Modern Slavery And Agricultural Production In Brazil And South Asia: Fill & Download for Free

Because, in short, slavery was much more ingrained into the economy and society than in most other countries.In their colonies in the Andes and Mexico, the Spanish found territories with relatively high demographic densities and with established centralized states, economic networks, and labour systems; they only needed replace the native leadership with their own and become the beneficiaries of the compulsory labour systems that had been used by the native rulers of yore. In their Central American and Caribbean colonies however, which were much more thinly populated, plantations ran on African slave labour. Native colonists from Spain formed a negligible part of the workforce simply because in the late 15th century the population of all her realms combined was barely over five million and a half.In the case of Brazil, Portugal simply didn’t have the option to use the labour of his own colonists - Portuguese population by the early 1500s was barely over one million people and they already had their hands full with their ventures in Africa and Asia. They were already struggling to man countless fortresses, outposts, and factories along the Atlantic and Indian Ocean coasts, their colonies, settlements and garrisons in those regions, the ships of trade and of war, and all other components that were vital to the trade routes that kept their spice empire alive - three continents were more than they could handle.Native labour was hardly an option, too; the Eastern portion of South America was too thinly populated, and there were no compulsory labour structures in place for them to take over. Native labour was used in plantations often in the beginning of colonization but, much like the rest of the Portuguese colonial project, it was done in a disorganized way - and it didn’t help that the captives often knew the terrain they were at and were more successful at fleeing. An alternative was settling natives in Catholic missions - but not only that practice was mostly restricted to the coastline and the Amazon basin until the 18th century, but the natives did oftentimes resist fiercely against it, the 100-year struggle between the Portuguese and the Mura Confederacy in the upper Amazon being the most extreme (and bloodiest) example. Even though the Bandeirantes did pretty much scrape the backcountry empty in slave raids (they razed many a Catholic mission with those raids) native labour was mostly used in farms in the capitancy of São Vicente down south. The economic heartland of Brazil, however, was in the Northeastern Coast and its sugar mills.The Portuguese first experimented with sugar mills in the Madeira island and, given their stunning success, they decided to replicate it in their American colony, and as the Northeastern coast offered the best combination of fertile soil, adequate climate and proximity to Europe, it was the main destination of investments by the Crown and private initiative. As African slaves could be more easily acquired in the Portuguese outposts in the continent and transported by sea (as opposed to native slaves, who had to be transported overland), they were more attractive a labour force for sugar planters, and the Bandeirantes simply couldn’t compete with the prices of African slaves. Besides, the Atlantic slave trade had an already established system for levying forced labour at the source, in contrast with the impromptu excursions of the Bandeirantes.Therefore, Brazil - and, by extension, Portugal - became dependent on slave labour not merely for running the cane plantations and sugar mills, but most, if not all other sectors of his economy, were directly or indirectly reliant on it as well. Salaried workers were often foremen, carpenters, ironsmiths, and other specialists dedicated to the production of sugar (besides the bush captains, agents who led armed bands into the backcountry to hunt for runaway slaves); subsistence agriculture, especially manioc, was devoted to feeding either the slaves or the planters’ ancillaries; production of items such as sugar cane liquor and rum were destined to be used to pay for slaves across the Atlantic; and so forth. The wealthiest members of society were mostly either planters or slavers (or some combination thereof).Even with the decline of sugar production after the Iberian Union, the Dutch occupation, and the competition of Caribbean sugar in the late 17th century, Brazil’s dependence on slave labour didn’t change - the main economic axis of the country merely shifted from the Northeast to the Southeast, as the gold rush in Minas Gerais caused a demographic explosion there, beyond incentivizing the Portuguese crown to tighten its control of the colony for fiscal purposes and reorganize the colonial economy to supply Minas Gerais with the tools, food, clothing and other articles the miners would need in their enterprise; and, naturally, the number of slaves also exploded - even though Portuguese settlers were eager to work on the mines themselves, the Crown had to restrict immigration to Brazil, lest the frenzy depopulate the kingdom. The exploitation (and death rate) of slaves increased significantly - there were mines like Chico Rei’s in Vila Rica, which I’ve seen myself, and it ran mostly on child labour.The Crown, by this point, had nose-dived Scrooge McDuck-style into the Brazilian pile of gold and diamonds, and never found its way back.For a series of reasons - all of which boil down to Portugal’s over-reliance on a mercantilist-colonialist economic model and the impossiblity of keeping it indefinitely (I’ve gone into detail about that in my answer to What if Portugal managed to keep Brazil? and to a lesser extent in my answer to If it had not been for the Peninsular War, might Spain have held on to her colonies in the New World?, which inspired the previous one), Brazil became independent after a brief war with Portugal in 1822–24. By then, the gold mines had long since been exhausted for the most part, but minerals and sugar were still the main Brazilian exports - cotton, tobbacco and cocoa, mostly grown in the Northeast, also deserve a mention. Slavery not merely reigned supreme in the countryside - in Rio de Janeiro, the capital of the nascent Brazilian Empire, and other cities, slaves were performing all of the menial tasks necessary for those cities to merely exist - such as the tigers, slaves who carried barrels with excrement from the houses to the beaches in the absence of sewage systems, and earned their epithet from the white marks that the dripping liquids left on their backs. As per the account of German traveler Carl Seidler:Madame has her slave maids - two, three, six or eight, according to how much the hapless husband opens his purse. Those black maids may never move away from the immediate surroundings of their stern owner. They must understand her and even interpret her glances. It would be too much to demand for the lady, were her the wife of a simple grocer, to serve a cup of water for herself, even if the jar is next to her over the table. How sweet it is to tyrannize! As for cooking and washing, it goes without saying: it was for similar toil of slaves that God created the blacks…Unlike those of our Spanish-speaking cousins, however, our War of Independence wasn’t a grand popular uprising to break the shackles of imperialism; it was a reaction to the Porto Revolution in Portugal, which threatened the autonomy Brazil enjoyed under João VI, and popular participation was minimal - there was much reluctance on the part of the rulers to arm slaves and poor farmers to fight. Brazil emerged from the war heavily indebted and facing new conflicts - agaisnt the Confederation of the Equator in the Northeast and the Argentinians in the South. The economy badly needed a new export to revitalize it, and it came from Portuguese-occupied Cayenne: coffee. From the 1830s onward, coffee exports would fuel the Brazilian economy and give the Brazilian Empire the resources it needed to wage war and sustain its ever-growing bureaucracy. Coffee production was centered in Southwestern Brazil, and - you guessed it - it ran on slave labour.In the 1820s, abolition of slavery wasn’t even seriously considered outside of the far fringes of political discussion; even though there was much pressure from the British to end the Atlantic slave trade, the talks around the subject were fruitless. In the 1830s, even though the Regency was more preoccupied with the centrifugal forces in the provinces leading to civil wars and attempts of secession than with the issue of slavery, the Feijó-Barbacena law was enacted in 1831 to prohibit slave trade - but it was, as the saying goes, “to impress the English”, and the authorities would turn a blind eye to the fact that well over 700.000 slaves would be introduced in the country over the next two decades. The Eusébio de Queiroz law of 1850 finally prohibited slave trade across the Atlantic (even though slaves would keep arriving in small quantities after the law was enacted, it had all but ended by 1860). However, internal slave trade remained very much active, as the North had an excedent of slaves their failing plantations simply had no use for, and so they were sold to work in the South. Plans to enact a law to free all children of slaves so that slavery could wither away without hurting the planters were considered at the time, but shelved due to the Paraguayan War.The Paraguayan War was a pivotal moment for the Brazilian Empire, not merely because it signified the zenith of its power, but also the start of its decadence. There had been an enourmous loss of life and treasure, and a vertiginous increase in the national debt. The sacrifices made by the soldiers weren’t properly rewarded and recognized by the Empire as it had been promised and expected. Besides, during the war, many slave-owning families helped their sons dodge the draft by sending slaves to the frontlines, and many more slaves were promised freedom if they volunteered to fight. The white soldiers who fought beside them became sympathetic with their plight and the abolitionist cause. The Empire’s estrangement with respect to the Army, and its insistence on procrastinating when it came to anti-slavery legislation, made anti-monarchical and republican ideas increasingly popular among the soldiers, creating a fertile ground for the Positivist ideology of some their commanders - who had won the trust and allegiance of their men in Paraguay. The Navy, which was much more cherished by the Empire, remained staunchly monarchist.The abolitionist movement grew rapidly from then on, but the Empire still failed to pass decisive legislation to abolish slavery; in 1871, the Rio Branco Law finally freed all the children of slaves in theory but, in practice, the law was poorly enforced, and the freed ones, being children, had to remain beside their slave mothers living and working for their former owners. Even though public opinion and foreign pressure were increasingly pushing for the end of slavery, the next law that was passed after Rio Branco was the Law of the Sexagenarians of 1885, which tecnically freed all slaves over 60. The law was ridiculous not merely because the life expectancy of slaves was appalingly low, but because those “freed” slaves had to work for 5 more years so as to indemnify their former owners!Between 1822, when Brazil proclaimed independence, to 1888, when slavery was finally abolished, there had been profound changes to the economy of the country, chief among them the slow but steady transition from slave labour to immigrant labour. As Brazil had, on the one hand, always suffered from lack of population - especially in the South - to occupy its enormous expanses of land, and as parts of the ruling class had, on the other hand, serious fears about having too large a black population and felt the need to “whiten” the country so as to make it more prosperous, European immigration was encouraged from the very beggining - starting with the Swiss in Nova Friburgo in 1818. However, in the first stages of immigration, not only was slave labour much more widely used in agriculture, but the immigrants often suffered heavy casualties due to disease and starvation, besides being treated as indentured serfs by their employers - effectively becoming debt slaves as they had to pay off their voyage from Europe and indebt themselves in order to acquire food, clothing, tools and other items their employers monopolized. During the War of Independence, many Europeans were enticed to immigrate to Brazil with promises of free land and animals, only to end up drafted into the Imperial Army. Many European countries outright banned immigration to Brazil for those reasons, and only in the 1850s did the Empire regularize the situation by offering to pay for the immigrants’ voyages and putting some regulations in place to keep the planters from abusing them.After the 1850s though, salaried labour began to consistenly supplant slave labour in plantations all over the country, especially in the coffee plantations in São Paulo - while in the Paraíba Valley coffee had been grown by slaves, in São Paulo it employed immigrant labour. The Paulista coffee planters were more “progressive” than their peers in other regions in the sense that they were more willing to improve rail and port infrastructure and invest in more modern and productive agricultural practices. Immigrants were mainly Italians - being Romance-speaking