Senate World History - Slavery in America in the 19th century

Since I've encountered several other history buffs on here, I thought it would be a good idea for us to gather together and talk about history. Any era, any country - you name it. May be either a free ranging discussion or discussion of a specific topic for a period of time. I'm opening the floor for someone else to start off the discussion, as it's late and I'm bushed. Anyone is welcome to participate.

 

OK, first topic: The use of black slaves on plantations in the Southern United States before the Civil War. I've been watching the TV miniseries of John Jakes' North and South trilogy and got to thinking. Personally, I believe that the South's use of slaves was wrong. Labor was needed to work the plantations, yes, but why did it have to come from men and women deemed as inferior and property by whites in the South? I think in this case, Southern gentlemen clearly didn't believe that the words of the Constitution applied when it came to blacks. As a native Southerner myself, if I had lived during the pre Civil War years, I would have been familar with slavery but would not have supported it.

I'll post more thoughts later, but right now I've got to run.

PS. Everyone is welcome to his or her opinion, but let's keep it civil. I don't want discussion of this particular issie to degenerate into a mess.

 

Where's the question? Unless you want an opponent to come in and defend it, I don't see what we're supposed to discuss here. Why did the labor have to come from Africans? It didn't, but it was cheaper that way. If you meant to ask something more along the lines of how they were able to justify it to themselves, then I think that's a better starting point.

To that, my answer would be that because of ignorance, many at that time genuinely believed Africans were inferior or savage, and thus they probably justified it to themselves by thinking that they were somehow doing them a favor by keeping them as slaves. But I think there were also many who knew that they're not inferior in any way, but still used them as slaves just because they could. No matter what logic they used to justify it, though, the bottom line is greed. Running plantations becomes very lucrative when you don't need to pay your workers. Not to mention the slave trade itself was a lucrative business.

 

I'm sure there would likely be somebody to try and come and defend it (especially after the shenanigans in the Trayvon Martin thread).

 

Surely there's better and more interesting periods of history that this?

 

If you want to propose another topic, feel free, but ask Jello first and see what he thinks.

 

I'm sorry, but these declarations drive me nuts. "Oh, if I were alive in World War II, I would have saved Jews." "Gosh, I wish I had the chance to march with Martin Luther King." The ugly truth is most of us would conduct ourselves in the same mediocre fashion as we are now.

What makes you so confident that you would have opposed slavery? The vast majority of Southerners embraced it, while the majority of Northerners opposed the institution merely on the grounds of "Free labor" rather than any sense of moral outrage.

On edit: By the way, I include myself in the mediocre, so please don't mistake this for preaching.

 

True but it's worth noting that we can't really say the vast majority of Southerners 'embraced' slavery. The average Southerner was too poor to afford a slave and many openly expressed a disinclination to, "Fight for a rich man's slaves" in the lead up to the war.
IMO they accepted it as a fact of life and consequently saw a threat to it as an attack on their way of life by outsiders.
That's where the passion came from.

It's amazing how we can pretty much still see the same dynamic in the gun control debate today.

 

I don't think anybody can know how they'd have thought about it. The present day is incomparable to a century ago. You don't know what you would have been doing, where you were doing it, who you'd be doing it with. You have no clue. So how can you say what you would have thought?

You would have been eating different food. You would have been drinking different brews. Your medication would have been radically different. The actual composition of your body would have been different. The stuff that feeds your brain would have been different; your mind would have been different.

Stuff around you would have been different. Public opinion would have been different. How to gain knowledge would have been quite different.

And of course, health issues would have been different. You might have been dead by now. And the dead have no opinions.

 

Kiki-Gonn: The average Southerner may not have been able to afford a slave, but that doesn't mean they didn't envy the slaveholder.

Keep in mind also that the American South was essentially an apartheid state for the century following the Civil War, and it took a combined effort by Black Americans, Northern liberals and the Federal Government to force Southern whites to act like human beings.

Their "way of life" was terrorism.

On edit: And of course I recognize that there was a minority of Southern whites who demonstrated extraordinary courage during the Jim Crow era. There are a number of stories I recall regarding rebellious librarians, progressive teachers and maverick judges/lawyers who did all they could to counter the hatred.

 

I think that's a little harsh. Sure, many Southern gentlemen before the war mistreated their slaves badly, but not all of them did, did they? And while it's true the Ku Klux Klan had a strong following in the South, to lump all Southerners together is uncalled for. Some in the South may have not wanted apartheid, but if so, the majority overruled them. Witness General Lee. He opposed the vote for blacks after the war, but he seems to have been opposed to slavery on principle.

