re: Just overheard a guy say "slavery wasn't racist"

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This board is 80% racist yokels who think they know everything.

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I've been quite clear - something beyond, "White southerners = bad; everyone else = clean hands" - as long as you concede that's bullshite (and I think you will), then we're good to go.


Yes, it's bullshite. More accurate would be:

White southerners = bad; everyone else = mostly bad but with a significant minority of much, much, much better than white southerners. I think you'll agree that part of the problem is that a lot of white southerners won't even agree to the "white southerners = bad" part of the equation no matter what the rest says.

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White southerners and the freed slaves/their descendants seem to be the only folks considered, when American chattel slavery was in fact a global issue.


Yes, northern banks in particular, IMO.

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Was it shitty? You betcha. But after their seven years were up they could walk away.

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Then why didn’t they have Indians or pwt slaves?

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Certainly the South paid for it. And paid for it and paid for it and paid for it.

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I disagree. I think the Civil War is one of the few (if not the only) wars where the losers got to write the history.

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APPENDIX I
Per Capita Wealth -- I860 -- By State -- In Order of Wealth

Rank - State - Wealth Per Capita

1 Mississippi $2,128

2 South Carolina $2,017

3 Louisiana $1,677

4 Alabama $1,497

5 Virginia $1,204

6 Georgia $1,153

7 Texas $1,075

8 Florida $1,050

9 Tennessee $1,005

10 North Carolina $832

11 Kentucky $814

12 Arkansas $811

13 Connecticut $771

14 New Jersey $734

15 Oregon $726

16 Maryland $696

17 Delaware $666

18 Massachusetts $625

19 Missouri $612

20 New York $597

21 Rhode Island $593

22 California $571

22 Pennsylvania $571

24 Vermont $570

25 Ohio $543

26 New Hampshire $530

27 Illinois $528

28 West Virginia $467

29 Indiana $463

30 Michigan $461

31 Iowa $402

32 Wisconsin $380

33 Maine $354

34 Minnesota $350

35 Kansas $288

LINK

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Contrary to popular belief Southern poverty has been a longer-lasting Civil War legacy than has Jim Crow or segregation.... Nearly a century after the war in 1960, eight of the ten states with the lowest per capita income were former Confederate states. Similarly, 150 years after the war started only one Southern state, Virginia, ranked within the top ten in per capita adjusted gross income as reported to the Internal Revenue Service whereas five of the bottom ten in 2011 were Confederate states. The classic example is Mississippi, which ranked number one in 1860 per capita wealth, but was dead last at fiftieth in 2011 per capita income. The depths of post Civil War Southern poverty and its duration were far greater, longer, and more multiracial than is commonly realized. It took eighty five years for the South’s per capita income to regain its below average 1860 percentile ranking.
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A month after Appomattox, US Lieutenant General Ulysses Grant wrote his wife, “The suffering that must exist in the South the next year…will be beyond conception. People who talk of further retaliation and punishment…do not conceive of the suffering endured already, or they are heartless.” Another Northern observer wrote, “Never was there greater nakedness and destitution in a civilized community.” The mayor of Columbia, South Carolina said that hundreds of people lived on loose grain picked up where army horses were fed. One federal official wrote, “It is common…[to see] women and children, most of whom were formerly in good circumstances, begging for bread from door to door…They must have immediate help or perish…Some are without homes of any description.”4

The war had destroyed two-thirds of Southern railroads and two-thirds of the region’s livestock was gone. Steamboats had nearly disappeared from the rivers. One hundred million dollars in insurance investments and twice that amount in bank assets had vanished. Excluding the total loss in the value of slaves resulting from emancipation, assessed property values at the end of the war were more than 40% lower than in 1860. Approximately a 300,000 Southern white males in the prime of adulthood died during the war and perhaps another 200,000 were incapacitated, which translated to about 18% of the region’s approximate 2.75 million white males in all age groups in 1860 and about 36% of those over age nineteen.5

During the war, Southern farms drifted back to nature. Since their protective levees had been destroyed, thousands of square miles of Mississippi delta cotton lands were overrun with briers and cane thickets. Returning Confederate soldiers often found their families existing in conditions of near, if not actual, starvation. The governor of the Union-loyal Arkansas state government, established in 1864 under Lincoln’s 1863 amnesty and reconstruction proclamation, reported many people living in the woods and begging for food. Within thirty miles of Atlanta an estimated 35,000 others were destitute and near starvation. In December 1865 an estimated half-million whites in three Gulf states alone were without life’s necessities, and some had starved to death....

Although Southern poverty and cotton culture is commonly associated with blacks, by 1940 two-thirds of Southern tenant farmers were whites. Shortly after the Great Depression began, the president of General Motors (Alfred P. Sloan) voluntarily cut his annual salary from $500,000 to $340,000. His $160,000 cut was more than all the income taxes paid by the two million residents of Mississippi that year.

LINK

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I'm not just talking about the war - I'm talking about reconstruction and all the other shite we have to deal with to this very day.

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