[QUOTE=spoke-]
While most of your post is spot-on, I think this statement is inaccurate. Slavery was an issue early on. It’s just that the founding fathers swept it under the rug for fear that it would prevent the states from uniting. . . . .
[/QUOTE]
Indeed, the question of slavery was an issue in the Constitutional Convention, and one of the many compromises made there was the concession to pro-slavery forces in Article I, Section 9, clause 1:
[QUOTE=spoke-]
I think you’d have to regard a petition signed by Benjamin Franklin and fiercely debated by Congress a serious effort. (I again recommend the Ellis book.)
It is however fair to say that the issue was dropped after that, and a strained silence on the subject prevailed for some time thereafter. That is not the same as saying slavery wasn’t an issue. It was an issue – just an issue that was too hot to handle, as the Franklin petition had revealed. No one in that first generation of politicians was willing to provoke a sectional crisis that might destroy the Union.
[/QUOTE]
Well, a lot of things were fiercely debated in Congress (the Continental in this case) in the early days. Especially more or less every single aspect of the U.S. Constitution itself which was being hammered out. So I guess it’s easy to lose sigh of one petition by Benjamin Franklin.
I don’t believe slavery wasn’t an issue, I’ve just never seen any compelling evidence it was a major issue (I may look at the Ellis book, but it would not be the first book I’ve read dealing with the issue of slavery in the late 18th century.)
I think I sort of look at slavery like I do prohibition or the temperance movement. There were temperance movements going all the way back to the 18th century, and even efforts to enshrine these concepts in the law all the way back then at the Congressional level, but I don’t feel prohibition or temperance was an issue back then, it wasn’t an issue until probably 1870-1900 and then it became a huge issue when it was actually enshrined in law.
[QUOTE=HubZilla]
I wonder if it was more expensive to own slaves than hire free workers. On one hand, you don’t have to pay wages for a slave, but you did need to shelter, feed, clothe, and even take care of the slave’s dependents (children and older folks).
Whereas, with a free worker, you could just pay a wage and care less about what he does outside work.
Was taking care of slaves more expensive than paying laborers?
[/QUOTE]
I’m actually not sure. Whites who weren’t fortunate enough to be slave owner’s in the old south were quite often in almost unimaginable dregs of poverty and would do farm labor for an extremely low price.
I think part of the advantage of slaves was:
They can’t quit.
The fact that they can’t quit, means you can pretty much be sure you won’t have a labor shortage come time to harvest.
If you have more than you need, you can sell them for a very tidy profit.
Slaves themselves reproduce, and the offspring can be sold.
Slaves are probably much less likely to steal, and probably much more likely to be hard workers. You can beat a slave, and you can severely punish a slave for stealing (and there isn’t a huge degree of motivation for most slaves to steal if you think about their general situation.)
And slaves can do just about damn near anything you want them to, while a paid laborer will expect that he gets time off work, and that he isn’t going to be responsible for anything you can imagine but instead for the work you’ve hired him to do. Slaves can be expected to both work your fields and clean your home, babysit your children, stable your horses, etc.
[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
What’s so “lurid” about it ? It’s not like other groups with similar attitudes haven’t done the same.
[/quote]
This is a historical discussion. If you have something specific that you feel happened to any wide degree or even at all in the American South in regards to slaves there are historical sources you can look in to in order to confirm or deny. Simply saying, “Well, the Nazis did it so slave owner’s” did it is just not going to fly in GD. If you actually think they did these things you need to demonstrate proof that they did.
Some were, indeed. I doubt anyone denies that. Do you have any statistics?
How do you explain slave accounts in which the slaves speak in terms not entirely negative (or sometimes in positive) with regard to their former masters after emancipation?
The rest of this is spurious opinion. However it is beyond doubt that a slave owner cares greatly about peace. On a plantation with, for example, 300 slaves and maybe maybe less than 10% than number of adult male non-slaves even some of the harshest tactics will be for naught if the slaves rebel. Slave revolts did happen and slaves did kill their masters, although it was remarkably rare, it remained a specter over the heads of most Southern slave owners and thus gave strong incentive to keep the slaves moderately happy.
Cite? I’ve never seen any evidence supporting the fact that someone aged 45 in the mid 19th century would have the appearance or health of someone aged 75 today.
Historical life expectancy numbers have the effect of presenting an inaccurate picture about what life was actually like in the past.
Keep in mind how life expectancy is calculated. Societies with high levels of infant mortality generally had a low “statistical” life expectancy. What would be a better indicator of what that society was actually like however would be to look at a distribution at any given year of the total number of persons of all ages.
The great number of persons dying aged 1-5 are all one entry of the number 1 through 5 which significantly brings down total life expectancy numbers.
[QUOTE=Captain Amazing]
Life expectancy at birth can be a misleading statistic, though, because it’s brought down by high rates of infant mortality.
