Thomas Sowell, himself black along with being an intellectual powerhouse, speaks for a few moments on slavery. I complain over the Civil War started in 1861. I complain over Abe's invasion. Do I defend slavery? Don't be silly. I have never said things about slavery to make it seem I think well of slavery. I have pointed out when you shoo slaves off plantations using guns, as did Abe Lincoln, the slaves suffer a lot. That they have to find a job. They never had to find a job. They must locate shelter. This was always a perk of slavery. They lack food. Also food and clothing more perks to slaves. To the narrow minded person, they may take this as approving slaves. But even today, there are a lot of misconceptions so I wanted Thomas Sowell to give us his views. Chip in and please, no fighting.
While it is true that slavery has been around longer than civilization itself, merely stating that is not a reason for diminishing our peculiar institution or whitewashing the impact of modern slavery within the United States nor the impact of Jim Crow upon today's negro population. The term slave was derived from slav. Romans would go to the slavic areas and conquer them taking slavs as property hence the name slave. Romans did not invent slavery. Almost every indigenous people found had a slave tradition including our own native Americans. What is different about our version is that it was the polar opposite of our founding principles. We institutionalized racial bias in return for money and wealth ignoring our own lofty ideals of equality and natural rights for all mankind. The beginnings of African slavery in the West started in Portugal and was exported to the New World as conquerors found natives unwilling to be slaves and crops like sugar, hemp, rubber, cotton and tobacco needed tending. First Europe sent us their criminals, the poor, the orphaned or the down and out. Then they found an easier and more profitable source of cheap labor in Africa and willing collaborators within the African communities, other Africans. The UK ended slavery before we did. We kept it up because it made us money. Thanks to abolitionists, the appetite for slavery diminished but the racism still remained even in the north. Sowell is right that the history of slavery is limited to our own history and that it goes farther back than anyone can imagine. He is right that almost every white person alive today had an ancestor that was once a slave. So what?
What's wrong with this black academic's essay on slavery is that it was the British who abolished slavery first throughout the British Empire by a bill in 1833. There was a grass-roots anti-slavery movement in Britain, which contributed significantly to changing public opinions about slavery, and the majority turned against slavery by the 1830s. The Royal Navy imposed the ban by intercepting slave ships to the Americas. When I was a student, the British Museum held an exhibition on the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. Abe Lincoln freed slaves to create chaos in the South and win the war and he didn't do it for humanitarian reasons.
Calling food, shelter, and a guaranteed job the 'perks' of slavery leads me to give out some perks of being the master. Slaves can be beaten, mutilated, raped and murdered with no cause. Slaves are cheap labor. Slaves are property. Slavery is not inherently wrong. It is simply part of an economic system. There were economic reasons for slavery in the beginning. Slavery became obsolete as the Industrial Revolution took hold and obviated the need for slave labor. At that point it became a backward and evil practice. According to Southern abolitionists, slavery was holding the South back from the economic prosperity it could have enjoyed.
Most historians date the Industrial Revolution from the mid-1700's to the mid-1800's. Do you have some other dates?
Mid 1700's? Industrial Revolution? No, I've always seen the Industrial Revolution cited as late 1800's, ie) 1880, to the early 1900's.
Google it; you are mistaken. Most authorities place it in the 18th and 19th centuries i.e. the 1700's and 1800's. If you find a source that agrees with you, please cite it and we'll go from there.
Well I did, and apparently Ive always seen it as Late 18th, Early 19th, and my brain misfired that to late 1800s to early 1900s. Guess I have to retract that
The Watt Steam Engine was one of the first major inventions that became the basis for the industrial revolution and that was developed and refined from 1763 to 1775 and it replaced the 1712 Newcomen engines. The newer innovations in iron refining (using coke instead of coal, reverberatory furnaces allowed a purer iron by separating the fuel from the iron ore thus reducing the amount of contaminants. These innovations allowed for the development of structural irons which led to creations such as The Iron Bridge in Shropshire, England that was opened in 1781. And then we have the Civil War which has the distinction of being the first war fought with a modern (for the time), factory-produced, military standardized battle rifle. You might be thinking of the Victorian Era (1837-1901) wherein a lot of the precursor inventions of a lot of the devices we use today were developed. Things like cameras, pneumatic tires, bessimer steel, radio, motion pictures, ice cream, ice makers, etc.
