The bright side of slavery

Besides, if this was meant to be a serious discussion, it wouldn't have such an idiotic title. Something along the lines of "Slavery: A Revisionist View" would at least have sounded intelligent, even if wrong-headed.

The creator here did, indeed, want to provoke people, IMHO...

Can you imagine? There is a little girl on the Gotti Boys thread that thinks mom and dad should foot the bill for everything....including a brand new car at 16.

I think you might be on to something Eoe. I think that young people have such a lack of accountability and responsibility today. Not to mention respect. I wouldn't doubt that they wouldn't fuss if someone said "you can have everything you want...except your freedom" because they are so spoiled and pampered they don't know how satisfying it is to accomplish something on your own.

eoe, it's not unlikely that this thread is a ploy to get attention--in which case it's been a resounding success--but we don't know for sure, in which case rebuttals ought to be made. in the worst case, we've been trolled, but even so perhaps someone following the thread has learned a thing or two about history, ethics, or even critical thinking.

probably, but way back in 1984, guy by the name of William Coors, he of the beer brand, spoke before a gathering of African-American businessmen in Denver, and tried to persuade them that they were beneficiaries of the institution of slavery, more or less along the same lines of argument as this author's thread. W. Coors btw is still a major shareholder in Molson Coors and a major financial contributor to conservative causes, so there are people who truly think this way.

I don;t think you should stereotype be into being unable to accomplish anything for myself based on a simple question eoe. But say you are unfortunate and poor and salvery is actually an option that would benefit your life. Not the stereotypical slavery of a white racist southerner but instead someone that is willing to serve there master for food, clothes, and a warm bed. Is slavery wrong in that sense? Is giving people opportunities for a cost slavery? Im a slave to my parents. I try to obey their rules and when i cross the lines i am punished but i still love them as my master. They have giving me things that if i were on my own i would have never had "food, clothes, warm bed." So yes if i had to give up my freedom to earn a better life i don't see anything wrong in it

And there you have it.

These are tomorrows leaders. Great. I might as well move to Canada now.

you disagree? Couldn't slavery be as vague as having to follow orders given by your commander in a war setting even though you know it is suicide? In the military all your freedoms are taken away from you and you are in their power. They can use you as they see fit and you often times have no say and must follow orders. And most people that are in the military are often people of lower intellect that go off and fight war while the other kids go to college. Kids view miltiary as a chance to serve their country and better improve their own cirumstances. SO while you have to give up freedom you are given back just a much, building character and values and learning dicipline and how to take orders from some one above you.

I want to know your stand on this eoe maybe you can convince me im totally wrong

I didn't think he was so stupid either. On the other hand, when I was his age, I have myself found it interesting to argue very far-out points of view from time to time. Back then I have greatly benefitted from people who would set me straight with good arguments, rather than by pointing out, usually correctly, that I was only trying to provoke. These days, I sometimes think it a good idea to give some of that back when young people do the same. So it was when 'discreet' dodged the challenge of actually defending his position, not when he stated it, that I stopped taking him seriously.

well what i know in history is that slavery already existed in africa before the US got involved they were just tapping in on it. Slavery dates back to early egyptions and i thought it was the muslim countries that enslaved blacks. So in that case to me it seem that life was already terrible in Africa and coming to America would be better.

I found this article to be interesting. It taught me some facts i didn't know...at least

http://mondediplo.com/1998/04/02africa



This is what i meant when i said that tribal leaders were selling their own people. Showing how Africans treated each other. To me it seems that everyone was an enemy in africa. If your own leader is selling out on you.

Nzinga Mbemba, ruler of the Kongo Kingdom, is a good example. He had converted to Christianity in 1491 and referred to the king of Portugal as his brother. When he came to power in 1506, he protested strongly at the fact that the Portuguese, his brother's subjects, felt entitled to rob his possessions and carry off his people into slavery. It was to no avail. The African monarch gradually allowed himself to be convinced that the slave trade was both useful and necessary. Among the goods offered in exchange for human beings, rifles took pride of place. And only states equipped with rifles, i.e. participating in the slave trade, were able to resist attacks from their neighbours and pursue expansionist policies.

Why do I think now of Hessians?

Discreet, you are apparently unaware that white people were enslaved at this time, as well. The Crimean Tatars routinely took Russians prisoner in their thousands during their annual raids, and sold them into slavery in Turkish markets.

