102. phillipdavid - Dec. 24, 1998 - 2:43 PM PT
likely than before to find a place in society. But this was truer in the early colonial years than it was in the 19th century.
103. phillipdavid - Dec. 24, 1998 - 3:05 PM PT
Hanspragma,
What Simpson said about Wade etc makes sense, except I don't know just how much "Johnson's main concern was to help the old plantation
aristocracy regain control,.."
Consider that Johnson was a self-made man who harbored deep resentments toward the old Southern aristocracy. Part of his original Reconstruction plan (or "Restoration", as he preferred to call it) was for the old Confederate high-ranking soldiers and any white Southeners with land holdings worth $20,000 or more to have to personally apply to the president for individual pardons. I imagine him actually relishing the prospect of these Confederate leaders humbling themselves before him to ask for amnesty.
104. PSEUDOERASMUS - Dec. 24, 1998 - 8:39 PM PT
Raskolnikov #83 what nonsense. I!ve said no such thing. Kindly never cite me again except verbatim. Loar #85 stick to commenting on my actual words rather than hearsay. As for Fogel, his book with Stanley Engerman is "Time on the Cross: Economics of American Negro Slavery". I can!t imagine you!d enjoy the book. All the same, before the rise of cliometrics and the "New Economic History", the conventional wisdom was that the institution of slavery had been economically moribund, dying naturally from inefficiency and technical backwardness. On the contrary, Fogel and Engerman meticulously and painstakingly demonstrated that to the very last, Southern slave capitalism was economically robust -- efficient, productive and very very profitable. (As I recall one thing F & E showed was that output per worker on slave-using farms was much higher than on comparable farms without slave labour.) I can!t fathom why this book was engulfed in political controversy for so long, for it makes peremptory and inevitable the conclusion that the only way slavery as an institution might have come to an end was with the decisive military defeat of the South, not through some fabulous "natural economic evolution" which had been the claim of many historians previously, usually the very ones who argued that the civil war had not been about slavery but about states' rights. (I!m glad it took historians trained as economists to make the historians see the point...) By the way you civil war threaders should all go up pick up Allan Nevins's "Ordeal of the Union: The Emergence of Lincoln", which I read on my interminably long flight. The political drama is absolutely riveting!
105. CalGal - Dec. 24, 1998 - 8:52 PM PT
Was that long flight to bush country? What!s up with the !!s?
106. RyckNelson - Dec. 24, 1998 - 8:55 PM PT
Excellent points PE. Glad you had an ok flight, because of the book.
I'm too busy with my new systems work at my present job to pick up a new book. I've allocated my time to present day articles concerning the situation in Borneo. I believe you're aware of what I mean by that.
You've mentioned the historians slant that slavery would end because of economic turns and that it was wrong. Then that the economists have redirected that slant by analyzing the vigor of slave owner concerns. Finally that the war was the unavoidable consequence of the sepratist south's stubborn slave owning ehtics.
I hope my summary is close enough, because I agree with your post.
Happy Holidays to you and anyone else up and about. I'm off to bed.
Peace.
Yo.
107. ScottLoar - Dec. 24, 1998 - 10:43 PM PT
Thou Most Fatuous Ass; In Message #82 I welcomed your comments, which invitation I now regret for in Message #85 I did not comment on the author but to the statement so you need not admonish or instruct me. You can "stick" it to your own person. I'll comment on your last post when I'm in better humour.
Gravel, you're okay. Slips do happen, as do gross misinterpretations on both sides.
108. ScottLoar - Dec. 24, 1998 - 10:46 PM PT
Also, never again presume to know my mind for I confide nothing to you, nor is my mind so plain.
109. gravel - Dec. 25, 1998 - 3:48 AM PT
ScottLoar:
About the affront caused by my presuming to know your complex mind. (It's okay for me, simple-minded person that I am, to assume that your not "plain" mind is complex, isn't it?) Usually you speak with clarity and authority, and you offer the sources that lead you to say what you do. On the one occasion when you didn't speak as you usually do, I noticed it immediately and assumed that it was intentional. Yes, I did read something into that. I am genuinely sorry that I spoke.
I will say this, though. If I had not interrupted you, ignorant though the interruption was, some good messages may never have been posted. Now you may consider these messages to be foolish, or to have proceeded from the foolish.
I, on the other hand, see those people's offerings as not only enlightening, but also, now that you object, as having heading off a monologue.
You may wish to consider that a person could read this thread, and even *your* messages, with an eye to learning something more than facts about one particular war, and also that one might try always to read with healthy skepticism.
cont'd
110. RyckNelson - Dec. 25, 1998 - 3:50 AM PT
and Tiny Tim said, god bless us everyone.
111. gravel - Dec. 25, 1998 - 4:16 AM PT
continuing #109
I'm going to state right now that the rest of this is of the commonplace. It does further interrupt the thread. But I'm hoping it won't ruin the thread. I won't write anymore after this; I will just read the thread, so please bear with me.
The message of LadyChaos which put forth the notion that Northerners were somehow befuddled or amused by the "maddeningly directionless Southern roads" is a good example of the place at which I began to object. Unmarked rural roads, I assume, are the roads being used in the illustration. Now any person (from the North or the South) who is from a small town, a rural area or a farm knows roads are usually built according to the landscape. I inferred that either the books from which LadyChaos got this information were slanted, or that LadyChaos was attempting to slant the direction of the conversation. This way of thinking on my part was not incorrect; apples and oranges are being mixed in that posting. But nobody seemed to have noticed.
Then you made a statement that I as a reader found strange. It was also uncharacteristic of you. I didn't want to go into depth in my objections because I do fear ruining a thread. I made the decision to attempt to object without using examples.
I don't mean to be overly personal, ScottLoar. I truly am embarrassed. And I apologize to everyone for having gone off on a tangent again. Simply, the subject was interesting, the writing helped make it so, and I got too involved.
112. ScottLoar - Dec. 25, 1998 - 5:46 AM PT
Gravel, you have misunderstood me. The bulk of Message #107 and all of Message #108 was directed to Pseudoerasmus, for what I thought were obvious reasons. The only paragraph I intended for you I addressed to you by name, Gravel.
113. ScottLoar - Dec. 25, 1998 - 5:50 AM PT
In all this I wouldn't want Phillipdavid's most excellent Message #101 and Message #102 lost, which bear repetition.
114. ScottLoar - Dec. 25, 1998 - 5:51 AM PT
Merry Christmas. Most truly, Merry Christmas.
