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Your opinion just isn't backed up by the factual realities of slavery in the Americas. As I posted earlier:
Well... I'm not an economist nor a historian of the U.S. economy during periods in which slavery was legal in the United States. So, to some extent I'm just parroting what I read from sources not myself. However, I've taken a few economic courses and a one semester course of the history of capitalism and labor in the United States.
In economic terms employers own the labor of their employees but they do not own their employees, their physical bodies. Enslavement is a concept of owning both the person and their labor.
I'm persuaded that in economic terms there are benefits to the owners of labor in owning the people laboring (slavery). Some slavery systems--like in Latin America--often involved monetarily compensating those enslaved (in this case enslaved black people) for their labor. In this way some were able to purchase their freedom over time. But the pay was a pittance.
If my deceased Black-American grandfather (who drove a mule on a Mississippi farm as a young man, before coming to Milwaukee, and had no more than a 6th grade education I came to find out) is to be believed, some black slaves in the U.S. South were compensated with chits of paper, not official currency per se, that allowed them to buy products in the local stores. I presume the small store owners were reimbursed with hard cash from either banks or the slave owners. So, the circular flow of the economy would still turn.
Inexpensive labor allows employers--or slave holders--to sell and export their goods at cheaper prices. Although, before the U.S. Revolutionary War Britain had set the prices at which raw goods from its American colonies could be sold to the British motherland. But before and after the U.S. Revolutionary War "wealth" was concentrated in a relatively small number of hands in the U.S. and in England.
The Great American middle-class did not come until much later. The conditions (and pay) free working whites worked under in the factories of the industrial North were horrendous. For all intents and purposes those people were slaves. In fact, the white children working in the factories, working looooong hours, would be motivated to stay awoke on the job by seeing children caught falling asleep strapped to a metal beam and then publicly flogged in front of them.
The conditions of labor--and the 8 hour work day--as we understand them today took a while to come. The returning WWII Generation through combined means of GI Bill and through labor unions, arguably built the Great American middle-class.
But what many don't realize is that the Eastern Northern States used black slave labor. New York City was partly built by the use of black slave labor.
Every now and then, a fact goes viral. Current case in point: that slaves helped construct the U.S. Capitol, where the son of an African man is set to be sworn in as the nation's 44th president.
Quote:
It turns out there's far less in the historical record on the subject than one might expect. Early historians of the Capitol's construction were largely indifferent to the work of common laborers, both paid and slave. Records from the time are spotty.
Only in the past 15 years or so has attention been trained on the role slaves played in constructing perhaps the nation's most important building — and the work has been led not by professional historians, but by individuals who developed a personal interest in the subject, such as retired Washington television reporter Ed Hotaling and freelance writer Bob Arnebeck.
Quote:
Slaves were likely involved in all aspects of construction, including carpentry, masonry, carting, rafting, plastering, glazing and painting, the task force reported. And slaves appear to have shouldered alone the grueling work of sawing logs and stones.
Slave crews also toiled at the marble and sandstone quarries that provided the stone to face the structure — lonely, grueling work with bleak living conditions in rural Virginia and elsewhere. "Keep the yearly hirelings at work from sunrise to sunset — particularly the Negroes," the commissioners wrote to quarry operator William O'Neale in 1794.
The commissioners' use of slave labor was unremarkable for the time. When the Capitol was constructed, from 1793 to 1826, the building trades in almost every colony augmented the work force with slave labor. This would have been especially true in the Potomac region — the home of about half the 750,000 African-Americans living in the United States, according to the 1972 book Free Negroes in the District of Columbia, by Letitia Woods Brown.
From a standpoint of a nation--on a graph--increasing its rightward shift in economic efficiency you are correct large scale slave labor in a nation is counter productive and will only enrich a few. One might keep that in mind when reflecting on U.S. corporations that left the Industrial Midwest and Northeast for the union busting South ("Right to Work" states), then left the South for Mexico, then left Mexico for Vietnam. Seeking the least cost in labor.
Of course, there is a balancing point. Costs of labor can't be too excessive either. Neither too excessive or too small. Economists crank out and crunch numbers using complex algebraic and calculus formulas. All--or-mostly, over my head. So, they figure that out because I can't.
First of all I KNOW that whites as well others were slaves too BUT to compare ANY SLAVERY in America to that of black slavery in America is RIDICULOUS and you KNOW IT. Secondly I know what I'm talking about I have been schooled by WELL educated history scholars face to face who do this for a living NOT that generic BULL they teach in the school system. So don't u try to come at me with that BULL Tom!
If you were in front of scholars that told you about the conditions of black slavery but refused to tell you the conditions on white or even original American slavery, then I question their motives. In school, you were taught that chattel slavery only happened to black people. That is WRONG. Chattel slavery, not indentured servitude, happened to thousands, if not millions, of whites as well. This is history that is refused to be discussed in our school system. If you don't believe it, fine. You dont have to and I am good with that. However, verify the sources I could give you and research for yourself.
As for the Tom thing. Is it that easy for you to get in your emotions?
Um...I don't think Africa is my country either. Generations of my family were slaves...their entire heritage was taken away. It's such an idiotic statement to make. Thanks like saying all white people need to go to Europe....not considering individual countries of origin like France, GB, etc.
Out of curiosity, what ancestry would this be?
The German white side of my family may have been enslaved at one point but that would have been over 2,000 years ago during the era of the Roman empire. Contrast that to my black side of my family, I was born in 1971, that's what... a few years away from Jim Crow? My black grandparents would have known old black people that actually lived through slavery.
Or are you a non-white person that is non-black as well? Like Asian?
