I don't agree at all that the US was built on the backs of slaves.
I agree with you Dan, I was just saying they had a fairly big role. Before the War, Charleston, SC was the richest city in the United States. That's a lot of capital and it came from slave crops.
But the statement, "The US was built on the backs of slaves." is not true. The statement implies that slaves did all the work which is just hogwash.
I agree, thus my concern about historical revisionism.
However to say that this country was built on child labor is also hogwash. A child cannot do the work of an adult. Never has and never will. Did children HELP build this county? Yes. Was it built on their backs? No.
Agreed. I think the poster who said that was pointing out that most cultures are built, at least in part, on the abuses some group of people whether they be slaves, children, peasants, or enemies. I agree that this is true but it about as new an idea as dirt and does not add anything significant to this discussion. I don't know what the posters agenda was, but it is often revisionist history that portrays anyone who strives, wins, achieves and benefits from it as an oppressor. And while it can certainly be true, it rarely diminishes the names of those like the pharaohs, the Caesars, the Washingtons and Jeffersons. But if you happen to lose, then you will be cast as a ******, Lee or Bonaparte. Its a lopsided way to look at history and revisionism can't take that away.
Slavery was mainly used to produce cash commodities. This made a few people very rich. I don't see how it helped most people in this country.
Because huge amounts of that money went North and was used to industrialize the North and most of the time when people think of building a country they think of roads, rails and factories. That's why the US government continued to constitutionally support slavery all the way to nearly the end of the war. And at one point during the war there was a bill to concede slavery in the south if the South would agree to end the war and re-join the union. (These simple facts pretty much ruin the idea that the war efforts in the North were some sort of moral campaign to end slavery. The Union ended slavery when it was both economically and strategically beneficial to do so.
I don't know how one can compare the slave economy to what was produced by immigration but the work done by immigrants was a far larger impact. Immigrants built the Erie canal, most of the railroads, settled the country, worked in the factories, created farms that fed the factories workers, created lumber, etc. Slavery mainly made rich men richer.
I'm not sure you can substantiate that. Again, the southern economy was not absorbed by Rhett Butler and Ashley Wilkes. That money was a huge part of the industrial and probably even westward expansion of this country and those crops where THE primary export of this nation both in raw and manufactured forms.
I'm not contesting the role of white immigrants to this country, but the role of the slave remains enormous until the time of the civil war, following which the northern immigration of the now free slaves provided a great deal of the labor in the industrial midwest.
The only long lasting institution, sorta kinda/maybe, built on slavery that I can think of is Duke University and Hospital. And I think that is a stretch.
As I've shown above, I do not think this is true.
Did slaves, freed slaves and decendents help build this country? Yes. I never said they did not. But SLAVERY did not build this country. Slavery, well legal slavery, was gone by the time the US exploded economically. The growth in the US really kicked in after The Late Unpleasentness.
Right, but that really only point out the weakness of a concept like 'building this country'. It does not include a temporal context. But up until the time of the war, the slaves are responsible for a huge amount of the growth of this country. It really is of no benefit to argue 'how much' because it can't be easily quantified.
Dang it I tried to keep this short......
Later,
Dan
No need to keep things short. Good discussion is not necessarily served by brevity.
