Re: I'm putting forward the moral imperative of dealing with slavery

1

There's no one correct tactic. The more different tactics you have, the better.

I think this is right in most contexts but I find it's so hard to put into practice when I see people I care about throwing themselves into struggles that seem wrong-headed or counterproductive.


Posted by: Thorn | Link to this comment | 12-12-16 8:53 PM
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He's such a hack.


Posted by: Von Wafer | Link to this comment | 12-12-16 9:00 PM
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(I'm kidding.)


Posted by: Von Wafer | Link to this comment | 12-12-16 9:00 PM
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(Or am I?)


Posted by: Von Wafer | Link to this comment | 12-12-16 9:00 PM
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I wonder if it sucks or is great (probably both) to have something you worked hard to formulate become conventional wisdom.


Posted by: Thorn | Link to this comment | 12-12-16 9:04 PM
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I don't know. Maybe we should ask whoever started OPINIONATED GRANDMA.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 12-12-16 9:19 PM
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Reading Barrington Moore Social Origins of Dictatorship, 1967 and in the chapter on the American Civil War, he tosses off a ref to "Foner, Business and Slavery" which is about ante-bellum Northern financing so I go to Wiki and look at Eric, too young then Eric's father and not in dad's bibliography so I find Philip Foner, Eric's uncle. Anybody interested, that is one heck of a family.

"To say that today, however, is unhistorical anyway, because socialism was not on the agenda in 1850." Foner, OP link

Hmm, went looking don't remember, I think at Counterpunch this week somebody rattled off a long list of quotes from Dixie circa 1850s attempting to connect "socialism" (quotes needed?) and abolition.

Ahh. Jacobin.Red Abolitionism

Jefferson Davis, on the eve of the Civil War:

In fact, the European Socialists, who, in wild radicalism, . . . are the correspondents of the American abolitionists, maintain the same doctrine as to all property, that the abolitionists, do as to slave property. He who has property, they argue, is the robber of him who has not.

"La propriete, c'est le vol," is the famous theme of the Socialist, Proudhon. And the same precise theories of attack at the North on the slave property of the South would, if carried out to their legitimate and necessary logical consequences, and will, if successful in this, their first state of action, superinduce attacks on all property, North and South.

I probably misread Foner.


Posted by: bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 12-12-16 9:40 PM
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I just reread the Moore chapter, and I suppose some here might find it barely acceptable. I feel a need for more comparative analyses, and Moore puts the ACW in context of the usual other revolutions and examines all the factors. His thesis is about the collapses of landed aristocracies in the face of industrializations, and gives room for all sorts of traditional and created hierarchies.

Whatever. I just have to walk away from the radical reductionism about the Civil War that is in fashion now.


Posted by: bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 12-12-16 10:47 PM
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It's a good piece but raises a couple of points:

But what I'm saying is that I've never seen a peaceful scenario for the abolition of slavery in this country. Now, a lot of people say it would have died out as a result of being uneconomical. How do you know that? When would it have died out? It was plenty economical before the Civil War, why would it suddenly die out? People say, "Oh, well Brazil abolished slavery." Brazil abolished slavery partially because we abolished slavery. Do you think Brazil would have abolished slavery if we hadn't?

Well, you know, there are countries in the world other than the US and Brazil. France abolished slavery in its colonies in 1848, without needing a war. Britain abolished slavery in its colonies in 1833, without needing a war. Mexico abolished slavery in 1810, without needing a war (well, they were fighting their war of independence, but that wasn't over slavery). And so on. What makes the US so unique that it couldn't follow the same path that almost every other European and American nation had taken by this point? (I am tempted to say it was because the US had a uniquely weak central government and a historical hatred of raising taxes, so couldn't bring itself to compensate the slave owners; the Civil War, of course, cost far more than a compensation agreement, and led to a newly powerful central government, but that's historical irony for you.)

And this annoyed me somewhat:

I don't believe there is one true party line that every movement has to have. The Maoist view is better: let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred tactics bloom.

Yes, of course, Maoism, that famously pluralist and tolerant political tradition!

(And not "let a hundred tactics bloom". "Let a hundred schools of thought contend". That's a critical difference; the point was that people were invited to criticise and disagree with ends, not just means.)

First, the Hundred Flowers campaign came immediately after the immense, world-historical cockup of the Great Leap Forward. And second, it was followed up by the Anti-Rightist Campaign, in which everyone who'd been daft enough to actually voice criticism of Mao and the Party was persecuted. Some believe that the whole thing was planned from the start, to flush out Mao's opponents; others say he was honestly surprised to find how much dissent there was in the party.


