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Who Were America’s Enslaved? New Database Humanizes the Names Behind the Numbers

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Re: Who Were America’s Enslaved? New Database Humanizes the Names Behind the Numbers

#161

Post by bigyikes »

alisonkisk wrote: post #154
danans wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not all suffered the same slavery we know today. What is the "slavery we know today"? Do you mean "American slavery as we understand it today", or "Slavery in the current day"? If the former, then how is the passage you quoted different from our understanding of American slavery? Do you mean to say it was better, worse, or in some other way different?

Charlotte's family weren't the well known field slaves or house slaves. They were tenants, renting their own lives from their legal owner for $2/week.

What does it even mean to rent from somebody that owns you?

Re: Who Were America’s Enslaved? New Database Humanizes the Names Behind the Numbers

#162

Post by baryphonic »

RuggedPineapple wrote: post #137
_iyig wrote: post #3

In a similar vein, George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate - today privately owned and operated as a living history museum - has an excellent series of exhibits which puts names and stories to the Washington family’s enslaved servants and laborers: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/groundbreaking-exhibi... The re-enactors are all fantastic and very knowledgeable. It’s unsettling talking to a black re-enactor who…

Washington is always the one that gets me. His will freed his slaves not when he died but when his wife died. So he knew what was right but intentionally allowed that only after he could be assured it wouldn't cause any hardship to him or his spouse. That feels more evil then just being a creature of the time. That's knowing better but making a conscious decision to embrace evil because it makes your life easier.

> So he knew what was right but intentionally allowed that only after he could be assured it wouldn't cause any hardship to him or his spouse. That feels more evil then just being a creature of the time. That's knowing better but making a conscious decision to embrace evil because it makes your life easier.

I'm pretty sure Washington's will freed his slaves on Martha's death because he didn't want to break up slave families (her slaves were part of her dowry and as such could not be manumitted so easily at will). Manumission law was quite complicated, and IIRC Washington himself lobbied to liberalize Virginia's law somewhat so that it was not as difficult to free slaves.

One of the most appalling aspects of US slavery was that it did break up families quite often. Washington doing this to keep the families together is hardly evil compared to what the alternative would have been.

EDIT: The parent post has grated on me a bit more. Why are we so arrogant to assume we know the whole context of what was going on two or three centuries ago? Every time I review the literature of historical situations, the richness and complexity is remarkable. We tend to think of our time as "more complex," but I think we are comparing the complex reality we experience with the simple stories we have been told (and continue to tell ourselves) about the past. In reality, much of the past was comparably complex to our own lives today.

Re: Who Were America’s Enslaved? New Database Humanizes the Names Behind the Numbers

#163

Post by RuggedPineapple »

baryphonic wrote: post #162
RuggedPineapple wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Washington is always the one that gets me. His will freed his slaves not when he died but when his wife died. So he knew what was right but intentionally allowed that only after he could be assured it wouldn't cause any hardship to him or his spouse. That feels more evil then just being a creature of the time. That's knowing better but making a conscious decision to embrace evil because it makes your life easier.

> So he knew what was right but intentionally allowed that only after he could be assured it wouldn't cause any hardship to him or his spouse. That feels more evil then just being a creature of the time. That's knowing better but making a conscious decision to embrace evil because it makes your life easier. I'm pretty sure Washington's will freed his slaves on Martha's death because he didn't want to break up slave f…

LOL. Better off as slaves... An actual slavery apologist in the comments.

Re: Who Were America’s Enslaved? New Database Humanizes the Names Behind the Numbers

#164

Post by tptacek »

elefanten wrote: post #153
tptacek wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the question. The socioeconomic structure of many of our largest cities is defined by redlining. Lawndale and Englewood in Chicago? Entirely the product of redlining. The property values of houses in areas cordoned off for white people? Redlining.

I overinterpreted your response to the previous commenter and jumped the gun a bit. Sorry for the exaggerated rhetoric, it wasn't needed and may not have been correctly aimed (at you). But, to your points, there are historical forces that bring people good/bad fortune - including racism in America. How do you decide which ones are worthy of ex post facto adjustment on a society-wide level? How do you balance and just…

I don't so much want to wade into the reparations question. I find a lot to agree with in Rayiner's position and a lot to think about in the concerns of people who worry that it would be impossible to administer.

All I have to contribute is the fact that whatever the impact of slavery was, it wasn't confined to our distant past. This country practiced economic apartheid well into my own lifetime, and the aftereffects are impossible to miss.

