Was it worth it?

[Allie]

No I cannot say I agree with Mr. Fitzhugh, no matter how much that disappoints you. I was thinking more along the lines, in no particular order: Jensen, Marx, Proudhon, Engals, Foner and Cicero.

And I did not say we would all be better off as slaves, at least I know I would not. I am talking about conditions in 1860 and before. You want to explain peoples actions, again and again, in terms of present day values.

If people are dependant on the state for food clothing and shelter, and that will BE removed if they dont comport to certain behaviors, are they not "slaves".

You want to minimize what working conditions were like in the North circa 1850. I lived in a small town where, on rough average 25 men died each year fishing....and some years during that era it was as high as 40 men. Is that inconsequential for a small town? Today that towns pop. is about 20,000....it was never a big town.

Mining deaths during this era were very high per capita as were factory deaths. Children were dieing in factories with no consequence for the owner. Why do you always want to single out 1 segament of society as having all the evils thrown upon them?

I know many of my Irish friends who had grand relatives who recalled the signs in business windows (INNA) - Irish Need Not apply....(we will not hire you). Why does that not trouble you? Do you think these immigants had a choice, once they got here? Railroad work: how many people died building railroad lines? Share croppers? How was their existance?

You want to see there was no "overseer", no "escape Posy". They had a fairly efficient overseer...exposure and stavation.

Lastly, if you are going to make a point DO YOU HAVE TO SHOUT IT IN BOLD?

Slaves also worked in mines, you know.

 

[ForeverFree]

I am going out the door but I will respond with scholar who have made this arguement for well over 100 years. Yes, the real slaves lacked freedom but they had value and were usually treated well -at least kept health. Wage slqaves were expendable. You didnt have to worry about their safety. If they died u really lost nothing and there were others ready to take their place.

I have to disagree with the scholars. Just some thoughts:

(a) I am not sure if it is true that the material circumstances of the average slave were better than that of the average immigrant. Assertions have been made to this effect, but I myself have not seen where this is borne out by a detailed quantitative or qualitative analysis of data from the era.

(b) I have a problem with this comparison of the average slave with the average immigrant. Why are we using the experience of the most exploited, poorest, and most discriminated-against group of white Americans as a standard for judging how bad it was to be a slave? The majority of free white men probably didn't want to live like either of these two groups.

To really want to understand how bad slavery was, we need to compare the experience of the average slave with the experience of the average free white person. Any other comparisons are contrivances, IMO.

(c) Both slaves and immigrants were exploited workers, but the condition of being owned - i.e., being human chattel - introduces living conditions that defy quantitative analysis. And so, looking at material circumstances inevitably fails to disclose how difficult it was to be a slave.

For example: the bond between husband and wife, parent and child, between family, is priceless, and has a value beyond measure. We know that many slaves families were split during the age of slavery. What was the cost of that? We don't have numbers for it.

I am reminded of the story of Celia, a slave:

In 1850, 60-year-old Robert Newsom, a prosperous farmer, traveled forty miles from his home in Callaway County, Missouri to neighboring Audrain County to buy a slave. Newsom was the head of a large and complex household that included several of his grown children, grandchildren, and five enslaved boys and men. His wife had died a few years earlier, a consideration that may have influenced his decision to purchase a female slave, a fourteen-year-old girl named Celia.

From the first day, Newsom treated Celia as his concubine. Testimony given before the Missouri Supreme Court in 1855 indicates that Newsom raped Celia for the first time on the journey home from the slave market. He installed her in a small cabin behind his house, where he continued to rape her on a regular basis over the next five years. During that time, she gave birth to two children.

In the spring of 1855, Celia began a relationship with George, another slave on the farm, and soon discovered that she was pregnant again. At George's urging, Celia approached Newsom's daughters and pled with them to protect her from their father during her pregnancy. The oldest daughter, Mary, later testified that Celia had threatened to hurt Newsom if he came to her cabin again, but there is no evidence that either she or her sister intervened.

