No one knows when slavery started, but it seems to have been a part of human civilization from the start. There is evidence of slavery in the earliest civilizations along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Mesopotamia, the Nile in Egypt, the Indus Valley in India, and China’s Yangtze River Valley. This suggests slavery was integral to the establishment of large-scale settlements.
Slavery was the norm in the world until European Protestants decided it was immoral and began to ban it. Until the Protestant nations of Europe rose to power, slavery was tolerated by Christians. The Catholic Church opposed the treatment of African slaves in the New World but was not opposed to slavery. It was the Protestants who went the next step and demanded the end of slavery.
Of course, slavery was not what modern people imagine. Slaves often had rights and there were rules for how slaves must be treated. The very first law codes were created to deal with the treatment of slaves. This makes sense since if there are a lot of slaves, there is the risk of a slave revolt, so keeping the slave classes happy was always going to be a primary consideration for society.
This was true in the American South. Contrary to the nonsense version of history taught in schools and popularized through movies and television, the African slaves in North America were treated well. They were valuable property, one of the most lucrative investments in the New World, so slave owners took care of them. A happy slave was a productive and profitable slave.
In fact, slaves were much more productive than the freemen. Contrary to the cartoon version of history, the plantation owners cared more about their slaves than the white workers on the plantation. One reason for that is slavery as a form of labor was much more productive than paid labor. The slave owner was more likely to have a hired man whipped than to whip one of his slaves.
That is the show this week. It is about the economic reality of slavery in the South leading up to the Civil War. The source for this information is an old book titled, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery by the economists Robert Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman. It is a great work of revisionist history, a skill that we will need to hone, given that our official history is mostly nonsense.
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This Week’s Show
Contents
- Intro
- Cartoon Version of Slavery
- Time On The Cross
- Ten Points About Slavery
- Final Thoughts
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Full Show On Spreaker
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The worst thing about being a slave is the long hours. And you don’t get paid!
You get lifetime room and board, which many people were not able to provide for themselves in a completely laissez-faire economy with zero public assistance.
You sound like a Communist, sorry
What “completely laissez-faire economy“? When? Where?
As soon as any government decrees land parcels; regulates land usage; inserts itself into commercial disputes; imposes a money system; regulates banking; builds or controls ports or roads; declares existence of limited liability entities (which are only imaginary); monopolizes defense; or collects tariffs and taxes there can be no laissez-faire.
It’s ok to reject libertarianism and communism. Those creeds are stories about fairies and unicorns. They have some truth only on their margins.
If you listen to the show, slaves kept about 90% of their labor. This was much higher than the freemen. That does not mean slavery was puppies and rainbows. it just means the condition of slaves was better than the comparable hired man. Life was tough back then for most everyone.
Great show today!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcgAdlKeQHs
Mildly Off-Topic, but the /pol/ server is now showing some tantalizing indications of possibly coming back from the grave:
CROSS. YOUR. FINGERS.
Sounds like working for Amazon
Taxes and “fees”, house payments, car payments, credit card payments, medical payments, insurance payments – yeah, slaves.
Do we have any legit photos of “Pam Hyde”?
Thanks in advance.
The worst thing about slavery is that it brought “them” here.
We got the Pilgrims and then the Africans. A recipe for disaster.
The deep American South was a HOT disease-ridden wilderness. African slaves were about the only way you could get labor in the deep South. I believe it was Memphis that the whole damn town died of yellow fever in the late 1800’s.
Barney Rubble: ‘The worst thing about slavery is that it brought “them” here.’
Courtesy of (((them))).
The great unsolved question is why did (((they))) decide to assassinate Lincoln?
Capitalism brought them here.
It was capitalism. Prejudice against this truth has contributed to the fecklessness of cripples who call theirselves conservatives or libertarians.