I live near Division and Chicago, just outside of Chicago in Oak Park. If I cross my alley and the street behind it, Austin Blvd, I'm in the Chicago neighborhood of Austin, where, if I'm a teenaged Black kid, my likelihood of being murdered shoots up dramatically. And Austin is a middle-class neighborhood (a typical Black household making $75k/yr lives in a higher-poverty neighborhood than a white family making $40k/yr). What changes when you cross that street is that you cross a famous redlining boundary.

A few years back you could easily get a map of Chicago redlining without consulting an encyclopedia or doing any research; you just needed to look at Uber's Chicago service map. The neighborhoods they wouldn't commit to serving were uncannily the redlined neighborhoods of the 1960s.

It wasn't because Uber was trying to perpetuate the practice, but because redlining ravaged west- and south-side Chicago, and we are nowhere close to digging our way out of it.

Lots of different groups of people have been economically disadvantaged in the United States, but I don't think anything like this, at this scale, with this impact. It fucked my city --- the best city in the country --- right up. It fucked up Detroit. It fucked up STL. It's a big deal and we should all be freshly furious about it.

Re: Who Were America’s Enslaved? New Database Humanizes the Names Behind the Numbers

#165

Post by throwaway535 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #110
throwaway535 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m an immigrant, and I’ll never stand for any kind of reparations for descendants of former slaves. Invariably this will come out of tax dollars to which I’m contributing by way of income tax. Why should I be charged for wrongs - however horrible - in which neither myself nor my ancestors were involved? Why should you be a contributor to the wrongs of this country's past? Simple, because you are a member/resident…

Slavery was not in the least a contribution to "financial success". It was very much a dysfunctional and failing system, for reasons that were made clear even by Adam Smith, who wrote in 1776 - and that are agreed upon by modern economists. What it did was create a huge unfair advantage for the few who could afford to "own" someone who had been enslaved - but that never translated to region-wide progress. Indeed, the…

> Slavery was not in the least a contribution to "financial success"... What it did was create a huge unfair advantage for the few who could afford to "own" someone who had been enslaved

I think you have been given a very skewed view of the role that slavery played in our country's economic past. There have been long efforts to downplay the role of slavery, and there still are. Cotton was the US's #1 export from ~1800 through 1930 due to slavery, and then continuing into the extremely exploitive sharecropping. That's the core period our country developed - and the single export that brought in the most capital into this country. That continuous inflow of capital is also what made New York City the financial powerhouse it became. [1]

Slavery wasn't a just for the few. One of the number one ways that people mislead with slavery is by trying to show the percentage of the slaves divided by the total population in 1860. That's extremely misleading, as individuals didn't own slaves, families did. The same way measuring what percentage of families own their home is accurate, not individuals that own the home, as only one in the family typically owns the home.

There were 15 slave states in 1860. Of the top 10 states, in all of them at least 25% of families owned slaves. With the top two states South Carolina and Mississippi topping out at 46% and 49% of families. Almost half the families owned slaves. And that's ignoring everyone else in the south who didn't own slaves, but participated in the slave trade - and those who rented slaves for labor but didn't technically "own them". [2]

On top of that of the top 5 states owning slaves, enslaved people ranged from over 40% of the population in Georgia, to almost 60% of the entire population of the state of South Carolina. [3]

Slavery and the white supremacy views it was built on, were an absolutely core part of the first part of this country's existence - culturally, economically, politically. Slavery wasn't a niche occurrence only for the elite - and especially so for the white South. It was disgusting, it was violent, it was immoral and it was everywhere. It didn't play a minimal role. The idea that a few wealthy elite slave owners "tricked" the rest of the southern population to go to war for them is a farce. The entire south gathered up to go to war because white supremacy was the culture of their land.

It's taken this country a long time to try to undo that work - and we still haven't finished...

But to downplay Slavery is to also downplay what was taken from Black Americans, and how much that theft built this early country.

