Slavery: A Positive Good (2012)

Dixie

“But I take higher ground. I hold that in the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin, and distinguished by color, and other physical differences, as well as intellectual, are brought together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding States between the two, is, instead of an evil, a good – a positive good.”
– John C. Calhoun, 1837

Is there a positive case for the domestic institution of negro slavery?

(1) In slave societies, negroes were a wealth generating economic asset: America’s slaves were worth more than its railroads, banks, and manufacturing industries combined.

In 1861, the average slave was worth $800. In 2009 dollars, a single slave purchased in 1861 would be an asset worth $135,000.

(2) In 1860, 49.8 percent of the population of Barbour County (AL) were slaves.

(3) In 1860, there were 2,717 free families in Barbour County (AL). There were 1,143 slaveholders. 42.1 percent of free families were slaveholders.

(4) In the Lower Chattahoochee Valley as a whole, there were 47 slaveholders who owned over 100 slaves. If the average slave was an asset worth $135,000, then each one of these super planters in 1860 had a fortune in slaves alone worth a minimum of $13.5 million dollars.

(5) In the Lower Chattahoochee Valley, there were 270 slaveowners who owned 50 to 100 slaves. If the average slave was worth $135,000, then each one of these middling planters had a fortune in slaves alone worth a minimum of $6.7 million dollars.

(6) In the Lower Chattahoochee Valley, there were 1,193 slaveowners who owned 20 to 50 slaves. If the average slave was worth $135,000, then these lower tier planters had a fortune in slaves alone worth a minimum of $2.7 million dollars.

Obviously, the planter class in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley was stupendously wealthy by modern standards – those numbers don’t include their non-slave property or investments and are based on the minimum number of slaves required to belong to each tier.

In 1860, there were 1,150 planters in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley. The planters were only 17.3 percent of slaveholders though. How’s that compared to the stock market?

(7) In the Lower Chattahoochee Valley, there were 1,637 slaveowners who owned 10 to 19 slaves. If the average slave was worth $135,000, then these upper middle class slaveowners had a fortune in slaves alone worth $1.35 million dollars.

(8) In the Lower Chattahoochee Valley, there were 1,485 slaveowners who owned 6 to 9 slaves. If the average slave was worth $135,000, then the typical middle class slaveowner had a fortune worth $810,000.

(9) In the Lower Chattahoochee Valley, there were 4,100 slaveowners who owned 1 to 5 slaves. 47 percent of slaveowners in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley belonged to this group. Every one of these slaveowners had at least one slave worth $135,000.

(10) In Barbour County (AL), 42.1 percent of free families were slaveowners – surely, the great majority of them were middle class slaveowners, while only a small minority were planters.

How much is the average negro household worth after 147 years of free society? The average negro household is worth $4,995.

As we have learned from Paul Kersey, the average single black woman in America has a net worth of $5, which is over a 99 percent depreciation in value from 1861. A third of blacks have a negative net worth. They are effectively bankrupt after 40 years and countless billions of dollars of wasted Great Society redistributive spending.

Freedom failed doesn’t quite capture the magnitude of the social and economic disaster that was abolition: it is more like freedom was a world shattering catastrophe that nearly crippled American civilization.

In free society, the average White household might have a net worth of $110,000 in 2012, most of which is locked up in the value of their depreciating suburban home – with both parents working in order to pay income taxes to a federal government that redistributes their wealth to millions of idle tax consuming negro voters.

In slave society, if you owned one slave, you had an asset worth $135,000 in 2009 dollars not counting your property or home, those slaves worked in direct proportion to the leisure time of a single male slaveowning patriarch, and there was no income tax because the government was funded with a revenue tariff.

(11) That’s the rub: under slavery, the negro was a fabulous wealth generating economic dynamo, the ownership of which emancipated White families from the drudgery of wage labor and significantly contributed to our national prosperity.

Under free society, the negro is the single biggest economic albatross in the United States and a civilization wrecking menace to public safety who through the genius of liberal democracy can vote himself a living from taxes and fees on the income and property of White families.

(13) Libertarians: What planter ever emancipated his slaves based on the assumption that liberating them would increase his wealth and make his plantation more productive?

(14) As a commodity, slaves were used as a store of value like gold and silver or stocks and bonds: a single slave in 1850 was worth $80,000 whereas a single slave in 1860 was worth $135,000.