115. Hanspragma - Dec. 26, 1998 - 3:48 PM PT
Phillipdavid. Interesting points about A. Johnson's background (#101). To pursue the point, you might ask WHY Simpson attributed to AJ an identification with the plantocracy despite such facts. Johnson met with black leaders, including Frederick Douglass, on Feb. 7, 1866, and launched into a diatribe on how he knows what is best for their people, and it is NOT the ballot. Douglass tried to argue with him, got nowhere. After the delegation had left, Johnson apparently told one of his aides, "Those damned sons of bitches thought they had me in a trap! I know that damned Douglass; he's just like any other nigger, and he would sooner cut a white man's throat than not." This info. comes from letters of the various participants to one another, and an article in the New York Times four days later.
In a sense, I suspect there is a case that the central thread of Reconstruction politics, including the impeachment trial, was suffrage for blacks, and the key result was a compromise. The 15th amendment gave the vote in formal terms, but various statutory shenanigans along with the threat and reality of lynching, etc. took it away in substantive terms. That compromise lasted another hundred years.
Early in 1867, Johnson gave an interview to Charles Nordhoff, managing editor of the New York Evening Post. Nordhoff came away convinced that Johnson was "a pig headed man, with only one idea ... a bitter opposition to universal suffrage and a determination to secure the political ascendancy of the old Southern leaders, who, he emphasized, must in the nature of things rule the South." Grammatically, that sounds like two different ideas, connected only by the word "and." Yet in reality, Nordhoff had a point. The two sides of that "and" are sufficiently interconnected to have counted as ONE idea!
116. phillipdavid - Dec. 26, 1998 - 5:51 PM PT
Thanks for the education, Hanspragma. I didn't know Johnson had those kind of thoughts -- my knowledge of him being rather superficial, somewhat akin to what you can read in the official whitehouse biography of him.
I did a look through the internet and found quite a few pages about Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction. Many of them seem to reflect the same sort of attitude you report of Johnson. Here is one lengthy example; it is not well written, so I don't recommend you wade through it (like I just did). It basically says that black suffrage was a mistake and government should have been left to the white man.
117. Raskolnikov - Dec. 27, 1998 - 9:36 PM PT
Pseudo: I apologize if I misinterpreted or misremembered what you said. It was several months ago, and it was an extremely brief discussion.
118. ScottLoar - Dec. 28, 1998 - 2:05 PM PT
I have long held interest in that "peculiar institution" of slavery yet like many academic subjects removed from one's practicable life the years passed and I had not yet returned to my younger interest until the coming of this thread and the challenge presented to my supposition that slavery was uneconomical in these United States. The challenge was proffered knowledge of "Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery", Robert William Fogel & Stanley L. Engerman, 1974, Little, Brown and Company (Inc.) which posits ten "principal corrections of the traditional characterization of the slave economy". I think this so profound that I am obliged to recount in this public forum a synopsis of the book, not only as germane to this thread on the Civil War, but as a catharsis of much of which I have understood as gospel's truth about slavery. Moreover, this knowledge was proffered by others and so cannot be ignored. Understand that I review the book without soliciting comment from any of you, for my purpose here is not to initiate more talk, but to first present with dispassion the contents of this book as I read, and second - not even second, for any of the readers of these posts may discount my criticisms and asides as purely subjective as they very well may be - to offer some poor insight on what I may find. Nevertheless, some of you may be moved to comment, which is all well and good, but the content of the book should remain uppermost in your own criticisms.
119. ScottLoar - Dec. 28, 1998 - 2:15 PM PT
I'll proceed at a pace comfortable to me and obliging to the necessities of making a living, so the review will be in drips and drabs, by chapter do I intend, but together comprise a fair outline of the book.
No better place to start than the Prologue, which recounts ten traditional supposition about slavery, most of which I subscribe to (not I use present tense, for I review as I read and have not gone beyond the prologue at this point. I cannot but quote in full:
"1. Slavery was not a system irrationally kept in existence by plantation owners who failed to perceive or were indifferent to their best economic interests. The purchase of a slave was generally a highl profitable investment which yielded rates of return that compared favourably with the most outstanding investment opportunities in manufacturing.
"2. The slave system was not economically moribund on the eve of the Civil War. There is no evidnece that economic forces alone would have soon brought slavery to an end without the necessity of a war or some other form of political intervention. Quite the contrary; (sic) as the Civil War approached, slavery as an economic system was never stronger and the trend was toward even further entrenchment.
120. ScottLoar - Dec. 28, 1998 - 2:19 PM PT
"3. Slaveowners were not becoming pessimistic about the future of their system during the decade that preceded the Civil War. The rise of the secessionist movement coincided with a wave of optimism. On the eve of the Civil War, slaveholders anticipated an era of unprecedented prosperity.
"4. Slave agriculture was not inefficient compared with free agriculture. Economies of large-scale operation, effective management, and intensive utilization of labor and capital made southern slave agriculture 35 percent more efficient that the northern system of family farming.
121. ScottLoar - Dec. 28, 1998 - 2:25 PM PT
"5. The typical slave field hand was not lazy, inept, and unproductive. On average he was harder-working and more efficient than his white counterpart.
"6. The course of slavery in the cities does not prove that slavery was incompatible with an industrial system or that slaves were unable to cope with an industrial regimen. Slaves employed in industry compared favorably with free workers in diligence and efficiency. Far from declining, the demand for slaves was actually increasing more rapidly in urban areas than in the countryside.
"7. The belief that slave-breeding, sexual exploitation, and promiscuity destroyed the black family is a myth. The family was the basic unit of social organization under slavery. It was to the economic interest of planters to encourage the stability of slave families and most of them did so. Most slave sales were either of whole families or of individuals who were at an age when it would have been normal for them to have left the family.
122. ScottLoar - Dec. 28, 1998 - 2:32 PM PT
"8. The material (not psychological) conditions of the lives of slaves compared favorably with those of free industrial workers. This is not to say that they were good by modern standards. It merely emphasizes the hard lot of all workers, free or slave, during the first half of the nineteenth century.
"9. Slaves were exploited in the sense that part of the income which they produced was expropriated by their owners. However, the rate of expropriation was much lower than has generally been presumed. Over the course of his lifetime, the typical slave field hand received about 90 percent of the income he produced.