Catholics, they integrated much better into Brazilian society than the second largest immigrant group, Protestant Germans (much the opposite of what happened in the USA). There were also many Portuguese and Spanish, Christian Syrians and Lebanese (invited by Emperor Pedro II after his visit to the country) and even American Confederates, who were also invited by the Emperor to develop the growing of cotton in Brazil (which was increasing its production after the price hike caused by the American Civil War).The introduction of immigrant labour and its eventual emergence as the main source of labour force in Brazil effectively rendered slavery obsolete by the start of the 1880s at the very least. The Empire, however, had previously relied on three main pillars for its power: the support of a wealthy constituency (the planter class); the collaboration of the Church and the loyalty of the Army. While the country had experienced massive changes, the Empire was way too conservative and rigid to be able to adapt itself to those changes. The parliamentary system by which it operated was ridden with fraud and cronyism and Parliament was constantly dissolved by the Emperor whenever he was dissatisfied with it, and cabinets had an average duration of less than 16 months. In his later years, Pedro II was old and tired and became increasingly disinterested in politics. Add to that the fact that the Empire’s core constituency - the planter class - was divided between slave-owning, traditional planters from the Paraíba Valley - and, to a lesser extent, the North - who were adamantly opposed to the abolition of slavery, and Southern coffee planters, along with many Northerners, who were strongly in favour, and that both the Church and the Army had both ceased to support the Empire due to its constant intransigence in those institutions. The centralist project of the Monarchy had once again become more trouble than it was worth, and resolving conflicting interests between different regions and interest groups with politics had become increasingly impractical. The Empire desperately needed to do something.While the Emperor was conveniently traveling abroad, Imperial Princess Regent Isabel summoned a new cabinet in the 10th March 1888, with João Alfredo Correia de Oliveira replacing the Baron of Cotegipe (who had been in favour of the Sexagenarians’ Law, but opposed to ending slavery) as PM. Finally, in the 13th May 1888, the laconic Golden Law was passed and signed into law by the Princess:Article 1: From this date, slavery is declared abolished in Brazil.Article 2: All dispositions to the contrary are revoked.While many in the country were jubilant, and the passing of the law did much to increase the popularity of the Princess - some freedmen formed a paramilitary group, the Black Guard, devoted to supporting her - it is true that there was much discontent amongst the few remaining slaveowners in the country. It is commonly thought that the Proclamation of the Republic one year later was triggered by the Golden Law, when it was simply not the case - even though Brazilian monarchists of the day like to float around the notion that the Monarchy altruistically commited political suicide so the slaves could be free. There wasn’t some kind of underground gathering of raging Brazilian planters clad in black and grubbing their hands as they planned the demise of the Empire - and waited 18 months to do it for some reason. The Empire fell because it had become too weak to defend itself and no one was willing to lift one finger to keep it alive - much less bleed and die for it. The Empire was overthrown by 600 soldiers who thought they were going on a demonstration and not a coup, and led by a monarchist marshall who was literally dragged from what was, for all intents and purposes, his deathbed. The Republic wasn’t cheered, and the Empire wasn’t mourned - and if all of this isn’t a testimony of its impotence, I don’t know what else could possibly be.TL;DR: Slavery was abolished late because the economy was addicted to slavery for decades, and the Empire couldn’t afford to lose the support of its constituency of planters by enacting too much anti-slavery legislation too soon.

“The Best Place in the World to Be a Slave.“The Myth that Antebellum American Slavery Was the Worst Slave System Ever. A persistent corollary of the absolute condemnation of slavery is that American slavery was the worst slave system in the history of the world, defined by the “most inhumane conditions you can possibly imagine.” The opposite was and is true. American slavery was much better than most of the slave systems in history, including new age slavery, and the statistics prove it. American slaves stand out as the only documented slave population in history to increase naturally. Shortly before Emancipation, about half of American slaves were age 16 or younger. Slaves in other societies decreased over time or their increase was undocumented. About 2.2 million slaves went to the British West Indies, but at the time of their full emancipation on August 1, 1838, there were only 670,000 slaves living there: a huge population decrease. Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois said American slavery was not the worst: “Then amid all crouched the freed slave . . . He had emerged from slavery, -- not the worst slavery in the world, not a slavery that made all life unbearable, rather a slavery that had here and there something of kindliness, fidelity, and happiness . . .” Du Bois observed also that the Spirit of 1776 softened relations between blacks and whites. One reparations advocate characterizes the French slave system in Haiti as the worst. Thomas Sowell cites other slave systems throughout the world as having discouraged manumission, despite a claim by a slavery scholar that North American barriers to manumission were distinctive.Many slaves with good masters proudly remembered that others called them “free.” “Folks in Crawfordville” said Georgia Baker, “called us ‘Stephens’ Free [Negroes].’” The patrollers referred to Henry Bland’s owner’s slaves as “free,” too, and his owner was so good that the slaves didn’t care if they were free or not at Emancipation; they all stayed on afterwards, and most died on the plantation. Emma Chapman remembers all the servants on her plantation being called “free” by the other slaves.Rev. John Wesley, in a letter to William Wilberforce, made the claim that American slavery was the worst: “Go on, in the name of God and in the power of his might, till even American slavery (the vilest that ever saw the sun) shall vanish away before it.” Nevertheless, as quoted in the Appendix, John Wesley noted the affection slaves had for their master on one plantation he visited. Abolitionists had an incentive to declare the entire institution “the worst,” for this made their opposition more powerful. Modern Afrocentric scholars still contend American slavery was the worst. According to Afrocentrist theorist Dr. Molefi Kete Asante in The African American Warrant for Reparations: The Crime of European Enslavement of Africans and its Consequences, slavery was unromantic, evil, ferocious and brutal, corrupting in every way, and American slavery was the most degrading of all.Advantages of North American Versus West Indian & South American Slavery. North America was a better place to be a slave than the West Indies, Central America or South America. Equating slave life in the United States to slavery in other parts of the New World is grossly inaccurate. One key factor making life more pleasant for American slaves was that their owners usually lived on the slave plantations, unlike the West Indies. Resident slaveholders better understood the needs of their servants, how to keep their servants reasonably happy, and more often worshiped with their servants. Slave owners usually treated their servants better than overseers did.Slavery in the West Indies and Brazil was markedly more deadly and oppressive than slavery in the United States. Massive slave uprisings in the New World were exclusively in South America and the West Indies, not the United States. The Haitian Revolution and several Brazilian slave rebellions were full-scale wars, not just uprisings, and they resulted in slaves taking control of whole provinces in Brazil and the entire country of Haiti. American slave uprisings were tiny, fleeting affairs by comparison. The most prominent uprising in American history was led by Nat Turner, a mentally deranged slave. The United States never experienced a slave revolt on the magnitude of those famous foreign upheavals . . . despite slaves outnumbering whites by huge margins on all the large plantations. Knowledge of the Haitian Revolution, referred to as “St. Domingo” or similar references, and concern for that possibility in the United States, encouraged many slave owners to be kind to their servants. The Haitian Revolution helped antebellum American slaves by encouraging planters to be more generous, even as it confirmed them in their desire for control over movement, meetings and education.Most scholars recognize the inaccuracy of using West Indian slavery as a comparison to Southern slavery, such as in the case of the legendary cruelty of slave drivers, a reputation earned in the West Indies but not fairly transposed to the South. Some horrendous Caribbean atrocities, with illustrations, appear in From Slavery to Freedom – A History of African Americans, but Caribbean blacks are not generally referred to as “African-Americans.” Slaves in the American South were treated much better than in the Caribbean: “It is in tropical culture, where annual profits often equal the whole capital of plantations, that negro life is most recklessly sacrificed. It is the agriculture of the West Indies, which has been for centuries prolific of fabulous wealth, that has engulfed millions of the African race. It is in Cuba, at this day, whose revenues are reckoned by millions, and whose planters are princes, that we see in the servile class, the coarsest fare, the most exhausting and unremitting toil, and even the absolute destruction of a portion of its numbers every year.”Due to the differences in the health of the two climates, white and black people in the North American colonies, and later the United States, lived longer than people in the West Indies. Caribbean planters therefore preferred to obtain adult slaves in Africa, while American slaves over time became almost exclusively native-born. Planters in the United States encouraged slaves to have children, while slave owners in the West Indies and South America discouraged it. The abortion of slave babies took place in the West Indies, but rarely in the United States. The reason for this disparity in procreation had to do with the “break-even” point, the point at which owners started realizing profits from their investment in rearing slave children, age 27 by the best calculation. In the West Indies, slave children tended to die before the investment was recouped, but U.S. slaves lived longer, and slave children and their parents were therefore a better investment. Disease in the West Indies cut down on the number of white people, too. European troops sent to the West Indies suffered horrific losses due to disease. European mortality was one reason Toussaint L ‘Overture and his revolutionary successors in Haiti were able to defeat the French, the best soldiers in the world at the time.In the West Indies and Latin America, the male-female sex ratios were unbalanced. Male slaves significantly outnumbered female slaves, due to the constant importation of male slaves from Africa. The balanced sex ratios in the United States, due to the natural increase of the slave population, promoted more harmonious and balanced family relationships. New age slaves, of course, experience the worst possible sex ratio, because they live with zero members of the opposite sex.Antebellum slaves benefitted from superior technology, just as their owners did, in comparison to people living in Brazil. Louisiana sugar plantations, for example, had safer and more advanced technology than their Brazilian counterparts, were working more virgin soil, and benefitted by the lower costs of other goods and services by virtue of being in the United States, a more advanced nation. There were multiple advantages to living in the United States, irrespective of race, those advantages created more wealth, and the slaves received a portion of that increased material prosperity compared to slaves elsewhere.Being brought to what became the United States of America, rather than Brazil, the West Indies, and other parts of Central and South America, was a supreme stroke of good luck for the new slave and the slave’s descendants. Only 5.4% of all African slaves brought to the New World were brought to the United States or the 13 colonies. Those 5.4% brought to North America would have offspring at prodigious rates, so that eventually, over one-third of New World slaves lived in the United States. The United States was a better place to have children.The slave’s life was worth less in the West Indies, and the owners and overseers tended to be less solicitous of the health of their slaves. Slaves were more valuable in the United States in large part because the United States outlawed the slave trade in 1807, effective on January 1, 1808, the very first day it could be outlawed under the compromise worked out at the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Slaves were legally imported into