re: According to my Yankee Boss and co-worker... slaves had it made...

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Trying to minimize the extent of people in the pre-war South owned or used slaves is an exercise in futility.

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You are right, but maximizing it for effect to imply that the entirety of the American South were slave owners is disingenuous and misleading. I don't think that anything but the facts serve any good purpose. I never heard of "renting a slave", but I'm quite positive that it occurred on a daily basis.

With the truth may come scarring, but with scarring comes the healing.

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I would say the majority of slaves had equal to or better lives than the Irish, Italians, and eastern europeans who came over in the 1800s to work in factories in the north. Long hours in dangerous conditions where you got paid a pittance. Slaves probably cost their owners more money than the small wage northern business men paid their workers.

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Wow.

Some of the takes in here are just white hot.

It was literally cheaper to pay the potato-eaters pennies a day and work them to death than to use slaves. You didn’t know this?

If there is a finite resource, it is more valuable.

Meanwhile more Irish came off the boats every day

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The Irish were free and came willingly. Even with their social conditions, to say that antebellum slaves had equal or better lives than any free person is silly. The Irish came knowing it'd be tough but that their hard work would ultimately pay off through the experiences their children would have. Slaves had children and those children could be taken and sold off without notice, never to be seen again.

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Starve to death in Ireland under British rule or go to America or some other far away land to be treated as slave labor. Yeah so, SO much better than being a slave.

Like I said both are bad but I'd rather be seen as a valuable asset over a cheap worker I can replace easily. Paying hundreds of dollars for a slave means you'll likely take care of that slave so you can get the most out of him. An immigrant you can pay pennies to can easily be replaced by another immigrant because all you are doing is moving his wage to another person.

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Today, I witnessed someone in 2019 say they'd rather be a slave than an immigrant.

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Lol talk about picking words. Nice way to remove the context of the conversation.


What you said is the equivalent of this.

"Only black people had hard lives in the 1850s. All people of European descent had it very easy."

Do you truly believe that?

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What you said is the equivalent of this.

"Only black people had hard lives in the 1850s. All people of European descent had it very easy."

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That isn't at all what I said.

But keep telling us about how slavery wasn't that terrible in the grand scheme of things.

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But my point is, slave or free, their descendents are better off for the hardship their ancestors had to endure. 

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For the slaves, that's only because slavery ended.

And I'm pretty sure they didnt sign up for it with the notion that it was going to.

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Just how dense are you? I never said that anyone signed up for hardship. You think the Irish signed up to starve to death from famine? The point I am making is that regardless of how shitty the conditions were in the past, coming to America, in any way, immensely benefitted their offspring down the line and their diaspora

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Some will never get it. They will continue to think their ancestors had it worse than any other people before or after them. Yep, no disputing it was horrible. You have to wonder what this country would have been like without slavery? How would those that were slaves turned out in Africa? How would our country have turned out? Serious questions.

They are correct

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Yes, we all know your point is slaves descendants ended up better off than if they had stayed in Africa. Whoopty doo.

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yeh why would you want to look on the bright side...hard to stay angry if you do