Posted on 04/23/2019 1:19:22 AM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
"Christians ended slavery." Do you think that’s a conservative simpleton’s mock-worthy bombast, embarrassing the rest of us with his black-and-white, unapologetic caricature of American history? No. It is the considered conclusion of a Nobel laureate, a former communist, a secular Jew, and arguably the foremost scholar on American slavery.
Robert Fogel (1922-2013), the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, was president of Cornell University’s American Youth for Democracy, investing eight years promoting communism. Meanwhile, he married Enid Morgan, an African-American woman, consequently suffering the ugliness of American racism personally. Eventually, he rejected communism. Apparently, the data didn’t support it.
Fogel was driven by data, perhaps the purest pursuer of empirical truth I’ve ever met in academia...
Fogel’s bean-counting approach led to his discovery that plantations, organized in a business-like fashion with their “gang system,” had an assembly line-like efficiency. Hence Southern slavery was fantastically profitable.
He concluded that if the Civil War had not been sparked when it was, the South would have continued to outpace the North, adapt slavery to industrialization, been unconquerable if a later Civil War had broken out, and likely would have spread slavery indefinitely. Slavery was on the ascendancy at the outbreak of the Civil War.
Furthermore – and here it sounds scandalous – most Southern slaves were treated materially well by their “owners.” The average slave consumed more calories and lived longer than the average, white, Northern city-dweller.
The moral question: If Southern slavery was profitable, even providing for the slaves a relatively decent material life, then why is it evil? If slavery is wrong, then, we have to look beyond the beans that can be counted, the dollars that can be earned, the efficiency that can be charted. The answer is found in a system of morality that comes from beyond mere materialism...
(Excerpt) Read more at acton.org ...
Thank you for this article. Apparently the author pastors a small church in a small town not too far from me. I will have to drive up some Sunday a.m.
Again, this is the kind of research and documentation that is the most likely to have impact in the current social environment.
I do not mean an impact on the most vocal (both sides of the culture wars). Frankly, most of the tribalists are too busy shaking their spears and screeching “yay for MY team” to actually pay much attention, but there is a large crowd of lurkers who are not so vocal, watching what is going on, and more serious. This is for them, and again, I thank you.
Because in a country formed with these words:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
Slavery just did not fit with those words, and people knew it, especially the Founding Fathers. They REALLY should have dealt with it then rather than kicking the can down the road.
I do appreciate that winning Independence was the primary goal, and later forming a Union, but being true to oneself, sort to speak, was fundamentally important.
In our history, because of those words in the Declaration, and the fact that slavery was necessarily still allowed, meant we would have to face the music at some point. 650,000 Americans died in that war, and that should have been the end of it, but we have had racial fire fanners at it ever since.
Apparently he was a very slow learner.
Especially if he pushed Communism for EIGHT years.
The premise of Christians propping up slavery would have to hinge on “Union forces were atheists” which was not true. As a matter of fact, Southern slave owners didn’t appear to be a very religious people.
Slavery would always be profitable, long term, based on prices for slaves.
When demand & prices for cotton fell, so did prices for slaves, which kept them within the range planters could afford.
In the 1850s slaveholders well recognized the continued need to expand slavery, as this remark shows:
Every machine ever made took humans to design, build, operate & maintain.
During the 1850s thousands of slaves worked building railroad lines while others worked in factories.
Richmond's Tredgar Iron Works was the South's largest factory and half its workers were slaves.
Robert A Cook PE: "And it was never profitable outside of large, single crop plantation s."
That might be true in Border States like Delaware & Maryland, where arguably slavery was dying out.
But in the Deep South where slavery was more profitable & widespread, the average slaveholder owned only a few slaves.
So it could not have taken large work-gangs to make slavery "pay".
Yes, I know. I've been saying that for years. Christian "children of God" doctrine, contradicts the notion that some people are better than others, which is the very foundation of slavery.
If your religious foundation is that "all men are created equal", slavery doesn't fit.
Christianity created what we now regard as "Western Civilization."
He concluded that if the Civil War had not been sparked when it was, the South would have continued to outpace the North, adapt slavery to industrialization, been unconquerable if a later Civil War had broken out, and likely would have spread slavery indefinitely.
Yes, the South would have been a major economic power if the North hadn't been siphoning away most of it's profits from it's production. However, I think he is wrong about slavery continuing indefinitely (despite Lincoln's efforts to make that happen) , because he is not dealing with the increasing social resistance to slavery, not just in the Northern and Border states, but in Southern states as well.
He also fails to realize that to make factory workers out of slaves, you have to train them, and as Frederick Douglas noted, the more slaves learn, the more discontent they are with their condition. Making them into factory workers would likely hasten the demise of slavery.
Excellent points, all.
