re: Watching Roots and its making me sick

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There were some sadistic bastards the owned slaves or were overseers; however, the majority of slaveowners were businessmen who realized that slaves were a substantial capital investment that did him no good if they were injure or dead. Read Time on the Cross.

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This. Slaves were like prized cattle. They worked hard and the slave owner provided them with a meal. They were also very expensive. It doesn't makes sense to injure your prized bull. But, ROOTS came out, and all of a sudden became a documentary, instead of a fictional story.

Not saying abuse didn't happen, but ROOTS is the worst case of fictional movie turned biography. JFK following in second.

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but it'd be ok to sprinkle in a few good stories

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Even the "good stories" don't take away from the barbarity that was slavery.


https://www.cnn.com/2013/02/17/opinion/greene-slave-narrative/index.html?iid=article_sidebar

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who recalled being sold at auction, of seeing brothers and sisters led away in chains

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Mary Armstrong, 91 and living in Houston when she was interviewed, said the person who owned her family was "so mean he never would sell the man and woman and (children) to the same one. He'd sell the man here and the woman there and if (there were children) he'd sell them someplace else."

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"I belonged to Madison Pace in slavery time," she said. She had a brother whose first name was Washington, she said, but he was "sold away." Their mother "cried a lot about it."

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Stearlin Arnwine, who was 94 and living near Jacksonville, Texas, when he was interviewed, said he would see slaves on the auction block, stripped to the waist for inspection by potential buyers. Women and their children, he said, would be crying and begging "not to be separated," but it did no good: "They had to go."

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"My father was a slave, A.H. Stewart, belonging to James Arch Stewart, a slave owner, whose plantation was in Wake County," said Sam T. Stewart, 84, interviewed in North Carolina in June 1937. "When I was two years old James Arch Stewart sold my father to speculators, and he was shipped to Mississippi. I was too young to know my father."

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Alex Woods, of Raleigh, North Carolina, born on May 15, 1858, said that as a boy he saw slaves being marched on their way to the auction block, each person chained to the one next to him, and, as he witnessed this, being "afraid my mother and father would be sold away from me."

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If a woman was a good breeder she brought a good price on the auction block," said Hattie Rogers, a North Carolina resident, when she was interviewed in 1937. "The slave buyers would come around and jab them in the stomach and look them over and if they thought they would have children fast they brought a good price."

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I guess as long as they were treated like "prized cattle," all is well. It wasn't that big of a deal; some were pretty much like family, except in a property kind of way.

WPA Slave narratives. They are valuable to a point. Bear in mind that the start of the Civil War, there were approximately 4 million slaves in the South. The slave narratives only interviewed about 2300 people.

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Yep. I stated in my first post that slavery is a deplorable part of human history, American or otherwise. I get that some in here were pointing out that Roots is a fictional work, but others took it a step further, imo.

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I agree. Some people are just sticking with discrediting Roots, but there also seems to be a disturbing vein of thought for some posters along the lines that slavery wasn't that bad or that it was somehow justified because other stuff was also bad.

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I hear ya. But its not exactly a new revalation.

To be honest, a whole lot of stuff that's occurred all throughout human history is pretty harrowing.

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Yep, while slavery throughout the world was terrible, what the Jews went through during the Holocaust was at an unimaginable higher level of horror.

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I agree. Some people are just sticking with discrediting Roots, but there also seems to be a disturbing vein of thought for some posters along the lines that slavery wasn't that bad or that it was somehow justified because other stuff was also bad.

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To the extent this is directed at me, my sole motivation is historical accuracy. Anything other than that is either mythology, or propaganda.

Slavery is abhorrent and an abomination. However, this is a 21st Century man speaking, and to project that perspective to the actions of persons in the 16th, 17th, 18th ot 19th centuries is the height of arrogance and is similarly ahistorical. Certainly, some morailty is universal and transcends time (e.g., racial/ethnic genocide, murder [except, apparently, abortion]); however, slavery does not fall into that category.

That being said, it is an historical fact that by and large, slavery as practiced in the United States was realtively benign as compared to other conemporary slave systems/societies. It is the only example of "modern" slavery (since the "age of exploration") where the slave population actually increased by "natural population increase" after the abolition of importation of new slaves (in every other instance, the slave population died out where slavery was maintained after importation was outlawed).

Does that make it "right"? No. Does it make it less evil in a modern context? No. But before we as a society are asked (actually required) to accept that every slaveowner in the South was a Simon Legree (who was actually a transplanted Northerner btw), how about a little actual evidence to support this?