Slavery and Money

Video (9:19): How profitable was slavery?

If you are a Black American descended from slaves, one or more of your ancestors may have cost the equivalent of $300,000. This likely explains the ugly practice of raping slave women and labeling the mixed race offspring "Black" and making it impossible to wash off and it helps explain the One Drop Rule where any amount of African blood made you not White.

The video is wrong about slave owners feeding and housing their slaves. To this day, the evidence this was not trying lives on in Soul Food and the high blood pressure likely rooted in an excess consumption of pig meat.

Hog jowls and chitterlings -- that's the correct spelling of a word you might think is spelled chitlins, which is such a common misspelling it's become an acceptable alternate spelling -- are traditional Black American foods because it was what White plantation owners discarded and refused to eat.

So it was trash, thrown out by slave owners, and slaves scooped it up and cooked it. Slaves grew most of their own food on the worst strips of land to feed themselves, plus turned discarded animal parts into dietary staples to help them survive.

I've read one or two books documenting the fact that in places with harsher conditions of slavery than the US, birth rates among slaves were too low to be explained without some method of birth control. It was speculated that most likely they were using herbs to abort babies.

I believe cod liver oil would do the trick, so I think it's entirely plausible they were inducing miscarriage, though maybe not with herbs per se. And that suggests slaves probably had healers and herbalists among them who brought knowledge of traditional tribal medicine with them and likely didn't share that fact with White slave owners.

Lack of defense is not why The South lost. Your vaunted good guy abolitionist President Abraham Lincoln put General Grant in charge because with a larger population to choose from, The North couldn't come up with a single officer who was Lee's match, much less his better.

Grant was an alcoholic callous bastard willing to enthusiastically use The North's one and only military advantage over The South: Numbers of BODIES.

It was a blood bath and The North was the side bleeding to death. Northerners wanted Grant's head on a platter and were campaigning to demand that Lincoln remove him because they were horrified and enraged by the steady stream of coffins arriving daily and filled with the bodies of their sons.

The Bixby Letter, written by Abraham Lincoln or for him by his assistant, which gets read in the movie Saving Private Ryan speaks of a woman who supposedly lost all five of her sons. It's possible some of her sons deserted rather than died and she is believed to have had Confederate sympathies.

The letter thanks her for her sacrifice in saving the Republic. 

So if Southern states had left, it would have destroyed the Republic? Why is that? 

If they are so awful and slavery is destroying The South and turning it into a cesspit of inadequate infrastructure and widespread poverty and blah blah blah blah, why invade The South to desperately try to keep those states? Why not say "Good riddance. Don't let the screen door hit you on your way out?"

Anyway, whether all five of her sons actually died or not, if you have seen the movie Saving Private Ryan, you have seen evidence that it was a blood bath and Lincoln was allowing entire families to die in pursuit of this war that Southerners didn't want. Southerners were looking for a peaceful solution while saying "I'm not your bitch." They just wanted to leave, not start a war.

Were slaves treated harshly? Sure.

But perhaps not as extremely harsher than pampered, privileged Whites as modern peoples seem to imagine. Slaves were beaten with whips. And White people were put in stockades as corporeal punishment and public humiliation to say "STOOPID, don't do that again."

When I was a child, paddling in school by teachers still went on. Historically, punishment for sailors included flogging, caning and keelhauling.

Flogging is a synonym for whipping in case it needs to be said.

The video says at one point the slave population had a value of $3 billion and states that it was worth more than the railroads, factories and banks across The North combined. I've previously covered the fact that Atlanta was burned to the ground because it was a powerful producer of goods keeping the Confederate troops supplied and strong, well-trained Blacks immigrating to The North after the Civil War fueled Northern industrial success for something like a hundred years.

Is it morally wrong to shaft the people essential to doing the work? Yes, of course, and stupid too.

Expensive Persian carpets made by rural tribespeople are feared to be a dying art which may be largely gone in another fifteen years or less. Why? Because the weavers who do the back breaking labor are paid the least and it mostly lines the pockets of myriad middlemen.

If you value what they produce, you should give them incentive to want to keep doing it voluntarily. You should pay them adequately and treat them decently.

Because no matter what it is they produce, it's not a given they will keep making it.