On the night of June 23, 1855, Robert Newsom went to Celia's cabin, no doubt intent on raping her yet again. He never returned to his own home.

Although Celia was never allowed to testify in her own defense, investigators reconstructed the events of the night through a combination of physical evidence and Celia's confession. Fearful of Newsom, Celia had hidden a hefty stick in a corner of her cabin. When Newsom attacked her that night, Celia retrieved her weapon and beat him to death with it. She then dismembered the body and burned it to ashes in her fireplace. The next morning, Celia offered Newsom's eleven-year-old grandson two dozen walnuts in exchange for his help cleaning out the fireplace and spreading the ashes in the yard.

The jury that convicted Celia of murder accepted her confession as fact, but some elements of her tale do not ring true. As Melton McLaurin observes in his book, Celia, A Slave, the task of cutting enough wood and tending the roaring fire necessary to consume a human corpse in a single night "would have taxed the strength of a healthy woman, and Celia was pregnant and sick" (McLaurin, 49). McLaurin implies that George either helped Celia or was primarily responsible for Newsom's demise and that Celia may have lied to protect him. George disappeared shortly after the murder and was never arrested or charged.

Celia stood trial for Newsom's murder in October of 1855 (State of Missouri v. Celia, a Slave). Her lawyer, John Jameson, argued that Celia was legally entitled to defend herself from a would-be rapist under an 1845 law that made any attempt "to take any woman unlawfully against her will and by force, menace or duress, compel her to be defiled" a felony. He requested that the jury be instructed that "The words "any woman" in the first clause of the 29th section, of second article of laws of Missouri for 1845, concerning crimes & punishments, embrace slave women, as well as free white women."

The judge, William Augustus Hall, refused to honor the defense's motion. Instead, he instructed the jury that a slave had no right to resist her master, even in the case of sexual assault. The jury found Celia guilty and sentenced her to death. (Celia's child was delivered stillborn in prison.)

The Missouri Supreme Court denied her appeal, and she was hanged on December 21, 1855.​

This is a horrible story, and could only happen in the case of someone who was owned by another person. But here's another aspect of the story: as I recall, Celia was treated well materially. As Newsom's concubine, she was treated with favor versus the other slaves. I believe she had her own little cabin, apart from other slaves, and I guess that she was better fed and better clothed. Being a veritable sex slave had material benefits.

But I don't know that many immigrant families who would want their own teenage child to go through that, just to live more comfortably.

I don't know what metrics there are to account for these types of experiences, but they or some alternative are essential for coming to grips with the issues involved in human ownership.

- Alan

 

[Tin cup]

I agree with these thoughts:

"Admit the right of the seceding states to break up the union at pleasure…and how long will it be before the new confederacies created by the first disruption shall be resolved into still smaller fragments and the continent become one vast theater of civil war, military license, anarchy, and despotism? Better settle it at whatever the cost, and settle it forever."
Pvt. Samuel Evans, 70th Ohio


"If the United States submits to a division now, it will not stop, but will go on until we reap the fate of Mexico, which is eternal war."
General Sherman

I'd say it was worth it.

Kevin Dally

 

[DanF]

My immigrant ancestor arrived here as an indentured servant. Within several years he had livlihood as a surveyor and owned his own property.

That was upward mobilty that few slaves ever had a chance at.

 

[brass napoleon]

My immigrant ancestor arrived here as an indentured servant. Within several years he had livlihood as a surveyor and owned his own property.

That was upward mobilty that few slaves ever had a chance at.

The vast majority of slaves who achieved that kind of upward mobility achieved it through northward mobility.

 

[brass napoleon]

I agree with these thoughts:

"Admit the right of the seceding states to break up the union at pleasure…and how long will it be before the new confederacies created by the first disruption shall be resolved into still smaller fragments and the continent become one vast theater of civil war, military license, anarchy, and despotism? Better settle it at whatever the cost, and settle it forever."
Pvt. Samuel Evans, 70th Ohio


"If the United States submits to a division now, it will not stop, but will go on until we reap the fate of Mexico, which is eternal war."
General Sherman

I'd say it was worth it.

