One Southerner says the Confederacy was a ‘con-job’ on white people — and its legacy still is today [View all]

[Javaman]

(A really interesting read)

http://www.rawstory.com/2015/10/one-southerner-says-the-confederacy-was-a-con-job-on-white-people-and-its-legacy-still-is-today/

>snip<

Q: Joshua Holland: You say the Confederacy was a con job on whites then and now. Didn’t white Southerners profit immensely from slavery prior to the Civil War?

A: Frank Hyman: Yeah, but most of the profit then, as now, went to the one-percenters – people at the top of the pile. About a third of Southern families did own slaves, so it was pretty widespread, but there were plenty of families that might own one or two enslaved Africans. They weren’t wealthy. The bulk of all slaves were owned by the top 5 percent or 10 percent of Southern families.
A small number of people in the South profited immensely. In my research I found that most of the one-percenters in the US were Southerners, not Northern industrialists. The Southern states were wealthier than any nation in Europe except for England, because there was so much money to be made growing cash-crops if you weren’t actually paying people to help you harvest them.

Q: But there was a middle class. In addition to those smaller landholders, there must have been other people who sold wagon wheels or imported fancy goods from Europe or whatever.

A: Right, but for the bulk of the population – what we would call the working-class today — slavery wasn’t at all financially beneficial. One-third of the population were African-Americans being paid nothing for their work, and that drove down wages. And not just in agriculture. Slavery drove down wages in the skilled crafts because a quarter of all enslaved people were trained to be carpenters and cobblers and masons and wheelwrights and shipwrights – and everything else you could imagine. The slave-owners thought, ‘gosh, why should I pay this white guy a professional wage when I can just train some of my slaves to do the work?’
So most white folks in the South were economic losers because of slavery, but many of them bought into the institution for what they saw as its social value. They might have a crummy deal in life, but somebody else had it even worse than they did. That was a big selling point in a lot of the literature from that period, many of which were owned by slaveholders. Pamphlets, newspapers, novels and magazines conveyed the message that you might have it rough as a poor white person, but you were still better off than black people.