You are apparently unaware that as much as one third of the population of England's North American colonies came here as bond servants or convicts--the only difference between their slavery and black slavery being that it would likely end before they died. Your contention that slaves were an economic necessity is a fallacy, and one which apologists for the old South would like people to continue to believe. In fact, although a Dutch ship brought African slaves to Jamestown in 1609, the captain was unable to sell off more than a few, and ended by leaving the rest there and abandoning his investment. Throughout the 17th century, both Dutch and English merchants tried to interest the colonist in purchasing slaves, but with very little luck. Slavery did not really get going in North America until the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th century, when the rice and indigo monocultures of South Carolina, and later of Georgia began to dramatically expand. Thereafter, slavery made its way to North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland and Delaware because the planters had learned that tobacco exhausts the soil very rapidly, and that to maintain high production levels, they had constantly to clear new land and put in a tobacco crop--slavery made that easy.

While you make your assumption about how bad life was in Africa in those times, i wonder if you know how bad life was for most Europeans in the same time period. While the Russians who were victims of the Tatar raids were the only ones likely to be sold into slavery, the rest of the peasantry of Europe were subject to have their goods taken by force, their homes burned, and perhaps even to be executed, based on an assumption of what their religious beliefs might be. Lonely old men and women who didn't quite fit in with society were subject to be executed as witches. Navies sent out press gangs, who seized men in the streets and took them at gun point to serve on warships. When crops failed, the agents of the aristocracy got busy running around and collecting all edibles they were able to seize--the higher classes never starved, but the working classes did so on a regular basis.

Most of your assumptions are based upon speculation which is informed by very little information. You have a very great deal to learn before you can casually make a statement to the effect that west African negroes were better off enslaved than living in their home villages, and expect it to be taken seriously.

You didn't seem to read it too closely since it pretty clearly points out that slavery didn't originate from Africa to the Europeans but rather the Europeans raided the coast before convincing Africans to assist in the slave trade.



It also points out that the Arab countries enslaved blacks and whites and the failure in Iraq in the 800s of black slavery due to revolts. Then it says this contradicting your claim of slavery existing in Africa..

As for slavery within African society itself, everything appears to indicate that it grew in parallel with the Atlantic slave trade and was reinforced by it. It similarly gave rise to many forms of resistance: flight, open rebellion, and recourse to the protection afforded by religion (attested in both Islamic and Christian countries). In the Senegal valley, for example, the attempts by certain monarchs to enslave and sell their own subjects gave rise, at the end of the 17th century, to the Marabout war and the Toubenan movement (from the word tuub, meaning to convert to Islam). Its founder, Nasir al-Din, proclaimed that "God does not permit kings to pillage, kill or enslave their peoples. He appointed them, on the contrary, to preserve their subjects and protect them from their enemies. Peoples were not made for kings, but kings for peoples."

(from that link i posted before)

Heres another pretty good link
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/01/0131_030203_jubilee2.html

Read third paragraph from bottom of how slavery helped the Us economy

You would benefit from reading deeply into the papers of George Washington, especially in the period 1758-65. Washington came to the conclusion, based on one the most careful and successful farm management programs (his own) then in use in Virginia, that any properly managed activity of his farms could be run more efficiently and profitably with free labor rather than slave labor. Washington disposed of about 600 human beings; about half of these he inherited from his half-brother Lawrence, when he inherited Mount Vernon (Lawrence had accompanied Admiral Vernon on the disasterous expedition to Cartegena, and named the estate in his honor); the other half, roughly, came with Martha Dandrige Custis, widow, when she married George. She held them in trust for Patsy and John, the two of her four children by Daniel Parke Custis who survived infancy. Washington recognized that the only efficient use of the slaves was in the tobacco monoculture, and then only if the fields were abandoned every few years, and left to run rank while new fields were cleared and planted. But in the long run, this entails the maintenance of the slaves, which can cost as much as hired labor, and the continual acquisition of new land. Washington also recognized that the London merchants had a vested interest in the continuation of the monoculture of tobacco, as they kept the planters continually in debt, and profited scandalously, if not actually criminally, in their dealings with the planters and the tobacco they provided.

Washington stopped growing tobacco. He diversified his fields and began to produce crops he could sell locally, or in near-by colonies. He grew grain, he grew hemp for rope, he grew market-garden produce, he expanded and diversified his livestock husbandry, both to supply all the needs of the hundreds of people living on the estate, as well as to provide a surplus for sale to underwrite the operation. He offered slaves the opportunity to learn trades and work incentives to the extent that law in the Commonwealth allowed him to pay them--noting that paid craftsmen produce a better product and work faster than mere slaves. (Your reference to the many "skilled" tasks performed by slaves is a shibboleth which ignores both the degredation in performance by persons with no stake in the quality of the work, as well as the economic havoc this worked on white small holders and craftsmen, who faced a competition not faced by small-holders and craftsmen in non-slave socieites.) Many biographers assert that the Commonwealth passed its first statute prohibiting slaves from being taught to read and write because it was well-known that Washington proposed to do that with his and Martha's slaves. Washington eventually pensioned as many of the slaves as he could, allowing them to continue to live on the estate. Although he died in 1799, his estate paid those pensions well into the 1830's.