Kevin Dally

Yes, and these weren't the first people to voice this sentiment:

"But if on a temporary superiority of the one party, the other is to resort to a scission of the Union, no federal government can ever exist. If to rid ourselves of the present rule of Massachusetts and Connecticut, we break the Union, will the evil stop there? Suppose the New England states alone cut off, will our nature be changed? Are we not men still to the south of that, and with all the passions of men? Immediately, we shall see a Pennsylvania and a Virginia party arise in the residuary confederacy, and the public mind will be distracted with the same party spirit. What a game too will the one party in their hands, by eternally threatening the other that unless they do so and so, they will join their northern neighbors. If we reduce our Union to Virginia and North Carolina, immediately the conflict will be established between the representatives of these two States, and they will end by breaking into their simple units."

- Thomas Jefferson, June 1, 1798

Source: <http://college.cengage.com/history/ayers_primary_sources/jefferson_taylor_1798.htm​

 

[OpnCoronet]

I would like to think of us as one nation but when I see the flag of disunion flying even today ..150 years later, I wonder what was gained by all this fighting..If they still feel this way maybe it was a mistake to force them back.
I hate to ask but in view of history since then did those union men die in vain?
Please tell me I am wrong that there is something I just dont get I look forward to hearing your thoughts...especially if you're from the south..

From the perspective of History, the benefits of the sacrifice's for the Union in the CW, were incalculable to World History of the 20th(and even 21st) Century.

 

[Specster]

Well, I would reckon that virtually all of us here are expendable at our places of work. So you're saying that we'd all be better off slaves? That freedom is dangerous and just encourages the rich to exploit us? That if they owned us, it would be to our benefit? Again, I have to point out how closely your line of thought comports with the antebellum slavery advocate George Fitzhugh:

"The socialists stumbled on the true issue, but do not seem yet fully aware of the nature of their discovery. Liberty was the evil, liberty the disease under which society was suffering. It must be restricted, competition be arrested, the strong be restrained from, instead of encouraged to oppress the weak - in order to restore society to a healthy state. To them we are indebted for our argument against free trade. We have extended it and explained its application. They demonstrated that social free trade was an evil, because it incited the rich and strong to oppress the weak, poor and ignorant."

- George Fitzhugh

Source: <http://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/fitzhughsoc/fitzhugh.html​

Looking forward to it. Perhaps George Fitzhugh is one of those scholars.

Well, I would reckon that virtually all of us here are expendable at our places of work. So you're saying that we'd all be better off slaves? That freedom is dangerous and just encourages the rich to exploit us? That if they owned us, it would be to our benefit? Again, I have to point out how closely your line of thought comports with the antebellum slavery advocate George Fitzhugh:

"The socialists stumbled on the true issue, but do not seem yet fully aware of the nature of their discovery. Liberty was the evil, liberty the disease under which society was suffering. It must be restricted, competition be arrested, the strong be restrained from, instead of encouraged to oppress the weak - in order to restore society to a healthy state. To them we are indebted for our argument against free trade. We have extended it and explained its application. They demonstrated that social free trade was an evil, because it incited the rich and strong to oppress the weak, poor and ignorant."

- George Fitzhugh

Source: <http://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/fitzhughsoc/fitzhugh.html

I tried to keep this discussion as civil as possible but you shoving your conderention down my throat is a getting old quickly. In your estimation, there is one "scholar" who advocated the position that wages slaves were no better off, and often worse off than southern plantation slaves. You are so thoughtful. You have chosen my scholar and condemned him as a fool at the same time.

I guess you have license as to who is a scholar and who is not. I should cut my losses here no doubt. You have proclaimed Fitzhugh - who I have no knowledge of, as my lord and savior. Thank you for nothing. You can go fry an egg with your condescension - from the get go.

