Comment from Page O’Turner on this thread.
This deserves its own post-
My lightbulb moment: I was recently in Helena, Arkansas – the first place in the country where slaves were emancipated (by order of a victorious Northern general before Lincoln’s proclamation) and visited one of the many state paid for museums honoring slaves in that town.
As I looked at pictures of slaves picking cotton I asked the museum official how long the cotton harvest lasted.
“3 weeks” he replied.
I asked how many cotton harvests there were each year.
“Just one” he replied, obviously taken aback by my ignorance of such things. I then asked what other crops were grown on a plantation.
“Just cotton” was the reply.
So, I blurted out much to my surprise, “The slaves were fed, housed, clothed, medical needs cared for from cradle to grave but they only had to work 3 weeks per year?” The museum official turned away from this insensitive racist in disgust without answering.
Mull this over. No wonder slaves didn’t rise up and kill the white families in their sleep (I always wondered about that).
Factory workers in the north worked 12 hour days, 6 days per week all year long with no housing, clothing, medical care or food and no one to take care of their babies while they worked, or them when they became sick or elderly.
!snip!
To be fair, the slaves planted the cotton, and they processed the cotton. This was a 5 month process. But what did they do the other 7 months on a cotton plantation that only grew cotton?
Listen, being free is paramount, no matter what the job. But was life on a cotton plantation, in terms of labor, hell on earth?
Was it hell on earth? I suspect not. Just as Page O Turner points out, slaves were taken care of in ways that free blacks were not.
Let’s be clear, too, about who owned the 4,000,000 American slaves that caused the creation of the Republican party: Democrats. Every last slave was owned by Democrats — north and south.
When we speak of a Democrat Plantation today, it’s not a coincidence. Yesterday’s cotton picking is today’s ballot box.
America is not a racist country. As D’Souza points out, if all of America was a racist country which desired to subjugate blacks, slavery would still be an institution here. Obviously, then, only *some* people are racist (the Democrats) and others (the Republicans) stopped it. Real history bears this out. So the next time someone calls you a racist just say, “No. I’m a Republican. Slavery and racism was the official platform of the Democrats.”
I just want to be clear.
I thought it was an interesting aspect of the cotton plantation that many do not think about.
I always imagined, stupidly, that the slaves were out there every day, running their hands raw.
But I am not minimizing slavery as an institution. No matter what you’re forced to do it is wrong… including making a wedding cake for a gay marriage.
One can’t argue vociferously that this, being forced to participate in something you are against, is against someone’s rights and then say, “slavery wasn’t that bad.”
Bad argument.
I’m just talking about the “labor” part. Was it as intense as we’ve been led to believe?
A couple of AL professors studied that and the poor white trash family farmer lived under the same conditions.
The whole thing is lies.
I do not advocate slavery or the terrible treatment of any human being. Now that being said, remember there were white slaves as well, in the same conditions, but we don’t hear about that. The fact that they were brought over unwillingly, some were brutally beaten by psychopaths, etc. is terrible, of course. I’m just trying to figure out why the hollywood version of black slaves’ condition has them being beaten to a pulp time and time again when obviously, you would never damage your workers to a point where you’d have to replace them and retrain others. That costs money, no? Same goes for animals. Farm animals are like walking money. You don’t mistreat them and you don’t stress them out to where they are useless. Unless you are an idiot.
You all missed the point. The museum wasn’t about slavery. It was about white oppression, white privilege, white guilt and white supremacy. Now let’s all go out, riot, loot, demand reparations and kill whitey.
I can think of nobody who mistreated the black community more than Barack Hussein Obama.
One other ‘job’ was the task of making cotton fields. Cutting trees (as in clearing forests) pulling the stumps, burning off the scrub, breaking the soil, picking out the rocks then plowing into fields.
