Slavery a necessary evil or What an Idiot

byron ed

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Slavery and our Capitalist system go hand and hand so maybe Slavery was a necessary evil for America... In America we developed what many call "Brutal Capitalism" which was born as Slavery grow in the colonies...was our nation’s unflinching willingness to use violence on nonwhite people and to exert its will on seemingly endless supplies of land and labor. ...If today America promotes a particular kind of low-road capitalism — a union-busting capitalism of poverty wages, gig jobs and normalized insecurity; a winner-take-all capitalism of stunning disparities not only permitting but awarding financial rule-bending; a racist capitalism... one reason is that American capitalism was founded on the lowest road there is...Our capitalism values are based off our old slavery capitalism... Exploitation...
I hope I misunderstand, because this seems a huge misread of American culture and history focused entirely on the villaIns. It seems bathed in predecessor-loathing; a sort of self-righteous mea-culpa; an unforgivingly inaccurate record of the whole; and quite painfully naive besides. Isn't this a somewhat sappy attempt to earn "diversity points" and to appear "so remarkably with-it" in this current spate of historical questioning?

...But as I said I hope I misunderstand.

Otherwise I'd have to say Back-Off. There was never any intention or expectation that slavery was a necessary evil for America. That's all hindsight, the opinion of some particular historical analysts (emphasis on anal) who did not in fact experience those past times themselves, so never at risk of any consequence in what they claim from their stuffed chair by the fireplace, warm tea in hand. They misrepresent the legitimate players -- those who actually put themselves at risk: The Founders -- as to what they thought, felt or did at the time.

In any case "we" today have never in the main "developed brutal capitalism" or had "unflinching willingness to use violence on nonwhite people." Back in the day it was the villains among our predecessors that did that. The rest of us, mostly Euro-Americans at the time, were of decidedly Christian aspiration. That was the aspired culture of the times, as dismissive of it as you may be today it was a powerful thing at the time. We know this from first-person accounts.

And America's (meaning the U.S.A.'s) capitalism was not founded on the old slavery capitalism of the colonies, but rather on the Ideal That All Men Are Created Equal. The original intention was to reach that ideal. In the main it was the villains among our predecessors that exploited the system, not the "we" then or the "we" now. So please let's avoid wearing the guilt of the villains of American history just to earn some kind of "badge of social enlightenment" for ourselves. It's smacks of claiming that "one of my best friends is black."
 
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O' Be Joyful

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what they claim from their stuffed chair by the fireplace, warm tea at hand. They make cynical misrepresentation of what the legitimate players -- the Founders -- thought, felt or did at the time.

Let us not bring Shelby Foote into this.
 

diane

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He is an easier read compared to the current crop of experts.
I enjoyed Shelby Foote's trilogy but he always said he was not an historian. True that! But he was an excellent story-teller.
 

jgoodguy

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I enjoyed Shelby Foote's trilogy but he always said he was not an historian. True that! But he was an excellent story-teller.
We need storytelling historians. Way too many historians enjoyed history class. In my junior high history classes at the end of summer or end of spring were exercises in staying awake in pre-air-conditioned classrooms.
 

diane

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That's how you keep 'em awake - tell a story! (Make sure the facts are straight, though...) Shelby Foote could hardly resist making Forrest the hero of the whole CW, and he was thorough with the entire canon.
 

5fish

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Otherwise I'd have to say Back-Off.
Your fulmination was about what? Do you realize the scope of slavery and its tentacles throughout our capitalist system... Cotton was the cruel oil of its day... Slavery's brutality was everywhere...

LINK: https://www.forbes.com/sites/hbswor...slavery-and-american-capitalism/#698bdcaa7bd3

snip...

For a long time, historians mostly depicted slavery as a regional institution of cruelty in the South, and certainly not the driver of broader American economic prosperity.

Now 16 scholars are helping to set the record straight by exploring the true ties between 19th century economic development and a brutal system of human bondage in the 2016 book Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development.

Snip...

Rather, the hard labor of slaves in places like Alabama, South Carolina, and Mississippi needs to be kept in view as well. In fact, more than half of the nation’s exports in the first six decades of the 19th century consisted of raw cotton, almost all of it grown by slaves, according to the book,

Snip...

In the decades between the American Revolution and the Civil War, slavery—as a source of the cotton that fed Rhode Island’s mills, as a source of the wealth that filled New York’s banks, as a source of the markets that inspired Massachusetts manufacturers—proved indispensable to national economic development,”

snip...