I said nothing along the lines of Mr. Fitzhugh so I would appreciate it if you dont make my arguments for me.​

Looking forward to it. Perhaps George Fitzhugh is one of those scholars.

 

[Specster]

Slaves also worked in mines, you know.

Really, that is incomprehensible. How many died there, as compared to "free men"? Do you think in the US more slaves died or more free men died? Who dug the shaft in the creator fiasco? Were those freed slaves of "free" coal miners?

 

[Specster]

[/QUOTE

Brass Napolaen said:
Well, I would reckon that virtually all of us here are expendable at our places of work. So you're saying that we'd all be better off slaves?

That is the height of hipocracy. Try working in the construction industry and see what happens today when a person dies on a job site due to an accident. OSHA and their state equivalents will be on site, fining the employers for every regulatory violation imaginable... that is for starters. Then come statutory, tort and perhaps criminal penalties including jail time.

If you have a productive employee the last thing u want 2 do is lose them. If the employee is useless, u will still pay thru the nose to see them leave. Expendable? I dont think so.

 

[18thVirginia]

I am going out the door but I will respond with scholar who have made this arguement for well over 100 years. Yes, the real slaves lacked freedom but they had value and were usually treated well -at least kept health. Wage slqaves were expendable. You didnt have to worry about their safety. If they died u really lost nothing and there were others ready to take their place.

One can be in a state of slavery even if there are no bars and chains.

Got to run. will respond to your question.

It has become a thing among young African Americans to look at their genealogical history. I think that when one looks at their family trees and sees the 1870 Brick Wall, one gets the sense of the difference between those who were free and those who were enslaved.

I have ancestors who were indentured servants--and I can find their names and the names of their children and distant cousins. I can see where they moved to another community, another state, where they joined the army, got bounty land that they settled on. But, many of the African Americans have family trees that don't go earlier than 1870. Their family trees were clear cut. They had no choices about where they went and no records of who they were related to.

It's a pretty easy visual explanation. Do your children and great great great grandchildren get to know who you are? That's a pretty big deal for all of us.

 

[DanF]

Well, it isn't a complete blank wall for all whose ancestors were slaves. Modern DNA testing has proven what many knew long ago. That many a slave womans offspring shared some of the same ancestry as the famjly that owned them.

 

[brass napoleon]

That is the height of hipocracy. Try working in the construction industry and see what happens today when a person dies on a job site due to an accident. OSHA and their state equivalents will be on site, fining the employers for every regulatory violation imaginable... that is for starters. Then come statutory, tort and perhaps criminal penalties including jail time.

If you have a productive employee the last thing u want 2 do is lose them. If the employee is useless, u will still pay thru the nose to see them leave. Expendable? I dont think so.

And just how do you suppose it is that those employees have come to have that value? Do you think it was by accident? It was because they and their ancestors had the political clout to get those very laws written that protect them. They could petition, protest, strike, vote, relocate, carry firearms, write books, publish newspapers - all to better their condition. And all things that the slaves could never do, and that their descendants would never be able to do.

How many similar laws were ever written for the BENEFIT of the slave? The vast majority of the slave laws were written to drive him deeper and deeper into ignorance and bondage, to prevent him from ever having the power that the free laborer had and wielded to his betterment and to the betterment of his descendants.

And yes, whether you like it or not, you are echoing George Fitzhugh. I've asked you to post your own sources, you said you would, and you haven't. But whatever scholar said it doesn't make much difference, the message is the same: the poor, helpless, ignorant masses are incapable of fending for themselves and will be devoured by capitalistic greed unless a lordly big brother takes ownership of them, and makes the decisions for them that they're too ignorant and helpless to make for themselves.

 

[cash]

Really, that is incomprehensible. How many died there, as compared to "free men"? Do you think in the US more slaves died or more free men died? Who dug the shaft in the creator fiasco? Were those freed slaves of "free" coal miners?

Who do you think worked coal, salt, and mineral mines in the south?

