Lowering the Confederate Flag - and Wally World

[Bill the Cat]

Well, well, ah . . . a genuuiine slavery apologist extolling the sainthood of slave owners. The meager shelter is well documented for many if not most plantations with as many as 16 to 20 slaves per cabin. You can visit plantation museums of the South with the documentation of housing and chains, and the punishment of slaves.

Again, you are comparing the 1% of plantation owners to the rest, who were not anywhere near as brutal.

Tis claim of RARE needs to be supported by references.

Source: https://www.boundless.com/u-s-history/textbooks/boundless-u-s-history-textbook/slavery-and-reform-1820-1840-16/slavery-in-the-u-s-122/treatment-of-slaves-in-the-u-s-652-9460/

Maintaining White Dominance

In 1850, a publication provided guidance to slave owners on how to produce the "ideal slave":
Maintain strict discipline and 'unconditional submission';
Create a sense of personal inferiority, so slaves 'know their place';
Instill fear in the minds of slaves;
Teach the servants to take interest in the master's enterprise; and
Ensure that the slave was uneducated, helpless, and dependent, by depriving them of access to education and recreation.

Treatment of slaves tended to be harsher on large plantations, which were often managed by overseers and owned by absentee slaveholders, in contrast with small slave-owning families, where the closer relationship between the owners and slaves sometimes resulted in a more humane environment.

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Source: Boundless. “Treatment of Slaves in the U.S..” Boundless U.S. History. Boundless, 21 Jul. 2015. Retrieved 22 Jul. 2015 from https://www.boundless.com/u-s-histor...-u-s-652-9460/

Yeah, RARE was probably the wrong word to use. You also seem to be under the impression that I am sympathetic to slavery. I am not. What I do object to is the unequal treatment the South receives compared to the relative silence of the atrocities and discrimination of the North directed at the blacks and Irish.

[fm93]

But political action is often swayed by popularity.

I wasn't saying anything about political action in this exchange.

The Supreme Court has established a precedent by claiming "changing societal attitudes" as a legitimate factor for making decisions. So, it isn't a poor comparison.

I wasn't talking about making decisions either.

Sure it does. The EVUUULLL slave massas who beat the poor slaves and denied them everything except food and meager shelter. That's exactly the imagery that is bandied about in this entire debate. It was RARE, but it was effective to use by opponents.

Nothing in my post even hinted at masters beating their slaves. What it did say is that slaves were not treated with equal dignity--with genuinely rare exceptions, slaves were not given access to education, or the same rights and freedoms as non-black society generally received.

[rogue06]

Again, you are comparing the 1% of plantation owners to the rest, who were not anywhere near as brutal.



Yeah, RARE was probably the wrong word to use. You also seem to be under the impression that I am sympathetic to slavery. I am not. What I do object to is the unequal treatment the South receives compared to the relative silence of the atrocities and discrimination of the North directed at the blacks and Irish.

Life back then was brutal for most people, period. Slaves on a plantation were expected to work from sun up to sun down during the growing and harvesting season and often got very poor quality food. But the same was true for poor free farmers who often had nothing to eat at all. And if you worked in a factory up north you worked that way year around. Several historians have argued that the conditions of slaves were better than those of free industrial workers^[1].

If they got sick slaves would more often than not get medical treatment (such as it was back then) because their owners didn't want to lose their investment. A factory, mill or mine worker was on his own since the boss had a large pool of unemployed people to pick a replacement from.

Moreover, if slaves complained that an overseer was being especially cruel or unfair it was hardly rare for the slave owner to fire them again because they were often very protective of their "property." This did not happen to foremen and overseers in factories, mills and mines since the owners had nothing invested in their workers and they could easily be replaced by those less prone to be "trouble-makers."

Another difference was that the young children of slaves weren't expected to work except for doing relatively simple chores whereas the horrific treatment of child laborers in industrial centers is infamous.

Still, let me be clear, I'd argue that the very real possibility that your family could be broken up and sold more than made up for this -- although if you got sent to the "poor house" families were separated there.

One last thing to consider is that as unarguably horrible as life was for a slave in North America it was by many magnitudes better than what it was like in the Caribbean and South America. For example, it is known that at least 90% of African slaves were imported into the Caribbean and South America with only about 6% being imported to North America. Yet by 1825, the U.S. had a quarter of blacks in the New World.

In the Caribbean and Brazil, the slave death rate was so high and the birth rate so low that they could not sustain their population without importations from Africa. And while the death rate of U.S. slaves was roughly equivalent to that of Jamaican slaves, the fertility rate was more than 80% higher.



















1 For instance, before after the start of the Industrial Revolution the life expectancy rate for those living in industrial areas was far less than for those in rural areas. This can be seen in statistics from England where in 1841 the average life expectancy in rural areas was 45 years of age but was only 37 in London and an only 26 in Liverpool. But a more pertinent figure are the estimates that the life expectancy for a free, white person in the U.S. around 1850 was 40 whereas it was 36 for a slave -- although I've seen more than one commentator state that those figures are true only for those who made it out of infancy (slaves had double the infant mortality rate!)

