# Sage Rat on Slavery **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Created:** [January 22, 2016, 2:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sage-rat-on-slavery/743843 "2016-01-22T02:32:01Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 11
**Author:** ![piepiepie](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/e47774/32.png) [@piepiepie](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/piepiepie)\ **Post date:** [January 23, 2016, 10:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sage-rat-on-slavery/743843/201 "2016-01-23T22:56:39Z")
> [@Penfeather](#): > > It’s actually fucking weird trying to think yourself into that mindset. On the other hand, Sage Rat could make a killing in Racist Mad Libs. ---
**Author:** ![lance\_strongarm](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/87869e/32.png) [@lance\_strongarm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lance_strongarm)\ **Post date:** [January 23, 2016, 11:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sage-rat-on-slavery/743843/202 "2016-01-23T23:18:30Z")
Anyone who tries to rationalize slavery is a fucking asshole. I issue a challenge to any such person - come be my slave for just a week. Yeah, thought so. ---
**Author:** ![Sherrerd](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sherrerd/32/8_2.png) [@Sherrerd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sherrerd)\ **Post date:** [January 23, 2016, 11:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sage-rat-on-slavery/743843/203 "2016-01-23T23:37:57Z")
> [@lance\_strongarm](#): > > Anyone who tries to rationalize slavery is a fucking asshole. > I issue a challenge to any such person - come be my slave for just a week. > Yeah, thought so. It would be interesting to know if there is even one person who rationalizes slavery, who does not _also_ believe that those enslaved are “naturally fitted” (by genetics, ‘culture,’ or some combination of the two) for slavery. In the grand Rat tradition of Venturing To Guess, I would VTG that there is not. In other words, Rat becoming your slave would not shed any light on the topic of whether slavery is defensible, because (presumably) Rat belongs to a demographic group which is NOT “naturally fitted” for slavery. ---
**Author:** ![MandaJo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ac91a4/32.png) [@MandaJo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MandaJo)\ **Post date:** [January 23, 2016, 11:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sage-rat-on-slavery/743843/204 "2016-01-23T23:41:46Z")
Yeah, these guys always seem to start with “Well, I imagine that if I was a slave owner and I had just spent $1000s on a piece of capital goods I wouldn’t beat them” or whatever. They very rarely say 'Well, I imagine that if I were a man who knew my wife was being raped most nights by the overseer, and that I’d be beaten and sold down the river if I said anything to anyone . . ." ---
**Author:** ![mhendo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mhendo/32/3159_2.png) [@mhendo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mhendo)\ **Post date:** [January 23, 2016, 11:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sage-rat-on-slavery/743843/205 "2016-01-23T23:49:32Z")
> [@tnetennba](#): > > Short answer is that there were white abolitionists in the antebellum South. Slightly longer answer is that southerners were so hostile (to the point of lynching) to people who were antislavery that those who did feel that way either moved north or knew to keep their opinions to themselves. It wasn’t just Southerners. Abolitionists often faced hostile and violent crowds in the American North as well. There are records of a considerable number of abolitionist meetings in Northern towns being broken up by violent mobs, and prominent abolitionist leader and editor of the Liberator newspaper, William Lloyd Garrison, was narrowly saved from a lynching in Boston during the 1830s. The fact is that, even on the very eve of the Civil War, the majority of white Americans, North and South, were not abolitionists. To the extent that whites in the North opposed slavery, it was generally as a broad question of principle, and they were most concerned about the spread of slavery to newly-opened western territories, because they feared that the expansion of slavery would leave less land available for free white yeoman farmers. Certainly, only a tiny minority of white Northerners considered themselves abolitionists, and most white who opposed slavery in principle were not willing to go so far as to actually call for its elimination in the South, as long as it didn’t spread into new territories. Even David Wilmot, the Pennsylvania member of Congress who introduced a proviso (unsuccessful) that would have banned slavery in the Mexican cession, said that a key reason for his measure was to preserve the American west for free white settlers. > [@tnetennba](#): > > I also saw a distinction made between antislavery and abolition, which I had never seen before and still don’t grasp. Apparently you could be anti-slavery but not an abolitionist? I think it was a way of mitigating the spite; “I may be antislavery but I’m not abolitionist,” which