And of course northern manufacturers, along with their European counterparts, supplied plantations in the South with tools, textiles, and other goods that were necessary to maintain the plantation regime. Plantation slavery, far from being a retrograde system on its way to being ousted by industrial capitalism, saw a second flourishing in the 19th century in the wake of the industrial revolution. And in the United States, cotton was central to that “second slavery.
 

jgoodguy

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Your fulmination was about what? Do you realize the scope of slavery and its tentacles throughout our capitalist system... Cotton was the cruel oil of its day... Slavery's brutality was everywhere...

LINK: https://www.forbes.com/sites/hbswor...slavery-and-american-capitalism/#698bdcaa7bd3

snip...

For a long time, historians mostly depicted slavery as a regional institution of cruelty in the South, and certainly not the driver of broader American economic prosperity.

Now 16 scholars are helping to set the record straight by exploring the true ties between 19th century economic development and a brutal system of human bondage in the 2016 book Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development.

Snip...

Rather, the hard labor of slaves in places like Alabama, South Carolina, and Mississippi needs to be kept in view as well. In fact, more than half of the nation’s exports in the first six decades of the 19th century consisted of raw cotton, almost all of it grown by slaves, according to the book,

Snip...

In the decades between the American Revolution and the Civil War, slavery—as a source of the cotton that fed Rhode Island’s mills, as a source of the wealth that filled New York’s banks, as a source of the markets that inspired Massachusetts manufacturers—proved indispensable to national economic development,”

snip...

And of course northern manufacturers, along with their European counterparts, supplied plantations in the South with tools, textiles, and other goods that were necessary to maintain the plantation regime. Plantation slavery, far from being a retrograde system on its way to being ousted by industrial capitalism, saw a second flourishing in the 19th century in the wake of the industrial revolution. And in the United States, cotton was central to that “second slavery.
All true, but the real story is how England and the Northern US threw off the shackles of slavery that created the demand for their goods and raw materials for their manufactures.
 

byron ed

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...Do you realize the scope of slavery and its tentacles throughout our capitalist system... Cotton was the cruel oil of its day... Slavery's brutality was everywhere...And of course northern manufacturers, along with their European counterparts, supplied plantations in the South with tools, textiles, and other goods that were necessary to maintain the plantation regime...
By your own statement then slavery's brutality wasn't everywhere, but concentrated in the plantation regime. By the 1830s no longer in England, no longer in the free states of the U.S., meaning no longer in the majority population of the U.S., meaning than in the main the "we" you attempt to portray was no longer primarily culpable for slavery's brutality in North America, but had begun correction on the journey to the ideal (All Men Are Created Equal).

So, rather, some of us here do realize the scope of slavery and its tentacles -- that it was not endemic to our capitalist system generally but by the Civil War only endemic to the capitalist slave South and certain Northern interests. Chattel slavery reached it's cruelest point only in the slave South, and then only at the behest of the minority Slaveocrats who, due to the 3/5 rule, held more representation in the U.S. Congress than they were due.

So I would say calm down. "We" in the main were not, and yet are not, culpable for slavery's brutality. That doesn't mean we aren't supportive of efforts to correct the evils of the Country's history. It just means we're not going to flagellate ourselves over it. You may not implicate most of "we" in your personal (imho misdirected) mea culpas. Let's implicate those villains among our ancestors who perpetuated slavery's brutality, certain slaveowners and certain investors.

In the main "we" and our capitalist structure were not dependent on chattel slavery to begin with, to note that most of capitalist North America and Europe had abandoned chattel slavery by the 1830s yet went on to achieve vast resource and wealth without it. Capitalism was not entirely evil, in fact being the salvation of the thousands of immigrants that came to dominate the population of the continent (if at the expense of the native population).

Let's discuss just the actual extent of the slave culture in U.S. history, and how bad it was for those caught up in the villainy of it.
 
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jgoodguy

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In the main "we" and our capitalist structure were not dependent on chattel slavery to begin with, to note that most of capitalist North America and Europe had abandoned chattel slavery by the 1830s yet went on to achieve vast resource and wealth without it.
Hmmmm where did all that cotton come from that generated that wealth?
 

5fish

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n the main "we" and our capitalist structure were not dependent on chattel slavery to begin with, to note that most of capitalist North America and Europe had abandoned chattel slavery by the 1830s yet went on to achieve vast resource and wealth without it. Capitalism was not entirely evil, in fact being the salvation of the thousands of immigrants that came to dominate the population of the continent
Here is MLK... https://www.dailysabah.com/columns/...revisiting-mlks-speech-the-3-evils-of-society

MLK pointed out that American society is deluded "into believing the myth that Capitalism grew and prospered out of the Protestant ethic of hard work and sacrifice; the fact is Capitalism was built on the exploitation and suffering of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor." The system is founded upon exploitation and to drive unjustly gained wealth to those on top, and "the way to end poverty" according to MLK is "to end the exploitation of the poor, ensure them a fair share of government services and the nation's resources."