Cuba and Brazil until the middle of the nineteenth century. Under the inexorable law of supply and demand, slaves became more valuable when the supply dried up. Illegal importation continued on a very small scale in the U.S., but importation decreased markedly when made illegal. From the time of the American Revolution until Emancipation, the life of the slave in the South noticeably improved.The law of supply and demand always affected the lives of slaves. The ancient world experienced the extended Spartacus Slave Revolt of 73-71 B.C. while Rome was still expanding and conquering new territories and slaves. Improvement in the treatment of slaves when new supplies of slaves were terminated – the law of supply and demand at work – was noted by anti-slavery historian Edward Gibbon in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. “But when the principal nations of Europe, Asia, and Africa were united under the laws of one sovereign, the source of foreign supplies [of slaves] flowed with much less abundance, and the Romans were reduced to the milder but more tedious method of propagation. In their numerous families, and particularly in their country estates, they encouraged the marriage of their slaves. The sentiments of nature, the habits of education, and the possession of a dependent species of property, contributed to alleviate the hardships of servitude. The existence of a slave became an object of greater value, and though his happiness still depended on the temper and circumstances of the master, the humanity of the latter, instead of being restrained by fear, was encouraged by the sense of his own interest.” Gibbon’s keen observation also summarizes the dynamics of slavery in America. When the external slave trade ends in a healthy climate, it has always been in the interests of masters to encourage the birth of slave babies, and that process is best accomplished with adequate nutrition and reasonably kind treatment. The abolition of the international slave trade improved the lives of slaves in the short run more than Emancipation itself, given the dreadful conditions ex-slaves faced from 1863 through 1868.The invention of the cotton gin, they say, prolonged and increased slavery in the United States, but it also had the same effect as the abolition of the African slave trade. The cotton gin increased the value of slaves. By markedly decreasing the cost of making cotton fabric out of raw cotton, cotton ginning created a better market for cotton cloth and a greater demand for volumes of the raw material. The enslaved were a critical part of a vibrant, international industrial system.Dr. Frank Tannenbaum tried to prove that slavery in Brazil was easier than slavery in the South, but he really only showed that slaves in Brazil had greater access to freedom through manumission. In terms of food, clothing, shelter and general work conditions, Dr. Ulrich B. Phillips was correct in asserting that Southern slaves had it best. Historian Carl Degler, through research, concluded that slaves in the United States were treated better than those in Brazil. The beneficial effects of cutting off the African slave trade outweighed the legal benefits for slaves in Brazil. Even though Spanish and Brazilian colonial slaves may have had legal rights unknown to American slaves, Southern slaveholders were more interested in seeing their servants have children who grew to adulthood, and to do that had to provide well for them.American slaves were more rapidly cut off from their African heritage, acculturated in European civilization and lived better than their counterparts in the West Indies. It was an advantage for American slaves to separate from their African origins. “Brought from the African wilds to constitute the laboring class of a pioneering society in the new world, the heathen slaves had to be trained to meet the needs of their environment.” Their new cultural environment fortunately differed markedly from Africa. By 1860, there were almost zero African-born slaves in the American South. African traditions and beliefs were strongest in the worst West Indian slave environments. Bemoaning the loss of African culture rings hollow. The most memorable cultural attributes retained by West Indian slaves included Vodun or Voodoo, a complex pantheon of spirits, witchcraft and associated beliefs from West Africa. Sorcery, animal sacrifice, and the conjuring of many different spirits in special rites accompanied with drums, rattles, dancing and chants hardly qualify as sterling cultural advantages. Those practices have not survived very well in modern West Africa. Adherence to indigenous African religions is strongest in the most poverty-stricken nations, including Haiti, Benin and Togo.Terrible Aspects of Slavery in the Arab World. The Arabs’ treatment of black Africans can aptly be termed an African Holocaust. Arabs killed more Africans in transit, especially when crossing the Sahara Desert, than Europeans and Americans, and over more centuries, both before and after the years of the Atlantic slave trade. Arab Muslims began extracting millions of black African slaves centuries before Christian nations did. Arab slave traders removed slaves from Africa for about 13 centuries, compared to three centuries of the Atlantic slave trade. African slaves transported by Arabs across the Sahara Desert died more often than slaves making the Middle Passage to the New World by ship. Slaves invariably died within five years if they worked in the Ottoman Empire’s Sahara salt mines. Black Africans did not enjoy immunity to many of the diseases found in the Arab world, which also resulted in high death rates.Slaveholders in the Muslim world often castrated black African male slaves to serve as harem guards. This is a prime reason there are not many communities of blacks living in the non-African Muslim world today, despite the millions of black African slaves sold into the Muslim world. Many African boys did not survive their castration surgery. As late as 1903, there were still 194 African eunuchs in service to the Ottoman ruling family.African women were enslaved by Arabs more than African men. Few black slave children survived in the Muslim world. In 1860, when 3,000 black female slaves were set free in Zanzibar, only 5% of them had children. Because under Islamic law a concubine bearing the child of the master could become a wife and her children would then share in the inheritance, Middle Eastern wives and children of masters had a strong incentive to interfere with the sex lives of female slaves and cause brutal abortions. Islamic jurisprudence historically allowed abortions in the first four months of pregnancy, long before the West allowed it. Islamic tradition supports the view that the soul enters the fetus at 120 days. If a concubine had the only son, the threat to the wife was even greater. The Koran allowed Muslim men to have as many concubines as they could afford, in addition to four wives.The Arab history of anti-black racism predates European anti-black racism by several centuries. The early Islamic empire exhibited all the characteristics of anti-black racism, and blacks suffered the lowest form of bondage. By 869 A.D., black African slaves in southern Iraq, the despised Zanj, launched an extended slave revolt that threatened Baghdad until 883 A.D. The main reasons we have not heard more about the horrors of slavery in the Muslim world are that Muslims did not express moral outrage against slavery and wrote no abolitionist literature against the institution of slavery. Dr. Thomas Sowell characterizes the moral indignation against New World slavery, and the lack of any such indignation against the Muslim or non-Western world, as “selective moral indignation.” The moral outrage against slavery was and is, in the grand historical context, a European-inspired cause gaining significant traction only in the 1760s. Europeans took photographs of chained black African slaves in Arab slave-trading vessels on the East Coast of Africa in the 1880s. Slavery persisted openly in Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries in the latter half of the twentieth century, 100 years after slavery was abolished in the United States. As late as 1960, African Muslims still sold slaves when they arrived on pilgrimages, as a way to finance their pilgrimages. Arab nations lagged far behind the rest of the world in abolishing slavery: Saudi Arabia and Yemen in 1962, United Arab Emirates in 1963, Oman in 1970 and Mauritania officially in 1981. Today, according to U.S. State Department figures, Muslim nations condone international human trafficking more than Western countries do.David Livingstone observed in Africa the horrendous slave trading practices of Arab and pagan slave traders, decades after Great Britain had begun to suppress the international slave trade, and almost a century after Lord Mansfield, with the stroke of a pen, freed slaves in England. The Ottoman Empire resisted British efforts to suppress slavery and the slave trade. Over the course of 70 years, 2,000 British sailors died to free 160,000 slaves. While Islam urged improved treatment of slaves in some ways, the rapid expansion of the Muslim empire rapidly increased the number of slaves, leading to crueler treatment. Africa and the Middle East never developed the moral abolitionist fervor seen in Western nations. Slavery is now most prominent in Africa.From the time of the Crusades until the early 1800’s, Barbary pirates or corsairs from Muslim North Africa raided European coasts and waters, selling captive Europeans as slaves in North African ports and Istanbul. Barbary corsairs attacked shipping in the Mediterranean Sea and Atlantic Ocean, raiding the coasts of Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Britain, Ireland, and Africa for slaves. Some Mediterranean islands and coasts in Spain and Italy were abandoned due to the threat of Barbary slave raiding. The United States initially paid tribute to the Barbary pirates to obtain the return of American captives. After building ships, the United States fought the First and Second Barbary Wars to stop this slave trading and piracy. In fact, the desire to defend American shipping and sailors from Barbary piracy gave re-birth to the U.S. Navy. The Marine Hymn refers to the Battle of Derne on “the shores of Tripoli.” The traditional Mameluke sword worn by Marine officers today is based on the one given Marine First Lt. Presley O’Bannon by Prince Hamet of Tripoli.Happiness. It is grossly inaccurate to characterize slaves as unhappy because of the circumstances of their servitude. In his Foreword to Remembering Slavery, Dr. Robin D.G. Kelley asks the rhetorical question how slaves could have survived without laughter, happiness, love, good times, healthy relationships, and self-esteem. In asking this question, we have the answer: Slaves enjoyed life with those vital forces. Genetics and mental attitude primarily define what it means to be happy, not life circumstances. Why do we think happiness comes from the life circumstances of material success, status, big homes, freedom of action, a particular job and top management responsibility? Aristotle said, “Happiness depends upon ourselves.” For a variety of reasons, antebellum slaves were about as happy as their owners.The Slave Narratives and the foreign and Northern observers quoted in the Appendix portray much happiness among the slaves prior to Emancipation. “We was always treated good and kind and well cared for,” Ellen Claibourn recalled, “and we was happy.” Rabid abolitionist Fanny Kemble, one of the few white abolitionists to live temporarily as an adult on a slave plantation, “passed some time on two . . . plantations where the negroes esteemed themselves well off.” “Dem was good old days,” Aunt Easter Jackson reminisced, “plenty ter eat and a cabin o’ sticks and dirt to call yo’ own. Had good times, too . . .” Charles Dickens, who despised the institution, wrote, “every candid man must admit that even a slave might be happy enough with a good master.” Happy slaves do not justify slavery, but they help explain how slavery truly worked.Happiness is tough to measure, but one way to do it is to look at suicide statistics. We’ve already seen that modern prisoners are 20 times more likely to commit suicide than antebellum slaves. On that dismal topic, modern British researchers found female prisoners were 20 times more likely to commit suicide than the general population; they earlier found male prisoners were five times more likely to commit suicide than the general population. Slaves in 1850 had an extremely low suicide rate, one in 10,000: one-third the white suicide rate. The suicide rate for American blacks in 2004 was 5.2 per 100,000; less than the 12.3 per 100,000 suicide rate of American whites in the same year; these statistics have not varied much from year to year, except lately the suicide rate for black males is rising almost to the national average. In both modern and antebellum times, blacks were and still are less likely than whites to commit suicide. It’s possible African-Americans have a genetic predisposition to be less depressed than other Americans.Rev. Nehemiah Adams of Boston noticed the happiness of slaves while observing their choral performance. “ The impression here made upon me, or rather confirmed and illustrated afresh, was, that the slaves, so far as I had seen, were unconscious of any feeling of restraint; the natural order of life proceeded with them; they did not act like a driven, overborne people, stealing about with sulky looks, imbruted by abuse, crazed, stupidly melancholic. People habitually miserable could not have conducted the musical service of public worship as they did; their looks and manner gave agreeable testimony that, in spite of their condition, they had sources of enjoyment and ways of manifesting it which suggested to a spectator no thought of involuntary servitude.” Music lifts our spirits, as Benny Dillard indicated when caught by surprise singing in his yard: “’Scuse me, Missy, I didn’t know nobody was listenin’ to dem old songs. I loves to sing ‘em when I gits lonesome and blue. But won’t you come up on my porch and have a cheer in de shade?”