Civil War History - Secession and PoliticsWas it Slavery, or was it States Rights? Perhaps it was the election of Lincoln? What were the real reasons for Southern Secession and what were the political issues in this time of war? Find your answers here in the Secession and Politics Disussion.
I'm not so sure as you that the Bible is the final arbiter on what is and is not immoral. Many cultures develop a notion of morality without benefit of the Good Book.
Ole
True, but in most nations some form or other of religion sets the moral standard for the nation and in the United States, particularly in the nineteenth century, the Bible was the moral guideline for most people.
Rose
__________________ "Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names".--J.F.K.
The War Between the States established... This principle that the Federal Government is, through its courts, this final judge of its own powers.
-- Woodrow Wilson
Since no slaveowner ever volunteered for a life of unpaid servitude(and all their descendents as well), its safe to say that they never actually applied the Golden Rule very rigorously. But, I'm sure many read their Bibles daily and prayed fervently.
My point was this: many people in America, and elsewhere found slavery immoral. Lincoln(and others), besides thinking slavery bad for black people, thought it was bad for the United States.
I'm not arguing that they were correct in thinking holding millions of people in slavery was hypocritical, in a republic where it was self-evident that "all men were created equal." Or that oppressing a racial group might lead to oppressing others. But that's how they felt at the time, and it was a factor in issuing the Emancipation Proclaimation, which is where we started on this thread.
Dear Hanny,
Your comment about more flogging in the Royal Navy and the Army than in American slavery is not completely relevant. You can always find groups of people: Jews under the Nazis, Cossacks under Stalin, etc. etc. etc. that were worse off than American slaves. That doesn't make slavery right.
The example you give is especially not relevant:
a. Enlistment(naval impressment during the Napoleonic Wars aside) was voluntary.
b. It wasn't forever, and it didn't condemn your children to military service forever.
c. Military service is paid, and there is promotion, and other opportunities.
Your comment about drafting freedmen in the Dept. of the South, while a hardship in many cases, how insignificant to centuries of involuntary servitude under slavery. My Dad was a draftee as well, but he wasn't a slave.
The legal relationship is that the owner of the chattel property is the area your forgetting, he had by law to provide home, work, food, cloths, medical care, take work for instance, the stick was punishment and the carrot was fincial incentives, the Average slave earnt about 20% of the national av wage by incentive payments, so the incentives were quite more important than the punishment, your where more likly to be flogged in the UK Army of that time, than as a slave, and the RN was three times more likly to flogg you than the Uk Army.
It only cost about $20/year to keep a slave. Wages for free workers was somewhat higher than 100/year.
And what are your sources for flogging.
Chuck in IL.
It only cost about $20/year to keep a slave. Wages for free workers was somewhat higher than 100/year.
And what are your sources for flogging.
Chuck in IL.
I am certainly no advocate of slavery, but I wonder what are your sources for the $ 20/year figure? I may have overlooked something in an earlier message, but one would think it should cost more than $ 20 a year to feed, clothe and house a person, even in the mid-nineteenth century.
Actually, Will, I have read the same thing. Although it seems low (and I had to read the article several times, checking the arithmetic, etc.), and it may well be on the low end of average. As in all averages, there are exceptions to either side. Field hands were cheaper to clothe than house servants, most often given only one set of clothes per year and that of "negro cloth," which appears to have been very loosely woven -- like burlap. Feeding was most easily accomplished by allowing garden space and enough daylight to tend it. Some were allowed to hunt and fish. Some were allowed poultry. At butchering time, the owners would eat high off the hog and provide their slaves with the remainder, from which we get chitlins, trotters, head cheese, jowl bacon, etc.
Somewhere in the archives is a rather lengthy discussion and, I think, some links to articles. Perhaps someone can at least come up with the name and approximate date of the thread.
Ole
__________________ I never knew a man who wished to be himself a slave. Consider if you know any good thing that no man desires for himself. A. Lincoln
Since no slaveowner ever volunteered for a life of unpaid servitude(and all their descendents as well), its safe to say that they never actually applied the Golden Rule very rigorously. But, I'm sure many read their Bibles daily and prayed fervently.
And, as I pointed out, since the Bible seemed to condone slavery by instructing slave owners how to behave toward their slaves, slave owners would have viewed the Golden Rule to mean they should treat slaves as they themselves would want to be treated if they were a slave. The slave owners didn't see themselves as the individual that made a slave a slave. They believed it was the Negro's lot (by nature) to be an inferior race.
Quote:
Originally Posted by matthew mckeon
My point was this: many people in America, and elsewhere found slavery immoral. Lincoln(and others), besides thinking slavery bad for black people, thought it was bad for the United States.
Everyone, in their own time and in their own way abolished slavery. Yet when the North decided it was time for the South to abolish slavery the South was expected to jump to it, in spite of the economic and social problems they hadn't been able to solve. After all, it wasn't the North that would have millions of free blacks, with no job or means to live, on their streets and since it was no skin off their nose, it was easy for them to make that demand on the South.
Quote:
Originally Posted by matthew mckeon
I'm not arguing that they were correct in thinking holding millions of people in slavery was hypocritical, in a republic where it was self-evident that "all men were created equal." Or that oppressing a racial group might lead to oppressing others. But that's how they felt at the time, and it was a factor in issuing the Emancipation Proclaimation, which is where we started on this thread.