[Tassman]

I'm talking about the "inalienable rights" of the Declaration, not the established rights of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. How someone interprets the right to "liberty" and the "pursuit of happiness" can, and often do, conflict.

The only “right” that matters is the right of equal protection for all citizens as guaranteed by The Constitution. The Constitution is the supreme law of the United States and if conflict arises then it’s the role of the Supreme Court to definitively interpret it.

Yes it does. It proved that independence was more important to the LEADERS of the Confederacy than slavery was.

Yes, “independence” to continue the abominable practice of slavery without interference. Apparently, in your view, the views of those who were not “the LEADERS of the Confederacy”, i.e. the slaves, were of no account. This point continually escapes you.

Exactly. Those "inalienable rights" frequently collide. So, why does one set trump another?

What trumps everything is the constitutional right of equal protection for all citizens as guaranteed by the Constitution.

Unconstitutional, perhaps. Right? That's another matter entirely. Enforced servitude under threat of penalty is quite harmful to a business IMO.

Adherence to the Constitution is what’s important for people living under the rule of law, not what may be "harmful for business". In any event, there’s no “enforced servitude” for the cake-shop owners, merely the denial of their desire to discriminate against those they personally disagree with.

Both had men and women. Both were on earth too. Reductionist drivel is all you have offered.

The common denominator between the two was and is racial supremacy.

Sure it does. The EVUUULLL slave massas who beat the poor slaves and denied them everything except food and meager shelter. That's exactly the imagery that is bandied about in this entire debate. It was RARE, but it was effective to use by opponents.

The fact is that slaves were, by definition, second-class citizens. They were not granted equal dignity and had no right of free movement. In short they were the property of their masters. Morally speaking this is utterly unacceptable at all levels…no matter how well they might have been cared for in some instances.

[shunyadragon]

Again, you are comparing the 1% of plantation owners to the rest, who were not anywhere near as brutal.

Slavery was an integral part of the economic system of the South, and the white population "the rest" supported the institution of slavery, White Supremacy, and reasons for secession from the United States.

I also question your figure of 1% considering the very large slave population of the South.

Yeah, RARE was probably the wrong word to use. You also seem to be under the impression that I am sympathetic to slavery. I am not. What I do object to is the unequal treatment the South receives compared to the relative silence of the atrocities and discrimination of the North directed at the blacks and Irish.

Based on your response, yes you definitely appear sympathetic to slavery. This response does not change your apparent sympathy toward slavery, as kinder and gentler than the reality of slavery. Your statements in other posts do also seem to be apologetic to the prevalence of the agenda of slavery in the South, and ignoring the clear statements in the Corner Stone speech and all declarations of secession of all states except Kentucky, which declared the reason for secession was the preservation of slavery and White Supremacy.

The Irish were never subject to the slavery of the Blacks in the South, and the Indentured Servitude, involving the Irish, poor whites, and other white minorities of the North, cannot be compared to the brutality and human degradation of the economic institution of slavery in the South. The Irish and other white minorities of the North were absorbed into the general 'white' population of the North in a few generations. This has never been true of Blacks. Slavery did not exist in the North to the degree that slavery existed in the South, and neither was the level of brutality. Slavery in the North was predominantly domestic and on a very small scale, and not a primary economic institution.

Yes, indentured servitude existed among whites and among blacks in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Yes, unfortunately child labor of poor whites, including newly immigrated minorities like the Irish, existed throughout the country and Europe in the 18th and 19th century, but this represents a separate issue. It progressively has become illegal, even though it still exists today around the world.

[Bill the Cat]

Slavery was an integral part of the economic system of the South, and the white population "the rest" supported the institution of slavery, White Supremacy, and reasons for secession from the United States.

Which has nothing to do with how often slaves were brutalized. There were also abolitionists in the south who did NOT support slavery, but remained in the South during secession and war.

I also question your figure of 1% considering the very large slave population of the South.

Source: http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=13&psid=3757

9. Approximately how many American slaveowners had more than 50 slaves in 1860?

a. 10,000 By 1860, only 2.7% of southern slave holders owned more than 50 slaves and only 0.1% owned 200 or more. These 2.8% of whites owned one quarter of all the slaves in the South.

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Based on your response, yes you definitely appear sympathetic to slavery.

Then you are being stupid.

This response does not change your apparent sympathy toward slavery, as kinder and gentler than the reality of slavery.

Reflecting on the facts does not make me sympathetic, nor do the facts that most slaves were NOT beaten daily make it "kinder".

Your statements in other posts do also seem to be apologetic to the prevalence of the agenda of slavery in the South, and ignoring the clear statements in the Corner Stone speech and all declarations of secession of all states except Kentucky, which declared the reason for secession was the preservation of slavery and White Supremacy.

