OK, I’m going to say what we’re all thinking:
I’d fuck them. Big oily slave orgies like something out of Caligula. Especially the half-siblings.
There, I said it so you don’t have to.
Hence company villages. While the workers there weren’t officially slaves, and the owners ranged from horrible to very good (as bosses have anywhere, anywhen), I hear that “owing your soul to the company store” mechanism worked quite well - for the masters.
Note that such villages existed in multiple locations. This one is close to Barcelona by car, but several days’ walk back when it was built; this one is Scottish.
It is considered pointless either because it is true - the slaves really are intellectually incapable - or it is just prejudice. So I attempt to train them to read, write, do arithmetic, work a cash register, etc., and then send them out to find jobs. If it is just prejudice, then they will be able to compete because none of the other slave-owners (I can’t be the only slave-holder in the society) are trying. If it is really true, then they need to find unskilled labor and do that. There has to be some kind of demand for that labor, or nobody would own slaves.
Frankly, it sounds like more bother than it is worth - my house isn’t big enough for more than two or three. If they run away, meh - I am rid of them. Sterilize them all so they don’t reproduce. I don’t need a whole colony. My wife would object if I kept any of them as concubines, so that’s out.
Heck, teach them to speak with an Indian accent and outsource them as help desk staff - they can’t be worse than the ones we got now.
Regards,
Shodan
I was thinking about this overnight and decided it was time to stop fighting the hypothetical.
This is the “modern” south. It’s the confederacy. The slaves are black and are considered inhuman. The entire culture has bought into this.
Tellingly, “some of [your slaves] may be your half-siblings”. This means that 1) my father was raping his slaves, and 2) nobody is verifying or even so much as acknowledging the parentage of these by-blows. This was happening in my house and I didn’t even bother noticing who was birthed from who, and who has lighter skin, or what.
I am clearly a total racist piece of shit. I was raised by a racist piece of shit, in a culture entirely composed of racist pieces of shit. There’s really no way to realistically believe that I turned out different in any significant way - at best I may have no taste for wanton carnage and abuse, due to being a pansy, but I will certainly see the slaves as subhuman property with inherent mental inferiority and worth as anything but labor and sex toys.
That being the case - well, the first problem is that we lost the family lands and I no longer have a place to house them all. Very sad. Most of them will have to go. I’d try to keep at least a couple of the prettier ladies, of course - you know, the ones with lighter skin, and features resembling my noble white father. Gotta have my fun. They can also handle the cooking and cleaning, and it shouldn’t be any trouble to stable them - every house of any size will have a room for the house slaves.
As for the others, I’d rather not sell them (though I would in a pinch) - I’d rather rent them out. Slaves pretty much have to live where they work to limit escape attempts. So I’d probably try to rent them out to some company town or the other, which would earn me a steady wage with the periodic large compensation when one dies. If I have any males of particularly good stock I might rent them out as breeding stock instead, if there’s a good market for that. Which there probably is, because I can’t imagine the transatlantic slave trade is still doing well after all this time.
Or maybe it is! Who knows. Going down that road too far (speculating about the alternate world history or events) threatens to unwind the whole hypothetical, because I seriously doubt the USA (or rather, the CSA) would still be a first world country after the north lost the war. National allegiances would be different, wars would have different countries on the sides, the US may/may not have sided with the nazis…
It sounds like you’ve gone beyond “not fighting the hypothetical” here.
Nor do i say i inherited it.
I am of my own means
I’m trying to picture what life would be like in this hellscape. Treating female slaves as sextoys is clearly expected by the society in question - the OP is pretty damned explicit that your own father was using his slaves and then basically tossing them aside. And working slaves to death was, similarly, standard procedure in the south, because slaves weren’t people.
The fact that in the hypothetical the CSA is still a slave state a hundred fifty years later suggests that rather than becoming more liberal, society has doubled down on being shitty - it’s such a slave state that emancipation is illegal. Put succinctly, the country is nuts, and everyone who lives there is about a racist a piece of shit as could humanly be possible. And in the hypothetical, that includes us.
And then eat them?
Yeah, my dream was about some surprise guests and wasn’t the least bit helpful with this topic.
The USA no, the CSA yes, the industrial might of the North triumphs 90 years late, and the CSA never becomes a superpower, halting this hypothetical in its tracks. And my partially congealed “Would Czarist Russia have become a superpower?” can wait for its own thread.
Well, you could have enslaved the guests. Then they would have been the ones surprised.
I keep having to remind myself that the OP doesn’t actually require the CSA to be a superpower - it merely requires modern levels of technology. And chattel slavery. (Sure he mentions the CSA being a superpower in a later post, but that’s not technically necessary to the OP).