The problem with criticizing the people of the nineteenth century is in not being able to understand their thinking and motivations. They believed the Declaration of Independence was not written with slaves in mind. It was written for free men. It was taken for granted that everyone understood the Negro was an inferior race. This was not a uniquely Southern way of thinking, either. All of the nineteenth century U.S. generally felt this way, even many of the Abolitionists that wanted to end slavery. Neither did Abe Lincoln didn't see Negroes as having been "created equal" to the white man. Slave owners would have been quite surprised to hear themselves referred to as hypocrites.
Rose
__________________ "Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names".--J.F.K.
The War Between the States established... This principle that the Federal Government is, through its courts, this final judge of its own powers.
-- Woodrow Wilson
I am certainly no advocate of slavery, but I wonder what are your sources for the $ 20/year figure? I may have overlooked something in an earlier message, but one would think it should cost more than $ 20 a year to feed, clothe and house a person, even in the mid-nineteenth century.
That was probably ample to support an individual at a time when practically all food was self-produced. Building materials were taken from the land and even cloth for clothing was often spun and woven on the farm from cotton grown there.
Rose
__________________ "Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names".--J.F.K.
The War Between the States established... This principle that the Federal Government is, through its courts, this final judge of its own powers.
-- Woodrow Wilson
I'm not so sure as you that the Bible is the final arbiter on what is and is not immoral. Many cultures develop a notion of morality without benefit of the Good Book.
Rose
The USA is a christian nation, its final arbiter on morality is the Bible for christians, the Abolitionsts argues that slavery was a mortal sin.
What i am asking is where in the Bible is that contained. The answer is that it is not.
I can see that god Saved Noah and his family, and later the Sons of Ham Gen. 9:20-27 were burnt black and cast out of Gods grace, fit only to be used as slaves, and would return to Gods good grace in the year of Jubalie, and that whites could be taken as slaves, and treated/governed by Mosiac law given directly by God to Mosses.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mattew McKeon
Your comment about more flogging in the Royal Navy and the Army than in American slavery is not completely relevant. You can always find groups of people: Jews under the Nazis, Cossacks under Stalin, etc. etc. etc. that were worse off than American slaves. That doesn't make slavery right.
Well i was comparing carrot and stick,approach to slavery, but if you prefer i can use US Union army desertion etc as a comparison of incidence of a body of men who desert rather than serve, compared to the number of slaves leaving slavery, more men deserted tha did slaves flee slavery, so which was worse slavery or service?.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mattew McKeon
The example you give is especially not relevant:
a. Enlistment(naval impressment during the Napoleonic Wars aside) was voluntary.
So you say, but i was talking about 1860 UK, but since you broaden the subject somewhat.
Impresment was for the duration, some lasted decades, enlistment was for life, and as part of cumutation of sentences for transportation for life.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mattew McKeon
b. It wasn't forever, and it didn't condemn your children to military service forever.
Nor was slavery for ever, your chances of being free was about 1 in 3 on your owners death, have you ever wondered who those drummer boys were?, oddly two at Waterloo were in there 60s.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mattew McKeon
c. Military service is paid, and there is promotion, and other opportunities.
slavery was not without pecuniry gain, there was promotion in its structure, and without the specilisation of slavery the modern factory process of mass production would not have come into being.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mattew McKeon
Your comment about drafting freedmen in the Dept. of the South, while a hardship in many cases, how insignificant to centuries of involuntary servitude under slavery. My Dad was a draftee as well, but he wasn't a slave.
I was offering it up as an example why the negros were moving about the country, and as an axample of how the government makes slaves of us all when it wants to do so, when Lincoln called up the Militia, Marlyland Gov asked for the States Militia Officers resignation he got them all, because every Militia oath was to his State, and then he disbanded the Militia and refused to comply with the order, but by passing the draft acts, any white or negro could be forced to serve, regradless of the feelings of the individual, making him a slave to the Government. Your dads choice is part of what i was a looking at, he served or went to jail, or in the Uk went into the mines, im sure other equally unpleasent alternatives existed in then US, the negro had no choice as a slave, nor when he was made free, he simply changed owners, and freedom and equality was a century away.
__________________ "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.
Liberty is a well armed lamb contesting the vote."
Benjamin Franklin, 1759
Dear Rose,
Your explanation of how slaveowners squared bondage with personal morality is very persuasive.
"Everybody abolished slavery in their own way and time"
I partially agreed with you, but looking at abolishing slavery in the 19th century(British Empire, Haiti, USA) its generally other people making the slaveowners give up slavery, rather than the slaveowners abandoning it themselves. In the New England states, which practiced slavery until after the Revolution, slavery was such a minor part of the economy, slaveowners could be overriden. In the British Empire, the imperial authorities in London dealt with Carribean slaveowners as only one part, and ultimately not a crucial part of a global empire.
Individual slaveowners partially or wholly manumitted their slaves, especially in the Revolutionary generation(Washington is the most famous example).
As far as pushing our own agendas and ideas on people on the 19th century. I'd personally plead guilty to that. Perfection continues to elude me.
But many folks of the time were critical of slavery for what it cost both blacks and whites. And as Lincoln said, both sides called on God to justify themselves.
On the meaning of the Declaration of Independence...I'm going to think and post later.
Dear Hanny,
One the US being a Christian nation. Sure is, as long as you exclude millions of Jews, Muslims, atheists, Buddhaists and what not. Personally, I find Civil War veteran Ambrose Bierce's definition of a Christian has a lot of validity.
Dear Rose,
I'm thinking, while a slaveowner might lay out 20 dollars cash, in terms of lost productive land and time(given over to labor, materials and acres) used to feed, cloth and house his slave laborers would count against his income.
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