"10. Far from stagnating, the economy of the antebellum South grew quite rapidly. Between 1840 and 1860, per capita income increased more rapidly in the South than in the rest of the nation. By 1860 the South attained a level of per capita income which was high by the standards of the time. Indeed, a country as advanced as Italy did not achieve the same level of per capita income until the eve of World War II."
123. ScottLoar - Dec. 28, 1998 - 2:37 PM PT
These revelations come about by "cliometrics", which my dictionary defines as "(t)he study of history using advanced mathematical methods of data processing and analysis". Well, we shall see what we shall see. I continue in my reading, and will post a synopsis after each chapter, if the maintainer of this thread stretches patience and allows me so. My own little comments will follow the synopsis.
I truly have no idea how this will all turn out.
124. Jonesatlaw - Dec. 28, 1998 - 3:09 PM PT
ScottLoar- Sounds great to me. I look forward to your posts. Meanwhile, I'll try to dig up some revisionist history from my college days- The Confederate Nation. It attempts to produce a national history of the confederacy, as a historical progression of government, "correcting" perceived flaws in the federal system.
It will be interesting to counterpoint this view against the "feudalistic" or racial views that are more mainstream.
125. Pseudoerasmus - Dec. 28, 1998 - 3:15 PM PT
Loar Message #107 & #108: what is wrong with you? I meant no offence or admonition with my Message #104. If you took it as such then for the sake of the recent comity in discussing Chinese characters, I apologise unilaterally. But surely you must acknowledge that whatever offence you might have taken your response was disproportionate and melodramatic. You yourself make remarks all the time which appear if not to you then to many Fraygrants condescending, brusque or even hostile -- and certainly more provocative than my "please don't comment on hearsay" remark. Yet few react to you the way you did to me in #107. Did I get epileptic with your recent "stepped on PE" barb over in the language thread? No. Yet no matter that I have of late acted civilly, even unctuously, toward you, you seem to think that I'm on the constant lookout to attack you. I am not. So let me be Snodgrassian and try to alleviate your tendency to take the least charitable interpretation of my intentions when I address you: I read your posts most eagerly and find them interesting, valuable and, when intended, amusing.
126. Pseudoerasmus - Dec. 28, 1998 - 3:25 PM PT
Well, it seems Loar has already posted Fogel and Engerman's own 10-point summary of their book, something I myself intended to do upon return from abroad. Let me add that the book does not itself present original research but is a summary, a report, of the nearly two decades of excruciating quantitative research that had been published in obscure academic journals and had quietly been challenging the "traditional intepretation" of the Southern economy. Upon publication the book produced a firestorm of scholarly debate, and not all the conclusions of the book have been accepted by economists and historians. But My understanding is that of those points mentioned in Message #119 to Message #122, the ones that proved, and remain, most controversial are #7, 8 and 9 -- especially Fogel & Engerman's estimates of the daily caloric intake of slaves and their average life expectancy. But the more purely economic conclusions are now considered uncontroversial. All the same, if you're interested in a book whose purpose is to refute Fogel and Engerman's, see Henry (?) David's "Reckoning With Slavery".
The commentary in this thread show that some of the most basic realities of the Southern economy -- those which have been accepted by most scholars -- are not at all reflected in popular knowledge, and some people continue to believe in outright myths about the antebellum economy.
Point #10 needs to be amplified. Despite an assertion made earlier in the thread, I think, by Arkymalarky that the Southern economy was stagnating, it was on the contrary dynamic, with an annual growth rate of per capita income in the years before the Civil War exceeding the North's. If I recall the text correctly, as an independent country, the South in 1860 would have ranked the third or fourth highest in the world in terms of per capita income -- higher than France's and Germany's and behind Britain and the North.
Someone else also made
127. Pseudoerasmus - Dec. 28, 1998 - 3:28 PM PT
Someone else also made another misguided point -- about the lack of economic opportunity for poor southern whites (relative to that for poor northern whites). The conclusion of Fogel and Engerman was that wealth inequality was about the same in the South as in the North. The degree of industrial backwardness in the antebellum South is also greatly exaggerated in the popular imagination. Although the South was surpassed by the North in manufacturing, the South in 1860 was nevertheless one of the most industrialised regions of the world, especially in railroad mileage and cotton textile manufactures. I don't recollect the specifics, but I'm sure Loar will get to them.
128. Raskolnikov - Dec. 28, 1998 - 3:45 PM PT
Pseudo: In 8th grade history, I was taught that the war was not over slavery, but over the "right to secede". In 11th grade history, I was taught that there were a host of factors. When I took a college level course, I was taught that it was over the issue of slavery in the territories. I once heard two college history majors, both bright boys and in their third or fourth years of college argue that the war was fought over tariffs. I have more or less consistently subscribed to the "its slavery" view, viewing most of the rest of the arguments as specious, ridiculous, or just cluttered.
I was once told that the problem with high school textbooks is that they are written by southern authors and they want to sell books to southern schools as well as the north.
My education in this matter have been atypical. I would be quite curious about how others were taught, particularly in the south, and I would love to get Arky to talk about this more, as a history teacher.
129. JadeGold - Dec. 28, 1998 - 3:53 PM PT
PE;
Have you a book recommendation applicable to this thread?
130. Seguine - Dec. 28, 1998 - 4:00 PM PT
"I can!t fathom why this book was engulfed in political controversy for so long, for it makes peremptory and inevitable the conclusion that the only way slavery as an institution might have come to an end was with the decisive military defeat of the South, not through some fabulous "natural economic evolution" which had been the claim of many historians previously, usually the very ones who argued that the civil war had not been about slavery but about states' rights."
[Rask: I was educated in Texas, where we were taught that the Civil War was considered by the South to be about states' rights and by the North to be about slavery and maintaining national unity at all costs.]
Pseudoerasmus: the reason the book was engulfed in controversy must have been sheerly ideological. The progressve religion dictates that what is moral is also pragamatic in every single respect. A history of slavery which supposes that there were economic benefits to the institution is extremely dangerous heresy.
You'll notice, please, that I am distinguishing progressives from liberals; the latter are nearly extinct now.
131. ChristinO - Dec. 28, 1998 - 4:03 PM PT
Jonesatlaw,
Indeed it will be. I'm very interested in the economics of the issue. I have to admit that this is primarily for emotional reasons. I tend to get rather passionate about Southern stereotypes particularly when the breast beating begins over the nobility of the North.
132. ChristinO - Dec. 28, 1998 - 4:09 PM PT
Jade,
You make an excellent point. It goes against the grain to think that something as detestable as slavery could be an economically sound institution. However, drug dealers, pimps and corporate theives make quite a tidy living.