(15) Paul Kersey writes:

“Black unemployment rates are directly correlated to the fact that a great many Black people are unemployable in America’s service economy, save for government/public jobs. Not institutional racism.”

The only known solution to this problem is slavery.

There are any number of industries where the millions upon millions of negroes who have an IQ less than 85 could be profitably employed today as slaves.

They could be put to work immediately as stoop laborers in the construction industry or in the fields harvesting fruits and vegetables. Alternatively, they could at least be hooked up to bicycles and used to manually generate cheap electricity to promote America’s goal of energy independence.

Even today, a slave society could find some use for them. Black women could be employed as domestics as they were in the Jim Crow South. They don’t have to become welfare queens shacking up with Mr. EBT to breed little Ja’Quares Walkers or Trayon Omar Washingtons in the Booker T. Washington housing projects.

If negroes were enslaved in such a way, we could empty our prisons, raise property values, raise per pupil spending on White students, slash law enforcement and court costs, fund an expedition to Mars, and slash the soaring cost of healthcare by curtailing epidemic black obesity.

(16) As far back as the 1830s, free negroes in the Northern states were notorious for elevating crime, destroying property values, and burdening prisons and other social services.

In free societies, the cost of negroes is socialized whereas it was privatized in slave societies: abolition eliminated natural masters (who provided employment for White working class overseers) who had a vested economic interest and legal responsibility for curtailing destructive behavior and promoting productive labor.

(17) Any student of the discipline of negro management in the Old South could have told you that emancipating slaves, blaming White people for all their various failings, and giving them access to drugs and firearms was a recipe for disaster. See the 21,000 black people who have been murdered by other black people in Detroit since 1969.

(18) In 1850, a slaveowner could have told you that the return on investment on negro education was quite low because of biological racial differences in intelligence.

(19) In 1850, a slaveowner could have told you that abolition and the politicization of the negro was a recipe for disaster based on previous experiments in abolition in Haiti and the British West Indies.

(20) Slave society promoted conservatism and racial solidarity in the Old South. It also created an indigenous elite that had the wealth and political power to resist the encroachment of the degenerating effects of liberal capitalist democracy.

Note: Virtually all the social ills that are commonly blamed on slavery are actually a consequence of freedom.

Slave societies didn’t tolerate or meekly subsidize negro criminals or flagellate themselves with racial guilt. The negro had no status as a citizen or a voter. He wasn’t a huge drag on our national prosperity as he is today in the 21st century.

Slavery was a positive good. It was a successful social system that broadly distributed wealth among Whites, created an elite invested in white supremacy, cultivated a moral sense based on the cult of honor, and most importantly, acted as a brake on the consolidation of power in Washington.

The success of slavery proved to be its downfall. It was a rival economic system that inspired enormous jealously, fear, and envy of the Slave Power in the North. As we all know, that’s what brought about the War Between the States, destroyed the White Republic created by the Founders, and set America down its path to the present racial disaster.

That’s not the fault of slavery though. It is the fault of slavery’s professed enemies.

About Hunter Wallace 12380 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

50 Comments

  1. You just said on the SNN podcast the other day that you didn’t want to see a return to slavery, and now you’re saying the opposite….

  2. The Aragonese (Habsburg) Spanish appear to have controlled Southern Italy and other Duchy, Principalities during the time of America’s discovery to about 1700. When we talk of Spanish conquest and enslavement in the new world and elsewhere, we are often talking about Italians/Austrians, with Spanish Pseudonyms.

    Henry Cabot for example was Italian but he took on an “English” name.

    The Italians were onto the new world very quickly.

    Columbus enclaved island after island in the Carib area. Then when they died he brought over…

  3. Anyone supporting the return of slavery is a jackass. Keep on dreamin’ jackasses. It ain’t ever comin’ back. Tough shit. Mammy ain’t be changin’ your diapers or pickin’ your goddamned cottonpickin’ cotton no mo’.
    And no Whites are goin’ to hang around doin’ nothin* ’cause they can’t get any work because the people with money have free labor from their slaves– and are too enamored of free labor to pay their own kind, their own people, any mind : Let alone pay $$$ for any kind of service/labor.
    * Whites aren’t goin to go a huntin’ in the woods to shoot squirrels and rabbits ’cause they don’t have $$$ for any kind of decent food. And no Whites are goin’ to put up with pellagra and rickets and god knows what else diseases ’cause they don’t have any money to eat properly and/or can’t afford medical care…..because of a slave-based and/or share-cropping economic system . And no Whites are goin’ to allow themselves to be thrown back into any kind of share-cropping economic system.
    Keep on dreamin’ jackasses while uncle sam keeps fucking you all up the ass big-time. Instead of talking/learning/ studying that, some here would rather daydream about some kind of “romantic” past that never even existed in reality. Jackasses.

