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Field slavery would have been close to its end. Nothing to do with wages, but because of the industrial revolution. A tractor can replace the work of dozens of men with shovels, and it never gets tired.
Cheap wage labor was not an option in many of the slave using areas because the weather was so hot and humid that the Africans were the only ones who could tolerate the weather without dying and nobody would have worked in those conditions for wages. Labor had to be by force.
Further north, perhaps Virginia, it seems to me that it would have made more economic sense to hire labor than to pay the cost of a slave, but in most plantation economies, hired labor wasn't really an option before things got mechanized.
Slavery is still practiced all over the world today, even in the United States, so slavery has not been ended. What ended was the plantation system of slavery.
I think it is insulting to contemporary African Americans to compare slavery to our current financial system.
No one is going to tie you to a post and whip you bloody if you fail to pay a bill. No one is going to rape your wife or daughter and justify that because they were the slave master's property. No one is going to sell your family members to someone in another community where you will never see them again.
You are not precluded from seeking education or job training to advance your station in life.
Yes, people face financial challenges today. I do not like what the stock market is doing to my retirement savings. However, I would never compare myself to a slave.
I agree with you but for the "contemporary" adjective. What you describe in your second paragraph largely took place in the 19th century ante-bellum South.
Some theorize that though it would have taken several more decades, the slave industry in USA would have ended without a war. What isn’t pointed out was the fact that it was USA & European nations who went into combat to try to put an end to the slave trade in Africa. In fact, the slave trade continued in many parts of Africa and the Arab world and still continues even today.
After the Civil War was over the; cotton, rice, tobacco, and corn still had to be planted and picked and it was black people who were going to it. Garrison Frazier and Baptist minister who had purchased he and his wife's freedom in 1856, described slavery as, " receiving by irresistible power the labor of another man and not by his consent." IMO Tenant Farming and Sharecropping got his consent.
It was in effect a man consenting to be a slave. As long as he thought he was working for himself he worked harder.
Last edited by thriftylefty; 06-14-2022 at 06:45 PM..
Some theorize that though it would have taken several more decades, the slave industry in USA would have ended without a war. What isn’t pointed out was the fact that it was USA & European nations who went into combat to try to put an end to the slave trade in Africa. In fact, the slave trade continued in many parts of Africa and the Arab world and still continues even today.
I have seen it myself in southern Morocco. Tuareg people buying, selling, and keeping enslaved people from Mauritania and Mali.
Low wage worker bees just slaves that you dont have to provide housing and food. Or even land for them to grow/build their own. So yea guess slavery was probably already on its way out. Especially if the South started to seriously industrialize. Plantation slave system doesnt work out well in sweatshop type factory environment. You have to feed and house them or they die. Whereas if you pay them crumbs and force them to find their own housing and food.... plus open immigration flood gates so if they die off, you have fresh crop of suckers thinking streets here are paved with gold.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^*THAT*^^^^^^^^^^^^
Wage slavery is still slavery, you just have to convince the slaves that they are "free".
^^^^^^^^^^^^^*THAT*^^^^^^^^^^^^
Wage slavery is still slavery, you just have to convince the slaves that they are "free".
There is considerable difference between wage slavery or indentured servitude and chattel slavery. Not that wage slavery is a good thing, but there is considerable difference.
Field slavery would have been close to its end. Nothing to do with wages, but because of the industrial revolution. A tractor can replace the work of dozens of men with shovels, and it never gets tired.
Cheap wage labor was not an option in many of the slave using areas because the weather was so hot and humid that the Africans were the only ones who could tolerate the weather without dying and nobody would have worked in those conditions for wages. Labor had to be by force.
Further north, perhaps Virginia, it seems to me that it would have made more economic sense to hire labor than to pay the cost of a slave, but in most plantation economies, hired labor wasn't really an option before things got mechanized.
Slavery is still practiced all over the world today, even in the United States, so slavery has not been ended. What ended was the plantation system of slavery.
It would have shrunken, but it would not have gone away. A good number of slaves were skilled in the trades and were worth their keep being leased out to other whites at profit. That hasn't gone away: For example, for-profit prisons in a number of states.
Where there is illegal immigrant labor today, there could be slaves held at the least level of subsistence to be rented out for labor.
There is considerable difference between wage slavery or indentured servitude and chattel slavery. Not that wage slavery is a good thing, but there is considerable difference.
Fully agree.
Wage "slaves" aren't beaten, raped, tortured, mutilated, branded, or killed. They're not chained, tied up, or shackled in irons. They're not separated by force from their families or sold to another person. They're not considered to be sub-human.
To say otherwise is inhumanely cruel and a slap in the face to those poor souls who endured such horrors.
Ezra Pound's quotation has always been interesting to me: “A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.”
We once had horrific working conditions in factories and mines, but the rise of powerful trade unions brought change and protected worker's rights. They used collective bargaining and strikes to gain needed concessions from business owners and corporations. We have seen a more recent systematic weakening and utter destruction of some important labor unions. Now we have hand wringing and calls for a living wage as income and wealth inequality becomes more serious over time. The gap between productivity and wages is constantly widening but working conditions have not declined to earlier horrific levels. Have workers accepted the status quo as a given fact of life? Do they think obscene corporation profits and CEO salaries are simply the way it is?
The slaves didn't have collective bargaining. Some just ran away. The 4.5 million slaves in the south in 1860 were oppressed and controlled but somehow seemed to accept their fate. They didn't rise up, en masse. The notion of the master's authority, or maybe white supremacy, was somehow accepted. By then, they were three or four generations out of Africa. They were deprived of traditions, religion, language, education, personal freedom, and even family ties in exchange for a marginal existence, three meals, some form of shelter, a place to sleep, and hard labor. Even so, if there was some sort of collective awareness or networking in and among the slave population across the south, I wonder if they would have been so resigned.
The South was fearful of a slave rebellion like the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1803 and imposed tight controls. The situation in Haiti was vastly different -- there were 500,000 slaves and 32,000 whites -- nothing like the south.
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