I think also there is the tendency to want to back one's position up with more than the "It's just wrong" argument.
133. ChristinO - Dec. 28, 1998 - 4:13 PM PT
Rask,
Elementary school in Texas: the Civil War was about slavery
HighSchool in NC: the Civil War was about power, money and slavery--in that order.
College in Californina: the Civil War was about power, money and slavery--------of course this professor was a Jeffersonian Socialist so the issue of State Sovereignty was the main focus of our coursework.
134. LadyChaos - Dec. 28, 1998 - 4:47 PM PT
gravel, Re: Message #111,
My comment about the response of Northern soldiers to "aimless Southern roads" was based on my recollection of a book entitled "Civil War Soldiers," which contains letters and diary entries of soldiers from both sides of the war. I left that book at my home in Europe, and have no way of citing a specific passage, but in any case, I wanted you to know that it was not something that I pulled out of the air.
ScottLoar,
I look forward to your synopsis.
135. lemwalker - Dec. 28, 1998 - 6:02 PM PT
An interesting book on the subject of slaves in industry is; Bonds of Iron.
Sharecropping. The system after slavery. What was the return on that?
136. arkymalarky - Dec. 28, 1998 - 7:40 PM PT
PE,
The reason I said what I did about the Southern economy is that there wasn't much of a middle class in the South, and I recall, as I posted earlier, reading that something like 10% of the population in the South controlled 90% of the wealth. Stats are confusing, as well, because are slaves included or not? Wouldn't that depend on who was doing the research? There were very few Southern towns and the white population was fairly sparse, so to simply look at economic stats for the two areas without consideration of the demographics of each would likely be misleading and that's what most textbooks do, I think. I'm getting into an area I don't know that much about, so I'll defer to those who have studied the economic data. As far as whether slavery was profitable for those engaged in it, cotton was highly profitable in 1860 from everything I've read, but the planter class had huge plantations with thousands of acres and hundreds of slaves. These were big productions, and it would stand to reason that they were very profitable. In fact, one of the Southern strategies in the war was to withold cotton from Europe and create more demand to increase their profits. Unfortunately, the North got an effective blockade set up fairly early and their plan backfired. Anyway, there were hardly any textile factories in the South and little economic diversity. That's why they were so adamantly supportive of slavery; their entire economy was dependent on it, and that's what I meant when I said they had a stagnant economy.
137. arkymalarky - Dec. 28, 1998 - 7:43 PM PT
As far as what's taught in the schools, it seems very clear when one looks at the events leading up to the secession of the first seven states from the union and the incident at Fort Sumter that the South feared that its ability to protect its interests in the nation were virtually at an end with a "Black Republican" elected president and no prospect of another slave state being admitted among all the new territory acquired from Mexico. It was about slavery because that was the defining characteristic of the South that the rest of the nation opposed. Slave states could have cropped up in the West and the South would have been satisfied. The North was willing to let the South keep its slaves at the time of secession, but it was pretty obvious that the trend was more and more in opposition to slavery among the people; however many would not have wanted to go to war over ending slavery and many of the soldiers who fought were Unionists, as was Andrew Johnson. IOW, the immediate cause of the war was secession, but the war could not have ended without bringing an end to slavery, and it would never have occurred had slavery not been an issue. That's why Lincoln handled it so delicately, waiting to issue the Emancipation Proclamation until he felt the situation was such that it could be done without too much backlash and without driving the border states to secede.
138. davidtudor - Dec. 29, 1998 - 9:16 AM PT
I must admit that much of what is contained in Scottloar's synopsis is new to me. I had no idea, for instance, that many slaves earned compensation let alone were allowed to keep a large portion of it. One could even gain the impression that perhaps the lot of a slave was not all that bad, but for the absence of one little word - freedom.
It is of some comfort to learn that slave families were sold mostly as entact units and that children were usually sold separately only when of an age that they normally would be leaving their family anyway.
Enough of that.
In my public school in Massachusetts, we certainly were taught that there were any number of other factors that led to the breach between North and South (states' rights being the principal one) but that it, of course, was slavery that was the core reason for the start of the Civil War. We learned a little about why slavery had been so important to the South's economy for so long, but not a lot. We also learned that some fortunes in the North had been founded on the slave trade. But, there really wasn't much effort to present any form of cogent counterbalance to the view that there had been a colossal moral failure in the South because of its obdurate views about slavery which had continued long after economic justifications had begun to wane.
139. 109109 - Dec. 29, 1998 - 11:31 AM PT
Other fun facts.
By 1850, only 10 percent of of American families owned slaves., less than 1/3 of white families in the South.
American Indians owned black slaves. Cherokees were known to be particularly cruel slave masters. Indeed, free blacks were allowed to own black slaves (except in Delaware and Arkansas - in 1833, the Supreme Court upheld Negro slave owning).
In 1860, half a million free blacks lived in the United States. Blacks owning other blacks was most prevalent in Louisiana. In 1830, one study demonstrates that there were approximately 3500 American black slaveholders who collectively owned 10,00 black slaves.
140. JaDeGoLd - Dec. 29, 1998 - 12:40 PM PT
Dinesh D'Souza is heard from.
141. 109109 - Dec. 29, 1998 - 12:50 PM PT
Jade
I'm pretty sure he did not make up those numbers. But, I think Seguine's earlier statement is most applicable.
"The progressive religion dictates that what is moral is also pragamatic in every single respect. A history of slavery which supposes that there were economic benefits to the institution is extremely dangerous heresy."
And we can't have messy ole' history nosing in on our modern day morality, can we?
142. phillipdavid - Dec. 29, 1998 - 1:01 PM PT
Re #9
"Over the
course of his lifetime, the typical slave field hand received
about 90 percent of the income he produced."
I am very curious about this, and would love to see an explanation of this.
143. davidtudor - Dec. 29, 1998 - 1:01 PM PT
Since when is the fact/concept that there were economic benefits to the institution of slavery dispositive of anything?
History nosing into modern day morality? What tripe.
144. 109109 - Dec. 29, 1998 - 1:04 PM PT
tudor
What in God's name are you referring to? Of what I have posted, what could you possibly disagree with?
145. cllrdr - Dec. 29, 1998 - 1:13 PM PT
Yes slavery was a wonderful, wonderful thing. Too bad those "politically correct" Liberals abolished it. But now that we're entering a new millenieum with Bob Barr and Trent Lott to guide us we'll be sure to see slavery's happy, joyous, and needless to say profitable, return.
