late wrote:The argument was about whether they were slaves, and they were not. Many contracts included land, and much of what was needed to start a farm on it. I don't know about mortality rates, do you have a source for that?
That's meaningless, by itself. You seem to be ignoring sugar and tobacco. My understanding is most worked in the fields. The rich estates kept a large staff to support their lavish lifestyle, but again, what's the point here?
"Slaves suffered extremely high mortality. Half of all slave infants died during their first year of life, twice the rate of white babies. And while the death rate declined for those who survived their first year, it remained twice the white rate through age 14. As a result of this high infant and childhood death rate, the average life expectancy of a slave at birth was just 21 or 22 years, compared to 40 to 43 years for antebellum whites."
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=2&psid=3040
I will start you off with two primary sources. The first is a book entitled
Time on the Cross - the Economics of American Negro Slavery (and its accompanying supplemental Volume Time on the Cross subtitled
Evidence and Methods). It was written by Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, both university professors. Another book I can refer you to is
They Were White and They Were Slaves - The Untold History of the Enslavement of Whites in Early America by Michael A. Hoffman.
If you become serious, start there and I will be more than glad to keep adding to the mountains of evidence that debunks most of the multicultural cow manure being spread by advocates of the NEW WORLD ORDER. The key is putting perspective to history and accepting reality.
Good, bad, or indifferent society chooses slavery. Consider that most Americans accept the income tax knowing full well that it is illegal, immoral, indefensible, reprehensible, unconstitutional, AND it was a plank out of the Communist Manifesto illegally put into our own Constitution. It enslaves the people, but the masses choose to honor it as if it were the word of God. Show an American a Bible and they will laugh at you. Show them an IRS agent, and they will tremble in their boots.
Americans get too hung up on brooding over American slavery and if you challenge the institution of slavery, you will be accused of "
racism." It is acceptable in every country on the globe except the United States. Yet the fact is, the United States never legalized slavery; they were not the biggest importer of slaves; slaves in the United States were treated better than any other country that enslaved Black people. Yet, the United States is the
ONLY country being pursued over a policy that has been illegal in the United States for 156 years. The states were the first in modern history with half of the states outlawing slavery
BEFORE the Constitution was ratified.
As a purely legal issue, it would be unconstitutional for Black people to seek reparations from white people on the basis of their skin. It would equally be unconstitutional to hold the federal government accountable for a practice that they did not legalize, but rather phased out at the ratification of the Constitution. It would be ridiculous to bring suit against the individual states since over half of them made the practice illegal before the ratification of the Constitution. Never do the liberals who harp on the subject talk about going after the line of families and corporations that owned the slave ships and benefit off the slaves. Blacks don't want to hold their own brethren accountable for selling them. The leadership of Black leaders only seeks to punish the Whites on a false presupposition. And we want to sweep the enslavement of the Irish under the rug as if it never happened.
In the 1650s the Irish were being enslaved by the thousands (over a hundred thousand) by the same people engaged in enslaving and importing Blacks to America, yet nobody is mad at the fallen super-power that made that a legal enterprise. The facts are, Irish were enslaved in the colonies; they were shipped to the West Indies, Jamaica and Barbados by the same slavers that brought Blacks to the colonies. In early America, Blacks and Cherokee Indians owned Irish slaves. Modernists don't want to admit that Blacks weren't the first nor were they treated the worse. You should check out the aforementioned books, learn the rest of the story and look up the cited laws, statistics, etc. Then, maybe, you will agree that it is time to look forward, not backward.