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If he was doing well he would not sell those slaves "that he doesn’t need" Why would he convert a stable currency into an unstable currency?
I said in the example the:
" If a slave owner only needs 200 slave and he has 250 then he would sell
off the ones they don't need, and keep breeding the ones they have
producing more free slaves for the slave owner to sell to others. "
The babies were free slaves owned by the slave owner ... big profits ! ! !
Quote:
Originally Posted by thriftylefty
"When girl child is old enough to have children then the heard of slaves grows and grows with many free slaves or will be sold later on to another slave owner. " ????
there were no "free slaves" on plantations
When the slave babies born they were free when you did not have to pay for them.
Farmers do the samething with live stock all the time.
really? Last time I look it was the North invading the South not the other way around. I didn't know it was treason for residents of the South to defend their land from federal troops with the main purpose to destroy the economy, infrastructure and private property and humiliate the south.
I don't know what is worse, slavery of a small % of the population that would have ended eventually or invading the south and having the bloodiest war in our history that many civilians died that had nothing to do with slavery and the economy destroyed........to me the latter was much worse......but hey that's my opinion.
The Civil War almost destroyed our country..........again there were other ways to end slavery or let it run out than going to war. Six hundred thousand Americans died in a senseless civil war…. President Abraham Lincoln did this just to enhance and get rid of the original intent of the republic. Every other major country in the world got rid of slavery without a civil war.
You are forgetting one thing.....slavery in the catholic countries wasn't as oppressive as the Usa.
The children of slaveholders and slaves even gained status from these unions.
You are also forgetting about Haiti,whci did have a bloody war.
Many aren't thinking like humans either in this thread...if you were a slave,would you have waited 10 or 20 years to be free just to save the country?
No,and neither would the slaves.
Their population was almost equal to whites,so I don't think it would have been peaceful.
" If a slave owner only needs 200 slave and he has 250 then he would sell
off the ones they don't need, and keep breeding the ones they have
producing more free slaves for the slave owner to sell to others. "
The babies were free slaves owned by the slave owner ... big profits ! ! !
When the slave babies born they were free when you did not have to pay for them.
Farmers do the samething with live stock all the time.
.
Forgive me I thought free as in liberty, the mortality rate was not that good as you can imagine with slave populations. Some slave women killed their offspring rather tham raise them. The only reason to sell a slave was to pay a debt and a prime slave would be one who could be productive, probally not a baby.
selling a slave you don't need is like taking money out of the bank you don't need so you convert money into something more profitable.
.
The South slave owners with there free slave labor and free
child labor by birth was gaining in wealth like the North who did not want equallity.
The Wealthy in the North wanted to free the Southern slaves so they would
flee to the North and give the wealthy and rich cheaper labor
In factories and the labor force.
Fred Southern slaves would work for less money than the white people in the North.
That way they would slow down the production of the South
and increase the Norths economey.
The North did not care about African Slaves, or the white poor either ! ! !
All they wanted was cheap labor, and domination of America just like today ! ! !
.
It's true that most northerners were not motivated by slavery in choosing to fight. It was the legitimacy of succession and the effects of that which motivated them. And once a war starts you don't need a reason. It makes it's own.
But the north did not need more cheap labor. They had the poor of Europe pouring across the seas, often with factory experience, and already if badly overcrowded places for them to go. They didn't have to fork out anything for children, old people, sick people or iresponsible people. There were twenty waiting to take their place. Wages were tiny and as the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire showed eventually, safety non-existant. Our of cities they had plenty of immigrants who worked mines for pennies, and child labor was predominant. One of my teachers in college has lost a couple fingers as a child. He was from Pennsulvania and worked in the sluce from a mine as a child.
The north did not need or want the slaves that would be freed in the war. They had plenty. If they had they would have farmed out industry to the south, paid only those able to work a small wage and let the welfare of those who couldn't work a factory slide.
The south also used immigrants who were only paid if they could work. They used them for dangerous jobs where death was too likely to risk a slave. Irish were perfered for canal work, for instance, since it was so costly to the workers. Irish were just workers you could get more of cheap. Slaves reperesented material wealth, and most plantations when they accounted for their wealth it was predominantly in slaves. This was one reason why freeing them was so unthinkable. They represented the majority of wealth in the south, not land, crops or goods.
