Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Is this the 'History' forum or the 'Distorted History' forum? Some of the responses here, particularly when it comes to US History, sure do make me wonder.
A good question would be, what were slaves free of after being freed? And what aspect of slavery could they free themselves of. For all practical purposes their post slavery lives closely resembled their lives during slavery. We put too much emphasis on the word free. IMO they were only free to choose their master.
While growing up in the Midwest I had neighbors from Mississippi who still went back down south to pick cotton during cotton picking season in the 70's. For the most part their lives hadn't changed that much in over 100 years of so called freedom.
If by ‘choose their master’, you really mean ‘choose their employer’, well, welcome to reality! That is the choice the great majority of Americans make every day. Everyone is FREE to decide who they want to work for, or FREE to work for themselves, or FREE to decide not to work at all.
If by ‘choose their master’, you really mean ‘choose their employer’, well, welcome to reality! That is the choice the great majority of Americans make every day. Everyone is FREE to decide who they want to work for, or FREE to work for themselves, or FREE to decide not to work at all.
What else do you expect of the meaning of Free?
They got essentially the same deal as before but freedom allowed them to decide who they would be getting the same treatment from. Maya Angelou told the sad tale of how a black man would sit on the porch while his white "boss" had his way with his wife inside his house. This was part of being free ? We're not talking about today we are talking about how much freedom did a black person really have in 1865?
A good question would be, what were slaves free of after being freed? And what aspect of slavery could they free themselves of. For all practical purposes their post slavery lives closely resembled their lives during slavery. We put too much emphasis on the word free. IMO they were only free to choose their master.
While growing up in the Midwest I had neighbors from Mississippi who still went back down south to pick cotton during cotton picking season in the 70's. For the most part their lives hadn't changed that much in over 100 years of so called freedom.
But if you asked them the question, what percentage wanted to return to the former state?
My maternal great-grandparents continued to work as sharecroppers on the same plantationi on which they had been slaves.
But they were able to do extra work to finally get ahead of the plantation debt schem. They went to Oklahoma to run in the 1889 land rush. They staked out land with a stream and built a saw mill and ranch that supported the family until the 1960s (when, unfortunately, my uncle who gained control of the property sold it).
They would not have been able to do that if they had remained slaves.
many slaves didn't want to free themselves. A slave was an expensive investment for a slave owner. It would be like a farmer buying a tractor today. So the slave owners took care of their slaves and made sure they were well fed and survived. Most slaves got medical help when they needed it etc. Surely there were some cases of abuse but that movie 'Roots' in the 1980s was not the normal but a rare exception. The movie was only made to stir up trouble between whites and blacks.
many slaves didn't want to free themselves. A slave was an expensive investment for a slave owner. It would be like a farmer buying a tractor today. So the slave owners took care of their slaves and made sure they were well fed and survived. Most slaves got medical help when they needed it etc. Surely there were some cases of abuse but that movie 'Roots' in the 1980s was not the normal but a rare exception. The movie was only made to stir up trouble between whites and blacks.
many slaves didn't want to free themselves. A slave was an expensive investment for a slave owner. It would be like a farmer buying a tractor today. So the slave owners took care of their slaves and made sure they were well fed and survived. Most slaves got medical help when they needed it etc. Surely there were some cases of abuse but that movie 'Roots' in the 1980s was not the normal but a rare exception. The movie was only made to stir up trouble between whites and blacks.
Which is why the idea of a federal Fugitive Slave Act to be passed by Congress was totally necessary and was never passed.
I was browsing online several years ago, and ran across a site which had a confederate school book. There was a section which tried to explain why blacks were used as slaves. It recalled how several decades if not a century earlier, the British had tried to use people from India as slave labor under the lash, in much the same way as the south was doing it, and it was an utter failure. As I recall, it said the people fiercely resisted it to such a degree, they refused to do the work properly and so often would lay down their life resisting the master and murdering the overseer, sabotaging the plantation, ect ect. They did that so often the British (I think it was the British they referred to) had to give up on using them for slaves because the same problem repeated itself on multiple plantations.
Therefore, I believe the key to how the slaves could have avoided being locked into generational slavery, rested upon the first boatloads of black slaves who arrived in the Americas back in the 1700's. Most people today would rather fight or die, than be a slave under those conditions. Had the first round of black slaves resisted to that degree, there would soon no longer be a large scale plantation slave system like that. They might have used prison labor for that, to some degree, but would soon abandon the idea of bringing over blacks from Africa.
As it was, just from watching the mini series Roots, Toby was a hard case, but he was the exception, not the rule. Newly arrived blacks to the plantation were often trained by other blacks to forget their past and taught to speak only English, accept their new name given by the master, and taught to do all the the work tasks required on the plantation without complaint or resistance. I suspect the reasoning for this behavior was that life on the plantation must have been slightly more palatable to them, or should I say, not much worse than what they had back in Africa.
Interesting but I think you may have misread about "India as slaves". Slavery is essentially part of India's historical culture, it's always existed there. Probably more slaves there than anywhere else in the world (still is in fact). Anyways none of what you said is accurate. East Indians and slavery went together like butter and popcorn, the reason that slaves were not exported from India is because there was enough of a market in India for slaves (or elsewhere in the eastern hemisphere). In fact, when slavery was outlawed in jolly old England, it continued in the british colonies of India until only a couple decades before the US Civil War (how convenient for freedom loving English to outlaw slavery where it wasn't needed but to keep it in colonies where it was needed), and then continued long after with the concept of indentured servitude (slavery in everything but name).