Posted by: ajay | Link to this comment | 12-13-16 2:51 AM
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9: Because a significant fraction of the US was willing to war in defence of slavery, and France and the UK lacked that fraction? The South went to war over Lincoln making frowny faces at slavery, after all.


Posted by: Walt Someguy | Link to this comment | 12-13-16 3:23 AM
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But isn't that just pushing the problem back a bit further? Why was the slave interest in the US prepared to commit treason, when the slave interest in the UK and France and Mexico was not?


Posted by: ajay | Link to this comment | 12-13-16 3:57 AM
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I suspect that abolishing plantation slavery was easier for European states because there were thousands of miles of salt water between them and the plantations. Most of the Europeans who profited from slavery and the slave trade probably never clapped eyes on a slave in their lives; slaves were a source of income, period, and if the government offered to replace it with a different source of income which was less complicated to manage, such as a huge cash payment up front, then that was cool. Slaves were not a intrinsic part of their lifestyle, as in Brasil and the United States.

Of course slavery actually in Britain had been made impractical if not illegal in 1772 (five years before the Republic of Vermont) by the decision in Somerset v. Stewart (it had previously been abolished by a decree of William the Conqueror in 1066 or 1067). I would like to know if there was any equivalent in France or if they just went for it in 1848.


Posted by: chris y | Link to this comment | 12-13-16 4:02 AM
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12: Slavery in France itself was abolished in the fourteenth century. It was abolished in their empire in 1794 (because Rights of Man) and then reintroduced by Napoleon in 1804 (because his wife's family stood to make a lot of money off it).

But then that doesn't explain Mexico and all the other Latin American states that managed abolition without a war. Weren't slaves part of the lifestyle of a rich farmer in Mexico or a mine baron in Chile?


Posted by: ajay | Link to this comment | 12-13-16 4:28 AM
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13.2. Yes, but revolutions are funny like that. They tend to get more radical than they set out to be.


Posted by: chris y | Link to this comment | 12-13-16 4:37 AM
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And, I suppose, the revolution in Mexico wasn't led by slave owners, so they had no incentive not to be radical.


Posted by: ajay | Link to this comment | 12-13-16 4:55 AM
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I don't think Mexico or Chile ever had the proportion of slaves that the South did. Brazil was, I think, the most similar of any non-island nation and also did not abolish slavery until very late.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 12-13-16 6:32 AM
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I see Brazil is mentioned above. Anyway, while I know there are countries in the world other than the U.S. and Brazil, I don't think you have any other examples of populous, industrial-era countries with such a large portion of their economy dependent on slavery.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 12-13-16 6:44 AM
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Wasn't Mexico more into peonage than chattel slavery? A nice distinction, I know, but a distinction nonetheless.


Posted by: chris y | Link to this comment | 12-13-16 6:49 AM
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I think so, unless there's a subtle distinction between peonage and peasanting that I'm missing.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 12-13-16 6:50 AM
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Serfs up!

(I'm sorry.)


Posted by: Flippanter | Link to this comment | 12-13-16 7:09 AM
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a historical hatred of raising taxes, so couldn't bring itself to compensate the slave owners

I'm pretty sure that Coates has shown (from sources, of course) that the collective value of slaves in 1860 was greater than more or less everything else in the US at the time*. Which is to say that there was no plausible tax base that could have made slaveholders whole in the absence of coercion.

*perhaps it was greater than everything excepting land? I don't recall the exact point of comparison, but it's staggering.


Posted by: JRoth | Link to this comment | 12-13-16 7:09 AM
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18: Yes, and in addition a corvee labor/poll tax system for everything besides haciendas. IIRC nowhere in mainland Spanish America had significant slave populations.


Posted by: Mossy Character | Link to this comment | 12-13-16 7:10 AM
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People are people so why should it be,
the U.S. and Brazil were best at slavery.


Posted by: Opinionated Depeche Mode | Link to this comment | 12-13-16 7:14 AM
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Why was the slave interest in the US prepared to commit treason, when the slave interest in the UK and France and Mexico was not?
The slave interest in the Cape sort of was, in 1834. The abolition sparked a small Afrikaner rebellion and accelerated their migration into the interior. Which fits the lifestyle/relative status explanation mooted above.


Posted by: Mossy Character | Link to this comment | 12-13-16 7:15 AM
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Also, I dimly recall that the economics of slavery worked very differently in the sugar islands. Slaves there were essentially worked to death and had to be constantly replaced with imports, so they were a very rapidly depreciating asset. In the US (and Brazil?) slaves survived for far longer, long enough to become a self-sustaining population (and self-renewing asset). Also, I think the profit margin on sugar was way down by the C19 (because of Brazilian production?).