My grandfather grew cotton in Texas back in the 20’s. When my mother was a kid, she had to help pick the crop. Grampa hired part-time workers to help, too. But according to stories my mother told, picking cotton was not fun. The dried pods (bolls) were very sharp and would prick your fingers. If the white cotton got contaminated with drops of blood, it wasn’t any good. So it was slow and tedious and somewhat painful. My grandfather never made any money at this work. My mother grew up and went to California as soon as she could! Oh, and everyone in the story was free and white. Not slaves.
Has anyone here read Sowell’s “Black Rednecks and White Liberals”? And there was another book I read 3-4 years ago (and I regret I cannot remember the title!) that was a real eye opener for me about southern slavery (there were more slaves held in the north than the south — all, by Democrats). If you watch the film Cold Mountain you can pick up some of the truth of southern slavery (and its sponsors) in it — surprisingly.
As an example: Let’s say the Left is successful in erasing the history of America by pulling down all the so-called offending monuments and renaming all the schools, streets, buildings, etc. They already have erased most of the history of American Progressive’s admiration for Italian fascism and German socialism. It is well-documented by the Nazi’s that they used, nearly word-for-word, the laws of the Democrats against blacks (post-Civil War)to write their own laws against the Jews of WWII Germany. Roosevelt worried that Mussolini was getting ahead of the U.S. in accomplishing their fascist ideals. Hitler worried the U.S. was way ahead of Germany in their supremacist ideals.
But back to my point: If the Progressive Left is successful in erasing U.S. history — as successful as they have always been and more so because they control the academy, Hollywood, media and the arts in general — is it any wonder to anyone that we have a very skewed idea of the real conditions of American slavery? No advocacy/grievance group exists today for Norwegians, Swedes, Scotts, Irish, English, Italian, or Welsh who came to America as indentured servants because they have all been written out of history. What else is untrue about black slavery? We don’t know.
I wonder who chopped the wood for the cooking stove and each fireplace in each room?
I’m convinced that Black Lives Matter is another domestic terrorist arm of the Democrats whose mission, in part, is to destroy all evidence of the Democrat’s historic slaving initiative. Democrats never do anything heinous under their own name. All those so-called Confederate icons? Those were all Democrat. Get rid of them, get rid of the historic connection. Then blame it all on the Right. SSDD.
Here’s a racist machine made by whitey, taking away their 3 weeks of work.
To understand the Civil War you have to realize one simple fact: There were NO Republicans in the Confederate Army. Everyone who fought for the Confederacy was a democrat.
@Frank Bass — Yes, thank you. And as the Big Lie of “racist America” is starting to ravel, suddenly you’ve got another wave of Democrat-led terrorists pulling down all the evidence. Coincidence? I think not!
My ex-wife picked cotton as a little girl in the 50’s. Oh yeah she’s WHITE! They were poor but I guess it only counts if your black or brown.
I’m a sixth generation southerner, who are you telling? Its well known to southern whites that most slaves were treated like step children: they would never be “heirs to the throne”, but they were well taken care of until their death.
Like MM’s mom, mine also picked cotton as a teenager, $1/100 lb. with equated for her to $1/day. She had to in order to buy a winter coat each year.
There is very, very little doubt that the child laborers in northern textile mills (happily supplied with low cost slave produced cotton) were really no better off than the slaves.
But I must point out one fact to the lovely AA above. U.S. Grant did, in fact own slaves. Both he and Lee became slave owners when their wives inherited them. The Lee’s freed theirs even before the emancipation proclamation. The Grant’s didn’t free theirs until after the war when the Constitution was amended.
All in all Americanized blacks then and now are better off than their families in Africa were and are.
Maybe it’s time for a frank national discussion of history:
From “A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States” (1856) by Frederick Law Olmstead (who designed Central Park among other things)
A tobacco plantation owner had an Irish gang draining his swamps in order to plant tobacco (which wore the soil out quickly). Asked why he hired Irish instead of using his slaves he replied.