  4. You keep on harping on about the Fed.

    The quickest simplest way to defeat the currency is to have a successful separatist movement. Wallace preaches a solution to your hobby horse issue and you fling poo.

  5. The federal reserve bankers– put in place by white lawmakers [ including southern lawmakers: shitloads and shitloads after shitloads of “em ] + the jew/commie mob in Chicago = African born Obama sitting in the oval office. Plenty of southerners are culpable for This* for constantly voting to renew the federal reserve charter — so I don’t really think southern lawmakers and big-shots have what it takes for seccession– they don’t even have the balls to vote “No” when the vote for the federal reserve charter comes up for vote every year.
    * This = Putting the jew bankers in complete control of the USA year in and year out since 1913. The bankers ( plus the jew commie mob in chicago) are the ones who wanted african born obama in the oval office. By controlling the whole economy and having the Ultimate Final word about Everything that happens in the government [because of the federal reserve act] white Americans are now without a say : Because of our own white lawmakers —-> including shitloads of Southern lawmakers.
    It’s not that I disgree with seccession necessarily, it’s just not going to happen. Americans- north, South, east, and west —>are too chicken shit for anything but watching teevee and playing golf : even the blue-collar white workers here in California: That’s all they talk about : Golf, sometimes fishing. That’s about it. Same down in the real- world South: If one is truthful about the matter.
    In the meantime, it would be alot more beneficial to be putting pressure on our lawmakers to STOP voting for the federal reserve banking system. That’s the crux of the problem ; A very great number of problems throughout the country : including the problems down South.

  6. actually you just keep taking pot shots. It’s actually a fairly good prediction. This Federation can’t go on and on. None ever do.

  7. My shots are hitting bullseyes —> left —> right—> north—> east —> west:
    And ——-> South.

  8. If slavery isn’t coming back, we should consider the negro’s value as combustible fuel, perhaps.

  9. As someone noted above, slavery was situational: high slave prices were due to the state of technology, dominance of the cotton market, and the ban on the slave trade.

  10. I think that’s where Billy Jo McCallister threw something off the bridge:
    The Chattachoochee River Bridge…. or, am I mixing up southern rivers ?
    Or, was it the Tallahatchie ? What the hell did she throw off the bridge anyhow?

  11. Do you actually think that the US will survive entirely intact once China overhauls the US economically? What continent sized republic or empire has survived intact “as is”?
    It’s far more likely that the US will fracture at some point than not.

  12. @Joe:

    As hard as it is for many people to understand, as Arthur Kemp, a citizen of the former Rhodesia noted, there are White people who would much rather be murdered in their beds than make their own beds themselves.

    If Hunter is correct, and the South really seceded from the Union over their right to hold Negro slaves than States’ Rights (opposing Northern tariffs and being treated like colonies rather than equal states with their Northern counterpart). And all this, after the White plantocracy was wiped out by their “farm equipment” in Haiti, what is left to say? Go figure.

    Even now, I have no problem with the idea of the South successfully seceding from the Union to hold slaves IF there had been a plan in place to physically separate the South from the rest of us so they and they alone could deal with the consequences when their “farm equipment” inevitably became too obsolete and expensive to maintain.

    Of course, Detroit, MI and Gary, IN, and Camden, NJ are all great examples of what plan was already in place to dispose of that “farm equipment” when it became obsolete. It would become the industrial North’s problem to deal with.

    The “just fuck ’em” antics displayed by the Southern slave holders toward other White working class yeoman north and south of the Mason-Dixon line totally justifies the pathological hatred toward them by Abner Snopes in William Faulkner’s story, “Barn Burning.” If I had been in his shoes, I wouldn’t have contented myself with just burning the damned barn.

    One great White civilization after another eventually failed, because rich, greedy, White bastards preferred cheaper colored labor over White labor. All of these civilizations became overwhelmed by and absorbed into their cheaper labor force.