If you were in front of scholars that told you about the conditions of black slavery but refused to tell you the conditions on white or even original American slavery, then I question their motives. In school, you were taught that chattel slavery only happened to black people. That is WRONG. Chattel slavery, not indentured servitude, happened to thousands, if not millions, of whites as well. This is history that is refused to be discussed in our school system. If you don't believe it, fine. You dont have to and I am good with that. However, verify the sources I could give you and research for yourself.
As for the Tom thing. Is it that easy for you to get in your emotions?
Well we will agree to disagree. Also I will chill with the Tom thing lol.. It's all good.
What I'm stating isn't exactly a controversial position. The United States did not become the world's largest economy because of agriculture. The 19th century was the story of agriculture, the primary labor of human societies for literally thousands of years, being surpassed by the industrial revolution. Industry and factory jobs brought millions of immigrants banging at the door to get these jobs. No one was banging at the door to become slaves, and the outlaw of the slave trade in the early 1800s meant that the growth of the slaveowners' labor force was directly limited by the human gestation period.
Now, if the great factories of places like New York and Philadelphia had been powered by slave labor you might have a point, but I haven't seen (and please quote it if I missed it) any evidence provided by you to back up your claim that the US was built by slave labor. Its not a moral thing (go a few pages back if you want to see my very strong opinions on the Confederacy), its just a factual issue. The wealth created by slavery was almost completely limited to the Southern aristocracy. The only thing it built was their personal fortune, which didn't drive development or infrastructure- it just drove larger plantations and more profitable agriculture for their families.
During the early 20th Century the factories of New York, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee were not much better than Southern slavery. In fact they were arguably worse conditions to work in than domestic slavery, or slavery in skilled trades, and maybe even agricultural slavery in the cotton fields. Only the rice plantations in the South I'm certain were worse than the Northern factories.
European labor were lured to the American North through the advertisements of jobs and good earnings. Some respects that was true were jobs and money was harder to come by in some of their native lands like Southern Italy and Sicily. But one will note many of these European immigrants stuck in poor, rat infested communities, in factory towns in cities like Pittsburgh, were psychologically depressed. And at some point both men and women working in the factories picked up guns to battle both police and Pinkerton security men hired by the factory owners to crack down on protesting workers. I mean... labor from factories in the U.S. literally got into gun battles with Pinkerton forces.
The 8 hour workday (where overtime past 8 hours requires time-and-a-half pay) was purchased in the United States with the blood shed of working men in the Midwest.
Cheap Mexican labor helps drive the U.S. agricultural business today as well. I'm sure you heard it complained by people on the political right and those owning agricultural fields, "Americans won't work on farmers as laborers because they want too much money." They say it in a negative way implying American working class greed.
And The United States and Brazil both pretty much feed the world. These two countries today are the largest agricultural exporters. If the U.S. Federal Government were not subsidizing the U.S. agricultural industry (corporate welfare) Brazil would have already marginalized U.S. agricultural exports. That's even with the United States today being the most advanced nation in agricultural science.
On the eve of the American Civil War in the mid-1800s cotton was America’s leading export, and raw cotton was essential for the economy of Europe. The cotton industry was one of the world’s largest industries, and most of the world supply of cotton came from the American South. This industry, fueled by the labor of slaves on plantations, generated huge sums of money for the United States and influenced the nation’s ability to borrow money in a global market. In many respects, cotton’s financial and political influence in the 19th century can be compared to that of the oil industry in the early 21st century.
Its just not that easy to answer. All I do know is that I cannot answer by what plantation owners did with the proceeds since they are also creating a cash crop in the process. It clearly was a source of international liquidity for the US .
That was an interesting article. I was unaware of any of that. "King Cotton diplomacy."
From my undestanding, books by Michael J Hoffman is one. There are several authors that have came out with this information. Interesting as far as I'm concerned. I'm researching it myself. Then when you look up where the terms redlegs, rednecks, and such come from, the article may be spot on but that's another topic so I won't derail the thread with it.
Whites remained slaves until the Emancipation Proclamation. In 1855, Frederic Law Olmsted, the landscape architect who designed New York’s Central Park, was in Alabama on a pleasure trip and saw bales of cotton being thrown from a considerable height into a cargo ship’s hold. The men tossing the bales somewhat recklessly into the hold were Negroes; the men in the hold were Irish.
Olmsted inquired about this to a ship worker. “Oh,” said the worker, “the ******s are worth too much to be risked here; if the Paddies are knocked overboard or get their backs broke, nobody loses anything.”
I would infer from that last paragraph that the Irish laborers were not slaves.
Those two paragraphs alone make the thesis of that blog rather dubious.
The black laborers if slaves would have likely cost the slave owner more because he or she bought them in the slave market and would want to recoup the money spent on them and then make a profit off of them.
The cost of the free white Irishmen would be less if one went overboard or broke their back because I'm hazarding a guess their employers were not paying health insurance for them in 1855 nor paying into unemployment or worker's compensation. Plus, their wages was likely tiny, and their employer did not spend money buying them.
Rarely were slaves mistreated. They were too expensive/valuable to damage.
What farmer whips his cows? What farmer burned their mules? What good is a pig with body parts cut off?
I know it sounds good and it's fun to pretend that white people are evil devils and act like you just stepped off the Amistad but your hyper emotional claims don't hold up.
That's not true, Gunther.
Farmers don't have to worry about their cows leaving them to sell their labor to acquire a house and luxury goods.
Violence and the threat of violence is what kept slavery viable. Prisons without gates, bars, and security guards willing and ready to use violent force would not keep prisoners confined to prisons.
Actually, some of the old Southern prison I believe, were gate-less and resembled large plantations in some ways, but they had guards with rifles that would gun a running prisoner in a heartbeat.
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