 

[18thVirginia]

Well, it isn't a complete blank wall for all whose ancestors were slaves. Modern DNA testing has proven what many knew long ago. That many a slave womans offspring shared some of the same ancestry as the famjly that owned them.

We know from DNA there is some kind of shared ancestry, but it is sometimes extraordinarily difficult to track which enslaved woman matches this descendant. I have some DNA matches with distant cousins who are of mostly African ancestry and even though I have a very limited set of ancestors who were ever slave owners, it's tough to speculate which one had offspring with an enslaved woman.

My husband has a DNA match with a family that must have been slaves of a great, great grandfather. We're able to narrow down which great grandfather by looking at the lack of matches of the other great, greats who owned slaves. But that doesn't get the African American cousin all that much closer to figuring out who his great, great grandmother was, since the last relative whose first name he knows is on the 1870 side of the Brick Wall.

 

[YankeeDoodle]

Curious. I have seen many who behave the exact opposite. A rental car has to be returned and its condition inspected. If there is a ding or a scratch you will go many rounds with insurance claims people (been there done that, its not fun).

I agree with this ...the argument that slaves were better off than free workers in the North is ridiculous.....you may have had a tough time but no one could give your daughter away as a gift..never to be seen again..

 

[Specster]

And just how do you suppose it is that those employees have come to have that value? Do you think it was by accident? It was because they and their ancestors had the political clout to get those very laws written that protect them. They could petition, protest, strike, vote, relocate, carry firearms, write books, publish newspapers - all to better their condition. And all things that the slaves could never do, and that their descendants would never be able to do.

How many similar laws were ever written for the BENEFIT of the slave? The vast majority of the slave laws were written to drive him deeper and deeper into ignorance and bondage, to prevent him from ever having the power that the free laborer had and wielded to his betterment and to the betterment of his descendants.

And yes, whether you like it or not, you are echoing George Fitzhugh. I've asked you to post your own sources, you said you would, and you haven't. But whatever scholar said it doesn't make much difference, the message is the same: the poor, helpless, ignorant masses are incapable of fending for themselves and will be devoured by capitalistic greed unless a lordly big brother takes ownership of them, and makes the decisions for them that they're too ignorant and helpless to make for themselves.

" Ive asked you to post your own sources.....and you havent" Post #31 lists two millennia of scholars, which I posted right after I said I would. Missed that mega mind?

Why is it that you think this race of people are so deficient, that they need you undivided help? At the end of the day, why is it you feel it is your place to defend people, above all others, that are capable of defending themselves?

Again, you want to bring slavery into an arguement on OSHA, just about 100 years after slavery was dead in the US.

Lastly, Id appreciate it if you stop shoving words in my mouth. I never said I was an advocate of Fitzhugh..he is meaningless to me....but he sure seems to have gotten your goat.

 

[brass napoleon]

" Ive asked you to post your own sources.....and you havent" Post #31 lists two millennia of scholars, which I posted right after I said I would. Missed that mega mind?

Why is it that you think this race of people are so deficient, that they need you undivided help? At the end of the day, why is it you feel it is your place to defend people, above all others, that are capable of defending themselves?

Again, you want to bring slavery into an arguement on OSHA, just about 100 years after slavery was dead in the US.

Lastly, Id appreciate it if you stop shoving words in my mouth. I never said I was an advocate of Fitzhugh..he is meaningless to me....but he sure seems to have gotten your goat.

Spectser, I've given you every opportunity to post - in your own words - how your opinion differs from George Fitzhugh. I've also given you every opportunity to post the words of the "scholars" you claim share your opinion (other than George Fitzhugh). Instead all we get from you are ad hominems and bile.

 

[Rebforever]

I agree with this ...the argument that slaves were better off than free workers in the North is ridiculous.....you may have had a tough time but no one could give your daughter away as a gift..never to be seen again..

Wonder how many times that really happened. Any ideas? I have read it someplace but forget where. The child might have been incorrigible.

 

[brass napoleon]

Wonder how many times that really happened. Any ideas? I have read it someplace but forget where. The child might have been incorrigible.

