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Old 05-25-2014, 04:29 AM
Status: "108 N/A" (set 29 days ago)
 
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When the Civil war broke out one wealthy plantation owner abandoned his plantation but transported 200 of his slaves to be hidden on another plantation. In the book Diary From Dixie, Marry Chestnut seems to believe the entire plantation system was only to accumulate Slaves. Even with out a plantation you could hire out your slaves at around $30.00 per month each and not be required to feed or house them. Well over 100,000 slaves lived in the cities in the south. The political economy of the south made slave owners politically powerful as many of them were law makers.

Last edited by thriftylefty; 05-25-2014 at 05:04 AM..
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Old 05-25-2014, 09:03 AM
 
Location: Round Rock, Texas
12,895 posts, read 13,227,554 times
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As Buck Private Cletus Goober (CSA) said, "It's a rich man's war, but a poor man's fight".
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Old 05-25-2014, 12:57 PM
 
Location: Cushing OK
14,539 posts, read 21,193,158 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ovcatto View Post
Actually, I ran across references that in order to be considered a plantation the enterprise required at least it least 1,000 acres and 50 or more slaves. Even more telling is that slave holders with 50 or more slaves owned one third of the slave population that resulted in 60% of all land being owned by 10% of the richest Southern farmers.

I would however go so far as to agree that the romanticized image of "Gone With The Wind" plantations estates populating the slave states inaccurate and while many sumptuous estates did exist, for the most part wealth plantation owners were absentee living instead in cities like Richmond, Charleston, New Orleans, Mobile and Vicksburg.

Two really excellent papers on the economy of Southern agriculture before and after the war.

http://www.econ.upf.edu/gpefm/jm/pdf...JMP%20Ager.pdf

The Agrarian South
Socially, there was a great difference between a planter and someone with a few acres, if they owned a slave or not. It was the inheritance from the early development of the south, with indentured laborers and then a mix and then slaves. But the dynamics didn't change that much. It was a embrassing the model of the English county lord, with multiple acres and many servants. Servants at that time didn't have it much better than slaves anyway. But that was the goal, land and property, which defined power. Since their model vanished slowly as industry overran agriculture, and eventually many of the country lords ended up landless from taxes imposed when the society changed, I wonder if without a civil war to end it the South would have tried to hang on anyway because their culture was so tied to this model and to lose it lose them everything.
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Old 05-26-2014, 08:17 AM
 
Location: Oak Cliff! That's my hood!
103 posts, read 134,308 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ScoPro View Post
Let it be known that Governor Sam Houston of Texas was a Southern Unionist who fought against secession & refused to take the oath of allegiance to the Confederacy. As a result, he was deposed from office.
The apologist BS that is Texas history glosses right over this. If I hear one more thing about how sympathetic Texas was to slaves or how we hardly had any slaves or how we just accidentally wound up in the Confederacy, I'm going to scream. Houston was the Father of Texas and they didn't even give him the honor of stepping down. They were LITERALLY like "pack your crap, bro." That's how much Texas loved slavery.

Quote:
Originally Posted by nightbird47 View Post
Servants at that time didn't have it much better than slaves anyway.
Servants had it far better than slaves. By all accounts, their children were not doomed to automatically be servants and were in no danger of being sold away, never to be seen again. And that's just scratching the surface.
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Old 05-26-2014, 05:32 PM
 
Location: Cushing OK
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Originally Posted by ridethemaverick View Post


Servants had it far better than slaves. By all accounts, their children were not doomed to automatically be servants and were in no danger of being sold away, never to be seen again. And that's just scratching the surface.
My reference was in a comparison to the direct ancestor of the southern plantation, the country estate. This was what the southern planter wanted to bring to mind. The origion of the people who did the farming, and served the family who owned it was serfdom. Serfs were not free and it was a heriditary condition. A form of tenant labor replaced serfdom, but life didn't much change. A tenant who did not pay their rent could not leave, nor could their children. Anyone evicted, or a servant dismissed, stood little chance of finding another job. No job, no food. Starvation especially in cities was a common form of death.

This was the model of the southern plantation. Slavery was just another name for human contol.

If your thinking servants, as in indentured, children were commonly required to remain until age twenty one, and usually the mother chose to stay with them. Depending on when and what kind of work, the death rate was fifty percent on up. Rape was common. They lived as possessions only to end when their indenture was and any added time for punishment or running was paid off. And excape and recapture could add years. Even what they wore belonged to their owner. They had children, they were penalized by time as payback and often the child remaining to pay back its keep.

The point in all these cases is use of other human beings under full control.

