Slavery was not nearly as bad as you were told.

Uncle Tom's Cabin is FICTION.

Slavery happened, and was bad. The outright chattel enslavement of other human beings is bad. Even indentured servitude (voluntarily becoming someone’s servant for a fixed amount of time to repay a debt) was probably bad. I’m not an apologist for southern slavery, which was one of (not the only, or the biggest) causes for the American Civil War. There’s a reason the plantation class feared uprisings like John Brown’s at Harper’s Ferry, because the enslaved were willing to risk their lives in an armed revolt to get away from their plantations. They still risked their lives during the war to roll the dice on escaping via the Underground Railroad. Before I go to bat for you guys, you have to understand the (far) right-wing fantasy of: perfectly groomed, well-loved helpers just chippin’ in an honest day’s work before retiring to their dainty English cottages also didn’t happen.

So, what was slavery actually like? It typically sucked for the people enslaved. But most people today have this hilarious, ridiculous mental picture of slavery: disheveled, starving, honest blacks singing a "spiritual” out in the fields while a white plantation owner dressed as Colonel Sanders stands behind them, whip in hand and cigar in mouth. Maybe he’s got a shotgun, menacing them. Maybe he’s even got a secret mistress slave that he accidentally knocked up. Maybe the determined slaves are planning an escape on the Underground Railroad. Much like the “incompetent Nazis” humiliation ritual, such tired tropes are paraded endlessly in media.

In real life, the answer is a lot more complex. It depends what time it was, where they were sent, how old they were, their gender/usefulness, and their individual owner. Slaves basically spun a roulette wheel at auction, where the outcomes ranged from “beloved member of the family” to “Uncle Cletus’ punching bag”. Yes, there were slaves who got beaten and killed for no reason. That doesn’t detract from the fact that the typical slave’s fate was much closer to “beloved member of the family” than “Uncle Cletus’ punching bag”. We remember those stories because they were awful, not frequent.

What are some other myths about slavery?

1. Everyone owned slaves

This one is retarded on it’s face, morality aside. Slaves were expensive, and few could afford them. Fewer still could afford more than a couple. The mental image of 50+ slaves working a plantation is seared into our mind’s eye, perhaps with the camera pulling away to reveal a thousand more plantations just like that one, is so ridiculous. It would be like the camera over Poland zooming out to reveal 10,000 more Dachaus and Treblinkas.

No basis in reality. Let’s take a source that is very, very courteous to the pro-reparations argument. With all this crying, even they concede that the highest possible rate of slave ownership is 30.8%. I find this ridiculous, personally. The South was a poor, unindustrialized backwater of the US. The people living there were not very well off most of the time, still struggling with literacy rates and disease immunization for example. This matters because poor people don’t own slaves.

Slaves were expensive, simple as. The average slave (a composite of all races, genders, ages, physical capabilities, etc.) was about $800 in 1860. Online inflation calculators only stretch back to 1913, but even then we can see 800 1913 dollars are worth $25,000 today. So, let’s say in broad terms that slaves cost as much as a new car.

How many new cars can you or your friends afford? Maybe one? Maybe your parents can afford two?

As you can imagine, hardly anyone (as a total of the white population) owned slaves. And when they did, it was typically one or two. The bulk of the slave population was housed in a handful of extremely wealthy Planter class plantations, where they owned hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of slaves and could afford to splurge on the ideal field laborer, a young and healthy male. Such a specimen would likely cost $50,000+ in today’s dollars.

You could not pay me enough money to take Jordan Peele off your hands if it meant I’d have to watch his truly horrible race humiliation fetish movies

Here is an official Census map, where the % of slaves in each county is almost a perfect heat map of average annual income in the South.

Note all of the counties where slaves were less than 1/3 the population. Given the highly concentrated locations of slaves, many Southern people had never even seen a slave by the time the war broke out. Outside South Carolina, Virginia, and the counties touching the Mississippi river, that is certainly the case.

2. The South was especially pro-Slavery

I don’t remember the exact numbers and I don’t want to lie, so just go read the revisionist “Slavery was not the cause of the Civil War” or “Everything you were taught about the Civil War was wrong”. They have a ton of stats concerning Southern abolition societies and referendums on freeing the slaves, etc. Suffice to say, Slavery was tolerated in the South but it wasn’t really “celebrated” outside the Planter class. Most people saw it as an unpleasant necessary evil, akin to slaughterhouses for juicy steaks. This also partly explains why the secession documents of various states babble on about slavery, because they were written by Planters. It also partly explains “THAT” quote by the universally loathed Alexander Stephens about how much he loved slavery. Note that slavery is not mentioned at all until the second paragraph of the speech.