“To live happily is an inward power of the soul,” Marcus Aurelius wrote. The Apostle Paul learned how to be content under all circumstances, even in prison. Modern “happiness research” shows that happiness is not primarily derived from the circumstances under which one is situated. Happiness is 50% genetic, 40% intentional, and only 10% circumstantial, according to Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky, a professor of psychology at the University of California - Riverside and author of The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want. Dr. Lyubomirsky observes that most people are surprised at the minor role played by life circumstances. Deliberate control over how one acts and thinks can affect happiness, according to Dr. Lyubomirsky. Behaviors leading to happiness include gratitude, a very common behavior among antebellum slaves; forgiveness, taught by Christianity; church involvement, which included many slaves; acts of kindness; and enjoying positive moments. Slaves and ex-slaves practiced these characteristics. The antebellum slave’s lifestyle was conducive to happiness. Slaves and ex-slaves could be happy even after experiencing sorrow, as shown by the life of Mary Ann Cord. A clinically depressed Mark Twain, overemphasizing the role of life circumstances, thought Mary Ann Cord was so happy and full of humor that she had never had any trouble in life. He was astounded to hear otherwise and put down in writing what he heard. Mary Ann Cord’s story of having her husband and seven children sold away, and her subsequent reunion with her youngest son Henry during the War, form the basis of Twain’s A True Story, Repeated Word for Word As I Heard It.Physical exercise and routine provide acknowledged mental health benefits, including help with mild to moderate depression. Regular physical exercise reduces anxiety and panic attacks. One suggestion to cure depression is to perform simple physical tasks that one can perform successfully, which is exactly what slaves in the field did. Regular routines help with bipolar disorder. Maintaining consistent sleep and wake times preserves circadian rhythm, which is helpful in dealing with bipolar disorder and depression. Ex-slaves were consistently woken by regular horn, bell or other sound early in the morning, at the same time every day of the season. Prisoners behave better if they can rely upon a schedule and know what lies ahead in their day-to-day prison lives.Sunlight, light therapy, heliotherapy – by whatever name known – also has significant mental and physical health benefits. Heliotherapy helps depressed patients faster than anti-depressant drugs. Slaves working in the fields – unlike prison inmates – obtained plenty of sunlight, which is better than artificial sunlight. Breathing fresh air is of course better than inhaling stale or polluted air. Early prison physicians believed sunlight and air were necessary for good prisoner health and that close confinement was bad.Exercise and physical conditioning offer many benefits. Exercise improves or maintains a healthy heart, weight, bone density, muscle strength, joint mobility, immune system, general physiology, sleep patterns, psychological well-being, hormone production, nerve growth and cognitive functioning. It can help improve, prevent or reduce the effects of diabetes, heart disease, dementia, depression, insomnia, neuromuscular diseases, alcohol-induced brain damage, surgical risks, high blood pressure, obesity, neurodegenerative diseases and low pain thresholds. Slaves typically worked long, physically demanding hours. Exercise helps the brain through neurogenesis, mood enhancement and endorphin release. Maintaining levels of physical activity reduces the number of days one suffers from mental and physical sicknesses. Physical conditioning improves self-esteem and happiness by improving attractiveness and keeping one’s weight down. Just as in today’s fitness-conscious world, Frederick Douglass was proud of the physical condition of both his grandmother and his mother.Farmers, in particular, are healthier and live longer than people in an urban or non-agricultural setting. The main occupational hazards in farming today, heavy equipment accidents and electrocution, were not present on antebellum plantations. On a day-to-day basis, there is less overall stress in farm work. Farmers have high job satisfaction because of the job characteristics of farming. Even though slaves did not have the same entrepreneurial satisfaction as land and business owners, they identified with the financial success of their owners, were proud of it, and obtained benefits from the plantation’s success. Minnie Davis explained this vicarious dynamic: “The Crawfords were considered very uppity people and their slaves were uppish, too.”The lifestyles of the writers and intellectuals who dealt with African-American affairs after Emancipation were not likely to appreciate these advantages. Our sedentary modern lifestyles cause problems. Today, we have to hire special drivers to get us to exercise. We call these drivers “personal trainers.” Leaders of our exercise videotapes and classes call out exercise cadences, just as the slaves worked to cadences or songs. We wish for motivation to exercise.Because of our sedentary lifestyles, in and out of prison, we gain weight. Obesity has reached epidemic levels. People spend billions of dollars every year to lose weight. Much of that money is ineffective to accomplish the goal of weight loss. Diets don’t work. Heart disease, diabetes, cancer, mental problems and other conditions afflict us these days, and we are now missing the beneficial effects of physical exercise. Slavery provided an excellent weight-control regimen. Hard work succeeds better than all of the diets, foods, pills, exercise programs, videotapes, books, magazines, weight loss camps and weight loss gadgets put together. Obesity existed in the slave days, but among the field hands, it was much less of a problem. Physical conditioning improved the well-being of slaves, just as modern prisoners realize its benefits. Take a good look at the physique of non-athletic Americans, and you will have no trouble appreciating that we looked better and were in many ways healthier during our agricultural pasts. Farm work has always been physically demanding, and before rural electrification, it was even more onerous.Plantation records indicate slaves were healthy and lost few days to illnesses or disabilities. “Hardly anybody even got sick on de plantation,” Mrs. Amanda Jackson observed. A number of ex-slaves noticed that their people were sick less before freedom, for several reasons. Physicians advised planters on ways to reduce illnesses and disease. “Slaves never got sick much,” agreed William “Bill” Henry Towns. Special hospitals or infirmaries were built on many large plantations. “There was little if any sickness,” Ike Derricotte remembered, “but Colonel Davis employed a doctor who visited the plantation each week.” Slaves lived on isolated plantations, stayed there most of the time, and were not exposed to as many epidemics, contagious viruses and seasonal illnesses on upland plantations. Lowland plantations were less healthy, but blacks had greater resistance to tropical diseases than their white owners. Physical contact with whites who left the plantation and came back with viruses was also restricted insofar as the field hands were concerned. In addition, field hands spent much of their time outside, physically separated from contagious workers who might infect them. The much-maligned pass system, enforced with mounted patrols, took on a public health function, especially during epidemics when the need for quarantine would be great. A highly contagious illness might kill several dozen bondspeople at a time, and their owners undoubtedly protected their servants from such epidemics. “There wasn’ much sickness,” said Lizzie Jones, “and seldom anybody die.” Most planters enforced cleanliness and neatness through on-site “public health” standards, and made sure the water supply was good and clean. With restricted alcohol intake, plentiful food, sunshine, warm log cabins, good clothes and superior cardiac health, African-Americans were better able to ward off illnesses. “Child, I wish I could call back dem days,” Mrs. Della Harris wished, because “Muma said people lived so much longer because they took care of themselves. . . Folks are so indifferent now I am afraid to say. Pshaw. Colored folks now, some are messy an’ don’t know how to be polite.”The quantity and variety of fruits and vegetables, made greater by economies of scale and specialization, contributed to slave health. Plantation gardens were often huge and planted with a wide variety of vegetables. Fruit orchards were more common on plantations than on small farms. Some planters provided one huge common garden, while others let their servants tend individual gardens, but variety and quantity would be enhanced through either method. Unlike peasants in Europe, and some poor people in the North, American slaves virtually never starved to death.Having socially acceptable sex at an early age with one’s life partner, a common practice among slaves, promotes happiness, too. No citations needed. All normal humans love to be touched by someone who cares. It is crystal clear the majority of slaves could have been happy. Science contrasts sharply with thoughts first initiated by those far away from Southern plantations, abolitionists unable to observe actual slave happiness or unhappiness. Placing too much emphasis on material differences, power and social stratification as a source of unhappiness overburdens the small part of happiness that is due to life circumstances.Happiness is a decision one makes with the genetic predisposition given to a person, not usually something thrust upon us from external or natural forces. The materialistic view of life holds that the people with the most wealth are the happiest, and that those who are without must be miserable until they obtain wealth or a fairer distribution of it . . . but that’s not reality. Those who sacrifice love for money tend to be unhappy, as Judeo-Christian doctrine has been preaching for millennia. Sometimes people who “have it made” in our eyes are miserable. Millionaires and billionaires commit suicide. Most slaves were happy. Abraham Lincoln’s letter to a friend illustrates both modern scientific and ancient religious doctrines remarkably well:BLOOMINGTON, ILL., September 27, 1841.To Miss Mary Speed, Louisville, Ky.MY FRIEND: By the way, a fine example was presented on board the boat for contemplating the effect of condition upon human happiness. A gentleman had purchased twelve negroes in different parts of Kentucky, and was taking them to a farm in the South. They were chained six and six together. A small iron clevis was around the left wrist of each, and this fastened to the main chain by a shorter one, at a convenient distance from the others, so that the negroes were strung together precisely like so many fish upon a trotline. In this condition they were being separated forever from the scenes of their childhood, their friends, their fathers and mothers, and brothers and sisters, and many of them from their wives and children, and going into perpetual slavery where the lash of the master is proverbially more ruthless and unrelenting than any other where; and yet amid all these distressing circumstances, as we would think them, they were the most cheerful and apparently happy creatures on board. One, whose offence for which he had been sold was an overfondness for his wife, played the fiddle almost continually, and the others danced, sang, cracked jokes, and played various games with cards from day to day. How true it is that 'God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb,' or in other words, that he renders the worst of human conditions tolerable, while he permits the best to be nothing better than tolerable. To return to the narrative: When we reached Springfield I stayed but one day, when I started on this tedious circuit where I now am. Do you remember my going to the city, while I was in Kentucky, to have a tooth extracted, and making a failure of it? Well, that same old tooth got to paining me so much that about a week since I had it torn out, bringing with it a bit of the jawbone, the consequence of which is that my mouth is now so sore that I can neither talk nor eat.Your sincere friend, A. LINCOLN.Perhaps this scene gave rise to Lincoln’s stated belief that “Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.” Lincoln, subject to depression, believed the largely erroneous idea that slavery was significantly worse in some areas of the South than in others. The same human virtues and vices, economic incentives, laws, religion, people and culture meant that slavery in the South was more or less consistent throughout. No convincing evidence supports the common misconception that the institution of slavery within the United States was significantly “worse elsewhere.” Proximity to free states may have encouraged some masters to be nicer, to prevent escape attempts. Some terrains were more conducive to an easier life. Most plantations were founded by people from other states as westward movement progressed. Unquestionably, slavery was worse in the West Indies, South America and the Muslim world.”Excerpts from Amazon.com: Prison & Slavery - A Surprising Comparison eBook: John Dewar Gleissner: Kindle Store (footnotes omitted from Quora answer).