If slavery would have ended on its own is debatable. Eventually when factory methods reached the area, slaves would be overly costly. You don't need so many bodies and you don't need the babies/old people/sick people you have to care for. What did happen post war is this morphed into a new serfdom with share cropping. The share cropper/serf is forced to stay where they are. They have land and keep some for themselves IF they have enough but must pay their obligation. Technically the share cropper is not a slave, but in reality they are not free either. Lets note that there was no color isolation in share cropping either. Poor whites also fell into this trap and had more in common with the ex slaves than the upper crust whites. There were of course small children and sick people and old people, but they were no longer the responsibility of the land owner. Its very possible that in time the agricultural situation without the war would have shifted to this new version of serfdom anyway because it worked.
Without the war and the disruption of southern society, slavery could have continued on until economics and technology removed its value. It was part of the social equation. It should be remember that there were also black slave owners who didn't treat their property much different than whites, and a few were wealthy. Their economic wealth was also in chattel bodies.
There is also the likelyhood that violence, perpetrated by slaves and owners and the radical abolition movement by inspiration if it looked like it would never be would have changed the scenerio, and an undeclared guerilla war might have replaced the civil war in time.
To cloth a slave was very cheap, they did not wear suits and ties,
and dresses like the rich and wealthy.
Go look at some of the old pictures of real slaves and you will see
it did not cost an arm and a leg to cloth ore feed them.
Feeding a slave was cheap, because they raised there own crops, and were given
left over guts, feet, hearts, livers, lungs, blood, heads, brains, tails, ribcages,
and everything else a Slave owner did not want after a hog was slaughtered,
same with a cow, all throw away cheap meat. Chickes cost almost nothing.
Houses were old shacks which were used family after family,
with large numbers of children.
Livestock feed was cheap, and the stock produced and made
the owner more money than they he could sell feed for.
Feeding slaves was cheap because you could not sell it and make more money
just like livestock feeding today.
You buy one male slave and 10 - 25 female slaves, and you have a
mulitiplying heard of slaves having children every year which would be put to work
in the field at a very young age, or sold to another slave owner for large profits.
It's common scince the more slave the more money to be made,
just like a heard of cattle, horses, hogs, goats, sheep, etc. ! ! !
Slave trade was big money for the Slave owners, just like today.
.
Slaves were the major wealth in the south. Cash was often not a major part of the planters wealth. But eventually if things changed, just multiplying the numbers of slaves as wealth wasn't going to work because the world was turning to cash as a measure of wealth. If wealthy southern planters wanted the goods from Europe they liked so much they were going to have to have more currency to buy them. And the British who had bought most of the cotton crop, often for trade in goods, had planted their own in India and had even cheaper labor than the south. Eventually their major buyer would have vanished and they would have had land, slaves and cotton which did not bring the payoff it had before.
Thing would have to change at that point since the economic dynamics would have changed.
No one forced southerners to persecute Blacks, they chose to be wicked. To argue that a major evil shouldn't be destroyed because a lesser one might replace it doesn't make much sense to me.
What are you talking about; slavery or the persecution of blacks?
Either way the southerner did not invent it. Slavery existed everywhere, but was slowly abandoned in the north. And persecution existed everywhere. So now your "choice" is not a choice at all. It is simply where people found themselves.
Did Washington and Jefferson choose to be wicked when they owned slaves? No. They woke up in a world where that was the norm. And so it is with the southerner in 1850. He woke up to a world where slavery existed. He didn't invent it.
The world that was created as a result of the Civil War was awful for the new freed blacks. No one would hire them, no one would feed them. They voted themselves into office, but were elbowed aside by literate, angry, armed white people. And that lasted the better part of 100 years.
And it's not that a lesser evil might replace slavery; it's that a lesser evil did replace slavery. All I'm saying is that there may have been a way to avoid that. There was a way, obviously, because they did it in the northern states quite nicely.
If he was doing well he would not sell those slaves "that he doesn’t need" Why would he convert a stable currency into an unstable currency?