Snip... https://altrightorigins.com/2018/05/13/corruption-jonah-goldberg/


John Locke... A father of capitalism.. inspired our Founding Fathers... He was a slaver...

Snip...

a wide and deep change in popular attitudes. It held that the individual is sovereign; that our rights come from God, not government; that the fruits of our labors belong to us; and that no man should be less equal before the law because of his faith or class.

Snip...

Goldberg tells us that Locke believed that political and economic equality were indivisible. All rights began with property rights and the right to own yourself was the basis of all political rights: “Economic and political liberties were indivisible” (p. 157). This resulted in an American society that erased all those aristocratic and class differences that plagued Europe.

Goldberg admits it is hard to praise the Lockean revolution without adding “except for slavery or except for women”

Snip... Locke was a slaver...

Locke himself was tied up with the slave trade. Half a century ago, in his magnificent The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture historian David Brion Davis noted that John Locke transcribed the Fundamental Constitution of Carolina which expressly granted masters absolute authority over their slaves:
There is no evidence that he found these provisions objectionable; indeed, he was to become an investor in the Royal African Company, and clearly regarded Negro slavery as a justifiable institution. (p. 118)
Thomas Dew’s famous defense of slavery invoked Locke (p. 19) and it was followed by many other defenses of slavery in the nineteenth century that recruited Locke to defend slavery. Both antislavery and proslavery arguments were liberal in Goldberg’s sense in that they appealed to “personal freedom, equal worth, government by consent, and private ownership of property as core human values” (p. 14). So, the Lockean Revolution was just as much about justifying slavery as it was about abolishing it.

Snip...

Radicalized slavery was not an exception to the Lockean Revolution: it was part and parcel of it.
 

byron ed

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Here is MLK... ...American society is deluded "into believing the myth that Capitalism grew and prospered out of the Protestant ethic of hard work and sacrifice; the fact is Capitalism was built on the exploitation and suffering of black slaves...
...and the exploitation and suffering of poor immigrants, native Americans and women generally. So oops, capitalism wasn't exclusively dependent on chattel slavery, and prospered well after chattel slavery's demise.

... and [capitalism] continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor..."the way to end poverty" according to MLK is "to end the exploitation of the poor, ensure them a fair share of government services and the nation's resources." ...
So now here's a new topic about exploitation of the poor after the Civil War. That could use its own thread, but ok. MLK was correct and brave to fight against the immoral applications of capitalism, but he was not against capitalism -- in fact saw it as an engine of opportunity for the poor.

...John Locke... A father of capitalism.. inspired our Founding Fathers... He was a slaver....Thomas Dew’s famous defense of slavery invoked Locke...and it was followed by many other defenses of slavery in the nineteenth century...So, the Lockean Revolution was just as much about justifying slavery as it was about abolishing it...Radicalized slavery was not an exception to the Lockean Revolution: it was part and parcel of it.
So here we have another new topic, ok. Interesting. Apparently Locke's ideas were employed in defense of slavery, meh. A separate thread might be in order.

Excuse me to notice, but it seems there's an attempt here to condemn capitalism itself, as if capitalism was slavery. Of course chattel slavery was driven by capitalism, but so were industrial and agricultural expansion -- opportunity and even free land for the people. No social system on Earth has worked well, because it's people that operate them. In North America Socialism would not have worked any better, per the example of Europe in the same time frame as the developing U.S.

So let's not talk about forms of government at all. Every form of government has its villains, and as calm historians let's call out the villains. Let's skip the self-flagellation for what our predecessors did or did not do. Let's skip the motivation of being seen as "remarkably enlighted," but again that doesn't mean we aren't supportive of efforts to correct the evils of the Country's history.
 
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Jim Klag

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...and the exploitation and suffering of poor immigrants, native Americans and women generally. So oops, capitalism wasn't exclusively dependent on chattel slavery, and prospered well after chattel slavery's demise.
You are correct. Only in the south was the economy ever dependent on slavery and what they practiced was hardly capitalism as we know it. Those great cotton planters made the robber barons of the turn of the century look like altruists. If they didn't need Yankee money or foreign money for their cotton, they would have built castles with moats to isolate themselves and their crops/livestock would be walled off so the little people couldn't get at them.
 
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