were chronically raped and then their children were taken from them for the duration of their entire lives. That was a slave woman’s life – rape, excruciating hard work, painful childbirth, loss of child, more rape, more excruciating hard work, etc. In the early days of the slave trade, these people were worked to death on accident on a pretty regular basis. The first few years of a slave’s career in the Carribean was basically just getting the will beaten out of him–only then was he considered ‘‘broken.’’ In later years when paranoia was rampant about slave uprisings, slaves were forbidden to even socialize with one another. These people had no life to speak of. They were humans who were not permitted to be human. They had to live with the knowledge not only that they would suffer for the rest of their lives, but that their children would suffer for the rest of their lives. A site was recently uncovered somewhere in New York that contained damning evidence of the physical condition of slaves. According to [the report](http://www.slideshare.net/ANTHROPOLOGOS/the-new-york-african-burial-ground-project-an-examination-of-enslaved-lives-a-construction-of-ancestral-ties): > [@](#): > > ''One half of the population died in childhood, and nearly 40% of those were infants. These rates are nearly twice the rates of infant mortality among the colonial English in the colony of New York. > > Muscle attachments become enlarged when muscles undergo frequent strain. Most of the population of men and women have enlarged muscle attachments in the neck, arms and legs. It has become commonplace for our technicians to find women’s bones that are so robust as to be indistinguishable from those of men. > > We also see [descriptions of various kinds of fractures from heavy load bearing]. If this trauma was not deliberately induced, it serves as evidence of being worked to death. > > The individual known as Burial #39 was a six-year-old child. This child has dental developmental defects showing that she was ill at birth, indicating the ill health of the mother as well. The orbits of the eyes show pitting, characteristic of active anemia at the time of death. There are lesions of outer layers of bone caused by general infection… Burial #39 has lesions at the arm attachments where the brachialis muscles strained, and muscle attachments in the arms are enlarged. The first and second vertebrae are partially fused due to force or heavy load trauma on the top of the head. Sounds very much like torture to me. This question is awful. The answer is not at all obvious to me. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/more-evil-american-chattel-slavery-or-the-nazi-holocaust/535669.md?page=2)