this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
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United States | News & Politics
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It was beneficial.
To white property owners. Much to the detriment of enslaved Africans and their descendants.
Literally the first sentence of the article. Emphasis added.
Ironically, one of the (many) reasons this is total bullshit is that not all slaves were imported for unskilled physical labor. In the Carolinas, when landowners began growing rice they paid a premium for female slaves from west Africa who had experience with rice cultivation because they had no idea how to do it themselves. So it would be accurate to say that white people benefited from slavery because it taught them skills.
You're sniping, but I think the parent poster was accurate in what they said. I don't think it was an euphemism for slave. It was the 1800s. What would you do with a slave if you didn't own property? If they're not tilling and planting or harvesting, or keeping house, or cooking, what would they be doing? A horse would be far more effective at pulling a carriage, and keeping one as a sex slave - while it definitely happened - was strongly looked down upon by society at the time.
If you kept a slave and had no good reason to own one aside from sex, you might well disappear in the night one night - not out of protection for the slave(s) but racial purity.
Sick part you “borrow slaves from what was called New York stock exchange. Then sell a slave or get collateral.
Right, but take the converse: if they didn't own land, they definitely couldn't afford a slave.
Slaves were property. A slave owner was a property owner.
I've become partial to a language change to enslaved people and slavers. It emphasizes the humanity of the victims of slavery and refuses to acknowledge the view of human beings as property. Instead enslavement is a property foisted upon the victims and enslavement is an evil perpetrated by slavers.
Ah, I see what you're saying. True.
WHITE slave owners.
You seem to be avoiding a certain adjective.
Slavery benefitted both white and non-white slave owners.
Edit: at least in the short-term, obviously you could argue differently for long-term effects.
This is an incomplete view of the history of slavery. By the numbers, the vast majority of the people benefitting from chattel slavery were white. However, slave ownership reached similar per capita rates among some of the Native American tribes, and there were instances of slaves being owned by free people of color. Notably, there are a large number of black tribal members in the United States. The United States government signed a number of treaties with the tribes in the 1860s that required them to free their slaves and incorporate them as full tribal members.
None of this is said to diminish the fact that the American system of slavery was a product of colonization by European countries. But it is rather reductive to claim that only white property owners benefitted from the atrocity that was chattel slavery.
How could you even track accounting profits that far back in time to repay today? What if the family descendants are poor today? (They lost everything in the Great Depression, as an example)
It's also basically the main reason that the US becamean superpower before WW1