Posted by: Mossy Character | Link to this comment | 12-13-16 7:24 AM
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We're just lucky slavery was killed in the U.S. before high-fructose corn syrup was invented.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 12-13-16 7:26 AM
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Brazil is still pretty messed up as far as race relations go.

I once trained a class of mid-level professionals at Brazil's development bank in Rio. Every one of them was white. Down in the street, not so much.

Unlike the US, Brazil never really did affirmative action or enforced integration or anything like that. It shows.


Posted by: Emperor Pedro I | Link to this comment | 12-13-16 7:33 AM
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Actually no rebellion in the Cape, I conflated other things. But accelerated migration.


Posted by: Mossy Character | Link to this comment | 12-13-16 7:33 AM
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25 is right. IIRC it was sugar beets that devalued cane. Maybe Brazil took on cane production from the islands for whatever reason, but I'm almost certain that non-cane sugar was part of the story.


Posted by: JRoth | Link to this comment | 12-13-16 8:14 AM
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I'm pretty sure that Coates has shown (from sources, of course) that the collective value of slaves in 1860 was greater than more or less everything else in the US at the time*.

I hadn't heard that - I can't find it on google; best estimates I can find is that slaves represented just under half the total wealth of the South - not the entire US - in 1860, at the end of a twenty-year bull run in the slave market. (And in fact this would have to be the case, wouldn't it, because the North was richer than the South and didn't have any slaves!) https://www.measuringworth.com/slavery.php

Overall, slaves in 1860 represented $3 billion in assets - about 14% of total US wealth, equivalent to 70% of annual GDP. A huge amount.

But then again the Civil War cost $4.1 billion, and the US managed to afford that.


Posted by: ajay | Link to this comment | 12-13-16 8:19 AM
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The value of the land in the South was also dependent on having somebody to work the land. In retrospect, we know that it was possible to grow cotton on that land without actual slavery, but that wasn't known at the time. I'm fairly certain "We'll give you $3 billion and you free the slaves" wasn't a possible option even if the taxpayers of the North were willing to foot the whole $3 billion.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 12-13-16 8:27 AM
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But then again the Civil War cost $4.1 billion, and the US managed to afford that.

Sure, but to keep on spending to keep up a war you're already in (against traitors!) is a lot more politically palatable, even if the total winds up huge, than "let's just give these folks a gargantuan amount of money".


Posted by: nosflow | Link to this comment | 12-13-16 8:38 AM
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Even talk of political palatability is a little disingenuous since it suggests that the total cost was known in advance and war was just the sugar necessary to get the medicine to go down.


Posted by: nosflow | Link to this comment | 12-13-16 8:39 AM
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But then again the Civil War cost $4.1 billion.

700,000 dead soldiers, also.


Posted by: Spike | Link to this comment | 12-13-16 8:49 AM
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30: I must be hazily recalling a few things TNC has written. Anyway, here's a relevant post at the end of which is a link to a useful Yggles post.

The bottom line is that, even if you could get around all the difficulties--and, per 31, plus issues raised by Coates, you probably can't--and simply fork over $3B to slave owners, it would take tripling the Federal budget for 25 years. Given that nobody actually expected the war to be as costly (in every sense) as it was, I truly don't think that would have been acceptable. That is, if you offered the binary choice by referendum in 1860--Civil War or compensated emancipation--people would have preferred war, and not just Southern fire-eaters. I mean, according to Yglesias, the North actually spent less cash than $3B to win.


Posted by: JRoth | Link to this comment | 12-13-16 8:50 AM
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Sure, but to keep on spending to keep up a war you're already in (against traitors!) is a lot more politically palatable, even if the total winds up huge, than "let's just give these folks a gargantuan amount of money".

But "let's give these folks a fairly gargantuan amount of money" worked in other polities, where the threat of war was absent. Look, it is not exaggerating too much to say that the US from 1840 or so onwards was in a state of constant low-intensity civil war over the issue of slavery. That wasn't the case for the UK, or its empire (the Afrikaner revolt aside). And yet the UK was prepared to pay out a pretty considerable amount to compensate slave owners - and as far as I know, nothing of the kind was ever suggested in the US.


Posted by: ajay | Link to this comment | 12-13-16 9:05 AM
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Those dollar amounts yous are using--are those 1860/1865 dollars, or some modern benchmark? Looking around, it seems like those amounts are in 1860s terms.