 

What is anyone going to say that isn't civil? Are you expecting someone to take a pro stance on slavery? What exactly is debatable about this topic beyond drg4's declaration that everyone's more susceptible to the faults of their own culture than they'd like to admit?

Um, I disagree. Or something. Personally.

 

We're now seeing two sides of the presumption that people would know what their position would be if they'd live in a different era. It's not much, but let's let it run for now. I do suggest, Skywalker8921, that you already think of a more suitable subtopic for when this one runs out of steam. Might be fast.

 

No, I wouldn't be surprised if someone does take a pro stance on slavery and I'm not going to berate them about it; I'm just saying that dicussing blacks, whether in the past history, or more recently with Trayvon Martin, could get a little charged at times and I don't want to see the thread degenerate into a lot of bickering and personal attacks.

In any case, when someone feels that we've exhausted a discussion on slavery, a new topic can be introduced. Frankly, I wouldn't mind if discussion of a particular topic was limited to about a week or so. If an interesting discussion has the potential to go on for longer, good, but if a topic seems not to be getting much response or discussion is exhausted before the week is up, a fresh one can be introduced. Also, I'm not going to set the topics to be discussed. Anyone can put forward one for discussion and a mod could change the thread title.

 

See my post just below yours. I agree this dicussion is running out of steam already and proposed some guidelines for handling topics.

 

I'd love to read any hypothetical argument you could foresee that someone on this board might present condoning American slavery as it existed in the nineteenth century.

 

by "slavery as it existed in the 19th century" are you referring to chattel slavery or ongoing russian serfdom?

really the subtopic title of this thread should be "american chattel slavery" so as to be specific. slavery is a really broad topic, stretching back thousands of years before the american civil war and persisting even to the present day

 

Rogue Ten, you're being a jerk. Cut it out and pay attention. I said nothing about Russia in here. Bring it up again and you just might get slapped down. If you had bothered to read my second post you would notice I said "slavery in the Southern United States." If you knew that and were just trying to be cute, I don't particularly find it funny, so kindly back off.

 

Well that's Rogue_Ten for you. He always tries to be a bit of a jerk and get under everybody's skin. Occassionally, that's part of his charm.

 

russian serfdom as it existed, particularly pre-alexander ii is pretty widely acknowledged as a form of slavery. indeed, thats why alexander ii is remembered as "The Liberator" for his (really quite mild) land reforms that caused estates in russia to operate a little more like tenant farms.

indeed, there are no other examples from the 19th century for me to draw on, were i to for some reason go out of my way to respect your tsarist sentiments in this Serious Senate Discussion Thread. the american and russian systems were pretty much the last holdouts of widespread systems of "unfree labor" (slavery) in the world. i actually have a book by peter kolchin comparing the two on my reading list. you know, for trolling purposes

 

How is rogue being a jerk by pointing out that your comment is vague
enough to cover a multitude of topics?

 

Am I the only one who is interested in Rogue's reading list? I'm fairly confident that he doesn't read the usual boring drivel.

 

Rogue is actually decently knowledgeable on some of these topics. I don't understand why the OP got angry considering rogue was being very relevant.

 

Yeah, but that doesn't make slavery any less wrong *. If that's a justifiable excuse for slavery, then well I'd bring up the fact that the Nazis did not consider Jews and Slavs to be human and therefore thought that atrocities against them were perfectly okay. Swedes, Norwegians, and British are closer to the ideal of the Aryan master race so they'll get treated better. But if you're a Jew or a Russian? Nope, we're going to gas you or starve you to death en masse so we can take your land and resources for our people.

And regarding the gas chambers, the Nazis didn't start out wanting to kill the Jews. They had this "Jewish Question" where they asked themselves, "what are we going to do with all these subhumans?" So they go about crafting all these policies to make life in Germany intolerable for Jews in the hopes that they'd self-deport. They'd tell other countries "we don't want our Jews, you guys take them". Eventually they got to the Nuremburg Laws where they stripped Jews of all citizenship in order to get them to leave faster...but it still didn't work since there were still Jews in Germany. So it was only after all that that the Nazis came to the "Final Solution", with "final" meaning the last resort and "solution" meaning that it would take care of the Jewish problem once and for all. So does the fact that the Nazis used this incremental approach make them less evil?

* Now obviously what we consider to be right or wrong is somewhat dependent on the cultural values of the time period. If you or I were alive during the Civil War era, in all likelihood we probably would've thought there was nothing wrong with slavery...after all, abolitionism at the time was a radical idea that was espoused only by a relatively small segment of society. Or as a certain fictional character said, "many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our point of view".