I did not say anything was exact, but that it wasn't a good time to be a poor laborer for anyone.
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Old 05-26-2014, 06:47 PM
 
Location: Jamestown, NY
7,840 posts, read 9,158,896 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ridethemaverick View Post
Servants had it far better than slaves. By all accounts, their children were not doomed to automatically be servants and were in no danger of being sold away, never to be seen again. And that's just scratching the surface.
Agreed. Even serfs in the Middle Ages had it better than slaves. They could not be sold like cattle or horses. Moreover, if they managed to escape to a town and stay free for a year and a day, they became free men. There was no Fugitive Serf Law as there was Fugitive Slave Law that required the return of escaped slaves no matter where they were nor how long they had been free.

By the 17th century, English servants had the right to leave and find other employment if they so chose. In the 17th century, slavery in the American colonies became codified in the legal system. Tradition and custom aren't the same thing as law.
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Old 06-03-2014, 12:35 AM
 
10,238 posts, read 19,545,817 times
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Default The Slave trade...

Some of the earlier posts are absolutely historically ridiculous. It was Africans who sold their fellow Africans into slavery to begin with and it was the Northern slave traders who brought them here (not a single slave ship was ever chartered out of a Southern port). The myth of the movie "Roots" that is was white slavers coming over and throwing nets over blacks is too stupid to have any credibility at all.

In poker parlance? Read it and weep (if you've got the honesty to face history as it really was). Here it is (read the sub-links too):

Slavery in the North

Slavery Denial

Northern Profits from Slavery

Even after slavery was outlawed in the North, ships out of New England continued to carry thousands of Africans to the American South. Some 156,000 slaves were brought to the United States in the period 1801-08, almost all of them on ships that sailed from New England ports that had recently outlawed slavery. Rhode Island slavers alone imported an average of 6,400 Africans annually into the U.S. in the years 1805 and 1806. The financial base of New England's antebellum manufacturing boom was money it had made in shipping. And that shipping money was largely acquired directly or indirectly from slavery, whether by importing Africans to the Americas, transporting slave-grown cotton to England, or hauling Pennsylvania wheat and Rhode Island rum to the slave-labor colonies of the Caribbean.

Northerners profited from slavery in many ways, right up to the eve of the Civil War. The decline of slavery in the upper South is well documented, as is the sale of slaves from Virginia and Maryland to the cotton plantations of the Deep South. But someone had to get them there, and the U.S. coastal trade was firmly in Northern hands. William Lloyd Garrison made his first mark as an anti-slavery man by printing attacks on New England merchants who shipped slaves from Baltimore to New Orleans.

Also, the notion that slaves were routinely beaten, raped and tortured is lunacy. I am personally just as any one else in that I am appalled over the idea that one man should own another. But the reality of it was not what is presented in the silly, selective, history books which want to present it all as a morality play between a righteous north and a horrid netherworld South.

An economic reality was that a "field hand" cost quite a bit of money and to routinely beat and torture makes no more sense than one would smash up the engine of their car because they heard a hum from it. Matter of fact, a book (Time On The Cross) -- whose authors have no love at all of slavery (as not many of us do) -- make the provable point that slaves in the South actually had a higher mortality rate and generally better living conditions than so-called "free" industrial workers in the North. Up there, many were bound by labor-contracts and to the company store -- and paid in script -- and subject to being tossed out into the streets if they got sick, injured, or old. In the South, there were laws on the books which prohibited deliberate mistreatment and they were bound by a social code and law as well, which provided that slave-owners were obligated to care for the sick, injured, and old.

So point is, while it is safe to say that almost all of us agree that slavery is nothing to be proud of. But it is a fact of human history and no people/race/ethnic group were neither slaves nor slave-owners.

And also, finally? There were free black slave holders as well. Some of you all need to get off your moral high horses and truly study history....

Black Slave Owners Civil War Article by Robert M Grooms
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Old 06-07-2014, 11:18 AM
 
244 posts, read 360,567 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by TexasReb View Post
Some of the earlier posts are absolutely historically ridiculous. It was Africans who sold their fellow Africans into slavery to begin with and it was the Northern slave traders who brought them here (not a single slave ship was ever chartered out of a Southern port). The myth of the movie "Roots" that is was white slavers coming over and throwing nets over blacks is too stupid to have any credibility at all.

In poker parlance? Read it and weep (if you've got the honesty to face history as it really was). Here it is (read the sub-links too):

Slavery in the North

Slavery Denial

Northern Profits from Slavery

Even after slavery was outlawed in the North, ships out of New England continued to carry thousands of Africans to the American South. Some 156,000 slaves were brought to the United States in the period 1801-08, almost all of them on ships that sailed from New England ports that had recently outlawed slavery. Rhode Island slavers alone imported an average of 6,400 Africans annually into the U.S. in the years 1805 and 1806. The financial base of New England's antebellum manufacturing boom was money it had made in shipping. And that shipping money was largely acquired directly or indirectly from slavery, whether by importing Africans to the Americas, transporting slave-grown cotton to England, or hauling Pennsylvania wheat and Rhode Island rum to the slave-labor colonies of the Caribbean.