means “I don’t like it, but I’m not going to change the law or anything.” Further research is needed. Other people have already discussed this, but one of the things that seems to be missing from a lot of the discussion in this thread is a sense of change over time. The OP, and the other thread that inspired this one, referred to George Washington and his slaves, and people in this thread have also been talking about slavery in the later national period, up to the Civil War. But you can’t really talk about slavery, and about anti-slavery sentiment, as a single entity in the period between the Revolution and the Civil War, because many components of the institution of slavery changed, as did many aspects of the anti-slavery movement. In the Revolutionary era, anti-slavery sentiment might not have been incredibly common in the South, but it was a fairly well respected and intellectualized strain of thought. Leaders like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison wrote about the incompatibility of slavery with republican institutions, and with Enlightenment notions of natural rights and human equality. These men are often not considered abolitionists because, as others have noted, they did not call for immediate and uncompensated emancipation, and their preferred method of dealing with blacks as slavery ended would have been deportation and colonization. Many prominent politicians of the early national period in American history, including James Madison, were members or patrons of the American Colonization Society. There was also a more general feeling among some Southerners that slavery would probably die out due to changing economics. Jefferson combined Enlightenment moral arguments, as well as this sense of economic inevitability, in his predictions regarding the decline and the end of slavery. He hoped and predicted that this would happen with the acquiescence of the slave-owners themselves, rather than through force or legislation. You can see this in his section on “Manners” in _Notes on the State of Virginia_. A key economic problem for this view of slavery as inevitably doomed was the rise of “King Cotton” and the westward spread of the United States. While it seemed to some in the late 1700s that there might soon be no more need for slaves, the incredible expansion of cotton, and the massive money to be made from it, helped to ensure the survival and even the expansion of the institution. This went along with a dramatically expanded internal slave trade, as the center of gravity of American slavery moved gradually west from Virginia and the Carolinas to the cotton South. The internal trade flourished, especially after Congress prohibited the international trade in slaves in 1808. The rise of cotton, and an American (and global) economy in which cotton was the single most important component, helped to expand the institution of slavery. This in turn helped to sow the seeds for a new abolitionist movement to arise in the 1820s and especially the 1830s, and it also explains the massive hostility to abolitionism in the South during the half-century before the Civil War. And the success of cotton didn’t just support the South; merchants and factories and shipping and a whole bunch of other industries in the North, as well as in England, thrived as a result of cotton, and saw their interests as inextricably connected with cotton and, therefore, also with slavery. The abolitionism that arose after about 1830 was quite different from the anti-slavery sentiment of Jefferson and his peers. It was still rooted in Enlightenment ideas about rights, but it was also massively influenced by the Second Great Awakening and the rise of evangelical Protestant Christianity, which saw slavery as not just about abstract notions of rights and equality, but as a fundamental moral issue that needed to be fixed if America was ever to experience the millennial return of Christ. You can’t understand the abolitionists of this period without understanding the role of religion in their ideas and their practices. Immediatists like Garrison argued that slavery was a sin, and that it needed to be eliminated instantly, and not gradually. In the same way that individuals were supposed to reject sin and embrace Christian morals, so were nations. Many in the South, of course, also embraced the Awakening and the Christian values that came with it, but instead of using the Bible and their religion to oppose slavery, they tended to look to religion for a justification of slavery, often on explicitly racial grounds. These differences in theological interpretations led to major North/South schisms in the largest American Protestant denominations, the Methodists and the Baptists. And the fact is that, during the period between 1830 and 1860, abolitionism was a rare and also a perilous worldview for a (white) Southerner to hold. On this issue, at least, i think some of you are being a bit hard on **Robert163**. While there are a bunch of examples of white Southern abolitionists, from famous figures such as the Grimke sisters through to far less well-known (and, no doubt, some completely unknown) people, the fact is that a vast majority of Southern whites, whether slave-holders or not (about 1 in 4 Southern families held slaves in 1860) believed that the institution was morally and Biblically correct, economically essential, and racially justifiable. This was the milieu and the culture in which they were raised, and the acceptance of slavery, and of the racial inequality that went with it, seemed as natural to most Southerners as the air they breathed. I think an interesting part of this whole debate is the assertions made by **Sage Rat** , and contested by many in this thread, regarding the role of violence in the institution of slavery. This part of the debate reminds me a little bit of the very robust debate in the 1970s over the same question. Two economists, Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, produced a two-volume study called _Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery_ (1974). The book claimed to approach slavery using new models of statistical analysis, and made a variety of claims both about the economic efficiency of slavery, and also about the nature and frequency of violence on plantations. The book was an instant sensation, but it was almost as quickly attacked and, in considerable measure, exposed as faulty by a large group of economists and historians. A key claim of the book, regarding violence, was that whippings and other violent episodes were not especially common on slave plantations, and that the historical image of slavery as a brutal institution had been overdrawn. But Fogel and Engerman suffered from some of the same misunderstandings as **Sage Rat** has demonstrated on this issue. Here’s a section from a very nice analysis of the _Time on the Cross_ controversy, written by respected historian Thomas Haskell. > [@](#): > > Similarly, as Gutman points out, readers of Time on the Cross are inclined > toward a benign view of slavery when they read that the average slave on the > Barrow plantation received only 0.7 whippings per year. In the first place the > figure is too low because it is based on an erroneous count both of the number > of slaves Barrow owned and the number of times he whipped them. But > more important, the figure is not the most relevant measure of the importance > of whippings. A whipping, like a lynching, is an instrument of social discipline > intended to impress not only the immediate victim but all who see or > hear about the event. The relevant question is, “How often did Barrow’s slaves > see one of their number whipped?” - to which the answer is every four and > a half days. Again, the form in which the figures are expressed controls their > meaning. If one expressed the rate of lynchings in the same form Fogel and > Engerman chose for whippings, it would tum out that in 1893 there were only > about 0.00002 lynchings per black per year. But obviously this way of expressing > the data would cause the reader utterly to misunderstand the historical > significance of the 155 Negro lynchings that occurred in 1893. Many people in this thread have made a similar point about the fact that a culture of violence, and an expressed willingness to use it, can sometimes be all you need to keep a subjugated population under control. The fact that slave owners didn’t always brutalize their slaves just on a whim doesn’t negate the centrality of violence and brutality to the institution of slavery. If you want to read a fuller account of the debate over Time on the Cross, Haskell’s article, which originally appeared in the _New York Review of Books_ in 1975, can be found in a book of his essays, and can be viewed in full on [Google Books](https://books.google.com/books?id=47XnQnB9FnUC&pg=PA40&lpg=PA40#v=onepage&q&f=false). It’s definitely worth a read. He deals with other issues like sexual predation, slave sales, and the breakup of slave families, as well as some of the economic arguments made by Fogel and Engerman. A more recent work by historian Edward Baptist has also talked about the role of violence in slavery, and especially in cotton production. Baptist’s book, _The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism_, talks about the way that plantation owners used violence to speed up cotton production. He argues, too, that you can see the result of this violence in the rapid rise in the efficiency of cotton picking during the nineteenth century. While plenty of economic and industrial processes became more efficient during this time period, most of them did so due to new technologies and/or changing modes of organization. Cotton picking, however, was done in almost exactly the same way in 1860 as it was in 1800, and yet the cotton-picking efficiency of American slaves increased by more than 300 percent during this period. Baptist argues that this increased speed was largely the result of violence, and the threat of violence. Here’s a section from his book. It’s a bit long, but it’s still well within fair use guidelines, and gives a sense of his main argument: > [@](#): > > A study of planter account books that record daily picking totals for individual enslaved people on labor camps across the South found a growth in daily picking totals of 2.1 percent per year. The increase was even higher if one looks at the growth in the newer southwestern areas in 1860, where