No. It was an accepted institution at the time. American slavery was far better for the slave than slavery in the West Indies, Brazil or the Middle East and was better for their descendants today. It also surpassed New Age Slavery, modern mass incarceration, and chemical slavery, drug addiction.I am sick of the constant shaming about slavery 150 years ago in the USA, claims for reparations, the ignorance of modern people who only know the abolitionist and socialist views of slavery, political correctness and modern refusal to recognize what the ex-slaves actually said. That’s why I wrote the following and put the ex-slaves’ names in bold:The Best Place in the World to Be a Slave.The Myth that Antebellum American Slavery Was the Worst Slave System Ever. A persistent corollary of the absolute condemnation of slavery is that American slavery was the worst slave system in the history of the world, defined by the “most inhumane conditions you can possibly imagine.” The opposite was and is true. American slavery was much better than most of the slave systems in history, including new age slavery, and the statistics prove it. American slaves stand out as the only documented slave population in history to increase naturally. Shortly before Emancipation, about half of American slaves were age 16 or younger. Slaves in other societies decreased over time or their increase was undocumented. About 2.2 million slaves went to the British West Indies, but at the time of their full emancipation on August 1, 1838, there were only 670,000 slaves living there: a huge population decrease. Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois said American slavery was not the worst: “Then amid all crouched the freed slave . . . He had emerged from slavery, -- not the worst slavery in the world, not a slavery that made all life unbearable, rather a slavery that had here and there something of kindliness, fidelity, and happiness . . .” Du Bois observed also that the Spirit of 1776 softened relations between blacks and whites. One reparations advocate characterizes the French slave system in Haiti as the worst. Thomas Sowell cites other slave systems throughout the world as having discouraged manumission, despite a claim by a slavery scholar that North American barriers to manumission were distinctive.Many slaves with good masters proudly remembered that others called them “free.” “Folks in Crawfordville” said Georgia Baker, “called us ‘Stephens’ Free Niggers.’” The patrollers referred to Henry Bland’s owner’s slaves as “free,” too, and his owner was so good that the slaves didn’t care if they were free or not at Emancipation; they all stayed on afterwards, and most died on the plantation. Emma Chapman remembers all the servants on her plantation being called “free” by the other slaves.Rev. John Wesley, in a letter to William Wilberforce, made the claim that American slavery was the worst: “Go on, in the name of God and in the power of his might, till even American slavery (the vilest that ever saw the sun) shall vanish away before it.” Nevertheless, as quoted in the Appendix, John Wesley noted the affection slaves had for their master on one plantation he visited. Abolitionists had an incentive to declare the entire institution “the worst,” for this made their opposition more powerful. Modern Afrocentric scholars still contend American slavery was the worst. According to Afrocentrist theorist Dr. Molefi Kete Asante in The African American Warrant for Reparations: The Crime of European Enslavement of Africans and its Consequences, slavery was unromantic, evil, ferocious and brutal, corrupting in every way, and American slavery was the most degrading of all.Advantages of North American Versus West Indian & South American Slavery. North America was a better place to be a slave than the West Indies, Central America or South America. Equating slave life in the United States to slavery in other parts of the New World is grossly inaccurate. One key factor making life more pleasant for American slaves was that their owners usually lived on the slave plantations, unlike the West Indies. Resident slaveholders better understood the needs of their servants, how to keep their servants reasonably happy, and more often worshiped with their servants. Slave owners usually treated their servants better than overseers did.Slavery in the West Indies and Brazil was markedly more deadly and oppressive than slavery in the United States. Massive slave uprisings in the New World were exclusively in South America and the West Indies, not the United States. The Haitian Revolution and several Brazilian slave rebellions were full-scale wars, not just uprisings, and they resulted in slaves taking control of whole provinces in Brazil and the entire country of Haiti. American slave uprisings were tiny, fleeting affairs by comparison. The most prominent uprising in American history was led by Nat Turner, a mentally deranged slave. The United States never experienced a slave revolt on the magnitude of those famous foreign upheavals . . . despite slaves outnumbering whites by huge margins on all the large plantations. Knowledge of the Haitian Revolution, referred to as “St. Domingo” or similar references, and concern for that possibility in the United States, encouraged many slave owners to be kind to their servants. The Haitian Revolution helped antebellum American slaves by encouraging planters to be more generous, even as it confirmed them in their desire for control over movement, meetings and education.Most scholars recognize the inaccuracy of using West Indian slavery as a comparison to Southern slavery, such as in the case of the legendary cruelty of slave drivers, a reputation earned in the West Indies but not fairly transposed to the South. Some horrendous Caribbean atrocities, with illustrations, appear in From Slavery to Freedom – A History of African Americans, but Caribbean blacks are not generally referred to as “African-Americans.” Slaves in the American South were treated much better than in the Caribbean, per Karl Marx: “It is in tropical culture, where annual profits often equal the whole capital of plantations, that negro life is most recklessly sacrificed. It is the agriculture of the West Indies, which has been for centuries prolific of fabulous wealth, that has engulfed millions of the African race. It is in Cuba, at this day, whose revenues are reckoned by millions, and whose planters are princes, that we see in the servile class, the coarsest fare, the most exhausting and unremitting toil, and even the absolute destruction of a portion of its numbers every year.”Due to the differences in the health of the two climates, white and black people in the North American colonies, and later the United States, lived longer than people in the West Indies. Caribbean planters therefore preferred to obtain adult slaves in Africa, while American slaves over time became almost exclusively native-born. Planters in the United States encouraged slaves to have children, while slave owners in the West Indies and South America discouraged it. The abortion of slave babies took place in the West Indies, but rarely in the United States. The reason for this disparity in procreation had to do with the “break-even” point, the point at which owners started realizing profits from their investment in rearing slave children, age 27 by the best calculation. In the West Indies, slave children tended to die before the investment was recouped, but U.S. slaves lived longer, and slave children and their parents were therefore a better investment. Disease in the West Indies cut down on the number of white people, too. European troops sent to the West Indies suffered horrific losses due to disease. European mortality was one reason Toussaint L ‘Overture and his revolutionary successors in Haiti were able to defeat the French, the best soldiers in the world at the time.In the West Indies and Latin America, the male-female sex ratios were unbalanced. Male slaves significantly outnumbered female slaves, due to the constant importation of male slaves from Africa. The balanced sex ratios in the United States, due to the natural increase of the slave population, promoted more harmonious and balanced family relationships. New age slaves, of course, experience the worst possible sex ratio, because they live with zero members of the opposite sex.Antebellum slaves benefitted from superior technology, just as their owners did, in comparison to people living in Brazil. Louisiana sugar plantations, for example, had safer and more advanced technology than their Brazilian counterparts, were working more virgin soil, and benefitted by the lower costs of other goods and services by virtue of being in the United States, a more advanced nation. There were multiple advantages to living in the United States, irrespective of race, those advantages created more wealth, and the slaves received a portion of that increased material prosperity compared to slaves elsewhere.Being brought to what became the United States of America, rather than Brazil, the West Indies, and other parts of Central and South America, was a supreme stroke of good luck for the new slave and the slave’s descendants. Only 5.4% of all African slaves brought to the New World were brought to the United States or the 13 colonies. Those 5.4% brought to North America would have offspring at prodigious rates, so that eventually, over one-third of New World slaves lived in the United States. The United States was a better place to have children.The slave’s life was worth less in the West Indies, and the owners and overseers tended to be less solicitous of the health of their slaves. Slaves were more valuable in the United States in large part because the United States outlawed the slave trade in 1807, effective on January 1, 1808, the very first day it could be outlawed under the compromise worked out at the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Slaves were legally imported into Cuba and Brazil until the middle of the nineteenth century. Under the inexorable law of supply and demand, slaves became more valuable when the supply dried up. Illegal importation continued on a very small scale in the U.S., but importation decreased markedly when made illegal. From the time of the American Revolution until Emancipation, the life of the slave in the South noticeably improved.The law of supply and demand always affected the lives of slaves. The ancient world experienced the extended Spartacus Slave Revolt of 73-71 B.C. while Rome was still expanding and conquering new territories and slaves. Improvement in the treatment of slaves when new supplies of slaves were terminated – the law of supply and demand at work – was noted by anti-slavery historian Edward Gibbon in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. “But when the principal nations of Europe, Asia, and Africa were united under the laws of one sovereign, the source of foreign supplies [of slaves] flowed with much less abundance, and the Romans were reduced to the milder but more tedious method of propagation. In their numerous families, and particularly in their country estates, they encouraged the marriage of their slaves. The sentiments of nature, the habits of education, and the possession of a dependent species of property, contributed to alleviate the hardships of servitude. The existence of a slave became an object of greater value, and though his happiness still depended on the temper and circumstances of the master, the humanity of the latter, instead of being restrained by fear, was encouraged by the sense of his own interest.” Gibbon’s keen observation also summarizes the dynamics of slavery in America. When the external slave trade ends in a healthy climate, it has always been in the interests of masters to encourage the birth of slave babies, and that process is best accomplished with adequate nutrition and reasonably kind treatment. The abolition of the international slave trade improved the lives of slaves in the short run more than Emancipation itself, given the dreadful conditions ex-slaves faced from 1863 through 1868.The invention of the cotton gin, they say, prolonged and increased slavery in the United States, but it also had the same effect as the abolition of the African slave trade. The cotton gin increased the value of slaves. By markedly decreasing the cost of making cotton fabric out of raw cotton, cotton ginning created a better market for cotton cloth and a greater demand for volumes of the raw material. The enslaved were a critical part of a vibrant, international industrial system.Dr. Frank Tannenbaum tried to prove that slavery in Brazil was easier than slavery in the South, but he really only showed that slaves in Brazil had greater access to freedom through manumission. In terms of