Just curious about something. How many slaves have you known and talked to about their slavery? I knew one and became friends with him. He used to tell me stories about Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, but what I thought most interesting is that he told me he was treated much worse by black people than white people. He even told me that his "owner" treated him like family.
> He even told me that his "owner" treated him like family.
Fine. So, with that single data point, would *you* support enslavement of a whole people?
I've known people who liked to be beaten, cut and burned. Doesn't mean I think it'd be a good public policy to do that to all, say, redheads.
My mother once worked at a retirement home in Atlanta and she had a former slave living there.
I was lucky enough to be introduced to this wonderful woman when I was a child. The stories that she would tell us will never be forgotten.
During the 1930's there was a WPA program to collect the interview living former slaves and record their memories of life under slavery. There are over 300 of them, most are available on the web, and I've read most of them at one time or another. In the vast majority of the cases the former slave didn't report any sort of abuse. Many of them even had fond memories of their former owners and weren't shy about saying so. Some said they were treated like family. All reported that life after slavery had been pretty hard, in many cases harder than life under slavery. But in all the inverviews I've read I cannot remember a single interviewee every saying that they wished they were still a slave. Doesn't that say something about the institution and it's effect on the slaves themselves?