It says here and here that the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 provided slave owners with £20 million, equivalent to £2 billion today. So that explains why it was possible in the British Empire but not in the US: that sum is hardly comparable.


Posted by: dalriata | Link to this comment | 12-13-16 9:28 AM
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36: The constant state of law-intensity warfare is a symptom that the issue was too central for one side to buy off the other, not a sign that somebody should have been willing to pay to buy off the other side.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 12-13-16 9:32 AM
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£20 million gold standard pounds were ballpark USD100m. Definitely not comparable.


Posted by: Mossy Character | Link to this comment | 12-13-16 9:35 AM
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Also, I think the French lost the large majority of their slaves in the Haitian revolt, which they fought bitterly, and for which they demanded a huge indemnity from the Haitians.


Posted by: Mossy Character | Link to this comment | 12-13-16 9:36 AM
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41

I think Foner is wrong. It was Haitian Revolution, not the American Civil War, that decisively set the trajectory for abolition in Atlantic world during the 19th century. To wit:

France abolished slavery in its colonies in 1848, without needing a war.

Well, the business in Haiti -- a fifteen-year conflict in which the French, before losing, eventually upped the ante to outright genocide (afterwards reciprocated by Dessalines) -- most certainly qualifies as "needing a war." The formality of abolition in 1848 was AFAIK just a belated recognition that France was never getting her Empire in the Americas back.

"The horrors of St. Domingue" had an impact on many of the subsequent struggles for and against abolition in the Atlantic world. It and subsequent revolts in the South -- the German Coast uprising, Boxley, Vesey, Nat Turner -- were a big part of the reason, or at least part of the justification, for why the anti-abolition faction in the States was so intransigent. The same spectre influenced Brazil's reaction to the revolt in Bahia in 1835, both in terms of the immediate crackdown and the decision to criminalize the maritime slave trade in 1850 (and this probably did make the eventual step of total abolition inevitable in Brazil no matter what happened in the States). It was also one of the major factors in Britain coming to believe that the slave trade was inherently dangerous and inefficient, and that profit could better be pursued by other means, which was the background to Britain's abolitionist trajectory from 1807 to 1833.


Posted by: Lord Castock | Link to this comment | 12-13-16 3:46 PM
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41:
Agree about Haiti. In my upper-level law school class on the early years of constitutional interpretation, the sea-change caused by the "Santo Domingo Uprising" was prominent.

I'd add the Caste War in Yucatan, widely covered in American, particularly Southern newspapers in the 1850's. Entire towns of whites massacred by Mayans, with the city of Valladolid standing vacant for over a year.

Add that to Nat Turner and you have a nightmare for Southern Whites.


Posted by: idp | Link to this comment | 12-13-16 4:12 PM
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For lots of detail about Haiti and its war for independence (and after), I found this book excellent: Haiti: the aftershocks of history


Posted by: DaveLMA | Link to this comment | 12-13-16 5:07 PM
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... and this is good about the slave revolt on St. John, VI in 1733: Night of the Silent Drums

I read that a long time ago before/during my first visit to St. John. IMHO slave revolts have largely been written out of history, at least as we see it here in the US.


Posted by: DaveLMA | Link to this comment | 12-13-16 5:13 PM
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For people who care, Manisha Sinha's field-defining book on the history of abolition is definitely worth reading, though I think it has some huge holes in the argument.


Posted by: Von Wafer | Link to this comment | 12-13-16 5:17 PM
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Certainly the chapter on Batman is uncommon in other works in the field.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 12-13-16 5:35 PM
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Thanks for those reading references, and to idp for mentioning the Caste War; not a part of history I'd previously studied and it looks fascinating.


Posted by: Lord Castock | Link to this comment | 12-13-16 8:10 PM
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By the way if anyone ever needs good solid facts to demolish the stupid "Irish slaves" meme, Liam Hogan (@limerick1914) has what you want. This meme is used by a lot of racist and/or stupid people to pretend that there's no legacy of disadvantage suffered by black people.


Posted by: emir | Link to this comment | 12-14-16 3:56 AM
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41 is a very good point; and agree that slave revolts don't get enough emphasis. There were a lot of them in Jamaica too, it's a common feature in naval history of the period - none as bloody or as successful as Haiti of course, but they probably played a role in the thinking as well.
Also, the West Indies were a huge drain on military and naval resources throughout the Napoleonic Wars, not least because of the huge non-battle mortality from disease among the garrison troops, and one can easily imagine London seeing the maintenance of the slave economy as an unnecessary distraction from the main effort of fighting Napoleon.


