The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson

I think it a fair proposition that if short fiber cotton had never become such a powerful influence in American economics and politics, slavery would have died out in the south just as it faded for economic reasons in the north, and there would not have been such a thing as the civil war.

The Cotton Gin allowed all that followed. But if Whitney hadn't invented it, someone else would have. It was the age of invention, for good or bad.

Most Freedmen farmed the same land they did as slaves, only they were now sharecroppers.

Leon F. Litwack's Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery cites numerous letters from slaveowners who found that most of their slaves had run off as the Union Army approached. Some came back. Many didn't.

This even makes its way into the fictional and very romanticized Gone With The Wind. You may remember the few slaves who stayed with Scarlett on the plantation. Most didn't -- the field slaves who aren't really "characters" in the book took off when it was safe to do so and didn't come back.

Would Miss Scarlett really have been out there working the fields if the field hands had stayed? I know it's fiction, but this is something that was so true and so familiar to people that Margaret Mitchell couldn't lie about it.

Most freed slaves had zero animosity towards the former slave owners.

How would you know? It's not like freed slaves could honestly tell the old masters how they felt. If freedmen had feelings of anger, animosity, or resentment, it would be dangerous to air them to anyone, for fear the word would get back to people who could hurt them. Those who did have animosity probably left and tried to put it all behind them.

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