Slavery in the South and Slavery today...the great "con"

Well maybe the United States is different, but I can tell you that slavery never really ended here in Brazil. Most people in this country earn a pittance, less than $US400 per month, and to even have this they need to work from dawn to dusk.

The majority of people earning this type of money are Negro people, basically they are still slaves, probably worse off in fact. Oh yes they are free to make their lives better, but without the opportunity this freedom ain't worth anything.

Same poo different day in my opinion.

This whole thread is a crock. I am amazed to see some idiot defending slavery.

GET OVER IT THE SOUTH WAS WRONG AND THE SOUTH LOST!!!!!!

Can the moonlight and magnolias manure.

I see the myth of who won the civil war is still alive.

The truth is the South allowed the north to think they won. Ever since the end of the war people from the north have been coming south and bringing their money to us.

We say yes sir and no sir and keep our hands busy building resorts and homes for the wonderful people of the north.

My goodness....we even sell cotton balls in a small bag. cans of Georgia whip butt, alligator teeth and all manner of other trinkets to the northern people.

Some of us down south even charge hundreds of dollors to take men from the north on hunting and fishing trips.

Now, on a serious note. My mothers family had slaves in Mississippi and my fathers family had slaves in south Georgia.

When the slaves were finally set free not one slave wanted to leave . There was much crying and distress. Only the young and able left the plantations of my family. The others stayed and continued to live in the houses my family built for them and they received a decent wage.
They took our family names also.

Our family has always been in business for themselves. I see no difference in the "old slave days" than today. We furnish our employees homes, healthcare and help them when they need financial help.

But we are the good Bosses just as there were good slave owners and horrid slave owners.

IMO we are all slaves to something. I feel I am a slave to the IRS and my employees. I feel responsible for the health and welfare of those that toil for my company.

It's past time to stop living in the past concerning the slavery issue. We must not continue to judge people by their color or education. It is time to concentrate on working together to keep our earth alive and well.

TrueCon:

I wouldn't defend the current injustices in the world, but, I find your whole argument quite idiotic and self-serving. You seem to be on a quest to justify to yourself your fundamental belief that you are superior to certain races, classes, geographical regions by virtue of your "productivity". And even assuming that you are indeed so productive and educated and all you claim that you are, you don't seem to have spent a second of soul-searching in your whole life to realize that you would owe all your "superior qualities" to where you were born and the good fortune you had to be educated, so you can appreciate the virtues of slavery with a pretend-economic analysis.

In any case.... Productivity!!! What a pathetic measuring stick for life. Are you a happy person? What happened to you when you were a kid? Maybe a cute little negro slave that your gramps gave you ran away and you were very sad????

Naturally we all work for the man. But, if we don't like that man, we kind of have the choice to go work for another (wo)man. And, yes, there is still the underclass who are not so free to move or switch jobs, but it is all in percentages. If 35% of US is under the poverty line, 100% of that used to be them and 0% used to be you. So sorry those numbers are shifting....

So, if your whole point is that we are still some version of a slave, I'll take this over your version any day. Just like I'd prefer being a black slave 200 years ago to being a slave 1000 years ago in Europe... And 'd prefer that over being a slave in Rome or Egypt 2,000 years ago... Do you catch my drift?

Lastly: I will probably kick myself later for humoring your argument by asking you a straight question. Where on earth is this 10%-90% business coming from? Did I miss out on those "negro" mansions in the south that they built with their 90%???

reply to post by dizziedame


Thanks for a reasonable and truthful post.

I posed the following question to the OP but doubt that I will get a straight answer.

As the descendant of two slave owners, maybe you could shed some light to this 10%-90% business that TrueCon claims?

What do these numbers represent? Truth? Or heavily skewed myth?

Thank you in advance for your time?

The calculations of how much the slave earned in form of his production was done in the book "Time on the Cross" look it up and be amazed. It was written in the 1970s (the books claiming slavery as backward and dying were written in the 1960s before any real research, and mostly were just biggoted) and the book has not been defeated yet.

Many people scream "racist" or "trashy" or all the crap you see people here screaming, but the book's facts are unchallenged. No one has been able to produce different results when researching slavery.

Finally it's becomming taught in Colleges the truth about the slave economies.