Well, if that is all you got from his brief lecture, I guess the so what is entirely inside of your thinking. To keep this short, let's all take a look at 12 presidents of the USA. The common feature is they were both slave owners and wealthy men. George Washington gets whitewashed by our historians due to his being among the founders. No words of derision over him holding perhaps the largest group of slaves of any free white man. So he gets ranked number 1 or 2. What does that tell you about your history teachers?
This is not about slavery but it is my thread and I don't actually object to interesting but off topic remarks. It has not taken this thread long to drift. But to add to the above, let's not forget that for years, the iron used was cast iron. Even the nations dome was cast iron so cast iron lasted into more recent years since car engines for decades were cast iron. Ductile iron casting came later and is much stronger than cast iron. The American civil war was not fought using a standard rifle. I suggest you visit Gettysburg, PA and see their battle museum where you will see a wide variety of weapons used by the infantry in combat. Of course other battle museums such as at Richmond, VA shows the same pattern. America later did standardize the Army rifle but not by the time of the Civil war. One issue I question though is just how widely used was the steam engine. I have actual hands on experience making a living using steam engines. We had pile drivers that used steam as the power. They work great.
Thomas made no claims concerning the British Empire. He never claimed England clung to slavery post our Civil war.
Let's imagine two slaves. For these purposes, those two will do. Slave 1 lives with a very poor white family. Slave 1 must work daylight to dark. And the poor white has little to give to the slave. But that is not normal. What is more normal is slave 2 lived with a wealthy white family. And just as most of us do not beat our dogs, nor beat our dairy cattle, nor even beat cattle to be used for meat, I do not find a case that the typical wealthy white family beat slaves. Not trying to deny that some families did beat slaves. Cruelty knows no bounds of wealth nor location. We can probably locate stories of indentured whites getting beaten as well. But when you beat your workers, just what have you accomplished? Trouble was for the freed slaves. What were they to do with themselves? OK, what can we find to use today? How about the men released from the Army and Marines. Their life is subject to strict rules. They are told how to act virtually 24/7. While some will defend the Government doing this to men, why do they defend government but not other men? Those men I speak of were such humans as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, two acclaimed presidents whom for some odd reason ... though huge slave owners, get excused by our historians and posters as if they had not owned hundreds of slaves. I don't get it myself. We had 12 presidents that owned slaves. And for the most part, those presidents are acclaimed by historians. Strange how that works. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidents_of_the_United_States_who_owned_slaves
You know, today man is being more and more replaced by machines. Is that what you look forward to? We are in the midst of such a revolution. Notice how difficult it is to find a job that needs the hands of humans other than on a keyboard. Back then, men got exercise as they worked. What will happen to our nation of fatties who sit all day long and do little walking? The idea that typical plantations could simply use steam engines is a myth. A lot of this depended on the crop on the plantation.
It teaches us that people will cherry pick historical facts to whitewash history as well. George Washington also feed many of his slaves. Many of the slaves he held were inherited when he married Martha. She inherited slaves when her first husband died. Washington inherited slaves at the age of eleven. Before he died he freed 123 slaves. Mount Vernon had 317 slaves he couldn't free them all because the law prevented it.
What bad thing did you say about George Washington? In general, isn't it much more common to run down slave owners?
The First Industrial Revolution evolved into the Second Industrial Revolution in the transition years between 1840 and 1870, when technological and economic progress continued with the increasing adoption of steam transport (steam-powered railways, boats and ships), the large-scale manufacture of machine tools
Less than 5% of the whites in the South owned slaves. Fully 3/4's of the white people of the South had neither slaves nor an immediate economic interest in the maintenance of slavery or the plantation system. This was written by none other than the late John Hope Franklin in From Slavery to Freedom, McGraw-Hill, 1994., p. 123. Franklin was a Harvard educated Professor Emeritus of History and Professor of Legal History at Duke University. Dr. Franklin also happened to be a Black man. This may come as an inconvient truth to some here. So, why did they fight. As Prof. V.L. Parrington said in his Pulitizer Prize winning book Main Currents in American Thought,"slavery was only the immediate casus belli. The deeper cause was the antagonistic conceptions of the theory and functions of the political state that emerged from antagonistic economic systems."
