Slavery: Demolishing The Yankee Stereotypes

Confederate States of America

My copy of Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman’s Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery arrived this morning. This excerpt sheds considerable light on what I mean by “Shattering the Golden Circle” or permanently breaking the Southern and Caribbean labor system, destroying our prosperity, and creating the “Third World” by applying the free labor ideology to the negro:

“The following are some of the principal corrections of the traditional characterization of the slave economy:

1. Slavery was not a system irrationally kept in existence by plantation owners who failed to perceive or who were indifferent to their best economic interests. The purchase of a slave was generally a highly profitable investment which yielded rates of return that compared favorably with the most outstanding investment opportunities in manufacturing.

2. The slave system was not economically moribund on the eve of the Civil War. There is no evidence that economic forces alone would have soon brought slavery to an end without the necessity of a war or some other form of political intervention. Quite the contrary; as the Civil War approached, slavery was an economic system was never stronger and the trend was toward even further retrenchment.

3. Slaveowners were not becoming pessimistic about the future of their system that preceded the Civil War. The rise of the secessionist movement coincided with a wave of optimism. On the eve of the Civil War, slaveowners anticipated unprecedented prosperity.

4. Slave agriculture was not inefficient compared with free agriculture. Economies of large-scale operation, effective management, and intensive utilization of labor and capital made southern slave agriculture 35 percent more efficient than the northern system of family farming.

5. The typical slave field hand was not lazy, inept, and unproductive. On average he was harder working and more efficient than his white counterpart.

6. The course of slavery in the cities does not prove that slavery was incompatible with an industrial system or that slaves were unable to cope with an industrial regimen. Slaves employed in industry compared favorably with free workers in diligence and efficiency. Far from declining, the demand for slaves was actually increasing more rapidly in urban areas than the countryside.

7. The belief that slave breeding, sexual exploitation, and promiscuity destroyed the black family is a myth. The family was the basic unit of social organization under slavery. It was to the economic interests of planters to encourage the stability of slave families and most of them did so. Most slave sales were either of whole families or of individuals who were at an age when it would have been normal for them to have left the family.

8. The material (not psychological) conditions of the lives of slaves compared favorably with those of free industrial workers. This is not to say they were good by modern standards. It merely emphasizes the hard lot of all workers, free or slave, during the first half of the nineteenth century.

9. Slaves were exploited in the sense that part of the income which they produced was expropriated by their owners. However, the rate of expropriation was much lower than has generally been presumed. Over the course of his lifetime, the typical slave field hand received about 90 percent of the income he produced.

10. Far from stagnating, the economy of the antebellum South grew quite rapidly. Between 1840 and 1860, per capita income increased more rapidly in the South than in the rest of the nation. By 1860 the South attained a per capita income that was high by the standards of the time. Indeed, a country as advanced as Italy did not achieve the same level of per capita income until the eve of World War II.

Everyone knows that the average White man in the South hated the planters and secretly yearned to a Yankee.

This poor oppressed soul had nothing better to do with his life. He yearned to be a “free laborer” in a Northern factory which would have made him, materially and economically, if not socially, effectively on the same level as a field hand with a name like “Jupiter” on a Mississippi plantation.

About Hunter Wallace 12390 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

33 Comments

  1. Over the course of his lifetime, the typical slave field hand received about 90 percent of the income he produced…..

    Wow. Nowadays, even the poorest people have more than that taken. There’s tons of attention always on “income tax”—- a main benefit being that it trains the gaze away from the MANY OTHER KINDS OF TAX, and how much is really being paid out (ss, sales, property of not only homes but often other property, like vehicles, etc.)

    Easily a self-employed person, not making much money, can pay 50%—- more with other business-related fees.

    The 1865 census is an eye opener for how well slaves ate, also, but it’s not taught in schools.

  2. @ Hunter The economy of the South grew rapidly in the 20 years before the Civil War, possibly quicker than any other section, I agree with that. But, take a look at the Southern railroad network in 1860. A first class railroad network that no one claims was built by negro slaves!

    You make too much out of slavery, as practiced in the costal lowlands & Mississippi Valley. The big money of the Northern cities had their eyes on a lot more than negroes & commodities. Even though negroes & commodities were their excuse.

  3. The Spartans were still held up as an ideal when I was young. Do children nowadays hear anymore of the story of the brave Spartan boy and the fox?

  4. My school teachers, the Marine Corps, and UCLA at the very least; and certainly no one who has received any instructions in the Classics (the Latin and Ancient Greek languages and Ancient history.)

  5. I will go along with the Marine Corp, but I think you make an overstatement concerning people holding up the Spartans as ideal. Ditto a Classical education. Yes, there was certainly more discipline in the past, but that is still a far cry from Spartan culture, Rudel.

    Moreover, a classical education did not hold up Spartan culture as “ideal.” As I wrote, you are making overstatements.

  6. A Spartan environment and setting would be ideal for a PRISON. I would go along with that. But society in general? No.

  7. ‘As soon as [SC] backcountry planters could secure the capital to buy slaves, they did so, and the successful introduction of cotton culture into the area in the 1780s and 1790s greatly accelerated the process. In a very real sense, the spread of cotton and slavery across the Lower South over the next half century testified to the continuing viability and adaptability of the Barbadian social model.’