1. https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cr... 2. https://www.snopes.com/news/2019/08/07/percent-of-whites-own... 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1860_United_States_census

Re: Who Were America’s Enslaved? New Database Humanizes the Names Behind the Numbers

#166

Post by TT3351 »

danans wrote: post #152
TT3351 wrote: post #135

Often in histories of slavery, the slaves don't speak. If you want to hear their voices, read "Slave Testimony," edited by John Blassingame. It's stunning in length and detail. Not all suffered the same slavery we know today. This passage is by an enslaved (interviewed by the American Freedmen's Inquiry Commission) in Kentucky, 1963, named Charlotte "I belong to Gen. Thos. Strange. I have two boys. I pay a dollar a w…

> Not all suffered the same slavery we know today. What is the "slavery we know today"? Do you mean "American slavery as we understand it today", or "Slavery in the current day"? If the former, then how is the passage you quoted different from our understanding of American slavery? Do you mean to say it was better, worse, or in some other way different?

Specifically slavery was more varied than "American slavery as we understand it today." The passage I quoted is different, in that it departs from the traditional model of plantation based, field labor slavery. It is still reprehensible exploitation, of course. It's just important to remember/question how diverse people's experiences actually were.

Re: Who Were America’s Enslaved? New Database Humanizes the Names Behind the Numbers

#167

Post by redis_mlc »

gibreparations wrote: post #73
adventured wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now that you mention it. Modern Germany should pay the US enormous sums in reparations for our role in destroying Nazi Germany, saving Western Europe (which Russia did not do, Russia enslaved half of Europe), freeing people from Nazi death camps, propping up a post-war democratic Germany against the conquering monster to the East. Not just the US of course. Britain and France among others are owed a lot more in repar…

You're joking but what you describe is pretty much the Treaty of Versailles, which was actually one of the triggers of WW2.

I study WW2, and FYI it's much more complicated than "the Treaty of Versailles."

The problem is that the "state" that started WW2 was the Austria-Hungarian Empire (against Serbia), and Germany was just a treaty ally. But then A-H dissolved, leaving Germany holding the bag. It didn't help that Germany refused to negotiate a peace treaty earlier, and that they destroyed the Alsace region during their retreat.

But in the end, it would have taken an occupation to demonstrate that Germany actually lost, and that didn't happen.

Hence the later Allied occupations of Germany and Japan in WW2.

Re: Who Were America’s Enslaved? New Database Humanizes the Names Behind the Numbers

#168

Post by redis_mlc »

adventured wrote: post #58
Zigurd wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do the people who had their property stolen by the Nazis have to pay the US for liberating the death camps? Yeah, no. There are simple answers to several of your questions.

Now that you mention it. Modern Germany should pay the US enormous sums in reparations for our role in destroying Nazi Germany, saving Western Europe (which Russia did not do, Russia enslaved half of Europe), freeing people from Nazi death camps, propping up a post-war democratic Germany against the conquering monster to the East. Not just the US of course. Britain and France among others are owed a lot more in repar…

I study WW2. One of the most startling things, and one that takes the longest to comprehend, is that the entire industrial output of the US went into the war effort for about 5 years.

Re: Who Were America’s Enslaved? New Database Humanizes the Names Behind the Numbers

#169

Post by frEdmbx »

bigyikes wrote: post #161
alisonkisk wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Charlotte's family weren't the well known field slaves or house slaves. They were tenants, renting their own lives from their legal owner for $2/week.

What does it even mean to rent from somebody that owns you?

Imagine taxation, or inflation of a fiat currency with legal tender laws forcing acceptance.

Re: Who Were America’s Enslaved? New Database Humanizes the Names Behind the Numbers

#170

Post by zozbot234 »

throwaway535 wrote: post #165
zozbot234 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slavery was not in the least a contribution to "financial success". It was very much a dysfunctional and failing system, for reasons that were made clear even by Adam Smith, who wrote in 1776 - and that are agreed upon by modern economists. What it did was create a huge unfair advantage for the few who could afford to "own" someone who had been enslaved - but that never translated to region-wide progress. Indeed, the…

> Slavery was not in the least a contribution to "financial success"... What it did was create a huge unfair advantage for the few who could afford to "own" someone who had been enslaved I think you have been given a very skewed view of the role that slavery played in our country's economic past. There have been long efforts to downplay the role of slavery, and there still are. Cotton was the US's #1 export from ~180…

> Cotton was the US's #1 export from ~1800 through 1930 due to slavery

Wait, you're making a very different claim than what I was talking about. I agree that it probably made some sense to have some kind of plantation economy in the South, and that, as a matter of fact the plantations the South did have were based on enslaved labor. And for sure, there are interesting debates to have about the unacknowledged contribution that's inherent in that. But slavery was never a necessary part of that successful economy; indeed, it's quite physically possible to have plantations that employ free laborers as opposed to relying on slaves!

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