the efficiency of picking grew by 2.6 percent per year from 1811 to 1860, for a total productivity increase of 361 percent. > > Almost as remarkable as this dramatic rise in productivity is the fact that the history of the modern world, of industrialization and great divergences, of escape from the Malthusian trap, has almost never noticed it. Or perhaps that should be no surprise. This increase confounds our expectation that dramatic, systematic gains in labor efficiency depend on new machine technologies, such as the continuous series of innovations in spinning and weaving machines that were increasing the productivity of Manchester’s textile workers. Some of the climb in cotton-picking efficiency may be attributable to a kind of “bioengineering”—new breeds of cotton, especially the “Petit Gulf” seed introduced from Mexico in the 1820s. Yet if heavy-yield and bigger cotton bolls of these breeds made picking individual bolls easier, the richer yield also meant more reaching and bending and moving and grabbing and lifting and carrying. And more expectations. > > \ > > There would be no mechanical cotton picker until the late 1930s. In fact, between 1790 and 1860, there was no mechanical innovation of any kind to speed up the harvesting of cotton. There was nothing like the change from scythe to mechanical reaper, for instance, that by the 1850s began to reshape the Chesapeake wheat fields Ball had left behind. Even slave-operated Louisiana sugar mills were more factory-like than the cotton labor camps were. And the nature of human bodies, the only “machine” that worked in the cotton fields, did not change between 1805 and 1860. Still, the possibility that enslaved people might have picked more cotton because they picked faster, harder, and with more efficient technique does not come readily to our minds. > > \ > > What enslavers used was a system of measurement and negative incentives. Actually, one should avoid such euphemisms. Enslavers used measurement to calibrate torture in order to force cotton pickers to figure out how to increase their own productivity and thus push through the picking bottleneck. The continuous process of innovation thus generated was the ultimate cause of the massive increase in the production of high-quality, cheap cotton: an absolutely necessary increase if the Western world was to burst out of the 10,000-year Malthusian cycle of agriculture. This system confounds our expectations, because, like abolitionists, we want to believe that the free labor system is not only more moral than systems of coercion, but more efficient. Faith in that a priori is very useful. It means we never have to resolve existential contradictions between productivity and freedom. And slave labor surely was wasteful and unproductive. Its captives knew it wasted the days and years and centuries extorted from them. They would never get those days back. Yet those who actually endured those days knew the secret that, over time, drove cotton-picking to continually higher levels of efficiency. > > [All from Chapter 4. No page numbers, because I have it as an e-book] Baptist’s chapter on this issue draws heavily on the work of other historians, and on slave narratives that talk about the use of violence to push slaves to work faster and faster. Anyone who has seen the film Twelve Years a Slave will remember the example of Epps having the two slaves who picked less than their quota whipped, and this incident is taken almost exactly from Solomon Northup’s own narrative of his experiences. And I haven’t even touched on other forms of violence, like family separation, and sexual predation. Both Haskell and Baptist, as well as many other historians, deal with issues like this. In short, anyone, who tries to minimize or wave away the importance of violence and brutality as a central component of the slave system simply doesn’t know or doesn’t understand the history. ---
**Author:** ![Penfeather](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/penfeather/32/384_2.png) [@Penfeather](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Penfeather)\ **Post date:** [January 23, 2016, 11:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sage-rat-on-slavery/743843/206 "2016-01-23T23:54:33Z")
> [@piepiepie](#): > > On the other hand, Sage Rat could make a killing in Racist Mad Libs. I only see one \_\_\_, the \_\_\_ \_\_\_. ---
**Author:** ![MandaJo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ac91a4/32.png) [@MandaJo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MandaJo)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2016, 12:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sage-rat-on-slavery/743843/207 "2016-01-24T00:06:30Z")
Thank you for the excellent post, mhendo. ---
