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To be blunt the Southern Aristocracy was lazy and close minded. By that I mean if they had adopted the Northern Factory approach to labor management they would have voluntarily gave up slavery. Look at how the workers in the factories of the North were treated; they worked for pennies, worked man-killing hours, children in the factories because of their small size let them move among the machinery, and if they were hurt, maimed or killed on the job, simply mop up the mess and move on to another poor Pole, German or Mick. The Factory owners didn't feed, house, clothe or medicate their employees. The used them up and replaced them.
It wasn't until Reconstruction forced the share-cropping system on Southern landowners that many realized their mistake. Share-cropping was as much a form of slavery as the Ante-Bellum south ever saw. It was economic slavery, dare I say even serfdom. And the beauty of the Share-cropping system was the work force was expanded to include poor rural whites. Often the families of the very men that made up the bulk of the front line infantry of the Confederate Army.
Argue amongst yourselves.

Obviously it was wrong. Besides owning humans being of itself wrong, look at what it has done to this nation.

A substantial number of people readily identifiable by their appearance and overall lower in intelligence (there are exceptions) now form a sizable underperforming sub-culture in our society. This sub-culture provides us now with violent crime and other societal pathologies far in excess of their actual percentage of the population at large.

Besides that, think of the violence in Africa caused by the slave trade. How much war and killing was done by blacks in the efforts to capture humans to sell at the coast. White men were not going inland and capturing people to load onto ships. It was the blacks they contracted with to provide captives. If there hadn't been the demand there wouldn't have been the violence necessary to capture Negroes for the trade.

Now we have to live with them. And our homegrown slave stock will never rise to the level of the educated African black doctors and other professionals that have lately immigrated to America and fit in quite nicely.

Morally, it can most certainly argued that slavery was wrong. However, in the mindset of that period of time, a very large number of people saw nothing wrong with it. Now, suppose we could fast foward in time to 150-200 years from now, and provided there is still a United States, or for that matter even life on Earth as we know it now, I believe that certain things that we consider to be both morally and legally right today, will be considered as wrong in that time period........just as we look back on the time frame in which slavery was legal.

My ancestors owned slaves, and it does not bother me in the least that they did. In that time period it was legal to do so, and was an accepted practice. I can't go back and change it, or question them as to why they did, and even if I could, it was the law of the land that they lived in that it was their right to do so. I'm not going to condemn someone who lived 200 years ago for doing what they thought was right, anymore than I want my grandchildren or great-grandchildren condeming me for doing what I had the right to do in the time that I lived in.

Yes indeed well said

Excellent post! Growing up near Johnstown and Windber, I have often thought about southern slavery versus northern wage slavery.
Pollocks, Hunkies, Dagos, and Micks were brought in by the thousands to man the mills, factories and mines in the north.
These folks often had it tougher than the African Slaves. A slave was worth something, like any other possession it had to be maintained and cared for.
But these wage slaves were only worth what they could produce.
Their existence, and their families existence was totally dependent on their jobs.
They lived in company owned shacks, most knew very little English. Their overseers were careful to keep them segregated, so they could not unite for better conditions.
Most never saw a US mint made nickel. They were paid in script, worthless everywhere but the company store to buy food and pay rent.
If they were hurt or killed, their families were homeless and penniless.
This harsh practice was completely legal in northern states where abolitionist were shouting about the evils of human bondage!
This was continued well after the 13th Amendment was passed. Even well into the 1920s and 30s!
These folks were poor and hopeless. If they protested about it they were beaten, sometimes killed! During the war trouble makers were moved to the very top of the draft list.
Reon

But these Pollocks, and Hunkies , Dagos and Micks, accepted this hopeless life because they knew their children were better off here in the United States than anywhere else in the entire world. This was, and still is, a land of personal freedom and opportunity.
Lotta people making noise about reparations for people who were never slaves, paid by the descendants of these wage slaves!😀 After all they have always had white privilege!
Reon

Is a hunkie like a honky?🤣

Yes, slavery did not end in 1865. It was just rearranged and called something else. I say that I saw slavery in the 1950s and early 60s in the Red River Valley of north Louisiana. It was called sharecropping, and there were half-hands that lived on the place and raised a crop for half of it which was owed to the store by the end of the harvest. There was always a balance left and it was illegal to leave owing. Day labor was paid from $1.50 to $2 a day most of what they spent at the farm store for lunch of baloney, bread, and strawberry soda pop. Real money was made picking cotton if you were fast, as much as 2 or 3 cents a pound, pecans were picked up at 5 cents a pound and children could be pressed into service picking cotton or pecans. A lot of the blacks secretly decamped the farms and headed north to wherever their relatives were that had already escaped.

As a child I would see truck loads of blacks being hauled to the fields during the hoeing season with hoe handles sticking out every which way. There was usually an elderly black man foreman of sorts filing hoes while the cotton was chopped.

I have heard that the farm blacks were not evacuated to town during the 1927 flood for fear they would get away and not return.

The houses were 3 room shotgun houses without any utilities. Some farms did allow a garden but some planted cotton all the way to the house.

If 'slavery' was it why would so many non-owners join in the battle voluntarily?

Slavery wasn't a thing here in the mountains of SWVA yet my GG grandfather walked away from a lucrative law career to join the CSA.

Question for you I got one

Thank you for finally answering the question.



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UrUr welcome

Okay virtue signal warrior....now what?

Reading comprehension time.

Notice I said “in 1860.”

I didn’t say now. I maintained historical mores for a reason.

Of course values change, customs change, laws change.

I asked him if, in 1860, slavery was wrong.

He said yes.

So in 1860, the predominant economic institution in the American South was wrong.





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Let’s hear it.




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Hunky is slang for Eastern Europeans brought here to work in mines and factories. Same with Dagos for Italians and Micks for Irish.
My grandfather on Moms side came here from Slovakia in the early 1900s. Their name was Kokoruda. He was a miner, but his son prospered with a dry cleaning business that was forced to close during the depression.
Mom was a Hunky, one of 15 children. They landed in the poor house run by the Salvation Army. The oldest brother would hide the girls if someone came around looking to adopt! Holding the family together was very important. They all worked hard and saved enough to buy a home in Hornerstown, a very upscale neighborhood at that time. They lived next to my Dad’s Mom.
She met Dad when he returned from Europe in 1946. Those Hunky girls were all gorgeous ladies and wonderful cooks.
Dad and Mom moved to Pleasantville, my home in the early ‘60s. He worked as a cranemen in Bethlehem Steel for 36 years, commuting the 35 miles over Pleasantville Mountain. That can be a fairly nasty trip in the winter!😀
He had a ‘58 Edsel convertible, push button automatic in the middle of the steering wheel! Couldn’t park on a hill because you’d never be able to put the thing in gear!
He started Oldham’s Auto Salvage in 1964, the year before I was born!
Reon

Now we wait until 9 or 10 months for the next War of Northern Aggression thread.




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Cool