Per the current meaning and current context of “slave”, nobody wants to be a slave. I don’t care how well they were apparently treated. The very nature of slave means you have no rights, or at the very least, you have no say in what those rights are…you are beholden to whoever makes the regulations. I’d rather live as a poor farmer than a slave who lives in a mansion. I think we all would.
But maybe the problem is in semantics. Rather than “slave” or “slavery”, maybe we should say “permanent servant” or “permanent servitude”.
Prisoners With Jobs?
Tax Serf
I haven’t listened to the podcast yet, so apologies if you brought this up, but for those interested: Eric Foner’s first book, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men is great on the economic ideology propping up abolitionism. Free labor simply couldn’t compete with slave labor in e.g. the Midwest, they thought at the time, so that’s why the Republican Party got such a huge following there so fast. (Foner is also a great example of a truly repellent person nonetheless doing excellent scholarship — he’s a Commie, literally, but he could keep it in his pants back then).
When Eric began work on an historical project, he never foned it in…
Kind of interesting that a good revisionist history on the actual reality of slavery would written by two guys named fogel and engerman. Who’d a thunk…
One of the things about slavery that I discovered years after skrool was that the banks owned more slaves than anyone else. Need money to money to put your crops in this year? Take a loan out with the bank and use your slaves as collateral. Jefferson, for example, was leveraged right up to the hilt, including his slaves.
Both sides of my family are from the South. I had only one wing who were former slave owners. My mom’s grandmother still had the plantation complete with sharecroppers working it. My mother could play with the black kids but the white kids were off limits. One time her grandma caught her playing with a white boy and she was spanked so hard she had to ride the school bus for a week sitting on a pillow. When her granddaddy was away, the grandma would have black workers come in the house for my grandma’s safety. The grandma viewed whites… Read more »
“Lincoln freed the slaves!” Now we’re all slaves to global capital, thanks a lot asshole.
On another note it’s funny when you learn that Irish immigrants in the new world were often used for dangerous work as they were not worth as much as a good african slave.
I think we should have let them split. We might be a lot better off today. They would be stuck with the poison from all the angry blacks.
When I was in college, some of the blacks would give me hell about how my great-great-grandpa was an awful slaveowner. I would let them know that my Irish ancestors dug out the canals in New Orleans and died by the score from the horrible diseases and no one cared because new Irishmen arrived off the boat daily. The black slaves, on the other hand, were valuable because they could generate revenue and could be bought and sold and were well-treated. They would always walk away grumbling to themselves. I also reminded them that because I’m part Irish/part Coonass/part German… Read more »
Exactly…and when the Irish died, they were dumped in a mass grave, and replaced by more cheap Irish…
J. Burden and George Bagby did some excellent shows on the reality of slavery. Apparently the vast majority was not plantation slavery, but small farms. It also gets in to the health and diet aspects. The Africans in America working as slaves had far higher protein intake and far better health than European serfs and factory workers. Two generations forfeited our entire inheritance through guilt over some evil that by and large never was. Even the Klan rose up in response to horrific and violent abuse during Reconstruction. It rose up in response to the Waukesha’s Michael Browns and Karmelo… Read more »
“…generations forfeited our entire inheritance through guilt over some evil that by and large never was.”
Oh, really? Please, tell me more…do you have any other examples, perhaps?
“A happy slave was a productive and profitable slave.”
The ruling class really put this idea to good use on AINO, didn’t they?
I read Frederick Douglass’s autobiography. Was he lying?
“Our history” That is the crux of why this thing failed. Any old interloper could come in and claim to be one of us. Of course, those two guys feel zero guilt and zero shame over America’s past. They were posing as us in order to speak for us. It is a very old trick. A trick that for thousands of years our best were wise to. They practiced exclusion so that interlopers could not plant themselves in our midst, masquerade as us and plant lies and sophisticated guilt and shame and deconstructive narratives within our story. Our history my… Read more »
As a member of the Ebil Ebil White Mens, I tend to rise early so as to get in a full day of Raping, Murdering, Pillaging and Oppressing of the Minorities. Buff them stereotypes!
