I remember seeing this quote a year ago in one of those “In defense of the Confederacy” books but I didn’t bother to actually read what they meant.
I know even on the SDMB I’ve seen people semantically argue that slavery isn’t slavery unless there’s a part where a human being is bought or sold as property, if you just grab a person and work them to death, that technically isn’t slavery. Is that what possibly they mean? If there’s no money changing hands it’s not slavery?
Anybody ever hear of the title argument and know what they mean?
Never heard of this argument, but it sounds so harebrained I can’t imagine it holds any meaningful traction. I would even wonder if the argument is being misinterpreted by someone (not you, OP) or mis-conveyed.
That couldn’t be the argument, since slaves could be, and were in fact, bought and sold as property in the slave states of the US.
I can’t see any argument for saying that slavery didn’t exist in the southern US prior to the Civil War, unless you are adopting some very non-obvious, artficial and tendentious definition of “slavery”.
Is this some contorted way of trying to argue that at some point slaveowners had ceased to rely on importing enslaved Africans in the triangular slave trade ?
I’ve never seen the argument. I have seen claims that slavery was benevolent, or that it benefited the slaves. Florida’s social studies curriculum for public schools says that slaves developed skills that they could use for their “personal benefit.”
However, in a world with holocaust deniers and flat earthers, it’s possible there are people who claim there was no slavery of any type in the American south.
It’s basically an argument by Southern apologists, which started almost as soon as the Civil War was over. For example The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates, by Edward A. Pollard (1866). Wikipedia quotes this from that book:
This site has the declaration of secession for the states that formally seceded. The ones that I read mention slavery in the first couple of sentences.
As a factual matter, of course it’s mentioned in their own secession announcements (and subsequently in the Constitution of the Confederacy and other writing of the time by Southerners).
But as cited above, there exists an idea, pre-dating the war, of the myth of some noble Southern cause that did not depend on preserving the institution of slavery and minimized its importance as a casus belli. For those who have a vested interest in such a myth, inconvenient things like historic records, including literal texts contradicting the idea, don’t much matter.
Unfortunately, it can spread perniciously as people don’t always fact-check things they hear or read. Or rather, we humans rarely do.
The import of African slaves was ended in the US and British colonies in 1807. Unfortunately the slave traders found ways to circumvent the law. The legislation was a minor inconvenience to the slave traders.
AFAIK The slaves already in the US weren’t helped by this legislation.
It’s the very topic of a recent book, Forget the Alamo – The Rise and Fall of an American Myth by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and Jason Stanford. It takes previous works about the Alamo to task for completely ignoring this aspect of the Texas War for Independence. Highly recommended
I can assure you this book won’t make it into mandatory (emphasis here) Texas history 6th grade classroom. The state of Texas will probably ban it and call it critical race theory if it hasn’t done so already.
I attended public school in San Antonio the entire time and not once did anyone mention those white male settlers had slaves and were really only fighting for their own freedom and no one else’s… not women, not African Americans, and not even the fellow Tejanos who fought and died beside them in the Alamo… After the war was over the Texas settlers immediately started taking away all the land and rights those hispanics fought for who were on their same side… None of this gets mentioned, it’s all propaganda.
I suppose those who were born into bondage and spent their entire lives on the same plantation weren’t slaves because they were never “bough” or “sold.” As if that meant their lives were any less insignificant to ol’ massa.
Seldom seen a nonfiction book that’s been read by so many people here. The recommendation is deserved. This is great non-academic history.
The book’s especially good at detailing the history of white groups protecting the myth of the Alamo, down into the 21st century. For us boomer kids, brought up on Disney’s Davy Crockett, real history - of the Alamo and Texas independence and the Southern insistence on pushing slavery into the west - will always be shocking.
The Lost Cause, as evidenced by the quote above, is perhaps the sickest lie in a history filled with them. Nevertheless, major historians accepted the myth and polished it into a high gloss and bequeathed it as a gem to a century of schoolkids.
If you go right to the source, the Constitution of the Confederacy, they mention slavery quite a few times, so unless the person rejects the CSA as the arbiters of what the CSA wanted, I don’t know what to tell them.
Funny enough, they banned the (involuntary naturally) migration of slaves from elsewhere
Sec. 9. (I) The importation of negroes of the African race from any foreign country other than the slaveholding States or Territories of the United States of America, is hereby forbidden; and Congress is required to pass such laws as shall effectually prevent the same.
(2) Congress shall also have power to prohibit the introduction of slaves from any State not a member of, or Territory not belonging to, this Confederacy.