[/quote]
True.
Define “way up”. What % of the adult population survived to be “elderly”. I would define “elderly” as no longer able to work.
I’ve often actually been incredulous at the general view that if you were born in the 19th century you were doomed to an incredibly short life, at best maybe reaching 50 years old.
When all evidence has always suggested that, if you get past 5 or so, and don’t happen to be unlucky enough to come down with a serious medical condition; medically speaking you’d live a good number of healthy, perfectly happy years.
Some statistics I’ve just read from the 1850 U.S. Census:
Number Of Deaths By Age
Under 1 - 54265 (16.80% of all deaths)
1 and under 5 - 68713 (21.27% of all deaths)
5 and under 10 - 21721 (6.72% of all deaths)
10 and under 20 - 28195 (8.78% of all deaths)
20 and under 50 - 90507 (28.02% of all deaths)
50 and under 80 - 47351 (14.66% of all deaths)
80 and under 100 - 10172 (3.15% of all deaths)
100 and over - 868 (.11% of all deaths)
[I’m aware the percentage totals just under 100 hundred]
What’s interesting is deaths from birth to under 5 total 122,978, or 38.07% of all deaths in 1850.
That is a number higher than the deaths of every person who died aged 20 to under 50 that year. It is a number of deaths, indeed, higher than all deaths combined from ages 10 to under 50. So I think it is worth noting just how significant infant mortality was and what an enormous statistical influence that has.
What’s also interesting is the (relatively) high numbers we see for the higher age brackets. 47,351 aged 50 to under 80 died, which suggests there was quite a good number of people in that age bracket still alive after 1850. And there was even 10172 over the age of 80 who died, and who knows how many in that bracket who didn’t die in 1850. Obviously the number of dead in the 80 to 100 bracket is a bigger number relative to the numbers of persons alive in that bracket, just assumed due to the fact humans (even modern, medically treated humans) just typically don’t live to be 80-100 years old statistically speaking.
And there were even 868 people, all the way back to 1850, who had lived to be more than 100 years old. I seriously doubt in such a society someone aged 45 is considered elderly by anyone.
I haven’t had time to look through all the Census schedules, but there is an interesting one highlighting Mobile Alabama and the deaths there in 1850:
267 blacks of all ages died in Mobile in 1850
This breaks down to:
Unknown Age - 29
Under 1 Year - 50
1 and under 10 - 42
10 under 20 - 50
20 under 30 - 19
30 under 40 - 26
40 under 50 - 17
50 under 60 - 13
60 under 70 - 10
70 under 80 - 5
80 under 90 - 2
90 under 100 - 3
Over 100 - 1
[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
Did they take care of older slaves, or just kill them ? That seems more likely to me, but I don’t really know. For that matter, I’d expect them to use the bodies of dead slaves for leather products, soap, and such, like the Nazis, or the British in Tasmania.
[/QUOTE]
We used the bodies of the dead for leather and soap?
That’s a new one to me but then again I’m an Englishman and we do tend to overlook our fuck-ups of yesteryear.
[QUOTE=chowder]
We used the bodies of the dead for leather and soap?
That’s a new one to me but then again I’m an Englishman and we do tend to overlook our fuck-ups of yesteryear.
[/QUOTE]
Forgot to add >>> :rolleyes: and>>>> :dubious:
While I don’t much like the idea of slavery, it seems unlikely that there was not some form of equilibrium.
Possibly some sort of feudal relationship.
As someone pointed out, a rebellion would have resulted in a Haiti like setup, and kids tend to mingle - strong relationships evolve.
I’m not sure that Mark Twain is a definative source, but being ‘Sold down de Ribber’ is something that strikes me as a fairly authentic description of ‘cruel and unusual treatment’.
Also I’m aware of the effectiveness of covert industrial sabotage, a very real problem if you have pissed off workers.
Like Chowder, I am British, and am intrigued by Garibaldi’s (Red Shirt) assertion that our ancesters made tallow and leather of Tasmanians.
I also suspect that Chowder is chewing on the possibility that states will attempt to secede from the US of Europe - as they find central bureaucracy intrudes on what the population considers ‘normal’.
My suspicion is that he was asking whether slavery was just the flag, and behind it a bunch of other ‘anti Federal’ resentments. Probably popularist.
[QUOTE=Martin Hyde]
Well, a lot of things were fiercely debated in Congress (the Continental in this case) in the early days. Especially more or less every single aspect of the U.S. Constitution itself which was being hammered out. So I guess it’s easy to lose sigh of one petition by Benjamin Franklin.
[/QUOTE]
Franklin’s petition was after the adoption of the Constitution. It was taken up for consideration by the first Congress in 1790 and was hotly debated in both the House and the Senate. Not a minor thing.