You can't seem to get it through your thick skull that secession was not a declaration of war by the South, and that secession and the war, while loosely connected, were not using the identical rationale. You've horribly misstated my arguments, poorly summarized them, and hen tried to take the moral high ground of fictionalizing the North's shared culpability in race relations. The fact remains that more free blacks lived in the south than in the north. Were it SOOOO bad in the South, why did so many more stay?

Source: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/free-blacks-lived-in-the-north-right/

As if this weren’t surprising enough, it was another fact that drove me to re-read Ira Berlin’s book about freed slaves. All of these people, and their descendants, continued to live in slave-holding Virginia, even during the Civil War. (Their part of Virginia would join the Union as the state of West Virginia in the middle of the war, but they had no way of knowing this when they decided to remain there, rather than flee.) Why didn’t my great-great-great-great-grandparents run away to safety in the North, rather than remain in the Potomac Valley region of slave-holding western Virginia, about 30 miles, as a matter of fact, from where I was born? Free Negroes headed north just as soon as they could, right? Didn’t my ancestors’ decision to stay put in the Confederacy run counter to what we all understood about the history of slavery?

I turned to Ira Berlin’s book for answers, and I was astonished to learn that my ancestors’ presence in the South and their decision to stay put during the war were not as uncommon as I had imagined. And perhaps most remarkable of all is the fact that professor Berlin explained the mystery of my ancestors’ (and many others’) seemingly counterintuitive decisions using numbers in plain sight, including those in the 1860 U.S. Census.

In that raging year of Lincoln’s election and Southern secession, there were a total of 488,070 free blacks living in the United States, about 10 percent of the entire black population. Of those, 226,152 lived in the North and 261,918 in the South, in 15 states (Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Texas) plus the District of Columbia. Let me break that down further: A few months before the Confederacy was born, there were 35,766 more free black people living in the slave-owning South than in the North, and removing D.C. from the equation wouldn’t have shifted the result. And they stayed there during the Civil War.

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The Irish were never subject to the slavery of the Blacks in the South, and the Indentured Servitude, involving the Irish, poor whites, and other white minorities of the North, cannot be compared to the brutality and human degradation of the economic institution of slavery in the South.

Degree of slavery in no way invalidates the existence of slavery.

The Irish and other white minorities of the North were absorbed into the general 'white' population of the North in a few generations. This has never been true of Blacks. Slavery did not exist in the North to the degree that slavery existed in the South, and neither was the level of brutality.

Until the 1800's, yes it did.

Source: http://slavenorth.com/

More than 3,000 blacks lived in Rhode Island in 1748, amounting to 9.1 percent of the population; 4,600 blacks were in New Jersey in 1745, 7.5 percent of the population; and nearly 20,000 blacks lived in New York in 1771, 12.2 percent of the population

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Slavery in the North was predominantly domestic and on a very small scale, and not a primary economic institution.

Irrelivant. Slavery was slavery.

[rogue06]

Until the 1800's, yes it did.

Source: http://slavenorth.com/

More than 3,000 blacks lived in Rhode Island in 1748, amounting to 9.1 percent of the population; 4,600 blacks were in New Jersey in 1745, 7.5 percent of the population; and nearly 20,000 blacks lived in New York in 1771, 12.2 percent of the population

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New York City had the highest proportion of slaves of any city outside of Charleston, South Carolina.

Source: The Hidden History of Slavery in New York

Now another blue-blooded institution–the New-York Historical Society–has joined this important public engagement with our past by mounting an ambitious exhibition, “Slavery in New York.” To all those who think slavery was a “Southern thing,” think again. In 1703, 42 percent of New York’s households had slaves, much more than Philadelphia and Boston combined. Among the colonies’ cities, only Charleston, South Carolina, had more.



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Source: HISTORY OF SLAVERY IN NEW YORK

New York has preeminently been the capital of American liberty, the freest city of the nation - its largest, most diverse, its most economically ambitious, and its most open to the world. It was also, paradoxically, for more than two centuries, the capital of American slavery.

As many as 20 percent of colonial New Yorkers were enslaved Africans. First Dutch and then English merchants built the city's local economy largely around supplying ships for the trade in slaves and in what slaves produced - sugar, tobacco, indigo, coffee, chocolate, and ultimately, cotton. New York ship captains and merchants bought and sold slaves along the coast of Africa and in the taverns of their own city. Almost every businessman in 18th-century New York had a stake, at one time or another, in the traffic in human beings.

During the colonial period, 41 perent of the city's households had slaves, compared to 6 percent in Philadelphia and 2 percent in Boston. Only Charleston, South Carolina, rivaled New York in the extent to which slavery penetrated everyday life. To be sure, each slaveholding New Yorker usually owned only one or two persons.

...

Slavery was no milder in the urban North than in the Deep South. Instances of abusive treatment permeate public and personal records. The city's Common Council passed one restrictive law after another: forbidding blacks from owning property or bequeathing it to their children; forbidding them to congregate at night or in groups larger than three; requiring them to carry lanterns after dark and to remain south of what is now Worth Street; threatening the most severe punishments, even death, for theft, arson, or conspiracy to revolt - and carrying out these punishments brutally and publicly time and again.



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