The book doesn't claim slavery is good - quite the opposite - but it does reveal the truth of slavery.

I find it funny people need to belittle me, because they cannot refute the obvious facts. Economically, slavery is better.

If you treat your slaves well, what is wrong with it?

Originally posted by True_Confederate



2) The slave trade ended almost one hundred years before slavery ended (in the United States). By 1860 no family was ever "broken-up" as a result of slavery. In all the 400 years of slavery in the Americas by those who would become United States citizens, a slave was never torn-apart from his family for any reason. The family was sanctimonious, as most slaveholders were devoutly religious.

Perhaps you can share some of your reference material or sources for your claims that no slave was ever torn apart from his family.
Or is it just your opinion that this never happened?

Slaves were not "forced to mate" nor were they raped frequently as a result of slavery (again a crime).

Is it your contention that slave holders were such upstanding citizens that they were not capable of committing crimes?

The criminal activities perpetrated by master on slave would have been no more frequent (and is recorded with limitations as being such) than any other criminal activities.

Care to share your sources for this claim?

Please for that sake of intellectual honesty review this site.
www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk...

Charles Ball, a slave from Maryland, was born in about 1780 . His grandfather was brought from Africa and sold as a slave. His mother was the slave of a tobacco planter. When the planter died when Ball was four years old, he family were sold separately. Ball stayed in Maryland but his mother went to Georgia and he never saw her again.

Ball was allowed to marry but in 1805 he was sold to a cotton plantation owner in South Carolina while his wife and children remained in Maryland. Ball made several attempts to escape but was captured and became another man's slave.

After a period in Georgia he escaped again and managed to get back to his previous home in Maryland. Unfortunately, his wife and children had been sold to a slave-owner in another state. He re-married and obtained a small farm until in about 1830 he was seized and returned to slavery in Georgia.

Ball managed to escape again and this time settled in Philadelphia. With the help of Isaac Fisher, a white lawyer, wrote his autobiography, The Life and Adventures of Charles Ball (1837). Afraid of being recaptured, Ball moved again and its is not known when and where he died....

I encourage you to read these accounts and then try to defend this corrupt and morally repugnant social & economic system.

Your source is just a website...but as I pointed out in the source "Time on the Cross" the book has a whole volume which cites everything it states. About 100 pages of citations.

As I said, it is the most authoritative piece on Slavery and has not been refuted by any one else with any other data though many have tried to discredit it.

Originally posted by True_Confederate
The calculations of how much the slave earned in form of his production was done in the book "Time on the Cross" look it up and be amazed. It was written in the 1970s (the books claiming slavery as backward and dying were written in the 1960s before any real research, and mostly were just biggoted) and the book has not been defeated yet.

Many people scream "racist" or "trashy" or all the crap you see people here screaming, but the book's facts are unchallenged. No one has been able to produce different results when researching slavery.

You make the bold statement that the "facts" presented in this book are unchallenged. Nothing could be further from the truth. Soon after this book was published it was reviewed by Professor Herbert Gutman professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he wrote on slavery and labor history.
He deconstructed the assumptions and poor methodology in the book Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery, by Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman.

Gutman systematically took Fogel and Engerman to task on variety of fronts. He argued they relied on evidence from a single, unrepresentative plantation. He also noted the authors were extremely careless in their math, and often used the wrong measurement to estimate the harshness of slavery (for example, estimating the number of slaves whipped rather than how often each slave was whipped). In Slavery and the Numbers Game, Gutman argued that Fogel and Engerman also routinely ignored better, readily-available data as well. Gutman roundly criticized Fogel and Engerman on a host of other claims as well, including the lack of evidence for systematic and regular rewards and a failure to consider the effect public whipping would have on other slaves. Gutman also argued that Fogel and Engerman had fallen prey to an ideological pitfall by assuming that slaves had assimilated the Protestant work ethic. If they had such an ethic, then the system of punishments and rewards outlined in Time on the Cross would support Fogel and Engerman's thesis. Gutman conclusively showed, however, that most slaves had not adopted this ethic at all and that slavery's carrot-and-stick approach to work was not part of the slave worldview.

