Fred Reed- Slavery was bad, hideous, but the north has a false sense of moral superiority

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First, slavery was always bad, frequently hideous, much worse in the Deep South than in Tidewater or New York, and consequent to the same desire for cheap labor that now results in importing Mexicans and exporting jobs to China. Any notion that abuses were rare or exaggerated is twaddle.

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the slave trade being phenomenally profitable, much like the drug trade today, many were involved who today choose to forget this: Yankees, Arabs, Jews, Quakers, and Southerners. It was strongly defended by many Christians in the South, and attacked by Christians in the North, who had no financial stake in it. Yankees owned slaves and, in the draft riots in New York in 1863, lynched and burned them alive. In this world angels are few on the ground. The North now simply lies about it.

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many today would say that Southerners deserved their problems, having brought them on themselves by enslaving blacks. But of course they did not. By 1861 most were born into a slaveholding society. Most were not enthusiastic about it, but had little idea what to do.

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freeing the slaves was an easy solution if you didn’t have the problem. If you were a planter with a wife and three little girls, would you give up your house and subject your family to poverty, rape, robbery, and revenge from blacks? I am not asking whether you think they should have done it, but whether in the circumstances you would do it. Another way of putting it: For what moral cause would you, today, give up your job, house, and investments, and step on the sidewalk with your family?

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controversy, usually witless, persists over whether the South fought to preserve slavery. The usual approach is to quote Southern planters, politicians, and newspapers as to the sacred quality of the peculiar institution and how God liked it. QED.

But of course these were the slave-owners, the rich, and their hangers on. They favored slavery for the same reason American businesses favor remote wars in Afghanistan: they make money at it. People do not fight bloody wars over years for the benefit of people that, after the war, they will have no desire to associate with. If you had asked a thousand Confederate infantrymen why they were fighting, do you think they would have said, “I’m fighting and dying and seeing my friends screaming gutshot so that rich bastards can own slaves while I live in a shack?”

You, the reader, probably do not favor mistreatment of women and girls. Would you favor fighting a war in Afghanistan in which America would lose over six and a half million dead–proportionately to population, what the country lost in the Civil War–to impose civil rights for women in Afghanistan?

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