I'm planning to buy Bobo as soon as the market opens!
146. 109109 - Dec. 29, 1998 - 1:16 PM PT
Green, baby. That's the color you need to worry about.
147. davidtudor - Dec. 29, 1998 - 1:19 PM PT
109109. It has to do with your 141, especially the last sentence. To the extent it was some sort of an apologia for slavery based on economic justification or benefit, I didn't dig it. To the extent you were saying that it is only "modern day" morality that found slavery abhorrant regardless of any so-called benefits, I don't buy that either.
If you were just being cute, never mind.
Maybe its my ancestoral abolitionist background rearing up.
148. Seguine - Dec. 29, 1998 - 1:20 PM PT
Liberalism, odd as it may seem to holier-than-thou prophets of righteousness such as Cellardoor, is not politically correct.
If it were, there would be no "progressives".
149. Pseudoerasmus - Dec. 29, 1998 - 1:21 PM PT
tudor (Message #138)
Ah, the pitfalls of laymen reading statements made by economic historians. NOWHERE do Fogel and Engerman say that slaves were "compensated", for there was no compensation in the sense of "salary". "Exploitation", in economic terms, means the market value of services rendered minus the compensation paid for those services. Slaves obviously got no salary, but did receive from their masters food, clothing, shelter, medical care and other services. Fogel and Engerman estimated that the value of these items amounted to about 90% of the average slave's output. In other words, masters expropriated approximately 10% of average slave output. Therefore 10% is the rate of economic exploitation.
These calculations are, however, controversial.
150. Pseudoerasmus - Dec. 29, 1998 - 1:23 PM PT
Message #145 is the sort of anti-intellectual idiocy that is unneeded in this thread. As I said early on, the tacit point behind all of Fogel and Engerman's assertions is that there was never any ECONOMIC pressure for slavery to come to end -- military defeat of the South was necessary.
151. 109109 - Dec. 29, 1998 - 1:25 PM PT
tudor
"To the extent it was some sort of an apologia for slavery based on economic justification or benefit, I didn't dig it. To the extent you were saying that it is only "modern day" morality that found slavery abhorrant regardless of any so-called benefits, I don't buy that either."
No problem. You can't read. But, given that fact, you should check your emotions. First Loar goes nuts, now you.
"Maybe its my ancestoral abolitionist background rearing up."
It could very well be.
152. CalGal - Dec. 29, 1998 - 1:26 PM PT
"No problem. You can't read. "
Awww. You beat me to it.
153. cllrdr - Dec. 29, 1998 - 1:27 PM PT
Pseudo -- You forgot the "harumpf!"
154. davidtudor - Dec. 29, 1998 - 1:31 PM PT
109109. Have no idea how you saw emotion in anything I wrote. Just wasn't there. Whatever. One of your problems is that you are so often deliberately just trying to be cute or slick that you don't get any benefit of the doubt when you are trying to be serious. In your case, you would be better off sticking with the glib shtick.
Pseudoerasmus. Thanks for the explanation in 149. Cash compensation to slaves just didn't make sense.
155. Pseudoerasmus - Dec. 29, 1998 - 1:31 PM PT
jadegold (Message #129)
I've really only read two normal books having anything to do with the United States in the 19th century, the previously mentioned "Ordeal of the Union: the Emergence of Lincoln" by Allan Nevins and Richard Hofstadter's "American Political Tradition", the famous collection of short biographies of America's great political figures. Other than these, all else I've read are economic histories. Perhaps the most relevant to this thread among the economic histories is "The Economic Growth of the United States 1790-1860", by Douglass C. North, who was the co-winner with Robert Fogel of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Economics. (The book is pretty readable but contains an older scholarship than Fogel & Engerman's.)
156. davidtudor - Dec. 29, 1998 - 1:33 PM PT
Well, isn't that predictable. The little CalGal/109109 tandem "I'm OK/You're OK" team again.
157. Pseudoerasmus - Dec. 29, 1998 - 1:35 PM PT
arkymalarky (Message #136)
"...there wasn't much of a middle class in the South, and I recall, as I posted earlier, reading that something like 10% of the population in the South controlled 90% of the wealth."
Well, somewhere buried in the Fogel & Engerman book is a passage about the inequality of wealth in the South and the North. Perhaps Loar could look at the index and quote it, but the two authors do explicitly contend that the distribution of wealth in the two regions was about the same.
"Stats are confusing, as well, because are slaves included or not?"
They are not included.
"There were very few Southern towns and the white population was fairly sparse, so to simply look at economic stats for the two areas without consideration of the demographics of each would likely be misleading and that's what most textbooks do, I think."
Are you joking? Do you really suppose that serious people might actually "look at economic stats for the two areas without consideration of the demographics of each" (whatever that really means)? Fogel & Engerman aren't a pair of accountants. They're econometricians, the first of the pair a Nobel laureate. The distribution of income and wealth BY DEFINITION considers demographics; per capita income BY DEFINITION considers demographics; per capita cotton textile production BY DEFINITION considers demographics.
"Anyway, there were hardly any textile factories in the South..."
Well, nonetheless, the antebellum South fared rather well compared with other rich countries of the time in the per capita production of cotton textiles. Certainly behind Great Britain, that mammoth producer of textiles, and the North, but either ahead of or on par with such places as France and Germany.
158. cllrdr - Dec. 29, 1998 - 1:37 PM PT
"These calculations are, however, controversial."
And interesting. Pseudo, would you say that any employer willing to provide "food, clothing, shelter, medical care and other services," the manner and extent of which being up to said employer, need not offer his employees any further compensation?
159. ScotusAntonovich - Dec. 29, 1998 - 1:56 PM PT
Question:
I've always been under the impression given a (admittedly) limited reading of American history, with the South being the primary focus, that the Civil War was mostly unnecessary due to the rapid growth of machinery to do the work faster and more efficiently than humans. Slavery would have died out more and more until the South would have willingly (imho) given it up by a decade later thus saving this country the bloodiest war in American history.
Does anyone have comments about this?
P.S. apologies if this was brought up before because I haven't completed my reading of the back posts.
160. Pseudoerasmus - Dec. 29, 1998 - 1:58 PM PT
Message #158
What the fuck are you talking about? I have 30 minutes on-line maximum, so I can't really entertain such a stupid question.