food, clothing, shelter and general work conditions, Dr. Ulrich B. Phillips was correct in asserting that Southern slaves had it best. Historian Carl Degler, through research, concluded that slaves in the United States were treated better than those in Brazil. The beneficial effects of cutting off the African slave trade outweighed the legal benefits for slaves in Brazil. Even though Spanish and Brazilian colonial slaves may have had legal rights unknown to American slaves, Southern slaveholders were more interested in seeing their servants have children who grew to adulthood, and to do that had to provide well for them.American slaves were more rapidly cut off from their African heritage, acculturated in European civilization and lived better than their counterparts in the West Indies. It was an advantage for American slaves to separate from their African origins. “Brought from the African wilds to constitute the laboring class of a pioneering society in the new world, the heathen slaves had to be trained to meet the needs of their environment.” Their new cultural environment fortunately differed markedly from Africa. By 1860, there were almost zero African-born slaves in the American South. African traditions and beliefs were strongest in the worst West Indian slave environments. Bemoaning the loss of African culture rings hollow. The most memorable cultural attributes retained by West Indian slaves included Vodun or Voodoo, a complex pantheon of spirits, witchcraft and associated beliefs from West Africa. Sorcery, animal sacrifice, and the conjuring of many different spirits in special rites accompanied with drums, rattles, dancing and chants hardly qualify as sterling cultural advantages. Those practices have not survived very well in modern West Africa. Adherence to indigenous African religions is strongest in the most poverty-stricken nations, including Haiti, Benin and Togo.Terrible Aspects of Slavery in the Arab World. The Arabs’ treatment of black Africans can aptly be termed an African Holocaust. Arabs killed more Africans in transit, especially when crossing the Sahara Desert, than Europeans and Americans, and over more centuries, both before and after the years of the Atlantic slave trade. Arab Muslims began extracting millions of black African slaves centuries before Christian nations did. Arab slave traders removed slaves from Africa for about 13 centuries, compared to three centuries of the Atlantic slave trade. African slaves transported by Arabs across the Sahara Desert died more often than slaves making the Middle Passage to the New World by ship. Slaves invariably died within five years if they worked in the Ottoman Empire’s Sahara salt mines. Black Africans did not enjoy immunities to many of the diseases found in the Arab world, which also resulted in high death rates.Slaveholders in the Muslim world often castrated black African male slaves to serve as harem guards. This is a prime reason there are not many communities of blacks living in the non-African Muslim world today, despite the millions of black African slaves sold into the Muslim world. Many African boys did not survive their castration surgery. As late as 1903, there were still 194 African eunuchs in service to the Ottoman ruling family.African women were enslaved by Arabs more than African men. Few black slave children survived in the Muslim world. In 1860, when 3,000 black female slaves were set free in Zanzibar, only 5% of them had children. Because under Islamic law a concubine bearing the child of the master could become a wife and her children would then share in the inheritance, Middle Eastern wives and children of masters had a strong incentive to interfere with the sex lives of female slaves and cause brutal abortions. Islamic jurisprudence historically allowed abortions in the first four months of pregnancy, long before the West allowed it. Islamic tradition supports the view that the soul enters the fetus at 120 days. If a concubine had the only son, the threat to the wife was even greater. The Koran allowed Muslim men to have as many concubines as they could afford, in addition to four wives.The Arab history of anti-black racism predates European anti-black racism by several centuries. The early Islamic empire exhibited all the characteristics of anti-black racism, and blacks suffered the lowest form of bondage. By 869 A.D., black African slaves in southern Iraq, the despised Zanj, launched an extended slave revolt that threatened Baghdad until 883 A.D. The main reasons we have not heard more about the horrors of slavery in the Muslim world are that Muslims did not express moral outrage against slavery and wrote no abolitionist literature against the institution of slavery. Dr. Thomas Sowell characterizes the moral indignation against New World slavery, and the lack of any such indignation against the Muslim or non-Western world, as “selective moral indignation.” The moral outrage against slavery was and is, in the grand historical context, a European-inspired cause gaining significant traction only in the 1760s. Europeans took photographs of chained black African slaves in Arab slave-trading vessels on the East Coast of Africa in the 1880s. Slavery persisted openly in Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries in the latter half of the twentieth century, 100 years after slavery was abolished in the United States. As late as 1960, African Muslims still sold slaves when they arrived on pilgrimages, as a way to finance their pilgrimages. Arab nations lagged far behind the rest of the world in abolishing slavery: Saudi Arabia and Yemen in 1962, United Arab Emirates in 1963, Oman in 1970 and Mauritania officially in 1981. Today, according to U.S. State Department figures, Muslim nations condone international human trafficking more than Western countries do.David Livingstone observed in Africa the horrendous slave trading practices of Arab and pagan slave traders, decades after Great Britain had begun to suppress the international slave trade, and almost a century after Lord Mansfield, with the stroke of a pen, freed slaves in England. The Ottoman Empire resisted British efforts to suppress slavery and the slave trade. Over the course of 70 years, 2,000 British sailors died to free 160,000 slaves. While Islam urged improved treatment of slaves in some ways, the rapid expansion of the Muslim empire rapidly increased the number of slaves, leading to crueler treatment. Africa and the Middle East never developed the moral abolitionist fervor seen in Western nations. Slavery is now most prominent in Africa.From the time of the Crusades until the early 1800’s, Barbary pirates or corsairs from Muslim North Africa raided European coasts and waters, selling captive Europeans as slaves in North African ports and Istanbul. Barbary corsairs attacked shipping in the Mediterranean Sea and Atlantic Ocean, raiding the coasts of Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Britain, Ireland, and Africa for slaves. Some Mediterranean islands and coasts in Spain and Italy were abandoned due to the threat of Barbary slave raiding. The United States initially paid tribute to the Barbary pirates to obtain the return of American captives. After building ships, the United States fought the First and Second Barbary Wars to stop this slave trading and piracy. In fact, the desire to defend American shipping and sailors from Barbary piracy gave re-birth to the U.S. Navy. The Marine Hymn refers to the Battle of Derne on “the shores of Tripoli.” The traditional Mameluke sword worn by Marine officers today is based on the one given Marine First Lt. Presley O’Bannon by Prince Hamet of Tripoli.Happiness. It is grossly inaccurate to characterize slaves as unhappy because of the circumstances of their servitude. In his Foreword to Remembering Slavery, Dr. Robin D.G. Kelley asks the rhetorical question how slaves could have survived without laughter, happiness, love, good times, healthy relationships, and self-esteem. In asking this question, we have the answer: Slaves enjoyed life with those vital forces. Genetics and mental attitude primarily define what it means to be happy, not life circumstances. Why do we think happiness comes from the life circumstances of material success, status, big homes, freedom of action, a particular job and top management responsibility? Aristotle said, “Happiness depends upon ourselves.” For a variety of reasons, antebellum slaves were about as happy as their owners.The Slave Narratives and the foreign and Northern observers quoted in the Appendix portray much happiness among the slaves prior to Emancipation. “We was always treated good and kind and well cared for,” Ellen Claibourn recalled, “and we was happy.” Rabid abolitionist Fanny Kemble, one of the few white abolitionists to live temporarily as an adult on a slave plantation, “passed some time on two . . . plantations where the negroes esteemed themselves well off.” “Dem was good old days,” Aunt Easter Jackson reminisced, “plenty ter eat and a cabin o’ sticks and dirt to call yo’ own. Had good times, too . . .” Charles Dickens, who despised the institution, wrote, “every candid man must admit that even a slave might be happy enough with a good master.” Happy slaves do not justify slavery, but they help explain how slavery truly worked.Happiness is tough to measure, but one way to do it is to look at suicide statistics. We’ve already seen that modern prisoners are 20 times more likely to commit suicide than antebellum slaves. On that dismal topic, modern British researchers found female prisoners were 20 times more likely to commit suicide than the general population; they earlier found male prisoners were five times more likely to commit suicide than the general population. Slaves in 1850 had an extremely low suicide rate, one in 10,000: one-third the white suicide rate. The suicide rate for American blacks in 2004 was 5.2 per 100,000; less than the 12.3 per 100,000 suicide rate of American whites in the same year; these statistics have not varied much from year to year, except lately the suicide rate for black males is rising almost to the national average. In both modern and antebellum times, blacks were and still are less likely than whites to commit suicide. It’s possible African-Americans have a genetic predisposition to be less depressed than other Americans.Rev. Nehemiah Adams of Boston noticed the happiness of slaves while observing their choral performance. “ The impression here made upon me, or rather confirmed and illustrated afresh, was, that the slaves, so far as I had seen, were unconscious of any feeling of restraint; the natural order of life proceeded with them; they did not act like a driven, overborne people, stealing about with sulky looks, imbruted by abuse, crazed, stupidly melancholic. People habitually miserable could not have conducted the musical service of public worship as they did; their looks and manner gave agreeable testimony that, in spite of their condition, they had sources of enjoyment and ways of manifesting it which suggested to a spectator no thought of involuntary servitude.” Music lifts our spirits, as Benny Dillard indicated when caught by surprise singing in his yard: “’Scuse me, Missy, I didn’t know nobody was listenin’ to dem old songs. I loves to sing ‘em when I gits lonesome and blue. But won’t you come up on my porch and have a cheer in de shade?”“To live happily is an inward power of the soul,” Marcus Aurelius wrote. The Apostle Paul learned how to be content under all circumstances, even in prison. Modern “happiness research” shows that happiness is not primarily derived from the circumstances under which one is situated. Happiness is 50% genetic, 40% intentional, and only 10% circumstantial, according to Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky, a professor of psychology at the University of California - Riverside and author of The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want. Dr. Lyubomirsky observes that most people are surprised at the minor role played by life circumstances. Deliberate control over how one acts and thinks can affect happiness, according to Dr. Lyubomirsky. Behaviors leading to happiness include gratitude, a very common behavior among antebellum slaves; forgiveness, taught by Christianity; church involvement, which included many slaves; acts of kindness; and enjoying positive moments. Slaves and ex-slaves practiced these characteristics. The antebellum slave’s lifestyle was conducive to happiness. Slaves and ex-slaves could be happy even after experiencing sorrow, as shown by the life of Mary Ann Cord. A clinically depressed Mark Twain, overemphasizing the role of life circumstances, thought Mary Ann Cord was so happy and full of humor that she had never had any trouble in life. He was astounded to hear otherwise and put down in writing what he heard. Mary Ann Cord’s story of having her husband and seven children sold away, and her subsequent reunion with her youngest son Henry during the War, form the basis of Twain’s A True Story, Repeated Word for Word As I Heard It.Physical exercise and routine provide acknowledged mental health benefits, including help with mild to moderate depression. Regular physical exercise reduces anxiety and panic attacks. One suggestion to cure depression is to perform simple physical tasks that one can perform successfully, which is exactly what slaves in the field did. Regular routines help with bipolar disorder. Maintaining consistent sleep and wake times preserves circadian