[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
A slaveowner isn’t likely to care about “peace”. He wants profit, and he wants power. The power to rape and torture and kill, for fun and profit. No one owns slaves unless they are a monster.
[/QUOTE]
I’ve got to chime in in disagreement here. While your description here applied to some slaveowners, it did not apply to all. Some were (at least in their own eyes) relatively benevolent and kind to their slaves (just as they were to their horses, dogs, and any other livestock they owned). What makes your statement so horribly wrong is that it implies that the moral objection to slavery is just that slaves were treated monstrously, and that if they hadn’t ever been tortured or raped, slavery would have been okay.
[QUOTE=Martin Hyde]
I’ve often actually been incredulous at the general view that if you were born in the 19th century you were doomed to an incredibly short life, at best maybe reaching 50 years old.
[/quote]
No one is saying that here.
The point is that the concept of an elderly non-working demographic is a 20th century invention and would be completely unheard of in the mid-1800s even for free white people (except maybe the extreme upper class). You worked until you died, because if you did live into your 60s or beyond it was because you were in good health. And for slaves, with poorer nutrition and medical care, the demographics would be skewed even more towards the younger folks.
There would have been plenty of work suitable for older slaves anyway. For women: tending children, spinning thread, making clothes, making quilts, cooking, making soap, tending to chickens and gathering eggs. For men: tending to vegetable gardens, tending to horses, tending hogs and cattle, mending fences, capentry and repairs, butchering animals and curing meats.
We had discussed this a while back, and I believe I said that, economically, slaves aren’t better than free market labor. I believe that I mentioned that at my alma mater, a University of Chicago professor of economics won a nobel prize stating that slavery was economically viable in the South during slave times.
I still hold that slavery during this era is economically unsound, and I will even go one step further and say that having a slave workforce will actually slow down economic growth. However, I finally found the cite, where I alluded earlier that Robert Fogel stated that, “The marketplace could not have ended slavery, because slavery was an efficient and profitable system.”
[QUOTE=spoke-]
Franklin’s petition was after the adoption of the Constitution. It was taken up for consideration by the first Congress in 1790 and was hotly debated in both the House and the Senate. Not a minor thing.
[/QUOTE]
I didn’t say it was before the adoption of the Constitution, I just used the extensive debates on a wide range of topics that happened prior to the development of the Constitution as an atmosphere in which politicians were debating a huge range of issues. An entire system of government was being developed and just about everything was on the plate. The adoption of the Constitution in no way ended that atmosphere, if anything it intensified it as the new Government continued to be fleshed out, and of course the Bill of Rights was debated at this time as well.
My personal opinion is, I don’t consider the abolitionist acts prior to the 1840s to be that substantial in regard to the core issue of slavery.
Was there debate about it in Congress? Yes. There was also debates in Congress about a wide number of things, vigorous debates, that no one would seriously have considered, looking back more than two hundred years to be “major issues” of the day. A few guys waxing philosophic yet taking no substantive action with regard to the institution of slavery being permitted by the federal government isn’t a big issue to me.
Abolitionists from the late 1700s until the 1840s weren’t even focused on the prohibition of slavery in the American South, but rather the colonization of slaves, basically sending them off of American soil to try and fix the issue by moving it elsewhere.
Even that was a relatively minor movement, resulting in a few thousand former slaves (many of them not even from the South) settling in Liberia.
[QUOTE=Martin Hyde]
Abolitionists from the late 1700s until the 1840s weren’t even focused on the prohibition of slavery in the American South, but rather the colonization of slaves, basically sending them off of American soil to try and fix the issue by moving it elsewhere.
[/QUOTE]
That’s just not so. Yes there were “colonization societies” but there were also abolitionist groups, foremost of which (in the early years) was the Pennsylvania Abolition Society (on whose behalf Franklin submitted his 1790 petition to abolish slavery). The PAS sought abolition of slavery nationwide, and petitioned governments and raised money to that end.
I don’t believe it!!.
A thread similar to this has been opened in GQ.
Go give them the benefit of your knowledge John C and Martin H
[QUOTE=chowder]
I don’t believe it!!.
A thread similar to this has been opened in GQ.
[/QUOTE]
There you are mistaken my friend. What happened was that Jimmmy the complete and total Jack-@ss tried to post to this thread and link to that one because I thought it was the one some here were recalling.
I posted to that one and, linked to it too, to make it at utterly unreal hash like I am on crack or something. In the process I seem to have revived the old thread.
I apologize to the folks in this thread and that one. I am a true nitwit who should never be allowed to touch a keyboard.
What a mess :smack: . (both are good/interesting threads tho)
Jimmmy I doubt very much you are a total nitwit, I doubt you are even a fraction of a nitwit.
I agree, both are interesting threads and I’ve learned more about American politics of that era than I ever knew before the threads were opened.