Posted on 10/13/2014 5:56:54 AM PDT by armydawg505
I love how Free Republic threads on the slave issue are all the same.
“It wasn’t THAT bad.”
I doubt ANYONE would choose to be a slave today. Although, many working today are either slaves to their employer or slaves to their government. Or both.
I know that I worked a summer in a CT tobacco field. We worked in that field in the manner that those in the 1840’s worked.
There was almost no automation, except for the planting process. The “bins” under the shade just did not allow for it, and the plants were to delicate to run through machines. This was leaf tobacco, the kind used for CT wrappers. Each wrapper was worth big bucks. You wreck leaves with automation.
It was hot, dirty, back breaking, low wage work.
Because I started working after schools during planting season, I was the only white kid in the field most of the day. They would bring up about twenty or so black men from Alabama to help. THEY were the great grandchildren of slaves. Real slaves.
They were some of the hardest working people I have ever worked with. I learned what being the only one of your race in a work group felt like. I came to be friends with them and admire their work ethics.
I cannot imagine that working in a shade tobacco field in August (easily 110 degrees) is different than working cotton in Mississippi.
Doing that without pay, six or seven days a week? If you haven’t done that kind of work, you have no right to say “It wasn’t THAT bad.”
I understand all of the automation arguments. I understand all of the “it was expensive and fading out” arguments.
But, I know I would not do it for free. Nor would many Freepers. Not if they had a choice.
THAT. The choice. That is the difference. That is why it WAS THAT bad.
I've worked in tobacco enough to say that you're embellishing. Yes, it's hard work, and most tobacco farmers did it themselves along with their wives and children. Those who could afford to purchase additional labor, did. Right or wrong, it was legal and an option at the time.
So, these Connecticut tobacco farmers, importing blacks to do their stoop labor, why do you hold them in a better light? Were these black laborers highly prized, paid very well, housed in equivalent housing to those who hired them?
If not, why not?
In the second place my pet dog doesn't have to work sunup to sundown. - many dogs work 24 hours a day, they are called guard dogs and are usually horribly abused to raise their aggression.
She doesn't have to worry about being sold.- um.... pets and their pups or kittens are sold all the time, no idea what you are talking about.
If she wanders off I'm not going to beat her - um... many pet owners would beat their dog if it wondered off.
She doesn't have to obtain her own food - slaves were fed and given housing.
It really was a horrible comparison on your part. - that's your opinion.
Can you point me to one?
Nobody would choose to be a transient farm-working cotton picker today either. That does not mean that it was all like "Grapes of Wrath", does it?
This is why no one can have a rational discussion of slavery, something that existed all through history in every continent and continues today in Africa and Muslim societies.
If you haven’t done that kind of work, you have no right to say “It wasn’t THAT bad.
See, no rational discussion is possible because of leftist-type emotionalism. This is how the left reacts on every single political issue that comes up.
We aren't allowed to say that not every slave was physically abused? We aren't allowed to say mention that some blacks owned slaves either?
Please explain to us the limits you desire on discussion, thought, knowledge and facts of history.
but why can't we even talk about something from history without having somebody screaming incoherently at us for it??
Not in this country, maybe around the world - I dunno.
Probably true. I was being very conservative. More like 10 years in reality.
One point to remember is that slaves are only good for unskilled jobs as you have to force them to work agains’t their will. If you put them on a skilled job in a factory they will sabotage it at every opportunity. The more industrialized the country the less jobs slaves can do.
New England also happened to be the most anti-slavery and Republican part of the country at the time. The western states such as Minnesota, Iowa and Wisconsin might give them strong competition for that honor, however.
For true contrast, Fredrick Douglass didn't have a lot of kind words to say about Baltimore, which was far closer to your typical northern industrial city than New Bedford. New York or the steel mills of Pittsburgh (where slavery was illegal) would have only been a slight improvement over Baltimore.
FWIW, my great-grandfather's family arrived in Boston circa 1856 and were planning to join a wagon train west, when it was decided that they should remain in Boston until my ggf was safely delivered. It was a very nice and civilized city at the time, much as Douglass describes.
It listed his property as a mule, 2 slaves and a wooden clock. It didn't mention his land grant from Mexico or the log house he built.