rhythm, which is helpful in dealing with bipolar disorder and depression. Ex-slaves were consistently woken by regular horn, bell or other sound early in the morning, at the same time every day of the season. Prisoners behave better if they can rely upon a schedule and know what lies ahead in their day-to-day prison lives.Sunlight, light therapy, heliotherapy – by whatever name known – also has significant mental and physical health benefits. Heliotherapy helps depressed patients faster than anti-depressant drugs. Slaves working in the fields – unlike prison inmates – obtained plenty of sunlight, which is better than artificial sunlight. Breathing fresh air is of course better than inhaling stale or polluted air. Early prison physicians believed sunlight and air were necessary for good prisoner health and that close confinement was bad.Exercise and physical conditioning offer many benefits. Exercise improves or maintains a healthy heart, weight, bone density, muscle strength, joint mobility, immune system, general physiology, sleep patterns, psychological well-being, hormone production, nerve growth and cognitive functioning. It can help improve, prevent or reduce the effects of diabetes, heart disease, dementia, depression, insomnia, neuromuscular diseases, alcohol-induced brain damage, surgical risks, high blood pressure, obesity, neurodegenerative diseases and low pain thresholds. Slaves typically worked long, physically demanding hours. Exercise helps the brain through neurogenesis, mood enhancement and endorphin release. Maintaining levels of physical activity reduces the number of days one suffers from mental and physical sicknesses. Physical conditioning improves self-esteem and happiness by improving attractiveness and keeping one’s weight down. Just as in today’s fitness-conscious world, Frederick Douglass was proud of the physical condition of both his grandmother and his mother.Farmers, in particular, are healthier and live longer than people in an urban or non-agricultural setting. The main occupational hazards in farming today, heavy equipment accidents and electrocution, were not present on antebellum plantations. On a day-to-day basis, there is less overall stress in farm work. Farmers have high job satisfaction because of the job characteristics of farming. Even though slaves did not have the same entrepreneurial satisfaction as land and business owners, they identified with the financial success of their owners, were proud of it, and obtained benefits from the plantation’s success. Minnie Davis explained this vicarious dynamic: “The Crawfords were considered very uppity people and their slaves were uppish, too.”The lifestyles of the writers and intellectuals who dealt with African-American affairs after Emancipation were not likely to appreciate these advantages. Our sedentary modern lifestyles cause problems. Today, we have to hire special drivers to get us to exercise. We call these drivers “personal trainers.” Leaders of our exercise videotapes and classes call out exercise cadences, just as the slaves worked to cadences or songs. We wish for motivation to exercise.Because of our sedentary lifestyles, in and out of prison, we gain weight. Obesity has reached epidemic levels. People spend billions of dollars every year to lose weight. Much of that money is ineffective to accomplish the goal of weight loss. Diets don’t work. Heart disease, diabetes, cancer, mental problems and other conditions afflict us these days, and we are now missing the beneficial effects of physical exercise. Slavery provided an excellent weight-control regimen. Hard work succeeds better than all of the diets, foods, pills, exercise programs, videotapes, books, magazines, weight loss camps and weight loss gadgets put together. Obesity existed in the slave days, but among the field hands, it was much less of a problem. Physical conditioning improved the well-being of slaves, just as modern prisoners realize its benefits. Take a good look at the physique of non-athletic Americans, and you will have no trouble appreciating that we looked better and were in many ways healthier during our agricultural pasts. Farm work has always been physically demanding, and before rural electrification, it was even more onerous.Plantation records indicate slaves were healthy and lost few days to illnesses or disabilities. “Hardly anybody even got sick on de plantation,” Mrs. Amanda Jackson observed. A number of ex-slaves noticed that their people were sick less before freedom, for several reasons. Physicians advised planters on ways to reduce illnesses and disease. “Slaves never got sick much,” agreed William “Bill” Henry Towns. Special hospitals or infirmaries were built on many large plantations. “There was little if any sickness,” Ike Derricotte remembered, “but Colonel Davis employed a doctor who visited the plantation each week.” Slaves lived on isolated plantations, stayed there most of the time, and were not exposed to as many epidemics, contagious viruses and seasonal illnesses on upland plantations. Lowland plantations were less healthy, but blacks had greater resistance to tropical diseases than their white owners. Physical contact with whites who left the plantation and came back with viruses was also restricted insofar as the field hands were concerned. In addition, field hands spent much of their time outside, physically separated from contagious workers who might infect them. The much-maligned pass system, enforced with mounted patrols, took on a public health function, especially during epidemics when the need for quarantine would be great. A highly contagious illness might kill several dozen bondspeople at a time, and their owners undoubtedly protected their servants from such epidemics. “There wasn’ much sickness,” said Lizzie Jones, “and seldom anybody die.” Most planters enforced cleanliness and neatness through on-site “public health” standards, and made sure the water supply was good and clean. With restricted alcohol intake, plentiful food, sunshine, warm log cabins, good clothes and superior cardiac health, African-Americans were better able to ward off illnesses. “Child, I wish I could call back dem days,” Mrs. Della Harris wished, because “Muma said people lived so much longer because they took care of themselves. . . Folks are so indifferent now I am afraid to say. Pshaw. Colored folks now, some are messy an’ don’t know how to be polite.”The quantity and variety of fruits and vegetables, made greater by economies of scale and specialization, contributed to slave health. Plantation gardens were often huge and planted with a wide variety of vegetables. Fruit orchards were more common on plantations than on small farms. Some planters provided one huge common garden, while others let their servants tend individual gardens, but variety and quantity would be enhanced through either method. Unlike peasants in Europe, and some poor people in the North, American slaves virtually never starved to death.Having socially acceptable sex at an early age with one’s life partner, a common practice among slaves, promotes happiness, too. No citations needed. All normal humans love to be touched by someone who cares. It is crystal clear the majority of slaves could have been happy. Science contrasts sharply with thoughts first initiated by those far away from Southern plantations, abolitionists unable to observe actual slave happiness or unhappiness. Placing too much emphasis on material differences, power and social stratification as a source of unhappiness overburdens the small part of happiness that is due to life circumstances.Happiness is a decision one makes with the genetic predisposition given to a person, not usually something thrust upon us from external or natural forces. The materialistic view of life holds that the people with the most wealth are the happiest, and that those who are without must be miserable until they obtain wealth or a fairer distribution of it . . . but that’s not reality. Those who sacrifice love for money tend to be unhappy, as Judeo-Christian doctrine has been preaching for millennia. Sometimes people who “have it made” in our eyes are miserable. Millionaires and billionaires commit suicide. Most slaves were happy. Abraham Lincoln’s letter to a friend illustrates both modern scientific and ancient religious doctrines remarkably well:BLOOMINGTON, ILL., September 27, 1841.To Miss Mary Speed, Louisville, Ky.MY FRIEND: By the way, a fine example was presented on board the boat for contemplating the effect of condition upon human happiness. A gentleman had purchased twelve negroes in different parts of Kentucky, and was taking them to a farm in the South. They were chained six and six together. A small iron clevis was around the left wrist of each, and this fastened to the main chain by a shorter one, at a convenient distance from the others, so that the negroes were strung together precisely like so many fish upon a trotline. In this condition they were being separated forever from the scenes of their childhood, their friends, their fathers and mothers, and brothers and sisters, and many of them from their wives and children, and going into perpetual slavery where the lash of the master is proverbially more ruthless and unrelenting than any other where; and yet amid all these distressing circumstances, as we would think them, they were the most cheerful and apparently happy creatures on board. One, whose offence for which he had been sold was an overfondness for his wife, played the fiddle almost continually, and the others danced, sang, cracked jokes, and played various games with cards from day to day. How true it is that 'God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb,' or in other words, that he renders the worst of human conditions tolerable, while he permits the best to be nothing better than tolerable. To return to the narrative: When we reached Springfield I stayed but one day, when I started on this tedious circuit where I now am. Do you remember my going to the city, while I was in Kentucky, to have a tooth extracted, and making a failure of it? Well, that same old tooth got to paining me so much that about a week since I had it torn out, bringing with it a bit of the jawbone, the consequence of which is that my mouth is now so sore that I can neither talk nor eat.Your sincere friend, A. LINCOLN.Perhaps this scene gave rise to Lincoln’s stated belief that “Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.” Lincoln, subject to depression, believed the largely erroneous idea that slavery was significantly worse in some areas of the South than in others. The same human virtues and vices, economic incentives, laws, religion, people and culture meant that slavery in the South was more or less consistent throughout. No convincing evidence supports the common misconception that the institution of slavery within the United States was significantly “worse elsewhere.” Proximity to free states may have encouraged some masters to be nicer, to prevent escape attempts. Some terrains were more conducive to an easier life. Most plantations were founded by people from other states as westward movement progressed. Unquestionably, slavery was worse in the West Indies, South America and the Muslim world.The beginning of the famous Serenity Prayer, in the version preferred by theologian Rev. Reinhold Niebuhr, suggests a basis for the contentment of antebellum slaves: “God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed . . .” Acceptance of the master-slave relationship, which the slave could not often change or change quickly, provided the basis for antebellum serenity. Modern people do not accept slavery, but the slaves usually did – they had to if they wanted to be happy. The rebellious, resistant, runaway slave, often a young male, was fighting an uphill battle and rarely succeeded. The rebel slave is eulogized now by neo-abolitionists out of all proportion, but the simple reality was that to be happy, most slaves first had to accept the institution. Nobody can blame them, though many today deny their happiness.Other than their natural optimism or pessimism, the single most important factor in slave happiness was their masters’ disposition, whether cruel or kind. One former slave, Louis Hughes, explained: “It had been talked of (this freedom) from generation to generation. Perhaps they would not have thought of freedom, if their owners had not been so cruel. Had my mistress been more kind to me, I should have thought less of liberty. I know the cruel treatment which I received was the main thing that made me wish to be free.” We can measure the extent of cruelty towards slaves by equating it to the percentage of new Mercedes-Benz owners who do not take good care of their cars. Top field hands were worth up to $43,000 in today’s money. Being worth substantial sums meant slaves were far more appreciated than prisoners who in today’s valuation have significant negative value to their owners. New age slaves are commonly worth a negative $25,000 times the number of years in their prison sentence.Just as management sets the tone for many work crews, shifts, shops and offices today, slave management determined the level of happiness on some plantations. “Punishment was seldom necessary on the Willis plantation,” Mrs. Mariah Callaway pointed out, “as the master and mistress did everything possible to make their servants happy; and to a certain extent indulge them. They were given whiskey liberally from their master’s still; and other choice