    Cheap labor is our kryptonite. You get what you pay for.

  13. Understood, Hunter. Our enemies would probably never notice anyway, but it’s potentially unhelpful be contradictory like that, that’s all.

  14. Clytemnestra,

    (1) Southerners were not murdered in their own beds by their slaves. They were murdered on battlefields by the Union Army. It was the Union Army that emancipated the slaves and armed them to kill us.

    (2) I’ve spent years studying the issue: everything that I have read leads me to believe that the threat posed by the North to slavery was the immediate cause of disunion (South Carolina even issued a “Declaration of Immediate Causes”) whereas irreconcilable sectional differences over the constitution and the nature of the federal government was the ultimate cause of disunion.

    It was a clash between slavery and anti-slavery, but it was also a clash between the ideal of a confederate republic and a consolidated democracy. There were many other issues involved, but those were the major ones.

    (3) The tariff was a legitimate resentment and was cited as a resentment by Georgia and South Carolina to justify secession. If you read the Declaration of Independence, you will find that the colonies had many resentments against the Crown, not just unfair taxation.

    (4) I’ve studied the Haitian Revolution: of the hundreds of slave rebellions in the Caribbean, the Haitian Revolution was the only one of them that ever succeeded. It succeeded solely because it was inspired by the French Revolution and was supported and legitimized by the Jacobins in metropolitan France.

    Napoleon succeeded in reconquering Saint-Domingue and the French Caribbean. Slavery was restored in Martinique and Guadeloupe. Toussaint L’overature died in a prison in France.

    Unfortunately, the return to war with Britain left the LeClerc expedition in Saint-Domingue stranded and cut off from reinforcements by the Royal Navy. French soldiers were decimated by disease. LeClerc himself died of disease and his troops surrendered to the British.

  15. “Even now, I have no problem with the idea of the South successfully seceding from the Union to hold slaves IF there had been a plan in place to physically separate the South from the rest of us so they and they alone could deal with the consequences when their “farm equipment” inevitably became too obsolete and expensive to maintain.” – I see no reason why the north could not defend her borders, and blacks couldn’t really survive north in any appreciable numbers until the advent of climate controlled environments in any event.

    “Of course, Detroit, MI and Gary, IN, and Camden, NJ are all great examples of what plan was already in place to dispose of that “farm equipment” when it became obsolete. It would become the industrial North’s problem to deal with. ” – We don’t know that, what we do know is that the slave states that were divesting themselves of slavery weren’t freeing them, but selling them to other slave states. Jim Crow did drive about half of the blacks north, but the north had her own form of defacto Jim Crow to complement southern efforts, and those cities cited above weren’t wrecked until that was lifted. Be of good cheer though, gentrification is driving them back south, along with proscriptions on evil racist checks on their bad behavior.

    “One great White civilization after another eventually failed, because rich, greedy, White bastards preferred cheaper colored labor over White labor.” – White labor wasn’t able to pick up the slack until the advent of the air conditioner.

  16. (5) Yankees were too busy nullifying the Fugitive Slave Law in the Constitution and the Compromise of 1850 – in order to keep as many free negroes in the North as possible, whose numbers were swelling in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York City – to negotiate such a deal with the South.

    (6) Hard to believe.

    Under the Constitution, Southerners had the right to come to the North to capture their runaway slaves, and to return them to slavery. Outrageous, I know. It was a violation of Northern rights and liberties to be deprived of the benefits of diversity.

    (7) Detroit, Gary, and Camden … Southerners had supported the Fugitive Slave Law all along, and had said all along that abolition would unleash a tidal wave of free negroes upon the North, and had urged Northerners to repudiate abolition for precisely that reason!

    (8) Technically, the slaves were confiscated as contraband by Lincoln, so they properly belong to the victors.

    (9) How is it our fault?

    Did we force you to liberate the slaves? Did we force you to keep slaves in the North? You could have always returned them.

  17. @Clytemnestra
    I agree with everything you said. Thank you for mentioning Faulkner’s work, “Barn Burning”. I had heard about the book when I was much younger. I never got around to reading it, however. You’ve compelled me to read it. A work I had known about but then forgot about. I probably got pre-occupied with kid stuff and forgot about it until your post. I appreciate it. I just googled it. The book can be read online. Going to read it.

