two questions about Slavery in the US - Page 6

sam h · #51 09-01-2005, 06:07 PM

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Love it or hate it... slavery is what helped establish us as an economic powerhouse.

Our ability to cheaply harvest goods helped fuel our industrial revolution.

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Wrong. Not only was the industrial revolution primarily catalyzed by other facts, many people think that slavery was actually inefficient in the south and that agricultural production would have been better with a true labor market.

hurlyburly · #52 09-01-2005, 06:20 PM

Would that result have been reached by now?

That's as sketchy as saying if slavery were used in the northern states (also avoiding the civil war), it would still be in use today.

States were fiercely independent and competitive. The "country first, state second" mentality wouldn't have been able to take hold.

At least, I can't see how. Like I said, what other issues could have unified enough states to form a strong centralized government? I think we'd resemble something much closer to the EU (much more conservative, though).

SheetWise · #53 09-01-2005, 07:16 PM

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Like I said, what other issues could have unified enough states to form a strong centralized government?

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Taxes. Interstate commerce. Military spending. Supreme Court.

slamdunkpro · #54 09-01-2005, 07:19 PM

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for over 400 years (i believe) the transatlantic slave trade carried on and carried millions upon millions of slaves to all parts of the world. to stop the US influx in order so we're not as economically stable or technologically advanced seems like a no brainer. we're talking MILLLIONS of lives. i dont need my 2100fp monitor that badly.

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Um no – These numbers are fantasies. Europeans didn’t start importing African slaves until the late 1700’s/early 1800’s. Slavery in the US ended in the 1860’s and importation had virtually ceased by 1850. So African slaves were shipped to North America for around 50 years.

The average slave ship held 300-360 slaves. It took about 9 months to go from Europe to Africa to North America. To displace 1,000,000 people would take about 3,000 trips.

The other factor that is almost never mentioned is that a lot of tribal African chiefs exercised ( in a lot of cases initiated) the slave trade as a way to both get rid of tribal prisoners or trouble makers and as a means of obtaining European goods.

jcx · #55 09-01-2005, 07:42 PM

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That's an odd way of seeing things. So you don't believe immigration would have extended to Africa and only slavery would have brought Africans to the Americas? I say if anyone is being presumptuous here, you are.

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Since there have been no great African migrations to the US outside of slave ships I don't believe I'm being presumptous. When the US industrial machine began to ramp up in the late 19th and early 20th centuries great labor forces were imported - almost exclusively from Europe (A few Chinese in the west). Why no Africans then? Perhaps because the available Africans who would/could have emigrated spoke a completely alien toungue and had likely never even heard of the US?

Lets assume slavery never existed. The footprint of western man would have been much smaller on Africa - how would members of a deep jungle dwelling tribe in Ghana even have known about the possiblity to emigrate? What makes you think they would have been interested? Where are the ships that would have born these immigrants over the ocean? Also, if given the choice (decidedly non-PC speech coming) why would the nation import millions of blacks when there was no shortage of white immigrants?

I'm no apologist for slavery. It was obviously wrong. But remove it and you remove a large segment of American (Not to mention Carribean and Brazilian) society. There would certainly not be millions of blacks living among us today. But perhaps I'm missing something. If you see a reasonable scenario by which many millions of Africans would have found their way to the New World from the 1600's to when the great (legal) immigration boom ended in the early-mid 1900's I'll consider it.

tylerdurden · #56 09-01-2005, 08:33 PM

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Would that result have been reached by now?

That's as sketchy as saying if slavery were used in the northern states (also avoiding the civil war), it would still be in use today.

States were fiercely independent and competitive. The "country first, state second" mentality wouldn't have been able to take hold.

At least, I can't see how. Like I said, what other issues could have unified enough states to form a strong centralized government? I think we'd resemble something much closer to the EU (much more conservative, though).

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You've got some good points. It could go either way. I *don't* see EU-style uber bureacracy taking hold here, though. It's amazing that they've managed to get a super-baroque apparatus distributed as widely as they have. I think it takes a special mix of elitism and monoculture to build that, a mix that the US doesn't have.

hurlyburly · #57 09-01-2005, 10:15 PM

I meant similar in concept, not design. Our constitution is much better glue to prevent that.

hurlyburly · #58 09-01-2005, 10:24 PM

You might have something with interstate commerce, good point. Fed. tax, military and court really needed the Civil War as a springboard.

Lincoln was a shrewd guy.

Non_Comformist · #59 09-01-2005, 10:30 PM

would it be fair or unfair to say that there would be less poverty today and all the ills associated with poverty?

hurlyburly · #60 09-02-2005, 11:43 AM

I don't know much about the how/when/why Africa became tapped for slaves, but if we hadn't imported slaves, Africans were still trading them to the Europeans, and understood that there was a world beyond their borders. But they may not have cared to emigrate. It could have occurred later, maybe along the same lines as the Middle East.

Where I thought you were presumptuous is here:
"the overwhelming majority of todays black Americans would be living in straw huts and burning dung to keep the Tsetse flies away. Ask them if they wish slavery never exisited. By wishing away slavery you deny them their piece of the American dream."

At first I thought this was pretty bold to believe that the black man today thinks he won the lottery by having slaves as ancestors. But I think that you may have touched on something. I'm not sure what yet, I've got to research a little deeper.