Worst Book Review Ever Criticizes Slave History For Not Presenting 'Both Sides'

[ieoeja]

106. Okay, let's include that.

Sometime after the African slave trade ended, the South found itself in serious trouble. Contrary to your "slave is too valuable" misreading of history, the South was actually killing slaves faster than they could be replaced. During her pregnancy, a slave will have to consume more than the they produce. And child slaves are pretty useless for awhile making them not cost effective. So outside Kentucky and Rhode Island, where they made slave breeding a major industry, there wasn't much effort to replace slaves domesticly.

Plenty of attempts were made non-domesticly. Cuba was invaded twice. Baja California was captured. Sonora was invaded (at which point Baja was lost). Guatemala was conquered. Then invaded a second time after being kicked out after the first time.

Every one of those adventures were launched for the specific purpose of obtaining replacement slaves.

Here in the good ol' US of A, laws were passed to slow the loss of slaves. This included laws making it illegal to free a slave, even if the owner wanted. Up to that point a lot of free Blacks would purchase and free relatives as often as they could. When it became illegal to free them, they continued purchasing friends and relatives. Legally, they remained slaves since they could not legally free them. In reality, of course, they were just friends and relatives.

The worst long standing result of benevolent slavery (as the above legal fiction became known) is that it introduces nonsensical data into the topic that lets propagandists trick people into believing that "Blacks owned slaves" is a real issue when it is complete bullshit.

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For the record: the first of my name was brought over as a "White Trash" indentured servant from Ireland in the 1740s. Five years later he was free and a sharecropper on his former master's plantation. Awhile later he owned his own place and, from time to time**, his own slave(s).

None of his children ever had to be a servant. Hopelessness is one glaringly big difference between slave and indentured servant.

That and the fact that he would be free someday meant the master better not treat his ass too bad or a day of reckoning was coming when the indenture ended.

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** If you're ever read that "most southerners did not own slaves" a period does not correctly belong after that phrase. It should end "at any given moment". Because the South wasn't just a slave culture. It was a Norman/Celtic military culture (which is why they were so confident they could kick the Anglo-Saxon*** North's ass in the Civil War). And in military cultures:

Land Owners call the shots.

Warriors are worshipped.

Craftsmen are respected.

Freed men are necessary for the food they produce.

Laborers who work for another man are the lowest life form on the face of the Earth. No man who would willingly do so and must therefore be beaten into submission.

So a small family farm like ours never owned generations of slaves. But roughly every other census showed them owning slaves. Because sometimes who needed some help. And in the old South, few men were willing to work for pay. So you had to buy a slave then sell him/her when the job was done.

That, or they just lied on the census since more slaves meant more political power. Too many people today would have given slave owners even more power because they think the 3/5th rule was meant to demean the slave (like anyone gave two shits how slaves felt) instead of a compromise between abolitionists who wanted a 0/5th rule since the extra political power was obviously going to the slave owners, not the slaves, and the slavers who wanted the 5/5th rule that many DUers think would have been just peachy keen ignoring the fact that it would have given slave owners more power. Many DUers clearly think with their hearts on this subject, not their heads.

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*** Anglo-Saxon's were reviled in the Confederate States of America. In fact, there were at least two proposals (one possibly facetious) to replace the dwindling African slave population with Anglo-Saxons.