Slavery can only be seen as an efficient and profitable labor source so long as one ignores its heavy impact on the free population which does not possess either the capital or the inclination to purchase slaves and compete on that basis. In the western portion of the Roman Empire two thousand years ago, huge slave-driven enterprises were set up, known as latifundia, which produced the entire range of low-end consumer commidities and goods in demand: wine, olive oil, grain, pottery, cloth, and a host of other products. As a result, the small-holder and the small craftsman were driven out of business. Many, perhaps most, of them filled the slums of Rome and got their free panem et cirque, their bread and circuses, at the expense of the state. So long as the Empire continued to conquer new lands, and open up continuing markets for the orders of Patres and Equites who ran and profited from these operations, everything was hunky-dory. But when the Empire began to contract, beginning in about the Antonine era (which is likely why Gibbon begins his Decline and Fall . . . in that era), those markets dried up, and the entire edifice came crashing down, because the exploiters had killed the consumer economy among free men and women.

The Southern states continually fought tariff bills, which New England and Mid-Atlantic states wanted to protect their markets for their manufactured goods. They, the slave-holders, were perpetuating by proxy the mercantilism of the pre-Revolutionary period by insisting that there be no tariff, which of course, allowed European manufacturing concerns to practice "dumping," and drive their American competitors out of the market. The free white consumer base in the South apart from the estate owners class was anaemic at best. With the new cotton production areas which were opening up in the Indian subcontinent and Egypt, even King Cotton was doomed. The entire process of the tobacco monoculture had been repeated with cotton in Alabama and Mississippi, and the worst horror stories of the slave era arise from the speculators who sold land, and the capitalists of human misery--who brought in large labor forces of slaves, and worked them as hard as possible on as little expenditure as possible. They clear-cut huge swathes through the native southern forests, slashed and burned, and put in cotton until they had exhausted the soil and then they moved on to the next wood lot or patch of forest which had yet to be raped.

Yeah, slavery was really efficient and profitable for the slave-owners, so long as they didn't blow their base capital on fast horses and doing the European tour. It simply screwed everyone else, black and white, in the country.

I think you may have missed my mention earlier in this thread of the discussion that occurred in the mid 1700s concerning slavery and if it was a boon or holding back expansion. Franklin's argument was that it was actually holding back growth at the time.

Setanta might know a little bit more about this. I was just reading a biography of Franklin and found it interesting that he and others argued it.

If you view it simply from the standpoint of economic theory, it probably held growth back. You have reduced the number of possible consumers by using slave labor instead of paid workers. More paid workers means more people consuming which means more growth.

Actually, the single most important factor in the growth of American properity was the flood of immigration. After that, wealth accumulated most rapidly in this country because of whale oil. In the days before the discovery of the many uses of petroleum, industry was lubricated with whale oil, houses were lit with whale oil, chemicals were extracted for manufacturing purposes from whale oil. In the first half of the 19th century, New England became the world's largest producer of whale oil. That they were able to survive the economic consequences of constant sectional economic warfare with the South was due almost entirely to the great wealth they accumulated throught the whale oil trade. They supplied the entire American market, and some estimates range as high as 50% of the European market.

During the War of 1812, the American frigate Essex put out of Boston on a cruise to Valparaiso and the southeast Pacific whaling grounds. There she absolutely devasted the English whaling fleet--to the extent that it never recovered, and never again offered serious competition to the American whaling industry. Sadly, Essex was taken by a small English frigate and her consort on a lee shore north of Valparaiso, because she mounted carronades, a powerful short-range gun, and the English stood off out of her range and pounded her with their long 16's. But the damage was already done, and this simple and emminently sensible military operation to wound the enemy's commerce had the unforeseen and serendipitous concequence of making New Englanders very, very, very wealthy indeed--and providing the capital to supply the wants of all of those millions of European immigrants. Hell, coupled with the fortunes the New Englanders had already made off the slave trade, it gave them the kind of leisure and education which allowed them to spend their time writing books like Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Good point in your last sentence, Set. We forget that, while the Southern planters were the slave owners, it was the Northern ship-owners who aided and abetted the "peculiar institution" by providing the slaves for market. The infamous Triangular Route went from Boston to what was called the Slave Coast to the West Indies and back. Medford Rum, distilled in Massachusetts, was one of the major coins of the realm.

And hence, the anguished outcry of New Englanders in 1760, when George III's government had the nerve to actually try to enforce the Navigation Acts, and the duty on molasses.