161. bubbaette - Dec. 29, 1998 - 1:58 PM PT
Cllrdr
"would you say that any employer willing to provide "food, clothing, shelter, medical care and other services," the manner and extent
of which being up to said employer, need not offer his
employees any further compensation?"
It worked well for the coal mine operators before the establishment of the UMWA.
162. arkymalarky - Dec. 29, 1998 - 2:03 PM PT
PE,
I was referring to textbooks of survey courses in high school and college, which give such broad overviews of the Civil War, and I was trying to point out that the stats they print often come with only very general background info if any at all. The textbook I use has data on economic production, population, etc, but does not explain the relevance of the difference in numbers, which has to do with distribution of the population and other demographic factors. I wasn't referring to per capita info, but to charts which show the value of production, miles of railroad, numbers of factories, etc. I know nothing of Fogel and Engerman's book, and would reserve judgment on their conclusions until I've either read it or heard much more from those who have.
163. davidtudor - Dec. 29, 1998 - 2:04 PM PT
bubbaette - wait a minute there. Those folks got some money too. Of course, they lived in company towns where the stores were company owned and prices were high and they quickly found themselves deep in debt to the stores, and that was the way life went.
Damn those unions, eh?
Sorry. Back to the South.
164. ChristinO - Dec. 29, 1998 - 2:06 PM PT
Cllr,
I haven't seen anyone arguing for slavery. We're all in agreement that it is wrong, but the point is not "It's wrong AND economically unsound". The point is that it doesn't matter if it's economically sound or not. It's a loathesome institution.
165. 109109 - Dec. 29, 1998 - 2:08 PM PT
Chris
You forgot? This is the rank emotionalism hour. To the thread, here is my contribution. I, like Chris, believe that slavery is a loathesome institution.
But indentured servitude gets a bad rap.
166. CoralReef - Dec. 29, 1998 - 2:10 PM PT
Message #128
Rask: I was taught that it was over slavery and holding the union together on the north's part, but more complicated on the south's part.
Didn't Thucydides say people go to war over 'honor, fear and self-interest'? My impression has been that the south went to war over the latter two and convinced itself that it was the first of the three that was their real motive.
167. bubbaette - Dec. 29, 1998 - 2:11 PM PT
DavidT
Nope, coalminers were paid in scrip good only to rent company housing and purchase overpriced goods at the company store.
168. davidtudor - Dec. 29, 1998 - 2:15 PM PT
bubbaette. I suppose you will now tell me that these stores only carried one brand of canned peas, too. (I was going to say toothpaste but that sounds a little ritzy.)
169. stostosto - Dec. 29, 1998 - 3:28 PM PT
Interesting thread. I have two comments on the debate so far. One is about the question of why the U.S. could seemingly reconcile itself fairly well after the brutal civil war. I just wonder if a factor might be the constant stream of immigration to the country which grew markedly after the civil war. Why hasn't anyone mentioned the absolute population numbers? According to my encyclopaedia, at the time of the civil war, there was 31 million people in the U.S. 22m in the North, 9m in the South, 3.5m of which were slaves. (Btw, about 1.1m people were killed in the civil war).
Now, in 1880 there was about 50m people in the U.S. and in 1900 there was 76m. Compare this to 31m around 1860 and it seems to me that an overwhelming part of the population must have regarded the civil war as little more than a historic curiosity.
170. stostosto - Dec. 29, 1998 - 3:43 PM PT
The other comment is a speculation on possible Northern self-interest in going to war - since by inclination I am skeptical about the idea of the moral argument of slavery being sufficient to propel the North to such a gigantic effort.
There was a clear conflict of interest over tariffs. The South wanted to lower the tariff on imported goods from Europe which effectively functioned on a tax on the South. The North wanted the high tariff upheld, since this protected its industry from competition from more developed industrial countries (this is the classical "infant industry" argument for tariffs).
If the Southern secession was successful, the North would not only lose the contribution to the government coffers from the tariffs paid by Southerners - it would also lose the large Southern market for its own industrial produce which it had to itself as long as foreign goods were kept out by the tariff.
On top of this, it must have seemed threatening to Northern merchants and traders that the South had an articulate ambition of strengthening its own direct trade links with Europe.
And wasn't a naval blockade of the South in fact one of the very first military steps made by the North?
As I said, this is mere speculation on my part. It may be trivial or it may be wrong. In either case I would appreciate enlightened comments.
171. bubbaette - Dec. 29, 1998 - 4:31 PM PT
re: 168
My point is that there are different types of servitude and they've lingered on after the emancipation proclamation. Certainly the coalminers and migrant workers who were paid in scrip could skip town, but their condition of servitude and standard of living was little better than that of slaves.
172. cllrdr - Dec. 29, 1998 - 4:40 PM PT
Pseudo re #160 -- Testy, testy, testy! I don't think it's a stupid question at all, especially as it's directed towards an economics maven such as yourself. Would this be a viable set-up? I'm just asking. Take a deep breath, re-read it, and get back to me, O.K.?
173. LadyChaos - Dec. 29, 1998 - 6:46 PM PT
stostosto,
Immigration was at least as divisive an issue then as it is today. Many of the new immigrants of the mid-19th century were Irish and German. The Irish were especially controversial because they introduced a large influx of Roman-Catholicism into a country which had up until that time considered itself to be resolutely Protestant. During the war, immigration in the North definitely helped both in economic terms (by providing labor for expanding industry and railroads) and in military terms (the Irish Brigade, for example, played a key role for the Union in several important battles). I'm not sure, though, if one could make the argument that immigration in any way aided in the country's reconciliation in the post-war era. If anything, this reconciliation can be most probably traced back to the fact that the Confederate soldiers who survived the war were "all fought out" by war's end, and that they returned to their homes (at the urging of the likes of Gen. Lee) to try as much as they could to rebuild a normal life.
It's also worth noting that during the war the Union congress was able to achieve quite a lot wrt the expansion of settlements, railroads, etc., and Northern industry advanced, as well. The result was that the North got richer during the war while the South was driven to its knees. The resourcefulness of the Yankee economy was not lost on the soldiers who had been defeated by it.
174. LadyChaos - Dec. 29, 1998 - 6:56 PM PT
stostosto,
The economic picture you present was more simple: Northern industry wage labor and Southern plantation slave labor were viewed by both sides as economically incompatible institutions. Fights over tariffs were secondary. The blockade of Southern ports was mainly to strangle the cotton trade and to prevent the import of manufactured goods, especially weapons, from Europe. The overt issue was the economic strangulation of the South, but the underlying issue (which was no less important) was to show the European powers that the South was dependent on the North, thus dissuading those powers from recognizing the Confederate States as a sovereign nation.
