Which leads me to a side question: is importing labor ever not a scam?
I know many, many people working in the United States on H1 visas. I don’t think that’s a scam. I also know many Hispanic immigrants working here. Where’s the scam in that?
So to return to the OP’s point, some slaves had it pretty good - some non-slaves had pretty bad circumstances too; but being a slave took lack of empowerment to a much deeper level, particularly when the whole country pretty much conspired to ensure you remained where you were. Sailors could jump ship and 50 miles from port nobody cared, indentured servants who ran far enough away could likely escape the obligations, neither of these could be blatantly murdered or savagely assaulted legally (yeah, yeah, I know) - but a black slave in a white society that enforced laws against ruanaways was a marked man with no choices.
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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!
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Thats not really the point (or mine at least).
The question is was being a slave tolerable? Not care free, or happy, or fair, or fabulous. IMO a fair number of people back then lead some seriously shitty lives by our standards. Slaves had it bad because they were, uhhh, slaves. Others had it bad for other reasons.
Were these other peoples lifes intolerable? We might or might not think so from our point of view, but the question is did THEY? And did the slaves? Or at least some slaves?
To me an intolerable life could also be described as constanty miserable. As somebody else pointed out, people can be in some pretty shitty conditions that on a day to day basis could be considered to be worse than slavery (or at least slavery under some circumstances) and still find some joy in life. And no doubt some fraction were unhappy and mad as hell about their life.
Now, you can point out a slave could have something done to them that by law could not be done to someone else and that alone makes their life intolerable. But thats really a cicular arguement because thats what makes a slave a slave. And if thats the point that makes a slaves life intolerable/miserable then I don’t see what else there is here to discuss.
And again, I submit that an intolerable policy that leads to an intolerable event does not inherently make ones whole life or day to day living intolerable.
Not quite. 
Being a sailor was close enough to indentured servitude that a case claiming the terms and conditions amounted to slavery made it to the United States Supreme Court in Robertson v. Baldwin. The court found against the sailors, which led to the decision being derided as “Dred Scott II”. A law making involuntary servitude aboard ship wasn’t passed in the US until 1915.
The scam is when they offer to transport you to a destination to work with the proviso that you owe a debt to be payed out of your wages. I’ve never heard of a single instance when that wasn’t a setup for debt bondage.
If you had a kid and lived everyday knowing that at any moment they could be snatched up from under you, along with your wife, your other relatives, and your best friends–and there was absolutely nothing you could do about it–would you sign up for that deal? Would you consider it tolerable?
One needs to question how “reasonable” a person can be treated when they are treated like property and regarded as animals. There is really no such thing as life being okay except for that pesky little detail of watching your kids auctioned off at any moment or catching a beating if you sassed master. I’m not saying this means all slaveowners were evil, but you’re talking about an institution that programmed swaths of black people into thinking the most they could hope for life was some hog guts and a shack. What does a “tolerable life” even mean when their standards were so inhumanely low.
I presume being a slave was somewhere between Song of the South and Django Unchained.
Sorry, but I find this statement so absurdly ignorant that I can’t allow it to go unchallenged.
Being required to make a living for yourself is absolutely nothing like being the litteral property of another human being. It isn’t even similar to feudal agricultural societies where peasents were tied to whomever lord’s land they worked. Which of these choices were slaves able to make:
Pack up and move to a different town or state unchallenged
Quit their job
Get an education
Tell their boss to “suck it” (which may or may not be effectively quitting)
Marry who they choose
Not get beaten raped by their boss
Call in sick (as opposed to being able to take a day off because they are so physically sick no amount of whipping can get them to work)
Take a vacation
Own personal property
Or do you fancy yourself a “slave” because you have to go to work in the morning to a job you don’t care for?
That would be a scam because it is illegal. The sponsoring company is required to pay H1B visa fees.
Debt bondage, indentured servant, whatever - “I owe my sould to the company store” in Sixteen Tons described a pretty common arrangement all over America.
Tolerable as a slave, but you and your loved ones could be sold off at any time; so I guess the short answer is life could for some be tolerable, but with a much greater level of uncertainty about the future than the non-slave.
You know the old shen about “there being no such word as gullible”? And how when merry pranksters like me pull it, there’s always one person who goes on at length about having found it, writing out the definition, calling the prankster a doofus, etc.? At least that one’s funny.
I didn’t say I fancied myself a slave, nor that anyone else does. But the truth is woven throughout your list of putative freedoms.
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My family had slaves in the USA, various colonies in the Caribbean, and northern South America. The worst treatment and conditions were in our plantations in Guiana, where at one the manager was so sadistic that the average life expectancy of a slave upon arrival from Africa was two years after arrival (he was eventually sacked). The norm, however, in Guiana was ten hours of work per day, seven days per week, two bunches of plaintains and a pound of salt fish per week, a set of clothes once per year, and whatever a slave could grow by his hut or fish in his spare time, for healthy workers made for higher profits. The adoption of religion by slaves (which was encouraged by British evangelists) led to some nasty persecution by plantation managers, for example, 50 lashes for having a prayer meeting.
Conditions were better in Barbados, but not hugely. It was more a matter of Barbados plantations being more established and there not being as much of a frontier mentality, so the bad overseers migrated south to Guiana. As far a how good could it get for a slave in Barbados, it was possible for a slave skilled in a trade to live in all respects as if he were not a slave, other than to pay a substantial sum to his owner each year. The most extreme example (and certainly one that is very far from typical) is of a slave who became so well respected that he was permitted by his owner to live with a white woman, and her estate was managed to take care of him once she died.
Bottom line: for some life was short and brutal, for some it was bearable, and for some it was on par with the lower class. For all it was slavery, of which there is nothing whatsoever that is positive.
