Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gauguin who wrote (11518)	7/21/1998 9:25:00 PM
From: JF Quinnelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71178

A type of slavery had been more egalitarian in America's early history, but for whites it was a limited term known as indentured servitude. Not perpetual as it was for blacks. Often it was just to repay the price of passage over to the New World, or perhaps to learn a trade. And not all blacks were slaves, there were even some free blacks in the South that were slaveholders themselves. Slavery would have ended in the South just as it did in every other country in the Western Hemisphere: peacefully and by the 1880s. America is the only country were the ending of slavery coincided with a terrible war, and we can thank Lincoln and the Radical Republicans for seeking that avenue. Any economic rationale for slavery was quickly vanishing at the time of the War, and it was surviving on social inertia. Eugene Genovese has written quite a bit on the subject, and the book Time on the Cross addresses the issue, but I don't recall the authors. One problem we never think about is the fact that slaveholders had a very large capital investment. Slaveholders weren't likely to voluntarily bankrupt themselves. The British used government bonds to buy out the slaveholders in the West Indies as their solution to the dilemma. And a widescale emancipation as in America needed to provide the former slaves with a stakehold, so that they would have had a chance to provide for themselves. Far from protecting us from "demons", Lincoln set an army of them loose across the land in the bloodiest war in American history. The Union's decision to wage war upon the civilian population undid centuries of practice in the West, where it had become civilized custom to confine war to combatants. Sherman's March to the Sea and the destruction of all in his army's path is arguably the act of a war criminal. The famine that haunted the South in the years after the War is rarely acknowledged today. There was no Marshall Plan, there were instead 10 years of military occupation during Reconstruction. And Reconstruction may well have the distinction of creating a racial resentment among white southerners that hadn't previously existed, and that lingered for years. There is a collection of interviews with former slaves that was done during the 1930s. You don't often see this collection referred to, and I wonder if it's because too many of these one-time slaves spoke fondly of their former masters; it's not the version of the past that is useful to modern race baiters. When you do see this collection mentioned, the memories of these old folks are explained away as nostalgic foolishness. The selections I've read remind me of Mr Brown, a 70ish black man who worked at the elementary school I attended in Virginia back in the 50s. We had just returned from a field trip to the Custis-Lee house at Arlington cemetery, and I recall Mr Brown telling us that his mother had been a servant at that house when she was a young woman. Far from being angry about the past, he seemed proud that his mother had known Robt E Lee and his father in law, George Washington's stepson. I know as a 10 yr old I was impressed.