Of course, it was the child's fault. Why wouldn't it be?

While nobody can possibly know how many times it happened, once was too many. Here's one of those examples, an 8 year old (must be incorrigible) boy named Lewis Clarke, given away at a wedding, and remembering back on it as an adult after he had escaped to that evil, awful North:

The wedding went forward. Polly, a very good sort of a girl to be raised in that region, was married, and received, as the first installment of her dower, a girl and a boy. Now was the time for Mrs. Banton, sweet good Mrs. Banton. "Poll has a girl and a boy, and I only had that fool of a girl ; I reckon if I go home without a boy too, this house wont be left standing."

This was said, too, while the sugar of the wedding cake was yet melting upon her tongue ; how the bitter words would flow when the guests had retired, all began to imagine. To arrest this whirlwind of rising passion, her mother promised any boy upon the plantation, to be taken home on her return. Now my evil star was right in the top of the sky. Every boy was ordered in, to pass before this female sorceress, that she might select a victim for her unprovoked malice, and on whom to pour the vials of her wrath for years. I was that unlucky fellow. Mr. Campbell, my grandfather, objected, because it would divide a family, and offered her Moses, whose father and mother had been sold South. Mrs. Campbell put in for William's claim, dated ante-natum--before I was born ; but objections and claims of every kind were swept away by the wild passion and shrill-toned voice of Mrs. B. Me she would have, and none else. Mr. Campbell went out to hunt and drive away bad thoughts-- the old lady became quiet, for she was sure none of her blood run in my veins, and if there was any of her husband's there, it was no fault of hers. I was too young, only seven years of age, to understand what was going on. But my poor and affectionate mother understood and appreciated it all. When she left the kitchen of the Mansion House, where she was employed as cook, and came home to her own little cottage, the tear of anguish was in her eye, and the image of sorrow upon every feature of her face. She knew the female Nero, whose rod was now to be over me. That night sleep departed from her eyes; with the youngest child clasped firmly to her bosom, she spent the night in walking the floor, coming ever and anon to lift up the clothes and look at me and my poor brother who lay sleeping together. Sleeping, I said ; brother slept, but not I. I saw my mother when she first came to me; and I could not sleep. The vision of that night, its deep, ineffaceable impression is now before my mind with all the distinctness of yesterday. In the morning I was put into the carriage with Mrs. B. and her children, and my weary pilgrimage of suffering was fairly begun. It was her business on the road for about twenty five or thirty miles to initiate her children into the art of tormenting their new victim. I was seated upon the bottom of the carriage, and these little imps were employed in pinching me, pulling my ears and hair, and they were stirred up by their mother like a litter of young wolves to torment me in every way possible. In the mean time I was compelled by the old she wolf, to call them "Master," "Mistress," and bow to them and obey them at the first call.

During that day, I had indeed no very agreeable foreboding of the torments to come; but sad as were my anticipations, the reality was infinitely beyond them. Infinitely more bitter than death were the cruelties I experienced at the hand of this merciless woman. Save from one or two slaves on the plantation, during my ten years of captivity here, I scarcely heard a kind word, or saw a smile toward me from any living being. And now that I am where people look kind and act kindly toward me, it seems like a dream. I hardly seem to be in the same world that I was then. When I first got into the free States and saw everybody look like they loved one another, sure enough I thought this must be the "Heaven" of LOVE I had heard something about. But I must go back to what I suffered from that wicked woman. It is hard work to keep the mind upon it; I hate to think it over-- but I must tell it-- the world must know what is done in Kentucky. I cannot, however, tell all the ways, by which she tormented me, I can only give a few instances of my suffering as specimens of the whole. A book of a thousand pages would not be large enough to tell of all the tears I shed, and the sufferings endured in THAT TEN YEARS OF PURGATORY...
​

You can read all about that purgatory, and his escape from it (how could he be so ungrateful?), here:

http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/clarke/clarke.html