Were The Slaves "Lucky"?

Great Debates
41

Yes, it was. There were other points of difference between the North and South, but they all went back to slavery one way or another. For instance, the Southern landowners opposed the Whig program of protective tariffs on manufactured goods, which protected/stimulated Northern industry while doing nothing for Southern agriculture but raising the price of manufactured goods farmers needed. But why was it, that the North was industrialized and industrializing while the South was almost purely agrarian? Partly, no doubt, because of the difference in climate – pre-air-conditioning, heat and humidity make everyone and everything slower – and partly because the North was better endowed with coal veins and waterheads. But also because the South was dominated economically, politically, socially and culturally by a landowning/slaveowning elite which consciously equated itself with the feudal lords of medieval Europe, had a lot of emotional investment in an 18th Century mode of society and economy, and was hostile to the very idea of industrialization. This, together with the relative inefficiency of slave labor for industrial production, and the lack of a mobile free labor force for the purpose, tended to freeze out industrialization.

Yes it is, in terms of slavery’s political/social/economic consequences: After the Civil War, the Southern Bourbon aristocracy (so called because, like the French Bourbons after the Revolution and Napoleon, they “learned nothing and forgot nothing”), still maintaining their local hegemony, and wanted something as near to their antebellum way of life as possible under the circumstances, became in effect regional managers for the Northeastern elite, running the whole South as an agrarian-and-extractive economy, based on the undercompensated labor of blacks and, to lesser degree, poor whites. Much like the slave days, but without the job security. This, again, froze out industrialization, despite repeated attempts to declare a "New South. And the Jim Crow system, unmistakeably a legacy of slavery, was all bound up with maintaining that whole set of cultural assumptions.

It is no coincidence that the Sunbelt economic revolution did not really take off until after the Civil Rights revolution. Certainly New Deal electrification and post-WWII availability of air conditioning helped, but Jim Crow was without a doubt holding back economic development in the South and keeping it a Gothic backwater. White Southerners should consider Martin Luther King, Jr., a greater Southern hero than Thomas Jefferson, Jefferson Davis or Robert E. Lee; he did more of real value for the South, including the white South, than any of them.

42

larry elder - 10 things you can’t say in america

The subject was brought up in that book, at least in passing.

43

Well, your question elides the part where the people who enslaved them were shot or bayoneted until the survivors were forced to free them. It just sounds better too: “Were the Africans who were kidnapped by the slavers “lucky” for their descendents after the slave power was crushed in war and eventually forced to give them truly equal rights?”

See, they’re not lucky today because they were enslaved. that doesn’t take the historical contingencies into account. They’re only “lucky,” such as it is, that the enslaving power was eventually destroyed and (a long time later) eventually forced to make peace with the idea of treating them as citizens with equal rights. But you can’t generally count on governments eventually doing the right thing.

That’s like saying, “Am I lucky I was robbed at gunpoint and then Bill Gates heard about it and gave me millions of dollars so I’d feel better?” Yes, you would be lucky, but not because you were robbed, and the historical contingency of Bill gates hearing about your case and helping you this one time does not in any way make this robbery, or the next robbery for that matter, less of a crime. It doesn’t let the robber off the hook because he didn’t decide to make it up to you.

In the same way, “lucky” or not, the current situation of African Americans does not let the slaveholders (generally Southern) or the slave traders (both Northern and Southern) off the hook in any way. They did not want to nor choose to free the slaves nor treat them as equals.

44

Pretty much just wrong.

There was slavery in Africa prior to the invasion by Europeans and Arabs, just as there was slavery in Europe and the Arab world, (and in Asia and the Americas), prior to their expansion into sub-Saharan Africa, however, such slavery did not tend to be chattel slavery. That was instigated when the outsiders began first to take slaves and later to arrange with locals to buy slaves. The slavery that exists in Africa, today, also tends to differ from chattel slavery.

There is no question that some percentage of Africans joined the invaders in creating both a market and a supply system, but the claim that Europeans and Arabs simply wandered into existing markets and began making purchases is a popular falsehood among certain groups, but it is not based in reality.

45

Are we assuming you stayed in Africa because you got lucky (or unlucky, as the OP would have it) or because there was no slavery? It makes a big difference, given the reasons you just outlined: having a significant percentage of your village/province/country’s healthy adult population dragged away for hundreds of years could hardly prove beneficial, even in purely economic terms.