But slaves were not currency They were assets, a commodity that could be used to collateralize loans. A southern planter could not go to a dress store and hand over a slave to buy a dress, or seed for the next planting season. To bring home the point, following the abolition of the African slave trade, slave owners in Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware made the domestic exportation of slaves a lucrative enterprise. In the 1850's South Carolina exported 65,000 African slaves while at the same time increasing cotton production by 60,000 bales and an increase of its slave population by 17,000.
Quote:
He could risk 50 slaves or $2.5-3 million in property (today’s estimate) to expand his operation and pay off the debt with profits if any from cotton production.
That's a curious argument because slaves were property, like horses, mules, or cattle. A slave owner could very well borrow a portion of his slaves, horses, or cattle, only the most desperate or a fool, would offer 100% of his assets. And as in the case of South Carolina, the excess slaves could be sold off without any harm to production.
Quote:
Eugene Genovese, who passed away about a year ago and was one of the early writers in slave economics, said slave labor, was not that productive. Although I don't agree with everything he wrote, most of what I have gathered from him and other writers on the subject is that self sufficiency was the main goal of the plantation system not profit.
Genovese's "The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South" was ground breaking work, but his economic analysis was faulty and subsequent analysis by economic historians has revealed major errors in his analysis. As for what you "gathered" from Genovese, let me say that plantations were not corporations with "profits" flowing to investors and with that in mind, "self-sufficiency is in the eye of the slave holder. Plantation owners did not operate on a break even basis making just enough to "get by" but were the basis for the accumulation of great wealth (wealth, revenue in excess of operating expense = profit).
It is impossible to know when or if slavery would have been eliminated without the Civil War. It seems unlikely, given that the slave-owning states were willing to commit treason and take up arms against the country in order to preserve it, but I don't claim to know for a fact that it would not have ended eventually.
What I find abhorrent, though, is the view implicit in this claim that it would have been morally justified to force the millions of enslaved people already living under slavery, and untold numbers of generations who would have followed them, to continue to suffer under slavery until their owners found it convenient to free them.
Slavery was an unmitigated evil, and the Confederate apologists who argue that the slaves should have been happy to wait for its end have a grotesquely twisted sense of morality.
I don't know if slavery would have ended or not, but likely morphed into something like sharecropping after the British economic market for southern cotton dissapeared as they were growing their own in India. The north would still have abolitionist sentiment, and even if it was not sufficent to change things, it would have found a spotlight. Where this went would have been an unknown. Also the British abolished slavery before the civil war, and crippled the atlantic traffic but boarding and seizing any ship engaged in it. It became a more risky business with the mightest navy in the world out to stop you. Pressure within Britan might have made the trade climate not so good within the South.
But I don't see ANYONE with any implicit or not claim that not having the war would have been morally justified if slavery ended anyway. Morality has nothing to do with it. Its a what if question. You have to look at the factual situation at the time and the known changes to come which would have anyway. Then you guess. Or say its a toss up. But nobody is justifying slavery by saying the civil war might not have been needed to eventually end it. Just saying it might have ended anyway with no qualifiers.
Look at the what ifs about WW2. What if Britan had been conquered by the Nazi's? One effect would have been the destruction of a lot of British citizens who were 'undesirable' or considered suspicious. But when arguing how this would have effected the war this isn't a factor. It is a side effect.
What if's are very interesting but you have to keep out the emotional agendas to really look at the possibilities.
Their population was almost equal to whites,so I don't think it would have been peaceful.
True, but I think it still would've taken a lot longer for a rebellion to happen. If population imbalance alone would cause a revolution, then apartheid in South Africa would've only lasted a few years instead of several decades.
My take is that slavery probably would've lasted into the mid 20th century when you'd get to a point where everyone in the rest of America would be outraged and join into any "slave rebellion movement" either directly or indirectly......or maybe we would've had a Civil War anyway, just that it would've been 50-100 years later than the actual one.
This article may be proof that with no Civil War it may have even lasted until the 1960s:
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They were assets, a commodity that could be used to collateralize loans. A southern planter could not go to a dress store and hand over a slave to buy a dress, or seed for the next planting season. To bring home the point, following the abolition of the African slave trade, slave owners in Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware made the domestic exportation of slaves a lucrative enterprise. In the 1850's South Carolina exported 65,000 African slaves while at the same time increasing cotton production by 60,000 bales and an increase of its slave population by 17,000. 