I wonder who inherited the wooden clock?
Even though he was a mere boy at the time, Booker T. Washington makes this and some other very interesting observations in his autobiography Up From Slavery, an incredibly good read even 130 odd years later.
I don’t think anybody in the South thought slavery was going to continue in perpetuity. The Civil War was about more than just slavery. Everyone knew mechanization was the coming thing.
If you are of the misguided assumption that the Southern businessmen operated in a vacuum and had no interaction with the rest of the country you would be wrong.
If you want to have an argument about just bashing the South that’s fine but the discussion here is really about the fact that in 1861 the US and the world was on the cusp of the industrial revolution and things were changing very quickly. If the Civil War had never happened slavery would stll have been on the way out and fairly quickly.
Yes but would you want slaves producing your Chevy Silverado or your laptop? Or your pharmaceutical drugs? I don’t think you would want them on the factory jobs and that was the Industrial Revolution.
Plus as farming mechanized you needed less labor to do the same work and is was inherently cheaper to hire people or with machines the family could handle the work and just use seasonal labor.
There is no evidence Julia Grant ever held title to any slaves. It is possible, to be sure, but it is at least equally possible her papa “gave” her one or more slaves without transferring legal title.
I’m also not entirely sure that a married woman’s property all became vested in her husband at this time. This was the case at the Founding, and by 1900 it wasn’t. Things changed gradually in this regard over the 19th century and differently by state. I don’t know about Missouri or Illinois.
Looked up some more on the subject of married women owning property. It is pretty complicated and varies a lot by state. But the laws were certainly changing in this regard during mid-century, with some of the earliest states changing the laws being in the South.
Good question, to which I would answer, look at all the stuff “Made in China” including some fairly high-tech stuff.
Thanks, nothing like an original source.
To be fair, Douglass was, understandably, not exactly an unbiased observer.
In 1830 there were 13,000 slaves, out of 2,000,000, owned by black men.
I think that's a good deal less than a majority.
http://www.theroot.com/articles/history/2013/03/black_slave_owners_did_they_exist.2.html
I am not screaming at all. It’s just really easy for some son of the south who’s life experience consists of working in an office telling us that it wasn’t that bad. And that is what most Freepers on these threads do.
Your Dad might have picked cotton, side by side. Have you? Did your Dad have a choice?
I know that no one is advocating slavery. I am saying there are plenty on here who are suggesting it wasn’t a bad existence.
I am arguing that based on my personal experience, working in fields using tools and techniques from that era, that hardly anyone would do that for free, and no one would suggest that lifestyle isn’t THAT bad.
I am well aware that slavery was legal. I understand blacks owned slaves. I understand that not every plantation was like the movies portray. I get all that. I understand blacks were considered sub human.
I am simply amused that anyone, now or then, would suggest that the land of the free was, indeed, free while people working in the manner I descibed did not have the choice to walk away. The point is so simple. All of the history or facts that are presented are really moot. Slavery removes Liberty. That is wrong.
I don’t intend to get into another civil war argument with people who are trying to justify this abomination. I simply wanted to express an opinion.
And, my argument is far from incoherent. It is simple and it’s based on natural laws. Your arguments support an immoral practice that is, and never has been moral.
The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it. No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves, shall be passed.
Much of the language of the confederate constitution was taken directly from the US Constitution (see comparison here: http://www.jjmccullough.com/CSA.htm) but there were a few notable exceptions, memorializing the Particular Institution for all eternity (or at least as long as the confederacy lasted) among them.
as bad as commonly depicted, if you want to stay in context.
Dad was a child, he did what he was told.
I am simply amused that anyone, now or then, would suggest that the land of the free was, indeed, free while people working in the manner I descibed did not have the choice to walk away.
In context, the US was the most free country on Earth at the time, and slavery was not unique to the US. Slavery continued elsewhere and still continues to this day.
No one is trying to justify it. Discussing it is not justifying it.
Just because someone says that slaves weren't wearing loincloth in the field all day long while getting savagely whipped (conducive to hard work I am sure, not) as some movies and stuff would have us believe does not mean they condone or "justify" it.
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