/36f8wy

Gutman's critique was so thorough that later reviewers called Time on the Cross "severely flawed and possibly not even worth further attention by serious scholars

Another book that exposes the poor research and inaccurate conclusions put forth by the the Book "Time on the Cross" is Haskell, "The True and Tragical History of 'Time on the Cross,' " New York Review of Books, Oct. 2, 1975.

Your source is seriously flawed. Your conclusions based on this source are seriously flawed. I encourage you to educate yourself.
Once again...for the sake of intellectual honesty do some real critical research on the matter.

One example of the flawed work and conclusions drawn by the authors of the book "Time on the Cross" is exposed in their own use of the "Barrow Whipping List" a record of slave misconduct & punishment by Bennet Barrow, a plantation owner & cotton planter.

The authors of the book, Fogal & Engerman, generalize the way slaves were treated based on this one record. It in no way shape or form can truly represent the frequency or severity of the beatings / whippings slaves were given, and yet that is what the authors of the book "Time on the Cross" do.

The authors, Fogal & Engerman, try to show that a system of positive labor incentives encouraged slaves to internalize the Protestant Work effort.

In reality though a fact that the authors conveniently left out is that per their own cited source, the Barrow Whipping List, that on an average, most slaves were whipped every 4.6 days, that most slaves were whipped for inefficient labor, that the most productive cotton pickers were also the most disorderly, and thus the most frequently whipped slaves, that those who were whipped had NOT internalized the Protestant work ethic and that the Fogal & Engerman, the authors of "Time on the Cross" purposely misrepresented Barrows Disgust for his slaves.

This book is so seriously flawed, I encourage every one to read it just so you can see how warped and desperate some are to justify slavery.

Slavery is a great idea Mr. Confederate. Why don't you come down to Phoenix Arizona and buy you a set of brand new Mexicans? They work hard and rarely complain. Their daughters are cute and don't offer up much of a fight when approached for sex. The food they cook is good and you will always have a pinata for your birthday. Slavery in the 21st century could be one big fiesta for us all.

Originally posted by True_Confederate
Your source is just a website...but as I pointed out in the source "Time on the Cross" the book has a whole volume which cites everything it states. About 100 pages of citations.

I'm glad your reading books, thats commendable, But one word of advice, "Don't believe everything you read." Take the time to consider the reviews & critiques of any work you consider scholarly enough to shape your ideas & views.

Especially when it comes to rewriting history.


[edit on 2-10-2007 by Sparky63]

You say that my source is flawed from the works of a man who does not present an empirical analysis but a critique of others' empirical methods.

Who here is being intellectually dishonest?

My other source, "History of the American Economy" is a 2006 book and its volume on the US slave economy re-affirms the facts presented in "Time on the Cross".

While "Time on the Cross" was the first comprehensive dive into the slave economy, it was not the only in depth economic analysis.

The conclusions were all the same, the productivity of slaves compared to counter-parts, the economic out-put and distribution of capital in the slave south.

Now, if Time on the Cross were completely and egregoriously in error, why is it now texts on the economics simply reaffirm what it originally stated?

Now about slave abuses? They were illegal. Is the United States without crime?

Because of the United States' criminal activities, is its purpose and being evil and heinous?

Originally posted by Godruigez
Slavery is a great idea Mr. Confederate. Why don't you come down to Phoenix Arizona and buy you a set of brand new Mexicans? They work hard and rarely complain. Their daughters are cute and don't offer up much of a fight when approached for sex. The food they cook is good and you will always have a pinata for your birthday. Slavery in the 21st century could be one big fiesta for us all.

Your brandishment of "Atzlan" is dispicable, and I think you would make a fine slave. You already are one, perhaps your master would treat you better than your employer.

Originally posted by True_Confederate
You say that my source is flawed from the works of a man who does not present an empirical analysis but a critique of others' empirical methods.

If the methods are flawed then the conclusions are not accurate. Have you taken the time to analyzed their methods? I think not.

Just so you know, analysis is an essential part of critiquing another's work.
Time on the Cross is not the Scholarly research you make it out to be.


Why do I have the feeling this is falling on deaf ears?

Originally posted by True_Confederate


My other source, "History of the American Economy" is a 2006 book and its volume on the US slave economy re-affirms the facts presented in "Time on the Cross".