  18. Southerners weren’t killed in their beds because the white yeoman farmers and other poor whites were forced by the Southern “aristocracy” into a type of militia to run constant surveillance of the slaves. What a waste of time and energy. Constantly having to worry about slave revolts and having to run constant surveillance to check for signs of any possible slave revolt.

  19. Suppose the Earth Liberation Front were to take power in the North. It declares war on non-vegetarians on the basis that meat eating is a sin and a crime against Gaia.

    The Earth Liberation Front wins the war. Domesticated animals are set free. Feral dogs turn into predatory packs. Cities are overrun and destroyed by wild animals as a consequence of a stupid idea

    That’s pretty much what happened with the negro.

  20. 47 percent of slaveowners in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley were small farmers who owned 1 to 5 slaves. Maybe slave patrols were a sensible idea that encouraged White racial solidarity?

  21. Joe would inflict Altruistic Punishment on the South if he got his genocidal hands on them. That much is clear.

  22. Clytemnestra says:
    @Joe:
    “As hard as it is for many people to understand, as Arthur Kemp, a citizen of the former Rhodesia noted, there are White people who would much rather be murdered in their beds than make their own beds themselves.”

    And all to many have been murdered in their beds. South Africa’s far-right leader Eugene Terre’ Blanche was recently butchered in the same fashion by his farm workers.

    Clytemnestra says: “One great White civilization after another eventually failed, because rich, greedy, White bastards preferred cheaper colored labor over White labor. All of these civilizations became overwhelmed by and absorbed into their cheaper labor force.”

  23. John,

    In Joe’s free society paradise, the White working class has no political power because their votes are nullified by the non-White electorate, and they are enslaved to Wall Street, the too big to fail banks, and to the millions of idle negroes who subsist on SNAP EBT off their tax dollars.

    It is like plantation slavery in reverse with the negro living in the Big House and the masters working as his field hands.

    Oh BTW, in the free society paradise, niggers terrorize White people with impunity, and niggers like Toure and Ta-Nehisi Coates are actually elevated above White people.

  24. “cheap labor is our Kryptonite. You get what you pay for.”
    Exactly. Bullseye. Writing this in Switzerland, where there is no cheap labor and liberals are not (yet) communist. Quite a marvel.

  25. I am not as well informed as many are on this site concerning all the aspects of slavery. Hunter is quite knowledgeable.

    David Duke has produced a short video on the subect of slavery and the role of jews.

    It is absolutely fascinating. Must see!!

    Comments?

    http://www.davidduke.com/?p=25681

  26. @John and All Readers
    I don’t have the least bit animosity for Southerners. I just think they got hoodwinked by their ruling class. It does not necessarily follow I want to see any violence done to any Southerner. I do not. I have written many posts over the last 3 months in my support for Southerners– especially my desire not to see any white Caucasian blood, Including White Caucasian Southern Blood , lost over the issues discussed here at “OD”.
    You —-> @ John —-> you, being a regular reader know all this already. You’re just pissed off because I mentioned the problem called the Federal Reserve Banking System. That’s all. I still suggest to All readers to read the article I linked in my post under this thread of commentary.Excellent reading: Very informative. Or just hit below:
    http://www.mind-trek.com/reports/tl17a.htm

  27. @Hunter Wallace
    As Phil said in his post on this thread of commentary; To paraphrase somewhat:
    Slavery = “Catastrophic”. I still think Phil was the most articulate of all of us here. I shall change my mind about it when the cows jump over the moon, the day after they make [+Fr John +] Pope, Patriarch, and Emporar of the World, the day after he beats up all those weird middle-eastern tribes from 5,00 years ago.
    Until then, Phil has the correct view.

  28. excuse the typo: That’s “Emperor “, not “Emporar”. I was thinking of the Latin:
    Popus Sanctii “Emporarii” [ + Blessedimus + Johnee + Gloriosii + Eternae +].

  29. Slavery wasn’t a catastrophe.

    The Union was the catastrophe. Declining property values. Integration. Black citizenship. Black voters. White guilt. Black crime. Negro equality.

    Where did it come from? Was that our idea? It was a regional problem for decades before the War Between the States. It was known to contemporaries who could see the results of abolition in Jamaica.

    It was the Northeast’s social system. That system was imposed on us during Reconstruction after our social system was obliterated by the Union Army.

