Was it ever tolerable to be a slave in America?

Factual Questions
41

I think the 1853 song My Old Kentucky Home is responsive to the OP. Many people (especially many Kentuckians) do not realize that this is a song about black slaves who lived happily in Kentucky until their owner came upon hard times and sold them, whereupon they were separated and had to work on sugar cane plantations in the deep South. Of course, things were not ideal even when they were in Kentucky, but there they had a pleasant environment and were able to hunt and sing. The song was inspired by Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Stephen Foster did not have much first-hand knowledge of slavery in Kentucky, but I think the song was reasonably realistic, by the standards of sentimental 19th century songs.
The sun shines bright in the old Kentucky home,
'Tis summer, the darkies are gay;
The corn-top’s ripe and the meadow’s in the bloom,
While the birds make music all the day.

The young folks roll on the little cabin floor,
All merry, all happy and bright;
By ‘n’ by Hard Times comes a-knocking at the door,
Then my old Kentucky home, goodnight.

Chorus:

Weep no more my lady
Oh! weep no more today!
We will sing one song for the old Kentucky home,
For the Old Kentucky Home far away.

They hunt no more for the possum and the coon,
On meadow, the hill and the shore,
They sing no more by the glimmer of the moon,
On the bench by the old cabin door.

The day goes by like a shadow o’er the heart,
With sorrow, where all was delight,
The time has come when the darkies have to part,
Then my old Kentucky home, goodnight.

Chorus

The head must bow and the back will have to bend,
Wherever the darky may go;
A few more days, and the trouble all will end,
In the field where the sugar-canes grow;

A few more days for to tote the weary load,
No matter, 'twill never be light;
A few more days till we totter on the road,
Then my old Kentucky home, goodnight.

Chorus

42

Lets ask this. Say slave has a wife and kid. Slave owner pretty reasonable as far as such things can go. Slave family works hard and their day to life isn’t much better or worse or different than the local share cropper or Farmer John, the local small farm owner. All pretty much work their asses off, have some half decent shelter, and generally enough to eat.

Now one day after many years slave owner sells the kid and ships em off far far away. Well, that is certainly an intolerable act and an intolerable social policy to be allowed.

Does that intolerable act make the slaves whole life and or day to day living intolerable?

Slaves certainly lived in some level of fear that any day the other shoe could drop and bad shit could happen. But many poorer free people back then had that same cloud hanging over them. The main difference being when it happened to the slave it would probably be because of them being a slave. For the free people it would happen instead due to bad luck of their own stupidity/carelessness.

On a philosophical level there is a big difference. On a practical level bad shits justs pretty much bad shit.

43

You’re right, of course. It’s just… it doesn’t seem particularly exact the way it’s written out.

I mean:
“Lawd” - I’m English and I would phonetically spell the way I say “Lord” that way.
“wuz” - half the world probably pronounces “was” that way.

But yes, you’re right that it is important to preserve the way people speak. And that is of course what they were doing.

44

As others have pointed out, “tolerable” is a hard word to define in the context of slavery. For example, Thomas Jefferson allowed his children that were borne by Sally Hemmings to work as house slaves as opposed to manual labor, assured them that they would not be sold off individually, and freed them upon their 21st birthdays - conditions that could be considered “tolerable” within the context of slavery. On the other hand, I would think that growing up knowing that you were your own father’s legal property because he inherited your mom from his father in law (who was also Sally’s father), used her as a sex slave while she was a teenager, and to add insult to injury, used your family as forced laborers, would hardly be tolerable.

45

Note that the treatment described (daily hard toil with the threat of physical punishment for transgressions, relieved by an occasional drunken holiday) accurately describes the life of most ordinary sailors for many hundreds of years. So it should probably not be seen as uniquely despicable.

46

Those cube farm christmas/holiday season parties are starting to make more sense too. Those sneaky bastard bosses. And here I thought they were just being nice with all that free food and booze :slight_smile:

47

People can have relatively happy, meaningful, fulfilling lives- at least at times- in many circumstances. People fall in love in death camps. People find joy in the little things as they flee to refugee camps. People give thanks for the life in the deepest of poverty. People thrive in prison. The human spirit is surprisingly resilient, and we often do a remarkable job adapting to the circumstance. But sometimes- even often- extreme circumstances can break us and lead to horrific psychological changes.

48

Yes. If you’ve already invested so much up front to get the slave and the slave himself is considered capital, there’s a real incentive to keep him alive and well so you don’t lose your investment. Wage workers aren’t capital (except in the minds of HR guys who parrot cliched “Employees are our most valuable asset” lines), and you pay wage workers as you go. If you don’t need them anymore, you don’t lose nearly as much investment by just letting them go or working them to death.

49

It’s the way they explicitly used the one party a year to crush their spirits. The way it’s used to make them think they can’t accomplish anything, that they have no self-worth. It’s enslaving their minds in vilest way.

I’m sure that would come into play in a milder form among some sailors. But I don’t think that would be the primary motivation of captains the world over who let their crew go drinking upon arrival in port. It wasn’t to make them dependent, it was to allow them a rowdy day off. I doubt many sailors felt like they couldn’t make any decisions for themselves.