I suspect what you read about was not east indian slaves, but the slavery of native americans. Indeed American Indians were originally used as slaves in north and south america but the problem is three fold: 1.) It was easier for them to run away back to their tribe, 2.) Western diseases killed many, 3.) Indians started wars amongst themselves to capture slaves to sell to Europeans, essentially destroying themsevles in the process. It really had nothing to do with them not adapting to slavery. Anyways so then the African slave trade began. In South American - Indians simply died in Spanish and Portuguese run mine pits faster than they could even replace them and they found Africans much more robust for that environment.
When Alan or John Lomax went to Mississippi collecting (stealing) songs from sharecroppers, he asked one of the musicians did he learn this song here or in town. The man replied that he didn't know there was a town. He thought the whole country was no different than the acreage he lived on. So thinking that a slave could of had the ideal that he could leave and go somewhere else and his life would be different was a stretch.
Slavery was a dying method of production. The importation of new African slave labor was long banned before before the Civil War even came about.
This notion or implication that America would’ve just continued slavery forever, had the South won, has no basis in reality whatsoever.
It is quite true that slavery was dying out. The question is: how fast? Some claim it had a decade or two left, while others insinuate that it would still be going strong but for federal invervention. The answer probably lies somewhere in between. Of course, the idea that a slave should have just shut up and accepted his lot because it's really unfair that defenders of his enslavement died fighting to defend it when it (supposedly) would have ended in another twenty or thirty years is unspeakably callous.
But I would like to point out that the banning of the slave trade itself really had no impact on the slave population. The slave trade was banned by Congress in 1808, and the 1810 census showed a slave population of less than 1.2 million. By the time of the 1860 census, there were almost four million slaves in the United States. While the illicit slave trade did continue - aided by nullifying Southern juries who refused to convict the few traders who were caught and put to trial - it provided only a small portion of the increase in slave numbers, the vast majority of which was natural increase.
It is also true that pure economics alone do not explain the course of the slave trade. The South was deeply invested in the idea that slavery was not just utilitarian but a way of life that was right and proper and morally necessary, as exemplified by the Cornerstone Speech of Alexander Stephens - which, as an aside, alone destroys the ludicrous notion that the Civil War was not in large degree fought over the issue of slavery.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Rocko20
It’s no one’s guess, Brazil who had 4 million slaves and was the last country in the western world to ban slavery, abolished slavery in 1888
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know America would’ve abolished it before 1888 even in a southern victory. So about 20 years tops is how much longer it could’ve lasted because America sure as hell didn’t have 4 million slaves like Brazil
You are confused on your numbers. Yes, the United States did have four million slaves. Well, to be precise, ~3,953,000 of them in 1860. In a previous quote you claimed 'American had only about 300K' slaves. That is the approximate number of slaves imported to the United States and its predecessor colonies. But, as shown by the census numbers, the United States had far more. And Brazil never had four million slaves. The four million is the approximate number of slaves imported to Brazil. But unlike in North America, slaves in Brazil did not expand their numbers. Indeed, they couldn't even sustain them. Estimates of the peak number of slaves in Brazil range between 2.5 and 3 million, but the numbers began to fall off after the banning of the slave trade in 1850 in Brazil - by 1872 only about 15% of the Brazilian population of 10 million, or 1.5 million, were slaves. They were imported, worked to death, and replaced by new imports. This is the opposite of the American dynamic, where the 1850 census numbers of 3.2 million slaves show that the numbers of ten years later demonstrate a slave population that had grown by a robust three-quarters of a million. Brazil did import a total of four million slaves, but did so over two centuries, so nowhere near even a majority of that four million were ever alive it once. It appears you have have mistaken the import numbers for a one-time population of slaves.
Anyway, what all of this illustrates is that the Brazilian and American institutions of slavery were so completely disparate that to try and extrapolate what would have happened in the U.S. by what did happen in Brazil is folly.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Rocko20
If Brazil gave up on slavery, the last western country to do so, by 1888 and they had 15 MILLION slaves as a 3rd world country. I assure you America would have given up on it far sooner.
It's comical you would think a 1st world country with 4 million slaves would continue slavery beyond a 3rd world country with 15 million slaves.
Brazil never had anywhere close to 15 million slaves. The country had a total population of about 14 million in 1890. As I noted before, Brazil's declining slave population was 1.5 million in 1872.
As I noted earlier, the Brazil is useless as a comparative tool, but if you're going to insist otherwise you need to at least get your numbers correct. You are citing one incorrect number after another, first claiming that the United States only have 300,000 slaves (it never did - the census of 1790 showed nearly 700,000 slaves, so the U.S. clearly had far more than 300,000 slaves from its founding) and then you claim Brazil had four million slaves (it didn't - again, that was the number of slaves imported into Brazil over centuries) and proceed to then contradict yourself by claiming that Brazil had 15 million slaves at a time when it didn't have that number of people total, free and otherwise).
I don't care about your insistence that slavery would have definitely ended in the United States by 1880 or so, but if you're going to insist on a poor metric (Brazil - worthless as a comparative tool) then at least inform yourself as to what you're talking about. You should also consider that you've clearly reached a conclusion that you want to reach, and are now casting about for data to support it. But that's not how either logic or science works. Conclusions must follow from the data (which you need to know before you can begin developing conclusions).
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
