Here's an excerpt from a well-researched textbook used in colleges until Political Correctness idiots gained power and now suppresed. Slaves were valuable property, but the Irish were expendabe. I want reparations!
A History of the South
Fourth Edition
Alfred A. Knopf 1947, 1953, 1963, 1972
Francis Butler Simkins and Charles Pierce Roland
P. 125-126
Abolitionist assertions that the bondsmen (slaves) were frequently inadequately clothed, underfed, and driven to death are economically unreasonable. Masters wished to preserve the health and life of their slaves because a sick Negro was a liability and a dead Negro was worth nothing. A rough plenty prevailed on the average plantation. “The best preventive of theft is plenty of pork,” was the advice of a Virginian.
Slaves probably fared as well in the enjoyment of the necessities of life as did most of the free laborers of the country. One of the most respected of all Northern critics of slavery, Frederick Law Olmsted, wrote that the Southern bondsmen lived in quarters quite as adequate as those of most mill or mine workers elsewhere, and that the slaves were perhaps the best fed “proletarian class” in the world. He also testified that they worked less than did free laborers.
Incomplete statistics reveal that the slaves averaged somewhat higher sickness and death rates per thousand than did Southern whites as a whole. But the slaves were from all indications as healthy and long-lived as white common laborers in the United States before the Civil War. It was general knowledge at the time in Louisiana that the slaves were better off in these respects than were the thousands of Irish immigrant laborers engaged in clearing land and digging drainage canals on the sugar plantations. The planters were reluctant to commit their expensive chattels to this dangerous work, but preferred to hire free laborers, whose loss by death, sickness, or injury cost nothing. A careful study of the figures on a group of 875 plantation slaves whose records are preserved indicates their average life expectancy at the time of birth to have been longer than that of the general population of such cities as New York, Boston, and Philadelphia during the same period. An authority on urban slavery concludes that the medical care, health, and welfare of slaves in Southern cities were superior to the care, health, and welfare of the free Negroes; and the outstanding work on the life of Negroes in the North at this time shows that they fared no better in such matters than did free blacks in the land of slavery.