Checks join date. Deletes comment.
OTOH, I’m a native English speaker who learned to speak in New Jersey. I would not pronounce “Lord” as “Lawd.” I would pronounce “was” as “wuz.” When I read these narratives, I do appreciate the effort to reproduce the speakers’ dialects.
Most slaves did “tolerate” their condition because most slaves did not attempt to escape or commit suicide. In many tropical plantations slaves had to be constantly imported because they mostly died. In most American plantations in contrast the slave population increased naturally, fewer slaves died than were born. Of course, the excess could be sold off to plantations where slaves were worked to death.
As for the contention that in the North factory workers and wage earners were routinely worked to death in conditions of debt peonage, well, that’s simply nonsense. America at that time had a massive labor shortage, which meant that a factory worker who found conditions at one factory intolerable could find another factory to work at, or head west.
The whole point of slavery was that there was a labor shortage, and so there was an economic incentive to force people to work for below market wages at literal gunpoint. In a labor surplus the boss can simply offer whatever subsistence wages he likes and the workers can take it or leave it, the boss doesn’t care because there’s plenty more starving proletarians willing to work for starvation wages.
But America during the 1700s and 1800s did not have a vast starving powerless proletarian or peasant class. That is why we were able to absorb wave after wave of starving powerless proletarian and peasant immigrants from Europe.
Using that logic am I to assume that most prisoners “tolerate” their condition because most do not attempt escape or commit suicide? I’d like some cites/facts backing up the claim that most slaves did not attempt escape or commit suicide before I muse on why they did not do so.
And if the slaveowner compared favorably to the factory owner in treatment of “employees”, why wasn’t there a mass exodus of white proletarians to the south hoping to sell themselves into slavery to better their condition? Why don’t we hear about black slaves who escaped to Canada, and found living as a free person so difficult that they returned back to their masters? Why don’t we hear about free people of color, starving and unable to care for their families, selling their children into slavery?
What has to be remembered is that slavery occurs when there is a labor shortage. If there are thousands of starving people outside the gates willing to work for starvation wages the boss doesn’t need to enslave anybody, the only threat he needs is the threat of firing someone. If there are thousands of starving workers outside the gates what sane boss would pay a substantial capital outlay to secure the future labor of a person? What sane boss would point a gun at a person who wanted to leave? He’d shrug his shoulders and get another desperate starving proletarian and if the person who left died of starvation in the gutter that was their own fault.
Or to put it another way for the people who don’t see the difference between being a slave and working for crappy wages in a crappy factory job. Back in the old south, a slave escaped from his master. A pattyroller hunted him down and captured him and was bringing him back.
“Well Uncle, tell me, why did you try to run away? Was your master cruel?”
“No sir.”
“Did he beat you?”
“No sir.”
“Did he give you enough to eat?”
“Yes sir.”
“And clothes?”
“Yes sir, I got a new set of clothes every year.”
“So it sounds like you had it pretty good back home. So why in the world did you run away?”
“Well boss, that job is still back there if you want it.”
The point is, what’s the definition of “tolerable” from the OP? Was slavery tolerable? It depends on what you mean by tolerable. Was slavery worse than death? No, even though plenty of slaves risked death to escape plenty more didn’t. So they evidently preferred life as a slave to death. So they tolerated slavery in that sense.
Or does “tolerable” mean “essentially interchangeable with life as a poor farmer/factory worker”? If that’s the question, then the answer is obviously no, because no free farmer or factory worker would volunteer to exchange places with a slave, and plenty of slaves risked their lives to escape to the life of an impoverished free factory worker or farmhand.
If you’d checked my profile instead, you might have done differently.
I’ve been on AFCA/SDMB since they were founded, but lost access to my prior account here.
I might suggest slavery is a reaction to a surplus of labour. Institutionally, the society forces someone to be responsible for feeding and caring for someone else, to avoid poor and desperate people from wandering the countryside. (The displaced monks after the dissolution of the monasteries, for example, were apparently a real problem in England).
The captives of foreign wars were sold into slavery in Rome. It removed droves of potential troublemakers from the conquered land, served as an object lesson, and provided menial labour in the empire (in the end, to the detriment of free Roman poor who were a drain on the capital’s economy. )
The black slavery was a solution to a set of interesting problems - europeans could not easily tolerate the southern and carribean environment, the local natives seemed to prefer death to slavery, and the African people happily sold their neighbours into slavery for the money (and to escape it themselves).
perhaps it’s an interesting fact that slavery became prevalent and sustainable when the lines between slave and freeman were unblurred; in general, whites were free, blacks weren’t. In the north, any white worker could run away, there was until well after the civil war always room to steal your own farmland from the Indians, well away from searching gangs. The distinction also meant that slaves could be viewed as subhuman, and therefore the common decency and humanity one person showed to another, regardless of class, did not have to apply to the slave class.
I guess an interesting question too is why slavery disappeared in Europe well before the advent of abolition movements, to the point where it was seen as an evil afflicting mainly the colonies?
Well, not in the North American situation. Certainly there have been periods where a surplus of displaced people ended up as something less than free workers - whether it was called indentures or slavery or Wal*Mart. But the economy of the colonies and the US through the 1840s or so was the other way around, with a tremendous need for labor and only ever-increasing numbers of slaves able to provide it.
That was the real root cause of the Civil War: the North had moved on to a powered economy in which vast numbers of raw-labor workers were no longer needed, while the South’s economy was almost 100% dependent on their ‘walking engines.’
I once suggested that the North insisting that the South give up slaves was much like a 100% green-energy Canada trying to muscle the US into giving up fossil fuels. As much as the argument was one of ideology and morals, it was an economic blow of colossal proportions for the South - as the aftermath proved out.