If anyone is still interested I pulled the book off the shelf and found the relevant passage:
There is a bit more info but this is the gist.
mmm
I don’t think it was slavery itself that caused the south’s economic problems. Slavery made the plantation system possible and it was that system which hurt the south’s economy.
The plantation system concentrated all capital into agriculture at a time when industrial manufacturing was taking off. The south basically decided to stay out of the part of global economy that was growing and, as a result, they got left behind.
And the plantation system concentrated most of the south’s wealth into a small group of plantation owners, which left everyone else, white and black, relatively poor. Living in the south didn’t just suck if you were black; it was also a bad place to live if you were white and didn’t happen to own a plantation. The southern middle class was poorer than the northern middle class. And this resulted in white immigrants choosing to move to places outside the south (and it led to a lot of white southerners doing the same).
My wife, whose parents spent World War II in an internment camp in Colorado, will accept the use of “Jap” when it is clearly part of the nomenclature of that period, and used to refer to that nation across the Pacific who attacked us.
Any other use, and she would ask me to ask a mod for an insta-ban. Carry on.
Another thing, think about if you were a poor white person in the south, where could you get a job? Picking cotton? Nope. Only slaves. Be someones maid, butler, or take care of his horses? Nope, all slave work.
This has been brought up in other books where a person, say a new immigrant, opened a store and needed say a young boy to do deliveries. White boys were not allowed to do this so he would have to buy a slave.
Or think about a factory in the south. Many slave owners would loan out there slaves to the factories where they would work cheaper than white workers so putting the whites out of work or suppressing wages.
So some of the biggest abolitionists were poor white southerners.
There were plenty of arguments against slavery. The hardcore religious folk believed enslaved persons cannot seek salvation. They must be free to choose salvation.
Others wanted to prevent the spread of slavery into new territories so that the new territories would be all “white”.
Of course slavery would have persisted as it always had done absent the ideology of capitalism presenting new modes of vastly more efficient resource allocation.
It’s an example of a very common tendency to include ourselves in good stuff but distance ourselves from bad: we did good, they did badly. “Look at what your child did!” never precedes a pretty picture. When the team we follow wins, “we won”; when it loses, “the team lost”.
But yeah, it’s important to avoid that emotional insertion whenever one is trying to be factual and those facts being recounted didn’t really include one.
I read Voyage of the Beagle last year. Darwin was a racist. He generally categorized ethnic groups as “lower” based on their appearance, “character”, and whether they had become Christian. This included blacks.
At one point in the journey, he came across a very large black slave and his master. The master raised his hand, causing the slave to think he would be struck or beaten (the master was just raising his hand for some random reason). Darwin was saddened that the slave, who could have beaten the master easily, had to live in such fear. Despite his generally low opinion of non-white races, he still saw slavery as wrong. He is not the only historical figure I had heard about who had racist feelings yet saw slavery as wrong.
Because enslaving another human being is morally reprehensible. They were kidnapped and torn away from their homeland, put in chains, overworked, underfed, raped, beaten, and murdered.
This is nonsense. Slavery was justified by an extreme form of capitalism - the one which said that the right to own property outweighed all other liberty rights.
Capitalism didn’t end slavery. Slavery was ended by government action which overrode capitalist interests.
Really? Do you have a cite for that? The early American abolitionists tended to be Quaker, but rooted their distaste for it in equality terms. For instance, Anthony Benezet opened his most famous tract with:
The clear indication is that they were redeemed even in slavery. Benezet spends most of his tract saying how God despises the “the groans, the dying groans, which daily ascend to (Him), the common Father of mankind, from the broken hearts of those his deeply oppressed creatures.”
Or we can look at Benjamin Lay, perhaps the first great American abolitionist and he quite clearly says that slavery is sin due to its oppression of God’s creatures:
Or Ralph Sandiford who couches black freedom in the idea that humans are all one blood created by God
This is not correct. The plantation system was very efficient. Cotton was so valuable that the land which could grow it was very valuable as well. The larger the plantation the greater economies of scale could be which could produce more cotton. The economic problem was two fold, first it was very hard work in a horrible climate and so most people would not want to do it if they had an alternative, the second was that tropical diseases killed most of the immigrants who would have made up the workforce. African slaves solved both these problems because they had no alternatives because they were not free to choose and they had resistance to tropical diseases.
The economy of the south could not have replicated the economy of the north because the concentration of people needed for a manufacturing economy could never have been achieved because so many people would have died of disease. Also the cotton growing land was too valuable to be used by subsistence farmers.
In addition to what others have said: Many of the defenders of slavery argued that bringing Africans to America to be slaves was a good thing because it exposed them to Christianity and this allowed them to be saved.
I remember getting into an argument about what “WE” did to the indians (he was using WE to refer to himself included). Thing is he was from Britain (heavy accent and all) and I pointed out really the British had little to do with it (at least post 1776). Now if we are talking what the British did to the IRISH, then he should use the word “WE”. But leave an American issue out of it.
I suspect it’s a big, big reason. Chattel slavery appeared when landowners couldn’t find a crowd of famished peasant who would work for a pittance, hence began to have an economical use for slaves. It ended when slavery began to be unprofitable.
Of course, the ideals of the enlightenment probably played a part, but it’s notable that slavery wasn’t abolished when those ideals took hold (look at the American founding fathers, who were big on this enlightenment thing, but with a blind spot for slavery), but only with the progress of industrialization and farming machinery.
Not just cotton. Those are the same conditions in sugar cane fields and maybe a bit worse. Also to an extent - tobacco.
Really ALL crops in the 1800’s and even later required massive amounts of labor. Think about “The Grapes of Wrath” in the was about fruit pickers and that was the 1930’s!
Just a side note. Here is a listing of prices for USED John Deere cotton picker/stripper.As a farm person myself I can tell you they cost more than a conventional combine used to harvest say corn or soybeans or wheat. Notice prices start at $93,000 for a 14 year old picker and $430,000 for one only 5 years old! New ones are in the $600,000 range. I could buy a used regular combine for less than $100,000.
And you thought YOUR fancy car was worth alot!
It’s not specific to slavery. Because it isn’t as common over here, I notice that Americans use a lot “we” in reference to historical events they of course had no part in (“We won the war against Japan” “We declared independence”).
And indeed I also noticed that it becomes much much less common when it comes to negative events ( “Why did they decide to intern the Japanese Americans?”).
That depends.
Are you only talking slavery for farm hands? What about the need for cheap domestic labor.
People today dont realize that taking care of a family back in the day was hard WORK. A wife spent sometimes 8 hours a day just doing meals. Now think about the difficulty doing laundry (you want work - try using a damn washboard!), making and sewing clothes, churning butter, making your own bread, gardening, and just general things like sweeping the floor and dusting.
Back in about the 1920’s my grandmother “worked out” as a domestic for little or sometimes no pay - just room and board. It was one of the few “jobs” she could find in a rural area especially for women.
The famous slave turned scientist George Washington Carver’s mother was bought as a slave to be a domestic for an elderly couple. In his case little George was later adopted by his owners/parents.
It was.
Thing is growing cotton over time burns out the soil because it doesnt replace the lost nitrogen. It was already happening across the south and accelerated later in the 1870’s and beyond.
THEN along came the boll weevil which also wiped out the cotton crops.
As I understand it some plantation owners were already selling off excessive slaves or just freeing them because the plantations didnt have the income to support them.