I also have to keep reminding myself that the CSA would probably have enough non-slave population to actually be a technologically advanced country. It’s hard to remember; as I understand it the southern states were largely agrarian and it’s not like the slaves will be allowed to acquire the skills necessary to do things like design cars or program computers. But there will still be a decent-if-outnumbered non-slave population who could do things like design the cars while the slaves handle assembly and other rote tasks.
Regarding the question the OP raised of what to do with slaves after all the workers have been replaced by robots, would they be replaced by robots? Robots are used because they’re cheaper and better than human labor, but would that apply with slaves? Sure the robots are much faster and make fewer errors, but they have a large up-front cost and would require educated maintenance where educated maintainers are fewer and further between. With cheap, disposable slave labor available the CSA might see little reason to automate their factories and mines. (And then they get so completely surpassed by non-shitty countries that their economy collapses, their slaves revolt, and they all die - but maybe that hasn’t happened yet in the story he’s writing.)
What if a huge group of slaves were by default communally owned, because they had illegally moved to your country? How could you resolve the ownership issue in that case?
Thank you, begbert2, for a non-hypothetical fighting answer.
I actually hadn’t considered the efforts people would have to go to to prevent escapes.
My justification for the continued slavery into modern times is that the Confederate states put slavery as one of their founding principles then, in this hypothetical world, they won a horrific war to spread it to the North. Going back on it and admitting they were wrong all along is too much to bear as a society so they have to keep it going.
Individual people may have reservations but they’d be treated like someone arguing against free speech or for the establishment of a state religion in real America.
For the super rich, they’d probably have the slaves doing pointless things to show off that they’re rich enough to waste slaves using them as coatracks or something.
Mexico and Canada would either be pretty fed up with dealing with the constant flow of refugees, or they would have embraced them with open arms and be pretty fed up with the CS marshals shooting at them. In either case they’d be pretty fed up with the CSA in general.
Actually most modern states would be pretty fed up with the CSA - we’d only have allies in countries with the kinds of people who, well, who Trump wants to ally with. The CSA would not be and would never have been a superpower. The upside to this is they likely wouldn’t have participated in either world war in any significant way - unless they decided to throw in on the side of the Nazis or something. The side effects of this on history would be wide-reaching, to say the least.
It’s worth noting that just because it would never be a superpower doesn’t mean the CSA couldn’t be a reasonably advanced country (technologically speaking) with a wealthy upper class - so your hypothetical (and story) are probably still okay on that front.
I would imagine that dissenters would probably be treated worse than that - it’d be not just possible but likely that dissenters would find support internationally for their cause, even political and financial support. They’d have to be crushed, to maintain the stability of the status quo.
Probably the most straightforward way to do this would be via implementing religious dogma about it, such that preaching equality would be heretical. That’s sure slowed down (but not stopped) acceptance of homosexuality around here. (Did the CSA mind state religions?)
I’m pretty sure the super-rich do that now.
Well, if you want to go full on evil: breed slaves. Then sell them to the organ banks.
Make them eat each other.
What if you take further? You use genetic modification to produce exact genetic matches to donors that need them. For those who aren’t organ donors, you could engineer a chemical dependency of some sort, so that they’ll die if they leave the property and don’t receive their daily dose of magical elixir.
Hmm, what if they have a crystal embedded in their hands that indicates when a certain ratio of their cells have become too aged? The crystal will start blinking and change color and the overseer will know it’s time to take the slave out and kill it. Maybe you could auction off the rights to hunt it. All of the other slaves would yell, “Run, rabbit, run”.
What? No! Do I sound like a humanitarian to you?
Err, unless you meant oral, in which case, sure, I’m a kind and generous lover, even to property.
There was a great article in the Atlantic where this actually happened to an American family.
Backstory: The mother of the family was from the Philippines. Dad from the US. they met and married shortly after the war. As a “gift” the father of the bride gave them a slave. A young woman, about age 16, who had been sold by her parents believing she would have a better life than poor, rural Philippines.
Well the woman lived with and grew up with the family even as they moved to America. The couple had kids and over time the woman they then thought of as an aunt, was living with them. Usually she was treated badly by the Mom. Not given her own room, no time off, always expected to be on beck and call. Being verbally abused.
Well over time the kids figured out what was going on. That she was a slave. But they didnt know what to do about it. She didnt have a Visa so was technically illegal so no good notifying the police. The best they could do was persuade their parents to treat her better. Give her her own room and such.
Later on the parents died so what to do with her? They tried taking her back to the Phillipines and her family but they were almost all gone by then so there was nothing for her there. They had no choice but to keep her living with them and try and provide her with a good life.
So basically once a slave is part of the system for many years their really isnt much you can do with them pother than start to treat them better.
Is adoption a option?
Plug them into the hyperdrive.