“It’s dangerous work and a negro’s life is too valuable to be risked at it. If a negro dies. it’s a considerable loss, you know.” p 113
Slaves looked down on free blacks – especially slaves of well to do families. “Their view of the matter is said to be expressed thus: “dirty free niggers! – got nobody to take care of ’em.” P 130
“A great many slaves have been freed and sent to the North, after remaining there for a time, are said to have returned – longing, like the faithless Israelite, for the flesh post of Slavery – of their own accord, to Virginia, and their report of the manner in which negroes are treated there, the difficulty of earning enough to provide themselves with the luxuries to which they have been accustomed. p130
JustAl- I remember reading about the horrible accidents in the mills involving children. Same goes for the kids in England doing the same work. The kids were small enough to clear threads, fabric etc from the looms when they tangled and sometimes got caught up in them.
We all know about fake news, we see it all the time. The deeper you get into history, the better you’ll understand there is a lot fakery involved there too.
As previously implied, an owner wouldn’t beat a slave for no reason but he may have beaten him rather than have him sentenced to death by a court of law. And logic may lead you to assume others seeing that miscarriage of justice (by the rich owner) decided a lynching was the real justice.
Or maybe not, but who knows?
I have both black and white in my family. We all picked fruit and cut grapes. I even had my own set of grape knives at the age of 4. LOL.
Slavery in Pennsylvania
http://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/blog/slavery-in-pennsylvania/
Indentured servitude is one of the more neglected elements of American labor history. Most historians gloss over the subject in route to African slavery. This is largely due to the impact of long standing issues of race in America, but Southerners understood Northern complicity in the institution of African slavery and often pointed to Northern hypocrisy in regard to the treatment of indentured servants and Indian slaves and their ongoing profits from the African slave trade.
” Indentured servitude ” Thank you! I came back to say something about that, too.
Did these plantations grow there own food?
Did they have cows to milk?
There must have been a lot to do everyday like on a farm.
The hardest work on a farm at that time would be running a sythe on several acres of grass or hay.
Something I don’t know is how many slaves did they have?
10?
20?
50?
I’m the grandson of a “share cropper”…..
and I’m not bitter.
The got food, but it wasn’t very good food. They got housing, but it wasn’t very good housing. They had a job, but it wasn’t a very good job. They had health care, but it wasn’t very good health care.
Am I talking about WELFARE or SLAVERY?
The English brought Scots over as slaves early on in the colonies. It was cheap labor and an effective way to destroy the Scottish clans. Many were sent to the Caribbean islands where they worked and perished in the sugar plantations.
@JustAl — Yes, I know about Grant and Lee’s “slaves.” But neither of them acquired slaves directly or of their own decision to buy them. Lee was also anti-slavery and was asked by Lincoln to lead the Union forces. The only reason he didn’t is because, as a devout Virginian, he felt the only place for him was with the Virginians and thus with the Confederates.
I guess the bigger and more important point is that out of 4,000,000 slaves in America, none were owned (with the exception of Grant’s wife’s inheritance) by Republicans. Among everything else, that’s a stunning fact about the resolve of the people calling themselves Republicans and resisting the temptation of hypocrisy.
You actually can say that it wasn’t “that bad” — if by “that bad” you mean compared to slavery as practiced everywhere else in the Americas. There’s a reason there were 11.5 million slaves transported to “everywhere else.”
Most of the slaves outside of the 13 colonies were used for sugar cane cultivation. Cutting sugar cane in the tropical sun for 12 hours is extremely taxing and dangerous. You can only do it for a few years until you, basically, die from heat induced exhaustion. That’s why so many slaves came to Western Hemisphere — the plantations needed constant replacement. Apparently, the worst miscreant in sugar cane slavery was Brazil which imported 4 million slaves — ten times as many as the colonies. So when do we get around to talking about Brazil?
See what you get for watching ROOTS in the 70’s?
New SAT question: Garlic is to a Vampire as cotton is to a _______?