Yup, I think it’s pretty uniquely despicable.

50

A lot of sailors were in a situation not far from slavery. They were kidnapped (Shanghaied) and forced to work themselves to death. Pirates were often just sailors who had escaped from forced labour.

51

Oh. Do you have any reading for me? I guess I grew up with tales of the Dutch sea farers, and they either glossed over that part or they really did think that being a sailor was awesome :stuck_out_tongue:

I know the word “shanghaied”, but I didn’t think it was most sailors or anything…

52

Interesting reading is “White Jacket” by Hermann Melville, real-life experiences in the U.S. Navy in the age of sail. His description of floggings was so powerful, it led to an outpouring of letters to Congress, and that led to our discontinuing of the practice of flogging.

And he was on a ship with good morale…

53

The situation with sailors was similar to that with slaves - some could have a pretty good life, volunteer for the job, etc. Others were pressganged or shanghaied to work on short-handed ships, particularly the British Navy IIRC. (Read Billy Budd - the British would stop American ships and “appropriate” anyone that “appeared” to be a deserter from their navy. Needless to say, most sailor-class people had no documentation and may have come from Britain originally).

Yes, I suppose with a kindly master and a good position on the ladder, a slave could have a “tolerable” life - provided nothing happened to change that. A death or bankruptcy or other circumstances could turn your life around 180 degrees as you became a disposable asset.

Also keep in mind that there was a completely different attitude to the power heirarchy in those days. For all the “all men are cerated equal” talk, no doubt the elite of the day did not tolerate putting on airs by the great unwashed unpropertied class, or servants, any more than tehy tolerated in from the house or field darkies. Even teh family dynamic was often a lot more authoritarian. (Even in the 1800’s “being told who to marry” was a common theme in romance novels for even well-to-do families. Actually following through on the rights nobly promised in 1776 is a relatively modern concept. ) Considering an earlier thread here about when drill sargeants stopped being allowed to physically assault their charges, the authoritarian nature of most relationships was more pronounced before electricity.

54

Shanghaiing

Until 1915 :eek:

Closely related:
Impressment

The Royal Navy impressed US citizens (still “British”) and was (one of the many) causes of the War of 1812.

55

Thanks Trinopus and thelurkinghorror! I’m still not convinced being a sailor (in general) was really the same as slavery though. There just seem to be components that are similar, but culturally very different.

But I think I may have hijacked the thread enough now…

56

Well, no one has tried to convince you that “being a sailor” was “really the same as [chattel] slavery [in the American south].”

But what do you call being kidnapped, held against your will, and forced to work for little or no wage? Certainly a good number of sailors were in a situation that would accurately be described as slavery.

57

I’m unsure of how knowledgeable you are of labor practices and class differences in the late 19th and early 20th Century. My grandfather was an indentured servant from Ireland. He was a slave in practice if not by definition. He lived in a company mill town making mohair upholstery for Model T Fords. Nearly all housing belonged to the company and few were allowed to own property (not like they were paid enough anyway). They told him who he was allowed to date (and by implication, marry). They told him who his friends could be and punished him if he hung around with anyone who they considered rabble rousers.

No matter how hard he worked, his initial debt just never got paid off. There was always a fine for some infraction or another. Folks like the doctor were under their thumb as well, and his charges might go up if you were getting your head above water. That was the 1910s/1920s. Then the depression came. People didn’t have money to buy Fords and the factory slowed down. If you were lucky to still have a job, your wages went down by 3/4.

In the early 1950s, He died of a brain tumor from the chemicals he was exposed to at work. World War II saved most of the children from those families. The GI Bill educated the sons and some of their daughters got to continue high school and maybe college using what little money had been saved for their brother’s education.

58

I know this is OT for GQ, but this comment brought sunlight to a very bad day.

I couldn’t comment earlier due to work stress and slamming down some food while fighting the good fight to get a computer back up within SLA, but THAT was seriously funny.

Well played, sir.

Well played.

:stuck_out_tongue:

(and yes, both the computer i was working on, and the computer i read the comment on, were mostly foxconn)

59

I’m dubious about your suspicions and not only because busting up somebody’s family on a whim is a pretty big deal. As a slave, what else do you have?

Following the end of slavery, African Americans withdrew a huge amount of labor: instead of working like slaves they worked as free men. This caused a drop in cotton production; as it coincided with declines in international cotton prices the resulting slump was rather pronounced. That suggests that slavery was rather different from being free: slaves worked a lot longer and presumably harder. In theory, the plantation system of gang labor could have been reproduced later: in practice it wasn’t.

Cite: Hughes and Cain (1994): “Ransom and Sutch point out that the withdrawl of about one third of the available black labor input in fact rendered irrelevant much of the wartime losses of animals, implements and buildings.” American Economic History 4th ed.

60

Medium knowledgeable? I’ve read a little. Again, similar components, but it’s not the same thing. I just find it a little off to say: oh, slaves weren’t the only ones who had it that bad!

Maybe nobody was arguing that it is the same, but it seemed like it, with posters saying “oh, but these people were also beaten, and allowed out drinking once a year”.

I feel like I’m hijacking this thread about slaves living ok lives, so I’m dropping this now.