If anyone’s seriously interested, I think The Half has Never Been Told by Edward Baptist is one of the best reads on slavery in the US.
Subject of a rather horrible (and now withdrawn) review by the Economist which says more about the Economist and the reviewer than about the book itself…
I’ve been wanting to read that. It’d pair nicely with Sidney Mintz’ book on sugar’s role in building the modern capitalist system.
I remember the anger over that review… I’m glad that the Economist had the sense to not take down the review when it offered the retraction.
Also, I’d like this, but I’m all out of likes… 
This song was literally sung by Union soldiers while marching.
ETA:
When you suffer from slavery, you can tell me. Otherwise, please drop the condescension. We get it, you don’t feel the triumphalism is justified, but you have not demonstrated that the war was not primarily fought due to the conflict over slavery- which is the crux of the issue being discussed. Saying that individuals fought for various reasons is like saying we didn’t invade Iraq for oil (or WMDs or whatever). But let’s face it, a lot of individual soldiers thought it had something to do with 9/11, but individuals don’t organize and enforce drafts, raise and pay for armies, or direct their actions and objectives.
What’s this?
*Interest intensifies*
You should read it… Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power - it’s a great book and rather short (and pretty cheap):
No. Sharecropping was used to give millions of freed slaves a means to support themselves, and while it had its drawbacks, it was not slavery. A slave is a prisoner, a sharecropper can leave. Furthermore there were white sharecroppers as well (by the early 20th century they outnumbered black sharecroppers), and sharecropping actually predates the Civil War, though it was not as widespread. Basically the immediate post-war large-scale sharecropping was an effort to rebuild the South and also give millions of poor and illiterate new citizens a subsistence living. It was an attempt to fix a problem with limited resources, but you portray it as Northern parasitism of the South.
in 1865 President Andrew Johnson returned the majority of Southern plantation lands seized by the Union to the original owners, who then became landlords of those tenant farmers, men who once were their slaves. There’s your “meet the new boss, same as the old boss” for you. So how was “the North” exploiting sharecroppers? Arguably if Johnson had kept all that land under Federal control you would have a valid point. He didn’t, and you don’t.
Slave owners claimed the same thing about slavery.
FDR also went to great pains to assure Americans that its sons would not be going to war. (For instance, from an October, 1941 campaign speech in Boston:
“And while I am talking to you mothers and fathers, I give you one more assurance. I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”)
So FDR and Honest Abe were both lying politicians. Don’t care; they got the job done.
(eyeroll)
I don’t dispute the existence of carpetbaggers, nor do I dispute that many were out for their own financial gain, but you can’t seriously believe that ALL southern plantation owners after the war were transplanted northerners. When Johnson gave the land back to the “previous owners” were those previous owners also northerners? So it was always northerners to blame for slavery, and the South is completely clean of any wrongdoing here. Interesting, let me know when you’ve turned that into a book.
I’m sure they did. Does that make it true? A slave was not even allowed to own money.
I always thought it was about states rights to own people.
Who said ALL? Certainly not me. It doesn’t need to be ALL to make my point. I’m not arguing that either side is better or worse. I’m just arguing that the new bosses were the same as the old and that the north wasn’t fighting to free the slaves. They wanted a bigger piece of the action and they got it.
Actually, I’m pretty sure the thing for slave owners to claim was that they needed to be property because they were incapable of supporting themselves. Which really isn’t quite the same thing at all as giving someone a job that’s rigged (in many cases) to let them work themselves deeper and deeper into debt.
Both are horrible, mind, but it’s difficult to claim that they’re exactly equal.
This sounds like you think the North instigated the war so they could loot the South. In that case the actual numbers of how many Northerners came South to take over plantations does matter. A relative minority of carpetbaggers wouldn’t justify the lives lost or capital spent to wage the war in the first place.
The Confederacy seceded over slavery. They also fired the first shot at Ft. Sumter. There were lots of other tangential reasons why Lincoln couldn’t let that stand, economic, diplomatic, political, etc., but you can’t erase slavery from that list. Southerners can’t justify slavery, so instead some of them pretend slavery wasn’t the real issue, or an issue at all, that it was about “something else.” That is desperate, wishful thinking.
I didn’t claim anything of the sort. However, the end result is often the same or similar with either and convict leasing was often worse than either.
Then you should stop using the phrase “slavery under another name.” That does equate them.
I said what I meant. My mind is not restricted by black/white thinking. How about you don’t tell me what to say …and I’ll continue not telling you what to say or not to say.
Yes, yes you DID. Every time you say something like
You are claiming that they are equivalent.
If you aren’t claiming they’re equal, then the existence of sharecropping says nothing about whether the north abolished slavery. You don’t get to have it both ways, and pointing at a PBS film that uses that rhetorical phrase does not make your attempt to use it literally any more believable.
We’re not just talking about sharecropping.
Fine. Here you go.
Are you really going to claim that that sentence does not directly equate slavery to sharecroppers? Really?
I’m not interested in splitting hairs to defend the indefensible.