Guess I’m a little miffed that Enslaving is off the board. But, not a perfect world sigh.
I transferred my Enslaving energy over to Pillaging, as that was my second favorite activity. I mean pillage pillage pillage, right?
“In fact, slaves were much more productive than the freemen.” An interesting fact—probably included in the book you referenced, but I’ve not read yet—is that slave owners learned way back before Stalin how to incentivize their slaves to maximize production. Slave owners began to assign slaves their own plot of ground which could be worked by the slave on his own time, that is to say after his assigned work duties on the master’s land. Slaves had every incentive therefore to work quickly and finish their master’s work and get back to working their own assigned plot of land. Proceeds… Read more »
The incontrovertible fact is that the transatlantic slave trade was the best thing to ever happen to the negro race. This has never been refuted. It cannot be refuted. Probably the penultimate examples of “no good deed goes unpunished” are the two entities which did the most in world history to end slavery, the British empire and its American offshoot, now bearing primary blame for its existence. Other than Robert DeNiro, I’m unaware of any white men who are willing to pay to copulate with negresses when there are alternatives, so I am skeptical of the stories of such from… Read more »
According to the FBI, there are years where not a single White on black SA is reported. The other years are single or low double digit reports. The other way around is never less than 10s of thousands.
Nobody had a more nuanced and accurate understanding of slavery than Jefferson. He understood that slavery was a violation of the rights of Africans, and that it had a negative effect on whites as well. Yet he also understood that Negroes were intellectually inferior to whites and that the races could never successfully mix when emancipation occurred. Consequently he advocated the deportation of Negroes once freed. Jefferson also understood the paternalistic aspects of Southern slavery, and pointed out in Notes on the State of Virginia that it was much more benign than Roman slavery. The aspect of the slavery question… Read more »
Indeed, the slaves in Africa died rapidly and horribly of starvation and maltreatment, while the slaves who reached America (sold by kings and tribal leaders who had excess numbers of them) got good food and decent working conditions…Some were given firearms to supplement their food by hunting small game…As Ali said when he was in Zaire for the rumble in the jungle…”I’m sure glad my great great granddaddy caught that boat..”
But slavery was dying by the 1860s because of the flood of Irish immigrants, who were cheaper than slaves, and didn’t have to be purchased….
the left has completely obliterated the history of lynchings by convincing us that it was a rachial thing. it was actually a criminal thing. more whites were lynched than blacks. if you raped or murdered someone, the outraged community would often take things into their own hands. whether you were black or white, .there were very few prisons in those times in many areas. prisons cost a lot of money that many communities didn’t have . so flogging, Exile , or hanging were all that was available .
We Slavs are still waiting for our reparations from the various Ottoman and Arab slave trades all throughout the Middle Ages.
During Ivan Groznyi’s disastrous reign, the Krim Tatars practically emptied southern and eastern Russia of peasants via slave raids.
Revision this–the transatlantic slave trade was the best thing ever to happen to the sub-Saharans.
And, well, the top slave traders in the Mediterranean, well into the 2nd millennium after Christ, were the “Venetians” (yes, it’s your usual suspects), with Christians also doing their share of purchases, and the Vatican “tolerating it” (not that their not tolerating it would have stopped the trade to any meaningful extent, understandably).
From 250,000 people to 45 million is quite a genocide. I have heard that one of the factors for the failure of the American Colonization Society was the sheer numbers of blacks that needed to get to Liberia. It was classic America. You can spend time and energy solving a civilizational problem and lay the groundwork for an enternal paradise on a geographically perfect continent. Or you can spend your time making a lot of money as fast as you can and kick the can down the road fat and happy and leave a far bigger and difficult to solve… Read more »
“European Protestants decided …” Specifically Englishmen and, more specifically, Quakers and Evangelical Anglicans.