A secular Jew makes a surprising discovery about Christians and American slavery

Acton Institute ^ | Apr 2019 | John B. Carpenter

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp: "My point in bringing up Eisenhower is to get people to note that Eisenhower believed there were forces outside the government which worked very hard to keep government policy funneling money through their hands."

Those "forces" were only doing their jobs, selling their services.
Congress's job has always been to separate out the necessary wheat from wasteful chaff, and there's no evidence to suggest Democrats are better at it than Republicans -- just the opposite.
Republicans in 1860 (as in 2016) got elected on their promises to clean up the Democrat swamp in Washington.

DiogenesLamp: "I cite Eisenhower because he can hardly be considered a kook, and I would think most conservatives would not dismiss his warnings out of hand."

Eisenhower reduced defense spending from 11% of GDP in 1953 (Korean War) to 8% in 1961.
Both Reagan and Trump increased defense spending, but from much lower levels: Reagan from 4% to 6%, Trump from 3% to maybe 4%.
Compare & contrast: at the peak of the Second World War, defense spending reached 35% of GDP.
Doubtless some of that was indeed "wasteful".
Point is: at today's <4% of GDP, it's hard to imagine some vast reservoir of "wasteful spending" just waiting to be effectively cut.

DiogenesLamp: "If there exists extra governmental agencies who work to keep defense spending up, is it not reasonable to assume that other people in other industries might also do the same?"

The world is full of salesmen doing their jobs.
The question for voters is whether Democrats or Republicans in Congress are better at separating out necessary from unnecessary spending?
Is that really even a question?

[BroJoeK]

fso301: "King Cotton died during the Civil War when European nations developed their own sources of cotton in Africa and India."

DiogenesLamp: "Which could not have happened but for the Union blockade of all Southern production.
Without warships blocking their harbors, the South would have continued to undercut foreign markets and kept Cotton King."

Well... except for this: in 1861 there was no effective Union blockade and yet Confederates decided to withhold their cotton from the international market, in hopes of forcing European customers to politically recognize the Confederacy.

Later in the Civil War, to help feed their armies in the field, Confederates stopped producing export crops like cotton and switched to basic food growing.
Of course all of that could have ended the day Jefferson Davis decided to accept terms and stop fighting.

But Davis preferred Unconditional Surrender and total destruction of the Confederacy.
Go figure.

[BroJoeK]

jeffersondem: "My thoughts are: this is going to rub some fur the wrong way, especially among liberals."

IOW, you have your script and are not going to depart from it, no matter what, right?

So who, exactly, writes your scripts, maybe we should talk directly to him/her/them/it instead?

[BroJoeK]

jeffersondem: "I don't understand why anyone would want to make either argument."

Nor do I, just hoping to make some sense of what I assume is your mischaracterization of DoodleDawg's posts, and then to tie it all into larger questions.
That's because it doesn't matter much whether most slaves were "house slaves" or "field slaves", but it does matter whether slavery could be expanded beyond its Deep South states' cotton base.

[jeffersondem]

“That's because it doesn't matter much whether most slaves were “house slaves” or “field slaves” . . .”

Perhaps it is a small point 150 years later. But why not get it right?

Getting it wrong - backwards as DoodleDawg did - could result in someone thinking that, back then, the cost of producing cotton, the ability to make land mortgage payments, international trade, confiscatory taxation, and the ability to fund the federal government's growing appetite for money - all these things did not matter to people in the South or the North.

That kind of economics leads a liberal to think the 1861 dust-up was over keeping the furniture dusted off.

[DoodleDawg]

The author included this finding: “ . . . 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. Contrary to popular myth, slave families were rarely divided up — only about 3% were — and slave-owners rarely used their slaves for sexual indulgence, with only about 2% of slave births being by white fathers.”

Statistics are misleading, and selecting statistics to prove a bias are more misleading than others. The author claimed that slaves consumed more calories and lived longer than the average Northern city dweller. But let's compare apples with apple, shall we? What was slave life expectancy compared with rural whites, North or South? What was the slave diet like compared to the white diet for farm families, North or South. Calories are fine, but if most of those calories are from starches instead of proteins then it doesn't make for a very healthy lifestyle. Part of the country matters as well. In 1850 the average life expectancy of a white person at birth in Maryland was 44.6 years. For a male slave it was 40 years. In the deep South, where plantation agriculture was widespread, it was 28 years for whites, 20 years for slaves. Child mortality rates for slaves was much worse than for whites, and child mortality amongst poor whites in cities was probably very high as well.

As for the claim that only 3% of slave families were split up, that is very hard to believe. Slaves were property and selling property brought in a lot of money. But say, for the sake of argument, that 3% figure was correct. It's still 3% higher than for whites in the South. And 3% higher for poor whites in cities.

But all that's wasted because after all your sole goal seems to be to rub liberal fur the wrong way, and you'll swallow any fairytale out there if that furthers your goal.

[jeffersondem]

“In 1850 the average life expectancy of a white person at birth in Maryland was 44.6 years.”

And the average white person in Maryland at that time had one testicle and one breast.

[otness_e]

Pretty good work.

You forgot to mention also that Alexander Hamilton (and, heck, John Adams as well) fully recognized the full horrors of what the French Revolution unleashed before it happened, and without even setting foot into the country.

And by contrast, Jefferson upon witnessing Bastille Day with his own eyes proceeded to sing praises for the Jacobins and various French Revolutionaries to the extent of breaking his friendship to John Adams and even William Short over it, even implying he considers them closer to his ideals of liberty than America at one point, and even wrote a letter supporting the Jacobins when they killed their king and had conducted the September Massacres.

In other words, he was basically the Castrolites and Ho-Chi-Minh worshippers of the Hippies, of the liberal media, even the communist-infested State department.

And honestly, it’s the fact that he outright supported the French Revolution and its excesses especially when he saw directly what they were truly like in person that has me losing a LOT of respect for that man. I could forgive him for owning slaves, even his not freeing them when he died. I could NOT forgive him for cheerleading the same people who wanted to dismember us Christians just for our even HAVING a religion at all. Were he alive today, he’d be singing praises for Karl Marx and Che Guevara.

[BroJoeK]

otness_e on Jefferson: "And honestly, it’s the fact that he outright supported the French Revolution and its excesses especially when he saw directly what they were truly like in person that has me losing a LOT of respect for that man."

Right, Jefferson was a... ah, complicated man, deserves a lot of credit for many good ideas, but not so much for some others.
I see Jefferson as our prototypical Democrat -- rebellious out of power, authoritarian in power, in 1860s, 1960s or today.

[Cronos]

Christians AND Zoroastrians ended slavery:

1. In Europe and the Christian Middle East (Egypt, Syria, Anatolia, Iraq) - by Christians. There were no more slaves there

2. in Iran and Persian ruled Iraq and Central Asia - by Zoroastrianism which had similarly outlawed slavery when Cyrus the Group conquered it.

3. Slavery of local “indians” in the Americas - by Catholic priests who protested against the actions of the Spanish and portuguese.

4. Slavery of black people transported from Africa — by METHODISTS specifically (I’m not Methodist, note) - who protested against the slavery transportation and use by Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans and Baptists.

Islam is pro-slavery in contrast