175. Seguine - Dec. 29, 1998 - 6:57 PM PT
I must comment on this cheap jab:
"Pseudo, would you say that any employer willing to provide "food,
clothing, shelter, medical care and other services," the manner and
extent of which being up to said employer, need not offer his employees any further compensation?"
Cllrdr, would you say that your failure to bring an intellectual dimension to your contributions here is made up for by refexively attacking your betters' moral rectitude?
176. LadyChaos - Dec. 29, 1998 - 6:58 PM PT
stostosto,
The economic picture you present was more simple: Northern industry wage labor and Southern plantation slave labor were viewed by both sides as economically incompatible institutions. Fights over tariffs were secondary. The blockade of Southern ports was mainly to strangle the cotton trade and to prevent the import of manufactured goods, especially weapons, from Europe. The overt issue was the economic strangulation of the South, but the underlying issue (which was no less important) was to show the European powers that the South was dependent on the North, thus dissuading those powers from recognizing the Confederate States as a sovereign nation.
177. LadyChaos - Dec. 29, 1998 - 6:59 PM PT
Sorry 'bout the double post. I got sent off into Bonzonaland for a moment.
178. Seguine - Dec. 29, 1998 - 7:08 PM PT
Stostosto,
"...I am skeptical about the idea of the moral argument of slavery being sufficient to propel the North to such a gigantic effort."
Me too! And while I agree with CoralReef's assessment of the South's motivations, I have never understood what the practical motivations of the North must have been.
"There was a clear conflict of interest over tariffs. The South wanted to lower the tariff on imported goods from Europe which effectively
functioned [as] a tax on the South. The North wanted the high tariff
upheld, since this protected its industry from competition from more
developed industrial countries (this is the classical "infant industry" argument for tariffs).
"If the Southern secession was successful, the North would not only lose the contribution to the government coffers from the tariffs paid by Southerners - it would also lose the large Southern market for its own industrial produce which it had to itself as long as foreign goods were kept out by the tariff."
I recall, now that you mention it, some distantly past textbook mention of tariffs. (As a sort of aside, which must have been glossed over by our uninterested instructors in high school.) However, it was never made plain how the tariffs might effect the southern and northern economies so drastically that war became essential. Your hypothesis sounds reasonable on its face, and I hope Loar and PE will address it in as much detail as they can.
179. ScottLoar - Dec. 29, 1998 - 7:11 PM PT
"Time on the Cross" (continued), Chapter One: The International Context of United States Slavery
Although known throughout the Old World it was the New World that became the great market for slaves. The Distribution of Slave Imports in the New World 1500-1870 (fig.1, pg. 14) shows Brazil occupying 38%, British Caribbean 17%, French Caribbean 17%, Spanish America 17%, Dutch, Danish and Swedish Caribbean 6%, United States 6% (inexplicably 101%), representing the trans-Atlantic transport of 9,735,000 Africans. Of these "80% of all slaves were imported between 1451 and 1810"; in fact, between 1701-1810 6,200,000 were imported to work producing sugar (fig.2, pg. 16, Imports of Negro Slaves by Time and Region) for it was "sugar that determined the extent of the Atlantic slave trade".
180. Seguine - Dec. 29, 1998 - 7:13 PM PT
Sigh.
...reflexively, not "refexively"...
...affect, not "effect"...
181. ScottLoar - Dec. 29, 1998 - 7:16 PM PT
Sugar production in the Cape Verdes, the Madeiras, and Sao Tome accounted for 90% of the 130,000 black imports between 1451 and 1550, but by the first half of the 16th century production shifted to the New World, first to Brazil which by 1600 was Europe's leading supplier of sugar, then by the end of the century British, French and Dutch plantations were in development. "By 1770 the annual yield of the sugar crop in the British Caribbean territories stood at 130,000 tons" three times that of Brazil that same year, yet the French Caribbean produced 151,000 tons, the Dutch 15,000 tons, and the Danes 11,000. The demographics of The Principal Importers of Negro Slaves, 1450-1870 (fig.3, pg. 18) shows the largest importer by far to be Brazi.
182. ScottLoar - Dec. 29, 1998 - 7:25 PM PT
US commercial production of sugar began in 1795 in Louisiana and by the time of the Purchase was merely 5,000 tons. Sugar production in the US never accounted for more than 10% of the slave labour force. Consequently, despite an extremely favourable natural increase of slaves in British North America and a high rate of natural decrease i the Caribbean the slave population in the US colonies North and South by 1770 formed only 22% of the population as compared to about 90% in the British and French Caribbean (Negroes as a Percentage of the Total Population in Four Regions, fig.4, pg.21), and in the US colonies grew at a slower rate "both in absolute numbers and in relative importance", remaining a minority of the population. In the Caribbean slaves became an overwhelming majority of the population, the size of the labour force much larger than in the US ("the average size of a sugar plantation in Jamaica toward the end of the eighteenth century was about a hundred and eighty slaves. By contrast, the average size of a holding in Virginia and Maryland at that time was less than thirteen slaves"), and the white owners far removed from the slaves unlike the US where the slaves lived in continuous contact with their white masters. Native-born blacks comprised the majority of the US slave population (fig.5,pg. 23, Foreign-born Negroes as a Percentage of the U.S. Negro Population, 1620-1860), again unlike that in the British and French Caribbean territories where a majority was born in Africa.
183. CoralReef - Dec. 29, 1998 - 7:26 PM PT
Regarding the North's practical motivations, don't underestimate the vision thing. In a nation that later had Manifest Destiny as a rallying cry, it's not hard for me to believe that just keeping the union together was seen as important enough on its own. There were already expansions westward and they were being held up by the problems with the South, endless arguments over whether new states in the west would be free or slave states. The push west demanded that the South be knocked into line, from what I understand.
184. ScottLoar - Dec. 29, 1998 - 7:28 PM PT
Still, U.S. Imports of Slaves per Decade, 1620-1860 (fig.6, pg.25) shows that from 1620 until the end of legal US involvement in the slave trade in 1808 imports trended sharply upwards, spiking in 1720-1770 then again in 1790-1808 when the slave imports were higher than in any previous 20-year period, "as many Africans (were) brought into the United States during the thirty years from 1780 to 1810 as during the previous hundred and sixty years of the U.S. involvement in the trade".