**Author:** ![Robert163](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/4af34b/32.png) [@Robert163](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Robert163)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2016, 12:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sage-rat-on-slavery/743843/208 "2016-01-24T00:18:53Z")
> [@mhendo](#): > > It wasn’t just Southerners. Abolitionists often faced hostile and violent crowds in the American North as well. There are records of a considerable number of abolitionist meetings in Northern towns being broken up by violent mobs, and prominent abolitionist leader and editor of the Liberator newspaper, William Lloyd Garrison, was narrowly saved from a lynching in Boston during the 1830s… Wow, thanks for such a good explanation: 1- Most of that is so scary/horrifying I don’t even want to think/talk/ask about it. 2- Please don’t think I am in any way endorsing or accepting any of that, it’s horrible. 3- I have 2 questions however, that are not as serious/bad topics, more general questions. 3a- How did the cotton gin and later the rail road (in the east) affect the cotton industry? 3b- You said that 1 in 4 families in the south owned slaves. This goes against the common saying I’ve always heard, that only rich people could afford slaves. Could you give some clarity on this topic please? Thank you for taking the time to explain all of that… ---
**Author:** ![Emiliana](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/f0a364/32.png) [@Emiliana](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Emiliana)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2016, 12:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sage-rat-on-slavery/743843/209 "2016-01-24T00:22:25Z")
> [@MandaJo](#): > > Thank you for the excellent post, mhendo. Yes, thanks for the post and the cites. ---
**Author:** ![Penfeather](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/penfeather/32/384_2.png) [@Penfeather](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Penfeather)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2016, 12:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sage-rat-on-slavery/743843/210 "2016-01-24T00:35:30Z")
> [@Emiliana](#): > > Yes, thanks for the post and the cites. Thirded; that was an excellent account. ---
**Author:** ![wonky](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wonky/32/393_2.png) [@wonky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wonky)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2016, 1:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sage-rat-on-slavery/743843/211 "2016-01-24T01:47:15Z")
I wonder if some of the issue with people not understanding the horror of slavery is the sense that if the country is pretty good, and if slavery was a big part of the country’s history, then slavery can’t have been that bad. It’s like the mental gymnastics people go through to say they aren’t racists: Racists are bad people and they are not bad people, therefore they cannot be racist. ---
**Author:** ![Guinastasia](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guinastasia/32/5751_2.png) [@Guinastasia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Guinastasia)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2016, 1:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sage-rat-on-slavery/743843/212 "2016-01-24T01:48:36Z")
> [@Robert163](#): > > I’m not really sure what your point is. I didn’t say say there couldn’t be. I said I had allways thought there were then when I went and looked for some I didn’t find any and that made me sad. It seems you are so intent on “proving me wrong” that you are not even paying attention to what I actually said or did not say. > > So which is it? Are you interested in sarcasm and self righteousness or actually having a discussion? You said: > [@Robert163](#): > > I googled Southern Abolitionists and really found almost no data at all. I went and googled the same phrase and came up with plenty of data. I don’t know how you missed it. As for “not paying attention to what you said”, yes, I did. And most of it was wrong, and I’m pointing that out – “Here, your claim is X, and it’s wrong. Stop claiming X to be true.” If you get all butthurt over people pointing out you were wrong, so be it. I’m not here to be nice to you, or anyone else for that matter. (Note: I’m not saying my intention is to be hostile, either.) ---
**Author:** ![Robert163](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/4af34b/32.png) [@Robert163](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Robert163)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2016, 1:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sage-rat-on-slavery/743843/213 "2016-01-24T01:56:04Z")
> [@Guinastasia](#): > > You said: > > I went and googled the same phrase and came up with plenty of data. I don’t know how you missed it. As for “not paying attention to what you said”, yes, I did. And most of it was wrong, and I’m pointing that out – “Here, your claim is X, and it’s wrong. Stop claiming X to be true.” If you get all butthurt over people pointing out you were wrong, so be it. I’m not here to be nice to you, or anyone else for that matter. (Note: I’m not saying my intention is to be hostile, either.) So now we are going to argue over "almost no"data. As I’ve said before, coming to the pit reveals peoples true nature. It’s kind of sad really, to see what people are really like. I’ll remember this the next time you are in GD pretending to be nice. ---