  30. Yes, someone has made a mess out of negroes. They also made a mess out of women. That’s what happens when you are in a Union with perverts who make a fetish of turning society upside down.

    Gay marriage? Black president. Just another example.

  31. The Federal Reserve?

    The Northeast had been relentlessly pushing for a central bank ever since Alexander Hamilton. The same people were pushing for it then. The version that finally got passed was the stripped down version.

  32. Hunter,

    This thesis is actually intriguing. Were I promoting it, I would literally BEAT OVER the naysayers heads one not-so-little item:

    I live in the much vaunted “Industrialized Rust Belt.”

    The people here are being wiped out by cancer.

    There is no other way of putting it. I have never seen anything like it. Each week, I learn of another immediate acquaintance or relative who gets “the death sentence.”

    It does not take a ph.d to figure out why this is. I have myself, along with a great percentage of this “Rust Belt” population, worked in these mills, factories, and plants. The only wonder is why we live as long as we do. By 10 am you are blowing black boogers out of your nose after getting to work at most of the “industries.” You are breathing everything imaginable and many unimaginable things. No one who has worked in a plant or factory needs me to dilate further on specifics. We all know them all too well.

    (I’m here talking to adults, not most of the kids who play on these sites, and who don’t know anything about working in an industrial setting.”

    I would also go ahead and tell the “working class” the truth. The writing is all over the wall:

    YOU ARE GOING TO BE REPLACED ANYWAY.

    A not so small detail that is overlooked by many who do not know technology is the following:

    Almost all emphasis on “robotics” in books, magazines, etc., is on the AI–artificial intelligence–aspect of the technology. That is, robots that you turn on and they go about performing tasks like we see in movies and science fiction. This may be possible, but we are a long way from it yet. And the literature accurately describes this.

    BUT, what is not so well know and seldom discussed, is robotics that are controlled. That is, someone at a console operates one or many individual units. This technology is very advanced and, moreover, you would be greatly surprised at the capability.

    It has NOT been widely put in use just yet, much as Digital technology that most think is “new” but has been setting “on the shelf” since the 80s. Yes, this is correct. It was for financial strategic reasons not put on the market at the time of its innovation. This is done frequently. Most people would be surprised at the time lag involved with technology and markets. You are mostly actually using technology nearly a generation old. What is taught in colleges in engineering schools is usually five to ten years behind Industry.

  33. The stripped down version is destructive enough as it is. Just because we didn’t get Hamilton’s version of it, doesn’t mean the stripped down version is beneficial to us. It most cetainly isn’t beneficial at all. It still needs to go if America is ever going to improve on a fundamental level, however stripped down, or not stripped down, the federal reserve system may or may not be. Doesn’t matter: The federal reserve system , like slavery, was [IS] catastrophic for the US.
    See my above post about “Emporar” and “Emperor” as to my inclination about any possibilty of me changing my mind on this matter.

  34. No union no central bank. Separatism no Fed.

    Nice point about industrialization. Cancer and you get replaced anyway. Lose a hand.

  35. Also, the “work” that everyone “loves” so much is almost all the work that is done after getting home from the daily grind. In other words, it is NOT the work that everyone has to do at the mill, factory, mine, shop, or plant or construction site. Almost everyone hates that with a bitter passion.

    People don’t “love” the work they have to do to “make a living” in these “workplaces.”

    The distinction s not trivial and needs to be pointed out.

  36. Here’s my SNN comment:

    Anti-Federalist,

    In the 1860s, slavery was a very sensible system. Read my article “Slavery: A Positive Good.” The first commercial oil well wasn’t drilled until 1859 in Pennsylvania.

    Think about it: we fought the most destructive war in our history over slavery in America on the eve of the Industrial Revolution which harnessed fossil fuels to make slavery obsolete.

    The mechanical cotton picker was invented in Memphis in the 1850s. Slave prices were exploding in the 1850s. They reached an all time high in 1860.

    Guess what? If abolition hadn’t destroyed slavery in 1863, slave prices would have increased. This would have spurred the mechanization of agriculture in the South which would have come decades ahead of schedule.

    Abolition made cotton and labor dirt cheap. The yeomanry lost their land and spent decades as sharecroppers. Wouldn’t it have been better if the development of the mechanical cotton picker had not languished for decades until the time of the boll weevil and the Great Depression?

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