185. ScottLoar - Dec. 29, 1998 - 7:35 PM PT
Fig. 7, pg. 27, Actual U.S. Negro Population Compared with the Population that Would Have Existed if the U.S. Had Duplicated the Demographic Experience of the West Indies; fig.8,pg. 28, A Comparison of the Distribution of the Negro Population (Slave & Free) in 1825 with the Distribution of Slave Imports, 1500-1825; and most especially fig. 9, pg. 28, The Distribution of Slaves in the Western Hemisphere, 1825, showing Brazil with 31%, British Caribbean 15%, Spanish America 11%, French Caribbean 4%, Dutch, Danish and Swedish Caribbean 2%, US 36% (!) all illustrate that by reason of favourable, natural increase and other factors as compared to the Caribbean experience the US became the leading slave power of the Western world. "By 1825 there were about 1,750,000 slaves in the southern (US)".
186. ScottLoar - Dec. 29, 1998 - 7:39 PM PT
Table 1, pg. 33, A Chronology of Emancipation, 1772-1888 illustrates that despite the 3000-year historical acceptance of slavery among contemporaries (including such luminaries as Thomas More and John Locke) by 1772 the tide of legal and popular opinion was clearly against the institution, finally abolished in Brazil in 1888, yet "only in the United States that slave-owners resorted to full-scale warfare to halt the abolitionist trend. And only in Haiti did a whole colony of slaves obtain liberation through a bloody revolution".
187. ScottLoar - Dec. 29, 1998 - 7:43 PM PT
"Many, if not most, of the slaves outside the southern U.S. were freed under programs of gradual emancipation" usually upon their eighteenth, twenty-first or twenty-eighth birthday by which time their labours had offset the costs of rearing to the extent that "gradual abolition imposes an average cost on slaveholders which was probably less than 5 percent of the initial value of their slave; the average loss may, in fact, have been quite close to zero". Nevertheless, by 1830 more than 1/3 the blacks in the Western Hemisphere were free and even in Brazil slave imports fell, yet in the American South "slavery continued with undiminished vigor".
So ends the first chapter of my synopsis of "Time on the Cross".
188. cllrdr - Dec. 29, 1998 - 7:46 PM PT
"Time on the Cross"?!?!?!?
Here come those tired old tits again.
189. CoralReef - Dec. 30, 1998 - 3:49 AM PT
Cellar.....was "Time on the Cross" a Joan Collins film?
190. pseudoerasmus - Dec. 30, 1998 - 5:41 AM PT
I don't understand why Cellardweller is treating Fogel and Engerman as though they were a Siamese-twins version of Charles Murray. Well, I do understand -- it's because Cellar's an idiot.
Cellardweller (Message #172)
Your question in Message #158 is stupid precisely because you are, presumably, asking for an "economic answer". There is none, for economic analysis has about as much moral content as the periodic table of elements, and therefore your question is economically meaningless -- unless you meant to ask "are there any non-slaves who are willing to work for food, clothing, shelter, medical care, etc. but no money wages?" But I suspect that was not the meaning of your question.
Just to please you, let me rework the verbiage of my Message #149. Slaves were capital investment, and like any equipment, they required daily maintenance. Hence, food, shelter, clothing, medical care and the like. When the costs of such maintenance were substracted from the output of slave labour, the slave owners ended up with approximately a 10% rate of return on their capital investment -- a 10% profit. This contrasts favourably with the post-WWII rate of return on capital in the United States -- between 8% and 9%.
191. ScottLoar - Dec. 30, 1998 - 6:32 AM PT
The sloppy use of slavery as an analogy disserves arguments and corrupts the very meaning of slavery, an institution of absolute bondage, total servitude, in which the master holds the power of life and death over the slave and can abrogate any rights supposed by custom and habit. Serfs, labourers, migrant and guest workers - you take your pick - none are in such mean position, and to suggest otherwise is intellectually dishonest or just basely sloppy thinking.
192. pseudoerasmus - Dec. 30, 1998 - 6:42 AM PT
Who has suggested otherwise? There was no analogy -- slaves WERE capital investment.
193. ScottLoar - Dec. 30, 1998 - 6:47 AM PT
Pseudoerasmus, my post unfortunately followed yours but clearly had no relation to it but referenced another, earlier comment by one in particular (that by "bubbaette") and a common misuse of the word by the many. My Message #191 had nothing to do with you; stop being churlish.
194. pseudoerasmus - Dec. 30, 1998 - 6:48 AM PT
Sorry, Loar, I guess you meant to refer to the analogy with coal miners. I wouldn't want you to call me "thou most fatuous ass again".
195. pseudoerasmus - Dec. 30, 1998 - 6:48 AM PT
Oops, too late. Churl = "thou most fatuous ass".
196. ScottLoar - Dec. 30, 1998 - 6:49 AM PT
I'm biting my lip even as I write this. Yes, my immediate reference was to the coal miners.
197. pseudoerasmus - Dec. 30, 1998 - 6:51 AM PT
You must have awfully chapped lips.
198. cllrdr - Dec. 30, 1998 - 7:05 AM PT
Not Joan Collins. Dorothy Dandrige
Fogel and Engerman have always been treated by the Media as the John the Bpatist(s) of racist revisionism -- Charles Murray being, of course, the Redeemer. On recent C-Span appearances, Mr. Murray has been most forthcoming on his belief in the necessity of withdrawing the vote from African-Americans, but other "lesser" races, classes and sexes.
#191 is excellent, Scott Loar
Pseudo -- I asked for an "econmic answer" as so many discussions of the subject in the Fray tend toward the "rational" plane, for fear of "emotion" (the nasty, nasty virus) entering the "debate" and clouding men's minds. Your mind is rarely clouded. Emotion, however, does tend to overtake you from time to time -- usually in the form of getting snappy with me and/or Socko.
199. pseudoerasmus - Dec. 30, 1998 - 7:09 AM PT
Cellardweller: Your Message #198 is simply idiotic. There is no "racist revisionism" in Fogel and Engerman's book AT ALL. I repeat: the point of the book is that slavery would not have come to an end without its military destruction.
200. pseudoerasmus - Dec. 30, 1998 - 7:10 AM PT
Cellardweller: Loar's #191 was saying that Bubbaette's comparison of slavery with coal miners' wage labour -- an analogy one might think you in your inept irreverence might approve of -- is nonsense.