**Author:** ![tnetennba](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/7993a0/32.png) [@tnetennba](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tnetennba)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2016, 2:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sage-rat-on-slavery/743843/214 "2016-01-24T02:35:25Z")
Mhendo, that’s probably the most informative and interesting post I’ve ever seen on this board. Ignorance fought. ---
**Author:** ![tnetennba](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/7993a0/32.png) [@tnetennba](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tnetennba)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2016, 2:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sage-rat-on-slavery/743843/215 "2016-01-24T02:36:46Z")
LOL at Robert. OMG Slavery was terrible! I never knew! :two seconds later: Wah! Somebody hurt my feelings on the Internet! ---
**Author:** ![monstro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ba9def/32.png) [@monstro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/monstro)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2016, 2:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sage-rat-on-slavery/743843/216 "2016-01-24T02:39:52Z")
> [@jsgoddess](#): > > I wonder if some of the issue with people not understanding the horror of slavery is the sense that if the country is pretty good, and if slavery was a big part of the country’s history, then slavery can’t have been that bad. It’s like the mental gymnastics people go through to say they aren’t racists: Racists are bad people and they are not bad people, therefore they cannot be racist. I think this is it exactly. We worship the Founding Fathers in this country from an early age. It’s very difficult to detach oneself from the fairy tales they grew up with and actually examine sanctified historical figures with the same hard gaze one would use on anyone else who is from a different time and (cultural) place. I also think most (white) Americans feel more empathy for the slave-owners than they do the slaves, just like most black Americans feel more empathy for the slaves. It’s kind of hard not to feel some degree of compassion and defensiveness for people you feel kinship and association with. But a person shouldn’t allow themselves to be deluded by all that compassion. ---
**Author:** ![raventhief](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/raventhief/32/4_2.png) [@raventhief](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/raventhief)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2016, 2:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sage-rat-on-slavery/743843/217 "2016-01-24T02:45:55Z")
> [@tnetennba](#): > > Mhendo, that’s probably the most informative and interesting post I’ve ever seen on this board. Ignorance fought. I have lost track of seconds and thirds- me too! Excellent post - thank you mhendo! ---
**Author:** ![Robert163](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/4af34b/32.png) [@Robert163](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Robert163)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2016, 3:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sage-rat-on-slavery/743843/218 "2016-01-24T03:15:18Z")
> [@tnetennba](#): > > LOL at Robert. OMG Slavery was terrible! I never knew! From post [66](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=19036321&postcount=66) of another thread: > [@](#): > > **engineer\_comp\_geek** Murdering a slave was generally considered equal to murdering a white man in the eyes of the law. > [@](#): > > **Robert163** How many white men were convicted and sent to prison for killing black people in the 1800’s? Cite please. [67](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=19036505&postcount=76) > [@](#): > > **Robert163** Ok, there were 11 confederate states. Lets take a 50 year time period, some states/territories may be older than 50 years and some younger so we will use the figure of 50 years. So lets say each year 10 slaves are killed. A very conservative number, I think. (11x50x10= 5,550). 5,550. And we have 15 people that were maybe executed for killing a black person. > > Does that sound to you like a penal system that is focused on punishing white people who kill slaves? Do my comments really sound to you like I’m an apologist for southerners? (that thread was posted previous to this one) ---
**Author:** ![mhendo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mhendo/32/3159_2.png) [@mhendo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mhendo)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2016, 3:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sage-rat-on-slavery/743843/219 "2016-01-24T03:25:03Z")
> [@Robert163](#): > > 3a- How did the cotton gin and later the rail road (in the east) affect the cotton industry? The cotton gin was absolutely central. Without this rapid method for separating the cotton staple from the seeds (especially for the shorter staple cotton used in America), cotton would have been far less profitable, and would have been unlikely to become the central driving force in the Southern economy. The rise and the spread of cotton production followed fairly quickly in the wake of Whitney’s invention, and American cotton production basically doubled every ten years for the next half-century. Railways in the south helped to carry cotton