Ok how is it that almost all slave holders took out life insurance policies on there slaves? How is it that Yankee insurers would pay if a slave owner abused their slave? How is it that the cost of a slave in 1860 would be about 100,000 dollars today? How is that some one would abuse something so valuable? How is that?
No one claimed that the slavers were all that bright - just determined.
If you were enslaved and treated the same as these people were, would you consider yourself to have been kidnapped? I suspect you would.
If you didn’t work fast enough and were flogged to “encourage” you, would you consider that torture?
If your wife, also enslaved, was forced to endure the sexual advances of the master, would you consider it rape?
You know, lots of white men and women in the 18th and 19th centuries were subjected to exactly such treatment when enslaved by Muslim.? Do you consider their treatment to have been justified because they were worth a lot of money?
BTW, thanks for recognizing the great financial value of a slave, as it shows why the South was (logically enough) willing to go to war over a threat to their capital investment.
Let’s use your numbers. 4,000,000 human beings x $100,000 - $400,000,000,000. That’s getting up into territory where it would actually show up in the federal budget.
Actually, I suspect it’s high, but half that number is probably reasonably close.
In 1860 dollars the value of all the slaves was somewhere in the vicinity of $2B to $3B.
To put that into some perspective, the federal budget for 1860 totaled $60,000,000.
So the slaves were worth around 50x the federal budget. Which gives a good notion why the idea of compensated emancipation wouldn’t work. Except possibly very gradually.
So 4 million slave insurance policies? Really?
Some slave owners or overseers were sadists, and derived sexual pleasure from abusing their slaves. See RE Lee, known as a cruel slave master before the civil war. He seemed to have a particular interest, to say the least, in young female slaves. Jeff Davis also fathered at least one of his slaves.
Horses up to 2500 lbs are routinely controlled with small whips, despite their value. Whipping a horse or a slave was not considered abuse. Raping a slave was not considered abuse. Selling a slave woman’s child was not considered abuse.