Posted by: ajay | Link to this comment | 12-14-16 5:29 AM
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if anyone ever needs good solid facts to demolish the stupid "Irish slaves" meme

Contrary to stereotype, some Irish slaves were actually reasonably intelligent.


Posted by: ajay | Link to this comment | 12-14-16 5:30 AM
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Seconding 48. Hogan goes amazingly deep into the details; some of the claims are based on hundred-year-old willful misunderstandings.

Some of the rhetoric I've seen around it has made me wonder if many Americans genuinely don't understand the difference between bonded labor and chattel slavery. That might also explain some of the "slavery wasn't so bad" arguments. So sad.


Posted by: dalriata | Link to this comment | 12-14-16 8:01 AM
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As a leftist, of course I don't buy into "Irish slaves," but I do recognize that tenancy, sharecropping, sold into apprenticeship or prostitution, debt peonage, casual, contract, and precarious labour etc etc etc are not as bad as chattel slavery but are also problems and oppressions that need not be dismissed or overlooked because chattel slavery was the worst. They are also not anywhere near as historically determinative as racialized chattel slavery but might be more relevant and informative in helping the working classes in present day circumstances.


Posted by: bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 12-14-16 8:18 AM
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52: Yeah, us too. But you know (and I know you know I know, etc.) that we're not talking about you. Obviously the Irish were at many times and places oppressed. If anything, I think that means that they should be able to be empathetic with other oppressed groups. I'd almost say that's a requirement for any claim to yourself to be a downtrodden person, instead of lying to further marginalize those are who are already more marginalized than you. Of course, not that that's anything new--see, uh, that Irish revolutionary who was also a Confederate propagandist whose name I forget.


Posted by: dalriata | Link to this comment | 12-14-16 8:24 AM
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An awful lot of our present problems, I believe, extend from the post-Civil War attitude "At least they aren't slaves" and the abandonment of Reconstruction and the Southern Blacks to the lesser but considerable oppressions of tenancy and sharecropping, partly because Northern Capitalism won the war and didn't want to question the property rights of Southern land capitalists. Thaddeus Stevens was twice the man Lincoln was, although of course Lincoln, railroad lawyer, never got the opportunity to betray the freed slave.


Posted by: bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 12-14-16 8:27 AM
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Bob forgets that FDR existed, which I guess is about par for Republicans.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 12-14-16 8:32 AM
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53:Oh, Jesus my fucking name? I have zero interest affiliation or attachment to anything Irish whatsoever.

(Joyce was an enthusiastic and committed exile. I approve. Yeats and Wilde are ok. Pierce Brosnan was cool. What?)

(PPS: I used to like Bushmills. Jameson sucked.)


Posted by: bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 12-14-16 8:33 AM
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It is interesting and informative that 52 was apparently considered outrageous and offensive. Date stored.


Posted by: bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 12-14-16 8:36 AM
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"December 14, 2016. A date that will live in anonymity."


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 12-14-16 8:41 AM
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The debt that France owes Haiti is the probably world's best example to demonstrate the legitimacy of the reparations movement.


Posted by: Spike | Link to this comment | 12-14-16 8:43 AM
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I absolutely approve of reparations, in trillions, with the caveat that the funding not completely come from the working class, cause HRC and Taylor Swift are also oppressed minorities.

(Keith Ellison, Schumer's protege on the Finance committee. Hope didn't last long.)


Posted by: bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 12-14-16 8:57 AM
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56.first: Huh?


Posted by: dalriata | Link to this comment | 12-14-16 9:03 AM
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53: Probably John Mitchel? Yeah, I was really angry when I found out about that. I had been impressed by the bits of his earlier writings that were quoted in my history books, to the extent that I actually as a teen got someone to buy me this. It was much later that I discovered his full sickening racist views. (I'd found the book heavy going tbh so I don't remember if there were bits in it where he was racist about Aboriginal Australians.)
At least Meagher of the Sword ended up on the right side.


Posted by: emir | Link to this comment | 12-15-16 2:42 AM
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62: Yes, that's who I was thinking of. When I read about him, he seemed very impressive until I got about halfway through. Equating Irish peasants with plantation owners due to both being people of the land is absurd, but I suppose racism'll do that to you. What a git.

As for Meagher, the tour guide on a side trip we took to Wicklow (beautiful!) went on about him. Had no clue that he became governor of Montana. Quite a story there.


Posted by: dalriata | Link to this comment | 12-15-16 7:59 AM
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