to ports, and to national and international markets, so in that sense they helped a lot. But, in some areas at least, cotton was also carried on rivers like the Mississippi. And railways are also a good example of how a slave-driven agricultural economy retarded industrial growth in the South. While railroads (and, before them, canals) expanded rapidly in the North to sustain and propel a growing mixed economy (agriculture, banking, manufacturing, trade), railways in the South tended to be built only as a mechanism for moving cotton. As a result, the North’s railroad mileage far outstripped the South’s by the time of the Civil War. > [@Robert163](#): > > 3b- You said that 1 in 4 families in the south owned slaves. This goes against the common saying I’ve always heard, that only rich people could afford slaves. Could you give some clarity on this topic please? Well, there are a couple of issues at play here, and it’s one of those areas where you can’t simply rely on factoids like “only rich people could afford slaves.” History is, for better or worse, far more complex than these sorts of simplistic assertions tend to convey. Firstly, if only one in four Southerners had slaves, even that figure by itself suggests that you needed greater than average wealth to be a slave-owner. We’ve already established that most Southerners supported the institution of slavery at some level, and if they didn’t have slaves, it generally wasn’t because of moral objections. The majority of whites in the South could not afford slaves. Your question also, i think, reflects one of the common impressions of slavery given by popular books and movies: the plantation. The image of a large property, with a grand house and a genteel Southern family, and dozens or even hundreds of slaves toiling away in the fields, is the dominant image of slavery in the minds of many Americans. But the fact is that these plantations represented a tiny elite among even slave-holders in the South. I’ve already said that about 1 in 4 white Southerners lived in slave-owning families. That means that, of approximately 8 million whites in 1860, about 2 million lived in families that owned slaves. But of those slave owners, only about 12% of them owned more than 20 slaves (20 is used by some historians as a useful minimum number to define a plantation). Going even further, the really big plantations, with over 100 slaves, represented the absolute pinnacle of wealth, and this Southern elite comprised about 2,000 families who between them controlled not only much of the economic but also the political power of the region. The vast majority of Southern slave-owners had 5 slaves or fewer. Some had only one or two. So, you basically did have to be rich to be a big plantation owner, but big plantation owners were not typical of Southern slave-owners in general. In order to have at least a few slaves, you did not necessarily have to be really rich, but you did have to be wealthier than the average Southerner. In terms of the experiences of slaves and owners, there is an interesting contrast here. If we want to understand the experience of the “typical” slave owner (if there is such a thing), we probably should look for a white family with a relatively small plot of land and four or five slaves. But if we want to understand the experience of the “typical” slave (if there is such a thing), we probably should look at the plantations, because almost half of all slaves were on plantations with 20 or more slaves, and fully three-quarters of all slaves were in situations where there were ten or more slaves. So, while plantations were a minority of all slave-holding institutions, they held a majority (or at least a plurality) of all Southern slaves. ---
**Author:** ![Emiliana](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/f0a364/32.png) [@Emiliana](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Emiliana)\ **Post date:** [January 24, 2016, 3:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sage-rat-on-slavery/743843/220 "2016-01-24T03:31:19Z")
> [@mhendo](#): > > \ > > If you want to read a fuller account of the debate over Time on the Cross, Haskell’s article, which originally appeared in the _New York Review of Books_ in 1975, can be found in a book of his essays, and can be viewed in full on [Google Books](https://books.google.com/books?id=47XnQnB9FnUC&pg=PA40&lpg=PA40#v=onepage&q&f=false). It’s definitely worth a read. He deals with other issues like sexual predation, slave sales, and the breakup of slave families, as well as some of the economic arguments made by Fogel and Engerman. > > \ Haskell’s chapter was a wonderful read, in no small part due to his marvelous writing style. Robert Fogel as the Evel Knievel of cliometrics is to die for. Haskell’s dissection (or rather that of the contributors of the books under review) of the book’s arguments on sexual predation and the breakup of slave families was just brutal. I too am often faced with the deficiencies of the historical record. It never occurred to me to just wing it. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sage-rat-on-slavery/743843.md?page=10) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sage-rat-on-slavery/743843.md?page=12)