@Kaiserschmarrn
Kaiserschmarrn wrote:With respect, you guys are quite close to sanitising discourse and imagery in a way that the left has always been opposed to and was instrumental in dismantling. I might be wrong, but my gut feeling is that this kind of moralising is something the left will come to regret. There are strong human instincts at work and they are present across the political spectrum.
I know there is a relatively new kind of scholarship that posits that slave labour was important in America's ascent and prosperity, but they are wrong. If you are interested in an overview of the arguments of the other side, see this paper.
I was looking at your paper and it's a very long paper to read. Could you please cite this source and also quote specific parts from this paper to back up your position? I can't tell if this is really a good source of information or not which is why I ask you to cite your source to defend your position. That being said, I will give you my sources to defend my position. The textile industry in the US and in the Northern US like New York City were ENTIRELY dependent upon the southern US for cotton. Cheap plentiful land in the south along with soil necessary to grow cotton and the slave labor required to work that land produced ALOT of millionaires who were white slave owners in the American south.
In addition, Britain got 75% of it's cheap cotton from the American south which played a big role in fueling it's Industrial Revolution and supplying it's empire. Slave labor was the key, the cornerstone to producing cheap cotton that the US economy was heavily dependent upon, including the textile mills in New England and slave labor in the American south was key and important to fueling the British Industrial Revolution and supplying it's empire given that 75% of the cotton they got from the American south and it was all produced by slave labor.
Without that slave labor, the US economy then and today would not be where it was and is. Slaves in the 1860 represented a 4 billion dollar investment and it was slave labor in the US and the cotton it produced that made the US credit worthy. This 4 billion dollar investment and the fact that the south perceived Lincoln as a threat to this investment was the reason why the south attempted to secede from the US but was ultimately defeated by the superior factory and industrial output of New England factories. Slavery was also not just an entirely a southern US thing, it also existed in the Northern US for some time. Here are quotes from my sources:
Greg Timmons of History.com wrote:Building a commercial enterprise out of the wilderness required labor and lots of it. For much of the 1600s, the American colonies operated as agricultural economies, driven largely by indentured servitude. Most workers were poor, unemployed laborers from Europe who, like others, had traveled to North America for a new life. In exchange for their work, they received food and shelter, a rudimentary education and sometimes a trade.
By 1680, the British economy improved and more jobs became available in Britain. During this time, slavery had become a morally, legally and socially acceptable institution in the colonies. As the number of European laborers coming to the colonies dwindled, enslaving Africans became a commercial necessity—and more widely acceptable.
With ideal climate and available land, property owners in the southern colonies began establishing plantation farms for cash crops like rice, tobacco and sugar cane—enterprises that required increasing amounts of labor. To meet the need, wealthy planters turned to slave traders, who imported ever more human chattel to the colonies, the vast majority from West Africa. As more slaves were imported and an upsurge in slave fertility rates expanded the “inventory,” a new industry was born: the slave auction. These open markets where humans were inspected like animals and bought and sold to the highest bidder proved an increasingly lucrative enterprise.
https://www.history.com/news/slavery-pr ... rn-economy EH.net wrote:These data sets reveal that prime field hands went for four to six hundred dollars in the U.S. in 1800, thirteen to fifteen hundred dollars in 1850, and up to three thousand dollars just before Fort Sumter fell. Even controlling for inflation, the prices of U.S. slaves rose significantly in the six decades before South Carolina seceded from the Union. By 1860, Southerners owned close to $4 billion worth of slaves. Slavery remained a thriving business on the eve of the Civil War: Fogel and Engerman (1974) projected that by 1890 slave prices would have increased on average more than 50 percent over their 1860 levels. No wonder the South rose in armed resistance to protect its enormous investment.
https://eh.net/encyclopedia/slavery-in- ... 96zJaYJCXIEugene R. Dattel of Mississippi History Now wrote:William Faulkner, Mississippi’s most famous novelist, once said, “To understand the world, you have to understand a place like Mississippi.”
To the world, Mississippi was the epicenter of the cotton production phenomenon during the first half of the 19th century. The state was swept along by the global economic force created by its cotton production, the demand by cotton textile manufacturing in Europe, and New York’s financial and commercial dealings. Mississippi did not exist in a vacuum. So, in a sense, Faulkner’s words could be reversed: “To understand Mississippi, you have to understand the world.”
Mississippi’s social and economic histories in early statehood were driven by cotton and slave labor, and the two became intertwined in America. Cotton was a labor-intensive business, and the large number of workers required to grow and harvest cotton came from slave labor until the end of the American Civil War. Cotton was dependent on slavery and slavery was, to a large extent, dependent on cotton. After emancipation, African Americans were still identified with cotton production.
Eugene Dattel continues:
Eugene R. Dattel of Mississippi History Now wrote:By 1860, Great Britain, the world’s most powerful country, had become the birthplace of the industrial revolution, and a significant part of that nation’s industry was cotton textiles. Nearly 4,000,000 of Britain’s total population of 21,000,000 were dependent on cotton textile manufacturing. Nearly forty percent of Britain’s exports were cotton textiles. Seventy-five percent of the cotton that supplied Britain’s cotton mills came from the American South, and the labor that produced that cotton came from slaves.
http://mshistorynow.mdah.state.ms.us/ar ... QF0fQ2V0lQ References-
Timmons, Greg. "How Slavery Became the Economic Engine of the South." HISTORY, 31 Aug. 2018,
http://www.history.com/news/slavery-pro ... rn-economy. Accessed 6 July 2019.
EH.net. "Slavery in the United States." eh.net/encyclopedia/slavery-in-the-united-states/?fbclid=IwAR0NCi-nUH_XEv0AQcBHwYmsjhDnHBnSeYefxGQ2Ai03IZz4196zJaYJCXI. Accessed 6 July 2019.
Dattel, Eugene R. "Cotton in a Global Economy: Mississippi (1800-1860)." Mississippi History Now, mshistorynow.mdah.state.ms.us/articles/161/cotton-in-a-global-economy-mississippi-1800-1860?fbclid=IwAR0zw8rGT0JEtGhwOn5wlMKqEThi-MaTPlKjMwhk0RkjD2LdgQF0fQ2V0lQ. Accessed 6 July 2019.
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