Are you referring to the book, "History of the American Economy" written by Gary M. Walton & Hugh Rockoff? This was published in 2004

Who is the author of the book you are referring to?

[edit on 2-10-2007 by Sparky63]

One thing you should keep in mind.
Robert Fogel, the author of the book "Time on the Cross" that you refer to, Fogel objected to slavery on moral grounds; he thought that on purely economic grounds, slavery was not unprofitable or inefficient as previous historians had argue.
You seem to think that his book approves of, or recommends slavery as a suitable economic system. His book did not advocate that at all. I think you missed the point entirely.

Fogel himself had to publicly submit this retraction: He had made the ridiculous claim that pregnant slaves were treated to the best health care.

According to Time on the Cross, "Slave health care was at its best for pregnant women. 'Pregnant women,' wrote one planter, ' must be treated with great tenderness, worked near home and lightly" (p.122)

In a reissued Norton edition of the book, they were forced due to scholarly criticism to make this statement. "

"It now appears that children rather than adults were the principal victims of malnutrition. [and] Much of the new story turns on the overwork of pregnant women" (1989, p. 285). In Without Consent or Contract, Fogel puts it this way "Masters were not generally guilty of working field hands to death, but they were guilty of so overworking pregnant women that infant death rates were pushed to extraordinary levels" (p. 153).

Review by Thomas Weiss, Department of Economics, University of Kansas.

Doesn't sound like quality health care to me.

Let me add this

Historians were all too eager to think that cliometric techniques had led Fogel and Engerman to what historians saw as outlandish conclusions. Perhaps for this reason, cliometricians felt some duty to defend the cliometric methodology and came down harder on the authors, questioning the quality of Fogel and Engerman's data, analysis and interpretation. Sutch's work on the material treatment of slaves, was a detailed attempt to replicate the results of Fogel and Engerman and he "found so many errors of computation or citation, data so selective or weak, and the presentation of the results so distorted that I have been forced to conclude that Time on the Cross is a failure" (1975, p. 339)

Clearly their work was and is flawed.

Care to make your claim again that this books facts have never been challenged?

[edit on 2-10-2007 by Sparky63]

[edit on 2-10-2007 by Sparky63]

Originally posted by True_Confederate

What is to be said about Northerners who portrayed the black slave as docile, uncivilized and unproductive? Even though it has been proven that the black slaves were 34% more productive than their white northern counterparts?

[edit on 1-10-2007 by True_Confederate]

The crack of a whip could have something to do with productivity.



I think I would prefer to deal with someone thinking I am lazy rather than endure the forced productivity. Look at the picture and tell me you don't agree.

[edit on 2-10-2007 by Sparky63]

even if those slaves were treated like little royal princesses.....
a pampered slave is still just a slave....
able to have just those things the master decides they should
unable to go anywhere unless the master approves...
unable to marry, unless of course the master decides it's worthy...
unable to learn unless the master decides they should learn...
eat only what the master provides...
able to worship only the God of the master's chosing...
unable to become an adult, make adult decisions, and of course, learn from the bad decisions made.


think about it.....
ya, you work 8-10 or more hours a day, and might not be getting paid much at all...but you get a paycheck at the end of the day.. that money is yours, and you get to decide....do you want a large apartment that will eat up most of your money, or maybe a smaller one that will leave you a little left over. do you want to eat chicken or fish tonight? want to go for a walk, want to walk north or south? know a friend that's hit a rough spot in his life? want to invite him over for dinner? want a beer, a cigarette, or maybe just a candy bar??

well, be grateful you have the choices!! when it comes to slavery, you have only what the master decides to provide. ya, some masters might have provided much for their slaves, and offered some freedom. but other didn't. just like today, some husbands provide much for their wives, and some offer much freedom....but, well, how many wives have divorced their rich husbands because they wouldn't allow them any freedom! how many have left their husbands because they chose to provide themselves with more booze, or a new tv, or a car, or whatever, while ignoring their wife's needs?

authoritarian rule doesn't provide a means for people to grow up! to learn to make the decisions, to learn the idea of natural consequences for one's actions....they why behind the don't do!

No matter how you try and justify it owning another person is wrong.