Exactly right. Mechanization would destroy it's profitability, and social pressure would simply continue to increase. I have long estimated that it would have taken between 20 and 80 years to go away, but the forces at work made it a virtual certainty that this was going to happen.
That is absolutely wrong. In 1776, all the colonies were slave owning states. Insist that the Declaration of Independence frees slaves, and you destroy the coalition that was necessary to win freedom from the British.
Thomas Jefferson sparked the germ of an idea, and it took time to work it's way through people's minds. Deny it that time, and there would have been instant revolt to forming the United States.
It simply could not have been done at the beginning, and even "four score and seven years" later, it would not have been done except for reasons other than the immorality of slavery.
I do appreciate that winning Independence was the primary goal,...
Do not mistake it. It was the *ONLY* goal for the Declaration of Independence. The effort to make it into a commentary on slavery is rather dishonest, because the signatories interpreted that salient clause to mean themselves, not slaves. Claiming it was referring to slaves is a subsequent "Penumbra" type interpretation. Slavery is *NOT* what they meant when the representatives of the states signed that document.
You are on a roll today. This subject
must be right in your wheelhouse.
Actually, Lincoln, the man most responsible for triggering that war, was in fact an atheist. He didn't embrace actual Christianity until deep into the war.
As a matter of fact, Southern slave owners didn’t appear to be a very religious people.
That's completely wrong. They were very religious, but they didn't buy the claim that slaves were their equal. I read a very interesting explanation for how slavery appeared to make sense at the beginning of this book. The author explains how the system evolved from European style indentured servants into full blown slavery. If you want an insight into that era's mindset, this book will give it to you.
It is tangentially related to other topics I discuss, and so I've learned a some things about it from pursuing those.
Slavery was always incompatible with Christianity, but for some reason a lot of people don't get this.
So he would like you to think. He's been spreading his BS on this subject, probably longer than I've been here.
Why did they keep fathering kids with slaves then? Our church back home was founded in 1757. The record of the pre-First War of Northern Aggression period showed that men were not great church attenders. Church was more for women and children. The tradition was for the men to stay outside smoking until preaching. They left the sanctuary after preaching. Slaves listened outside from the windows.
It would be hard to reconcile owning slaves with Christian theology, especially with Paul saying that slaves and masters were equal in the sight of God.
Maybe. But even if slavery continued, if only until fossil fuels in tractors and harvesters came about. 1900-1910.
All of them? Are you asserting that all the slave owners were fathering kids with slaves? More like it was just random outliers, and most slave owners did not.
It would be hard to reconcile owning slaves with Christian theology, especially with Paul saying that slaves and masters were equal in the sight of God.
It was hard, but with profits inducing them to find a way, they managed to convince themselves it was acceptable. After all, weren't there slaves in the old testament, and didn't the old testament tell slaves to obey their masters?
You will find that people will figure out ways to believe what they want to believe, and when you present them with a contradiction between demonstrable facts and what they wish to believe, they will cling to what they wish to believe and dismiss the annoying facts.
It's almost universal among people to do this.
Link doesn’t work. What is the name of the book?
Paul acknowledged that slavery existed but he pushed the idea that all were equal in the sight of God. Slave owners in the 19th century would have been very opposed to this idea, even if it was Biblical. One of the pastors of our church was fired for preaching that passage. In order for someone to justify slavery, they would have to consider the enslaved person to be “less than fully human”.
If they loved the sin of slavery more than the Lord, I would be suspicious of their Redemption.
Well, actually it is NOT wrong at all. Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson actually wrote about this.
https://www.benjaminfranklin.org/p/in-his-later-years-benjaminfranklin.html
Franklin, at the time (he died in 1790), and Jefferson, decades later in his letters to John Adams and others.
“There is nothing I would not sacrifice to a practicable plan of abolishing every vestige of this moral and political depravity.”
—Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Cooper, September 1814
The idea of slavery being wrong was pretty quickly in many of the founders heads. I did not say they imposed, just thought about it. But others did!
The Founders managed to outlaw slavery in the northern territories as part of the Northwest Ordinance in 1787.
Pennsylvania abolished slavery in 1780, Massachusetts in 1783, And Connecticut and Rhode Island in 1784.
Washington also manumitted his slaves in his will (upon his wife Martha’s death, so the Mount Vernon slaves—many were hers, not his—so they wouldn’t be separated when he died), and he died in 1799. He also wrote about it (why he was against slavery) before he died, too.
“There is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a plan adopted for this abolition of [slavery] but there is only one proper and effectual mode by which it can be accomplished, & that is by Legislative authority.”
-George Washington, 1786
https://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/slavery/washingtons-changing-views-on-slavery/
Before you say someone is “absolutely” wrong, make sure you know of what you argue.
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