Intellectual history is generally the study of good ideas or what we currently think are good ideas, but it is the bad ideas that have the most impact. The use of slave labor in the New World, for example, seemed like a good idea at the time but has proven to be a terrible burden on us. If the slavers knew that their descendants would be tormented by the consequences of slavery, would they still have done it?
I heard Jefferson originally wrote “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of property”. Perhaps instead of writing “all men are created equal”, they should have written, “all men deserve the equal application of the law“.
Would the plantation owners who bought thousands of slaves have shied away from it if they knew the future consequences? My guess is no...Greed doesn't care about the future...
I think ascribing slavery to "greed" is a bit simplistic. The planter class was far more complex than that, and varied too much over the time (1619-1865) and place (New York to Virginia to Texas) to make a monolith of them. My ancestor was listed as a planter in 1790 South Carolina, and he owned nine slaves raising hogs and corn. Slavery was not all about economics, as much as Marxist historians attempted to make it so in 20th century textbooks. It became and evolved into a shared culture on both sides of the economic and color line.
I agree with most of that...Slavery, however, was dying before the invention of the cotton gin, because Africans were not skilled agricultural workers..But picking cotton involved little skill, and exporting the cotton was highly profitable, and that fueled the demand for slaves, even after the slave trade was banned by Britain...Only when cheap immigrant labor, mostly Irish, became available did slavery lose much of its appeal, and probably would have died out in a couple of decades...Also, sharecropping proved more profitable for the landowner, because the crop risk was transferred to the black labor....
I heard Jefferson originally wrote “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of property”. Perhaps instead of writing “all men are created equal”, they should have written, “all men deserve the equal application of the law“.
Would the plantation owners who bought thousands of slaves have shied away from it if they knew the future consequences? My guess is no...Greed doesn't care about the future...
I think ascribing slavery to "greed" is a bit simplistic. The planter class was far more complex than that, and varied too much over the time (1619-1865) and place (New York to Virginia to Texas) to make a monolith of them. My ancestor was listed as a planter in 1790 South Carolina, and he owned nine slaves raising hogs and corn. Slavery was not all about economics, as much as Marxist historians attempted to make it so in 20th century textbooks. It became and evolved into a shared culture on both sides of the economic and color line.
I agree with most of that...Slavery, however, was dying before the invention of the cotton gin, because Africans were not skilled agricultural workers..But picking cotton involved little skill, and exporting the cotton was highly profitable, and that fueled the demand for slaves, even after the slave trade was banned by Britain...Only when cheap immigrant labor, mostly Irish, became available did slavery lose much of its appeal, and probably would have died out in a couple of decades...Also, sharecropping proved more profitable for the landowner, because the crop risk was transferred to the black labor....
There's another bad idea Z didn't put on the list-letting the Potato Irish in the country. https://www.printsoldandrare.com/blackhistory/253bh.jpg
The US has had so many bad ideas over the last 160 years that they would fill a small book...WW1 and giving women the vote would be way up there
I find the Christian scapegoat on equality lacking. Christendom has linearly declined in the west.
Perhaps Christianity in modernity has become a perverse vehicle for equality but it still doesn’t explain the contradiction.
This is like the misnomer that Christians were pacifists in the Roman Empire because they weren’t allowed to join the Military.
There is a podcast called the stone choir that deals with the issues you talk about. Would be interesting for y’all to get together.
Thanks for the show ZMAN. Big fan.