In case it wasn’t clear, I think people who think “Slavery wasn’t so bad” are widely under-weighing the suffering caused by the violent enforcement of the status quo. Slaves tried to escape all the time, and fugitive slave enforcement was incredibly violent—and the violence was state-sanctioned.
I was asking to try to understand how the statement imputed to Bill addressed that issue—because without addressing the violence of fugitive slave enforcement, the statement did not even seem plausible to me.
The central premise of Time on the Cross—that slavery was economically profitable and unlikely “wither away”, and this had some positive effect on the treatment of the slaves, seems quite plausible to me. (That said, I believe this is only true after the invention of the cotton gin).
But I find it implausible that this benefit outweighed the negatives of the fugitive slave enforcement in the US.
The central premise of Time on the Cross—that slavery was economically profitable and unlikely “wither away”, and this had some positive effect on the treatment of the slaves, seems quite plausible to me. (That said, I believe this is only true after the invention of the cotton gin).
The first half of the thesis is most assuredly true. It could be that if not for the invention of the cotton gin, slavery would not have been profitable in the cotton-growing regions of the US South, but slavery was extremely profitable and economically dynamic elsewhere, so I wouldn’t be inclined to lay too much emphasis on the gin (except as a matter, possibly, of where slavery came to be located, as it did die out “naturally” in the areas where it was unprofitable.) However, it is also true that northern and/or metropolitan political leaders generally believed (however incorrectly) that free labor would generally be more efficient than slave, which to be fair it was in the industrial production processes that the abolishing regions had a comparative advantage in.
I am extremely skeptical of the second part of the thesis, because most everything I’ve seen indicates that slaves were worse off than black sharecroppers were worse off than southern whites were worse off than northern whites. But I haven’t actually read Time on the Cross too closely.
In case it wasn’t clear, I think people who think “Slavery wasn’t so bad” are widely under-weighing the suffering caused by the violent enforcement of the status quo. Slaves tried to escape all the time, and fugitive slave enforcement was incredibly violent—and the violence was state-sanctioned.
I was asking to try to understand how the statement imputed to Bill addressed that issue—because without addressing the violence of fugitive slave enforcement, the statement did not even seem plausible to me.
The central premise of Time on the Cross—that slavery was economically profitable and unlikely “wither away”, and this had some positive effect on the treatment of the slaves, seems quite plausible to me. (That said, I believe this is only true after the invention of the cotton gin).
But I find it implausible that this benefit outweighed the negatives of the fugitive slave enforcement in the US.
The first half of the thesis is most assuredly true. It could be that if not for the invention of the cotton gin, slavery would not have been profitable in the cotton-growing regions of the US South, but slavery was extremely profitable and economically dynamic elsewhere, so I wouldn’t be inclined to lay too much emphasis on the gin (except as a matter, possibly, of where slavery came to be located, as it did die out “naturally” in the areas where it was unprofitable.) However, it is also true that northern and/or metropolitan political leaders generally believed (however incorrectly) that free labor would generally be more efficient than slave, which to be fair it was in the industrial production processes that the abolishing regions had a comparative advantage in.
I am extremely skeptical of the second part of the thesis, because most everything I’ve seen indicates that slaves were worse off than black sharecroppers were worse off than southern whites were worse off than northern whites. But I haven’t actually read Time on the Cross too closely.