Yes. My grandfathers were both coal miners, one electrocuted thanks to his inability to afford proper footwear. You all can mail me my check check at www.urasucker.com.
America wasn’t truly ‘prosperous’ until well after slavery had ended....................
The North was always richer than the South...
More complex than that. Rephrase it as “Did slavery give some people economic gain at the expense of the slaves?” Then the answer is “of course, yes.”
There are other reasons for the prosperity.
Of course. That’s why automobiles, Gatling guns, the steam engine and the computer were all invented and marketed in the ante-bellum South, where Henry Ford developed mass production of machinery and McCormick invented mechanized harvesting. All those damyankees ever invented was the cotton gin and crack cocaine./s
But did slavery actually create the wealth of the U.S.? Does this claim have any historical basis in fact, or is this a distortion of history to influence the views of voters?
To the liberals, answers to such questions don’t matter. They are hell bent on shoving reparations down our throats.
Whenever the liberal narrative of an issue is in conflict with historic facts, the narrative is presumed to be truth. That’s how liberals operate.
“American prosperity resulted from slavery.”
So I guess the cotton growing South generated the real economic growth in the US and not the industrial North.
NO. Next question please.
Until air conditioning, the states where slavery had been legal were generally less prosperous than the states where slavery wasn’t legal, so no, slavery didn’t cause America’s prosperity.
The contribution of slave labor to the US economy was minimal.
Almost all the wealth created by slave labor was created in the South.
Almost all of that was destroyed in the War Between the States (Civil War).
It is almost certain the U.S. destroyed more wealth in the Civil War than was contributed by slave labor over the entire history of the United States.
The industrial revolution is what drove American prosperity. While it is fair to point to tobacco and cotton as cash crops which defined much of the US economy in the 18th century, the emergence of manufacturing in the mid-19th century shifted the economic power base of the US to the northeast and midwest. Certainly there was a link between the two in terms of the industrial textile mills of the northeast which used the raw cotton grown in the south. But the rise of the iron industry and food farming in the midwest became larger components of the economy in the late 19th century and beyond.
AND that their heirs would be better off today had they remained in Africa??
The reason that the South lost so decisively was because slavery kept them from modernizing. If slavery was a net benefit the South would have been10 times more productive and twice as wealthy.
It hurts the victimhood narrative - but slavery produced very little real “wealth.”
Like all state-controlled or forced labor rackets, it can not compete in efficiency, output or even pricing with free labor markets. Yes - it benefits those few in control of the monopoly, but it penalizes everyone else.
If southern slavery was economically efficient, the south would have won the Civil War. Brazil would be a world super-power
No. Slavery created the inner cities and the poverty/victimhood industries.
Worst mistake our ancestors ever made was bringing Africans over here.
Bkmk
Still is... But now it is not race selective, it encompasses all races. It was never “Free labor”, it always did cost a minimal amount of maintenance to feed and house slaves. This is still the case now, but instead of being fed and housed on the plantation, we are given a small weekly paycheck to be fed and housed remotely. And rather than owned by any certain individual, we are all now co-owned in a rotation labor pool to be swapped and traded like baseball cards.
Too much thinking. Eggheads and their rabbit holes of mental masturbation come up with the stupidest ideas.
If slavery created prosperity then the history of the world would be dominated by wildly prosperous nations rather than subsistence hellholes.