3. Slaves were mistreated as a rule

I hate this one because it’s so stupid. We established above that slaves were quite the investment. Nobody is spending the money, time, and energy to get a slave back to their house just to start wailing on them. Even defenders of the “mainstream” slavery narrative admit that slaves were treated like farm animals. Ok, I agree. How many farmers buy a work horse to take it home and start beating it? How many of them use only negative reinforcement with animals that clearly can’t understand their words? Some, sure. But, no, slaves were not typically beaten on a whim unless they got a particularly cruel master, just like farm animals today. There’s no evidence of it occurring outside individual instances, and it just doesn’t make sense. The myth that every slave owner beat their slaves is a sensationalism drawn from individual accounts like the autobiography of Frederick Douglass, someone who could genuinely claim that it happened to them.

What about other forms of abuse: starvation, disease, sleep deprivation, etc.?

British civil servant and eyewitness Anthony Trollope writes upon his tour of the Kentucky countryside mid-slavery,

"I went into some of their [slave] cottages on the estate which I visited, and was not in the least surprised to find them preferable in the size, furniture, and all material comforts to the dwellings of most of our own [English] agricultural labourers. Any comparison between the material comfort of a Kentucky slave and an English ditcher and delver would be preposterous [!]. The Kentucky slave never wants for clothing fitted to the weather. He eats meat twice a day, and has three good meals; he knows no limit but his own appetite; he has many varieties of amusement; he has instant medical attention at all periods of necessity for himself, his wife, and his children. Of course he pays no rent, fears no banker, and knows no hunger".

"I would not have it supposed that I conceive slavery with all these comforts to be equal to freedom without them; nor do I conceive that the Negro can be made equal to the white man (Author’s note: Lmao). But in discussing the condition of the Negro, it is necessary that we should understand what are the advantages of which abolition would deprive him, and in what condition he has been placed by the daily receipt of such advantages. If a Negro slave wants new shoes, he asks for them, and receives them, with the undoubted simplicity of a child. Such a state of things has its picturesquely patriarchal side; but what would be the state of such a man if he were emancipated tomorrow?"

In other words, we have an Englishman telling us it would’ve been better to be an American slave than an English impoverished. Curious.

But what about other emotional turmoil? I’ll pick an easy example and darling of the media: breaking up families. Surely that used to happen, something about keeping the families disenfranchised and downtrodden? Trollope clarifies:

A gentleman in Kentucky does not sell his slaves. To do so is considered to be low and mean, and is opposed to the aristocratic conditions of the country. A man who does so willingly, puts himself beyond the pale of good fellowship with his neighbors. A sale of slaves is regarded as a sign almost of bankruptcy

Remember, these people were (Christian) Aristocrats, not Marvel villains. They saw themselves as custodians of an inferior race, not their tormentors.

Also, there’s the hilarious distinction that not every slave worked as a field laborer or even outside. While less common, there were many slaves that served other roles: kitchen workers, letter couriers, nannies, administrative aids, even educators to children. The more slaves a family owned, the more specific that slave’s niche was. The slaves that taught the children of the Aristocracy (in the time before widespread school availability or attendance) were often quite educated themselves, somewhere in the Bachelor’s degree range by today’s standards.

4. All blacks were enslaved

There was an entire class of society called the “free Negro”, referring to either their former slave status, or the fact they were just never enslaved. Free negroes could sometimes be the majority of small towns, and they themselves occasionally owned African slaves.

Even state-sponsored Wikipedia grants that there were only about 287,000 total slaves (of all races) imported into the US since 1620, 150 years before it was even America. (Wikipedia also volunteers that only 5% of slaves taken from Africa went to the US) Doing some beer math, you can certainly conclude that less than half the blacks in the US were enslaved- accounting for the children of slaves and also slaves who were freed.

Free blacks were not exactly cherished in society, but they were generally allowed to live like whites- assuming they kept to themselves. They were almost always allowed to own property (including slaves), run businesses and employ whites, marry and have their own children and wealth, invest, and engage in other functions of middle-class life in the 1800s outside of civic functions like voting or serving in the military. So long as they didn’t cause trouble (which would include race mixing in that time), they were usually left alone.

However, they essentially lived as “guests” in another group’s country. It was rare for them to get due process, and they were often extra-legally punished for crimes. For example, rape (especially of a white woman) would invariably end in lynching instead of prison time. It was seen as an affront to the generosity of the whites, on top of the crime itself. You decide whether this is ethical or not.

The artist drawing this Free Negro did NOT do her any favors. Mr. Popo headass.

Alright I was gonna do like 5 more points but I’m kind of tired of this topic from all the libslop so I’ll probably do a Part 2 if you guys are interested.