Yes, people in the North got cheap textiles (and probably cheaper food) out of slavery. However, after slavery, they paid a lot more for their textiles and food than they otherwise would have because slavery made mechanization of southern industry non-cost-effective. It also made mechanization of some Northern industry non-cost-effective.

Even if we assume that the economic benefit to the North outweighed the cost of the Civil War and the years and years of activism, legislative debate and so on, which is possible but doubtful, I still think you’d find most in the North would rather not have had it.

To answer your second question, slavery is obviously beneficial to the slaveowner in the instant case. That is, you will clearly benefit from owning somebody who does your household chores and farms your land and not having to pay them (other than paying to feed and clothe them).

However, others (and even you) may not benefit in sum over time, since jobs will not be created for the (free) lower orders of society that otherwise would; your economic benefit will be partly or totally offset by the cost of feeding lots of unemployed people created by your decision to import some slaves.

By the same token, you as a country will see benefit to your domestic industry, because your costs are reduced, but industry in other countries will suffer as a result because they cannot compete.

It’s the same reason American manufacturing jobs are going to China today, though admittedly on a less significant scale- Chinese factories can pay their workers peanuts, and pass on the savings. American factories have to pay their workers minimum wage or better, and comply with much more stringent (and therefore more expensive) standards for working conditions.

46

Well, it disincentivizes mechanization where such things are possible or easily obtainable. Obviously, that is not always possible when we are talking about agriculture (historically speaking) or, say prostitution. I agree with the points you are making, but saying slavery is an “bad idea all-around” is too absolute a statement when morality isn’t being considered.

Other points of difference are other points of difference. Many may have been related to slavery, just as they may have been related to money, culture, big government, or ego. I think it’s simplistic to say the Civil War was only about slavery when other issues were clearly at issue.

First, not all of the South is lagging behind. Northern VA is one of the richest areas in the US, and has some of the best school systems in the country. There are plenty of other areas farther south that are also not lagging behind. Second, of course the legacy of slavery still has deleterious effects, but it alone does not explain why the South is the South. I think it has just as much to do with the fact that Southerners don’t react well to being told what to do; something they had a problem with prior to the Civil War.

Not quite. Most likely, a society that tolerates slavery like the kind that was practiced in the US, would not care about feeding unemployed people. Plus, jobs will be create if the slaves produce goods or raw materials that can be used by others.

IANAE, but I think the depressed wages that would generally occur, and would lead to higher unemployment, would be mitigated by the fact that slaves and others were not competing for the same jobs.

True. But, again this would likely not be a problem in the eyes of a society that condones slavery.

Exactly. The problem is that there are perfectly logical and “good” reasons to pay people nothing, or next to nothing, for their work. Doesn’t make it moral or right, just provides some understanding as to why paying people as little as possible is a compelling idea.

47

double post

ETA: Son of a bitch… it wasn’t a double post. I just typed out like a page and a half and then accidentally edited it all out. :smack:

48

Slavery also has other destructive effects. Some examples:

It tends to result in lower quality workmanship and reduced capability. Slaves do inferior work, and they tend to be more restricted in the kinds of work they can do because no one will give them the education and position they’d need to do it. A well educated slave is a dangerous slave, because a slave isn’t your employee; he’s your enemy.

Racism; racism as we know it was largely a creation of the African slave trade. Not that the ancients were without prejudices of their own, but racism and even the idea of race as anything other than the skin color you happened to be developed as a mean of excusing the practice of enslaving large numbers of black people. And has since then spread beyond the groups that had anything to do with that trade, and evolved to create prejudices about other “races” as well.

And then there’s the typical fetishization of uselessness among the slaveowning class ( not unique to the Old South, or even slavery ). In order to differentiate themselves from the slaves, the owners disdain actual work as beneath them. Which means you tend to end up with a slaveowning class that disdains work, and a slave class that is highly limited in what work it can do due to it’s condition.

And related to the above two points is the general warping of society to excuse slavery. The fact is, slavery is wrong and deep down everyone knows it, including those who practice it. Including, yes, the ancient peoples for whom it was near universal; you wouldn’t find many even then who’d be just fine with slavery when THEY were the slave. Hypocrisy is not a modern invention. Slaveowning societies convince themselves that it is necessary and just, and that warps them. They become dedicated to sustaining the system for its own sake, in order to justify the belief that it is necessary. They ignore or suppress technology that threatens slavery, they convince themselves of falsehoods about the enslaved groups to justify their victimization.