Northerners profited from slavery in many ways, right up to the eve of the Civil War. The decline of slavery in the upper South is well documented, as is the sale of slaves from Virginia and Maryland to the cotton plantations of the Deep South. But someone had to get them there, and the U.S. coastal trade was firmly in Northern hands. William Lloyd Garrison made his first mark as an anti-slavery man by printing attacks on New England merchants who shipped slaves from Baltimore to New Orleans.

Also, the notion that slaves were routinely beaten, raped and tortured is lunacy. I am personally just as any one else in that I am appalled over the idea that one man should own another. But the reality of it was not what is presented in the silly, selective, history books which want to present it all as a morality play between a righteous north and a horrid netherworld South.

An economic reality was that a "field hand" cost quite a bit of money and to routinely beat and torture makes no more sense than one would smash up the engine of their car because they heard a hum from it. Matter of fact, a book (Time On The Cross) -- whose authors have no love at all of slavery (as not many of us do) -- make the provable point that slaves in the South actually had a higher mortality rate and generally better living conditions than so-called "free" industrial workers in the North. Up there, many were bound by labor-contracts and to the company store -- and paid in script -- and subject to being tossed out into the streets if they got sick, injured, or old. In the South, there were laws on the books which prohibited deliberate mistreatment and they were bound by a social code and law as well, which provided that slave-owners were obligated to care for the sick, injured, and old.

So point is, while it is safe to say that almost all of us agree that slavery is nothing to be proud of. But it is a fact of human history and no people/race/ethnic group were neither slaves nor slave-owners.

And also, finally? There were free black slave holders as well. Some of you all need to get off your moral high horses and truly study history....

Black Slave Owners Civil War Article by Robert M Grooms

Your post is almost entirely about race in some odd way of justifying slavery, how is this relevant to plantation owners in the South? Like some of your points are really arbitrary, like blacks sold other blacks, black slave owners (no offense, bringing that up is something that happens on sites like stormfront, the fact that you think it is worth citing shows really poor understanding of that time period).

I see your post responding to something that really isn't an argument here. I don't see too many post calling the white man the devil. Your post really just comes off as insecure, since it is essentially challenging something that really isn't being hotly discussed at the moment. I just looked through the past two pages, and there is hardly any demonizing of whites, or even the South.
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Old 06-07-2014, 11:48 AM
 
Location: Berwick, Penna.
16,214 posts, read 11,273,221 times
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Another factor that hasn't received much attention here was the practice of breeding slaves for "export" to newer territory in regions where the land had previously been overworked; I'm given to understand by other sources that much of Coastal Virginia -- the area between, roughly, Fredericksburg and Petersburg, was a hotbed of this practice in the antebellum years.
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Old 06-09-2014, 09:35 PM
 
10,238 posts, read 19,545,817 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by violent by design View Post
Your post is almost entirely about race in some odd way of justifying slavery, how is this relevant to plantation owners in the South? Like some of your points are really arbitrary, like blacks sold other blacks, black slave owners (no offense, bringing that up is something that happens on sites like stormfront, the fact that you think it is worth citing shows really poor understanding of that time period).

I see your post responding to something that really isn't an argument here. I don't see too many post calling the white man the devil. Your post really just comes off as insecure, since it is essentially challenging something that really isn't being hotly discussed at the moment. I just looked through the past two pages, and there is hardly any demonizing of whites, or even the South.
LOL. Yeah, right. My post is "insecure"...whatever the hell that means. But oh well, what IS the point of this thread? Can you tell me? Can you tell yourself? Pray explain....?

No offense intended in turn.

No, you are right, what has been presented with most posts is not so much a direct slam at the South, but rather an indirect one which allows for a chicken-deflection....

Stormfront? LMAO. Is THAT the best you can do? That is silly, sophomoric, and dumb. I don't go to Stormfront at all. A lame attempt to fix some sorta idiotic "guilt by assosication"...especially when there is none but desperate contrivance...is just that. Good lord...

My bottom line? C'mon! That is, bring on your argument. I will match it one for one. In poker parlance? I call your bluff....

Let it begin. Start with explaining what was the purpose of this thread to begin with? Do some people just love to hog wallow in historical guilt?

Hey! (beautific halo over head)...know what I think I am gonna do? (not for a few days, cos I want some grits and fried okra), I am going to publish a little more on northern slave ownership and trading, and how the worse race-riots were in northern state...especially when civil rights laws began to apply up there.

But, anyway..c'mon...engage with me. Tell me where YOU are from, and quit being so evasive as to it all...and let's us debate it right here and now! In front of everyone....
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