    -Professor Jack P Greene, John Hopkins University, 1987

  8. Spartans were held in high regard when I was a child too. By my father and grandfather, my teachers, the military and the one pastor I can remember form my youth. My high school was the Spartans, but holding a nation/ people in high regard isn’t the same thing as saying they were the ideal.

  9. “My high school was the Spartans, but holding a nation/ people in high regard isn’t the same thing as saying they were the ideal.”

    Perhaps ideal is too strong a word but there are certainly many things about Spartan culture that we can learn from, not the least of which was their outstanding integrity and bravery.

  10. ‘You make too much out of slavery, as practiced in the costal lowlands & Mississippi Valley. The big money of the Northern cities had their eyes on a lot more than negroes & commodities. Even though negroes & commodities were their excuse.’

    Earl- I think, in light if the quotes above, the point of this post was to utterly decimate the fallacy of ‘evil’ when speaking of Negro slavery. As another poster (Dixie G) has noted, ANY system that guaranteed a 90% return on wages earned, is a good, when compared to the modern Moloch State.

    That it has the (false) stigma of ‘slave’ attached to us, is meaningless, once we realize that a) Massas had the welfare of their property in view, b) the family unit was the norm and monogamy was the pattern for darkies, unlike today, c) welfare and EBT is merely trading Christian slaving for pagan slaving- as I’ve noted here, before, and d) ‘What else you gonna do wif dem shifty niggas,’ otherwise? Oh, sure a Gates or a Douglass comes about once in a generation or so, and those can be shipped back to Africa, to be ‘kings and princes’ over in the Dark Continent…. But the utter reality of this and almost every preceding article of HW, has been to point out that THIS IS ALL NIGGERS ARE GOOD FOR- and both they (and we) BENEFITTED FROM THIS SYSTEM, once you remove the bullsh*t about ‘equality’ and ‘souls’ for the darkie. Without the common grace of a White, Christian civilization, they ARE nothing but beasts. But, with us as their Massas, they actually can- and do- begin to approach something resembling Adamic nature (if not status) rather than as merely ‘behemah.’

  11. It’s useful to think about what the long term playout of negro slavery would have been in the South had it continued into the present and beyond that. Of course, there are always unpredictable consequences from any action not taken, but in general, I think most likely it would have played out about like this:

    The general level of IQ amongst the slaves in general would have been raised as the most intelligent slaves would have been bred the most, and especially stupid ones discouraged from breeding, perhaps being sterilized once medicine made it feasible at all for females and non-damaging for males (castrating males works, but produces eunuchs, which have many disadvantages as laborers). Further, while no significant number of white females would have willingly copulated with black males, there would be inevitable rapes and so forth, plus which many white men would have gone in unto their negresses and fathered mulatto offspring which would be declared Black and would whiten up the black gene pool. Over time, selective differential breeding plus injections of White DNA would have made the Blacks smarter and less distinguishable form Whites, and eventually the color barrier would have broken down, resulting in eventual race mixing on a wide scale.

    In addition, as the Black gene pool got smarter, sooner or later an insurgency may have occurred. (By contrast, from a social engineering perspective, the LBJ Great Society policy had the predictable effect of shaving 10 or more points of the average Black IQ in forty years. Blacks on average today are more stupid than they were in 1960, or even 1970. Their speech is more niggerish, their behavior more blatantly idiotic and often self destructive, than at any other time in North American history. Ascribe to that what motives you will.)

    With no Jews to act as a catalyst, this might have taken 300 years, but eventually you would have a heavily negrified “White” population, much like Portugal.

    Separation, not segregation and not stratification, is the only winning game plan for the long term. Total physical separation of the races, combined with filtering out the undesirable genetics from within our own population on an ongoing basis, is survival and a White, forward moving future. Anything else will result in a wormy, stupid herd, coffee colored or otherwise.

  12. You people are really scary. This website is a perfect example of what is wrong with America today. I don’t know what black people you have been around, but the vast majority that I have met are intelligent, usually educated and very humane and kind people, quite different from you lot. And yes, I’m white, Scottish-Irish descent, and Methodist. Very fair skin, blue eyes, dark red hair. I live in the south. I also work in healthcare where, it seems, there is a lot less hatefulness and discrimination than in the general population, thank God. I can’t believe there are still people today who think that owning another person should be allowed. You people must not believe in God at all, if you did you would know that you all have to answer to him someday. I hope I beat you there, actually, because I’d kinda like to see people like you squirming in front of Him. And seriously? Still using the work “negro?” People like you make any person with any amount of decency sick. Seriously.

  13. Incidentally, you all want to “separate” yourselves from the United States? Good, we don’t need people like you. Do us all a favor, and MOVE! Go bug the Canadians.

  14. Slavery, capital punishment for crimes now considered both barbaric and trivial, levirate marriage, dietary restrictions both reasonable and seemingly purposeless (for the place and time), and all sorts of other stuff was commanded by the Bible.

    No sect of “Jews” follows all of it, no sect of Christians follow all of it and only tiny scattered groups follow major and clear parts of it, and indeed, today no one could follow all of it.

    If we are to have slavery, enslaving members of our own race would seem more sensible. Far less destructive to the gene pool.

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