The general loss of human potential; all the things that slaves could have done or created, but weren’t allowed to. And for that matter, all the things their racism-crippled descendents could have done but were never allowed to do. Not to mention all the products they could have bought; slaves make a poor driver for a consumer driven economy.

And then there’s the fact that slaves are part of society too. If you want to talk about how much slavery benefited or hurt society, you have to include the slaves in your calculation. Counting only the benefits to the owners and ignoring the costs to the slaves means you are falling for the same fallacy that the slaveowners did. The question isn’t “was Bob the slaveowner better off”; the question is were Bob the slaveowner plus his hundred slaves better off than a hypothetical Bob and his hundred free employees. And the answer IMHO is the latter; Bob and his employees as a whole are going to be more prosperous, more capable and more stable, even if Bob personally has to settle for a nice house instead of an outright mansion.

49

I don’t know that that’s necessarily true. First of all, there are cases where people voluntarily sold themselves into slavery in some parts of the ancient world. But beyond that, I don’t know that you can say that just because somebody doesn’t want to be a slave means that they think that slavery as an institution is wrong.

50

That’s just people being hypocrites. Hypocrites by their nature never think ( or at least never admit ) that what they are hypocritical about is wrong when they are doing it.

Or to put it another way; suppose back then humanity had collectively been magically asked to vote on the proposition “Should slavery be allowed, if you are going to be one of the slaves?” Do you think the vote would be “yes”?

51

But the other points of conflict would not have existed, at least not to the degree of leading to demands for secession, if there had been no chattel slavery in the South. IOW, no slavery, no Civil War.

I agree there were and are cultural differences between North and South not essentially depending on the history of slavery – see Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, by David Hackett Fischer – but, again, if slavery had never been established in the South, then those differences by themselves would not have been enough to retard the South’s cultural, industrial and economic development so drastically as it was retarded in our timeline.

52

Neither do juvenile delinquents.

53

OK, document where we came in and kidnapped mass bunches of blacks and stuffed them into our ships … I would be more than willing to believe that there are way more purchase reciepts for slaves than not. We were buying them from someone … and they were already there in the markets.

54

So in your complete stupidity you imagine that by being major players in the financing of the slave market, that you as the purchaser then bears no responsibility for the expansion of said market?

This is incredible dumbness, using your logic the purchaser bears no responsibilty for the crime committed in procuring stolen goods, and when those stolen goods turn out to be human beings, well frankly you should just leave this debate with your idiocy.

This is aside from the fact that Europeans certainly did procure slaves on their own account whenever they could.

55

Probably not, but I don’t know that that’s hypocrisy. I can at the same time not want to be a slave, but not care that you are. That’s not hypocrisy…it’s just that I care more about my welfare than I do about yours. As an analogy, I don’t want to be homeless, but it doesn’t bother me very much that there are homeless people out there. I just don’t want to be one of them.

56

I was about to call you out for not caring about homeless people, until it occurred to me that while I care about them I don’t care enough to actually do anything about it.

Well, once a week I give one ten bucks, but I suspect I may not have made a huge dent in the issue.

57

I think what tom may have been alluding to is the argument that European demand drove the massive expansion of slave-marketeering and in some places created the markets in the first place, even if they were only occasionally involved in the actual work of raiding themselves. I think generally the earlier back you go, the more prevalent actual European slave-raiding ( overwhelmingly Portuguese in those early centuries ) becomes - it was more an early phase, that was later largely supplanted by subcontracting out to locals who knew the interior.

However it is worth noting that the slave-raiding of Amerindian populations in the New World was also not uncommon. For example the Brazilian Paulistas who for a time regularly raided Jesuit-controlled Paraguay for Guarani slaves.

58

I’m reminded of The Omega Glory and McCoy’s mini-speech about destroying a civilization so its descendants might live longer. He wasn’t in favour.

59

We paid people to kidnap them and bring them to us. That makes me feel so much better. Then they were chained, beaten , controlled like animals and worked to death. We were so above reproach.

60

No no no, you don’t understand. Since black people did it to other black people, and at some separate point in time completely unconnected with the current state of affairs of our culture white people did it to other white people, we’re all even-steven now! It’s time to move on and let bygones be bygones, don’t you think?