food on special occasions.” Laura Hood fondly remembered that “Marse Henry was as good a man as ever put a pair of pants on his legs.” Thomas Cole would not have run away to the Union Army if his old master had been alive, because, “He was one of de best men I ever knows in mah whole life and his wife was jest laks him.”Slaves worried about some things, the main concern being separation from family members or their plantation through slave sales, but they did not have to worry much about providing the necessities for themselves or their families. As Adeline Burris recalled, “Dey didn’t have to worry about rent, clothes, nor sumpin to eat. Dat was there for them. All they had to do was work and do right.” A number of ex-slaves appreciated the sense of security, being taken care of, and having others who cared about them. Sarah Poindexter nostalgically remembered that, “I was happier on de Poindexter plantation and had fewer things to worry ‘bout than when I was ascratchin’ ‘round for myself.” The absence of worries liberates people. “Oh, Missy,” Jasper Battle recalled, “dem was good old days. Us would be lucky to have ‘em back again, ‘specially when harvest time comes ‘round. You could hear Niggers a-singin’ in de fields ‘cause dey didn’t have no worries lak dey got now.”Many plantations were nearly or entirely self-sufficient or capable of being that way but for the decision to grow cash crops. Paying bills and taxes, military duty, interest rates, business matters and politics did not concern them. Bob Benford remembered slaves “didn’t have to worry bout payin’ the doctor.” Slaveholders promptly resolved disputes between slaves in most instances. The owners wanted peace and happiness. Most slaves knew better than to wound or kill. There was not much crime on their plantation. Friends and relatives were nearby. On some plantations, nearly all the slaves were related to each other, to the point that marriage partners had to be found outside the plantation. Slaves had usually known their masters for many years, were part of that master’s family, and were very well acquainted with their physical surroundings. Masters made special efforts to make sure their slaves had a mate of the opposite sex, though sometimes their spouse lived on a neighboring plantation. Freed slaves commonly said that during slavery they were care free. This was almost universally said about their childhoods. George Johnson was not treated badly at all in Maryland, but made it to Canada when he was 15 because he wanted to be free; he said being a slave was sometimes easier, “because I have had some care upon me here, and there I had none.” One child was told by his mother that during slavery they “had plenty of ebvery t’hing an’ nothin’ to worry ‘bout.” Millie Evans expressed this advantage of being a slave compared to being a slaveholder: “Now chile I can’t ‘member everything I done in them days but we didn’ have ter worry bout nothing. Ol’ mistress was the one to worry.”The condemnation of slavery has much to do with the huge material disparities between antebellum planters and their servants. This disparity still exists, a relic of antebellum slavery and differences between Africa and Europe. Antebellum slaves enjoyed life for its spiritual, social, musical and hedonistic aspects in addition to their basic needs for security, food, clothing and shelter. Conspicuous consumption and “keeping up with the Joneses” was not their concern. The material disparities within the slave community were not nearly as great as those separating slaves from their white owners. The racial difference with their owners may have made it easier for them to accept their status.Lifestyle. Money played a less significant role in the slave’s life. Slaves did not need money to buy food, clothing, shelter, medical care, spiritual assistance, spouses, holidays, festivities, weddings or funerals. One slave remembered that the dollar given to him on Christmas was often unspent by the following Christmas. Slaves could not buy many things, including land, firearms, books, often whiskey, carriages and certain types of fancy clothing. Antebellum slaves were therefore less materialistic than were their white contemporaries. Black leaders today call upon their people to be less materialistic. Antebellum slaves did not have money problems, as we know them today. They lived more or less in a cashless society on the plantation.Rev. Nehemiah Adams of Massachusetts observed the pass system keeping slaves at home after 8:00 PM in the city was not all bad. These rules were “theoretically usurpations, but practically benevolent . . . for [a]round the drinking saloons there were white men and boys whose appearance and behavior reminded me of ‘liberty and pursuit of happiness’ in similar places at the north; but there were no colored men there: the slaves are generally free as to street brawls and open drunkenness. . . I had occasion to pity some white southerners, as they issued late at night from a drinking-place, in being deprived of the wholesome restraint laid upon the colored population. The moral and religious character of the colored people at the south owes very much to this restraint.”Unquestionably, slavery protected slaves from alcohol and drug abuse, gambling, assaults by strangers and the transient lifestyle. By monitoring their activities, making sure they were productive, controlling their movements off the plantation and reducing plantation expenses, alcoholism and drug addiction were limited in the slave quarters. Sarah Fitzpatrick said, “”Niggers’ didn’t drink much whiskey fo’ de war, dey only got whiskey when de white fo’ks give it to’em.” As was the case with the top Union general instrumental in freeing them, Ulysses S. Grant, who tended to drink when he was not busy, active slaves did not have to drink and did not have the time or interest for that activity. Slaves didn’t always have the money for strong drink or access to it. Slaves did not normally stay out late at night.Many slaves received regular rations of alcoholic drinks, but again the profit motive reduced their access to alcohol. As Kato Benton observed, “White folks was good to us. Had plenty to eat, plenty to wear, plenty to drink. That was water. Didn’t have no whisky. Might a had some but they didn’t give us none.” Slaves were often given enough alcohol to celebrate and as a reward for hard work.Sarah Fitzpatrick said the slaves did not gamble until after the War, and then they picked it up from Union soldiers. They did not have much money to gamble before the War, and any money they had was earned. The pass system kept blacks out of saloons, card fights and violence while focusing their lives on the plantation. Planters monitored organized get-togethers, which kept their servant’s out of trouble.Slaveholders obviously did not want their servants to fight with each other: not unless it was a boxing match. “Marster lak to see his slaves happy and singin’ ‘bout de place,” Junius Quattlebaum reminisced. “If he ever heard any of them quarrelin’ wid each other, he would holler at them and say: ‘Sing! Us ain’t got no time to fuss on dis place.’. . . Them was sho’ happy times.” Planters strictly controlled violence and kept it from erupting into personal injury or death. Slaveholders also worked with the patrollers to create a safer community, forming a “partnership” between the government and private enterprise, the exact type of local crime prevention partnership said to be so effective today in controlling crime. Law was enforced at the critical local level. The deterrent effect of punishment on the plantation was greater than today, because a higher percentage of crimes were detected there than in the modern urban setting.Aunt Lizzie Hill said her owners “raised me right.” In addition to Christianity, slaves learned the English language, the basic tenets of Western civilization, technology and many of the hallmarks of Western civilization. Early defenders of slavery based the necessity of civilizing influence on race, rather than the superiority of Western civilization compared to the culture of West Africa. Early African-American writers acknowledged the value of Western civilization, too, but now the tune has changed. Western civilization is faulted under modern ideas of multiculturalism. Some say Eurocentrism is racist.After we discard race as a factor, we still see the obvious cultural and physical advantages of leaving a primitive, unhealthy region with hundreds of different tribes, languages and religious variations for the more unified and advanced culture of the United States. The U.S. has a great constitution, ample resources and an educated population. In fact, it was advantageous to all peoples to come to the United States, for whatever reason, in the early years of American ascendancy and expansion. All races and peoples entering the United States or the Thirteen Colonies left behind cultural disadvantages of one type or another, based on class, wealth, status, religion, oppressive government, criminal convictions, military obligations, family background, race, prejudice or gender. All people who came to these shores brought their contributions to the melting pot.Slave children did not attend school and had little opportunity to learn, but there were exceptions on many plantations. The narrative of William Hayden provides an example: “In the year 1807, there was a school started for some colored children . . . and as their masters did not want them taught by a white man, they engaged a colored one . . . As there were not enough FREE children to make up the school, notice was given, that any one wishing their servants taught, (if they were willing to entrust them with Ned,) should be permitted to send them to school. On hearing this, I applied to Mr. Ware, and having obtained his consent, started, with three others, from the same factory.”There are numerous instances of slaves being able to read and write. In fact, about 5% of slaves learned to read and write by 1860, an estimate which may be too low. The children of the masters were most likely to teach slaves to read and write, and next to them, plantation mistresses taught slaves the most often. Many plantations had at least one literate slave. Frederick Douglass’s mother could read, though Douglass never knew how she learned. In recognition of the illegality of slave education, slaves would never reveal how they learned to read or write.Security. Most slaves had a sense of security. One of slavery’s critics, George Eason, admitted, “Slavery had a good point in that we slaves always felt that somebody was going to take care of us.” Those who remembered slavery fondly, like Jennie Bowen, considered it one of the main advantages: “We-alls had a good time an’ us was happy an’ secure.” “Aunt” Tildy Collins said, “Yes, ma’am, I sho’ was borned in slavery times, an’ I wish to Gawd I could git now what I useter hab den, ‘caze dem was good times for de black folks. Dese free niggers don’t know what ‘tis to be tuk good keer of.”Slavery had its own form of Social Security, because when the older slaves became too old to work, they were still cared for amongst their friends and family, had a roof over their heads, and food to eat. In 1837, a slavery defender contended, “I may say with truth, that in few countries . . . there is more kind attention paid to him in sickness or infirmities of age. . . . Compare [the slave’s] condition with the tenants of the poor houses in the more civilized portions of Europe - look at the sick, and the old and infirm slave, on one hand, in the midst of his family and friends, under the kind superintending care of his master and mistress, and compare it with the forlorn and wretched condition of the pauper in the poorhouse.” This changed upon Emancipation, but not at every plantation, according to Betty Curlett: “When Mars Daniel come home [from the War] he went to my papa’s house and says, ‘John, you free.’ He says, ‘I been free as I wanter be whah I is.’ He went on to my grandpa’s house and says, ‘Toby, you are free!’ He raised up and says, ‘You brought me here frum Africa and North Carolina and I goiner stay wid you long as ever I get sompin to eat. You gotter look after me!’ Mars Daniel say, ‘Well, I ain’t runnin’ nobody off my place long as they behave.’ Purtnigh every nigger sot tight till he died of the old sets. Mars Daniel say to grandpa, ‘Toby, you ain’t my nigger.’ Grandpa raise up an’ say, ‘I is, too.”The security of slavery benefited the less capable and less disciplined slaves more than it did talented and intelligent servants. Skilled tradesmen, overseers and drivers were more likely to defect to the Union Army than ordinary field hands were. White Southerners were disappointed when their most responsible slaves, those to whom they had entrusted management positions or given valuable training, were some of the first to leave the plantation for the Union lines. Talented slaves had more to gain by freedom and less need of the security provided by the plantation regime. The unfairness of laws prohibiting the teaching of slaves to read and write was felt most keenly by those who had academic abilities and aspirations and who had learned some reading or writing as slaves. Slaveholders like Frederick Douglass’ owner feared that slaves would want freedom if they learned to read and write. The earning of wages for another stung skilled tradesmen more than the indirect, delayed profits created in an agricultural enterprise. Another factor is age. Older workers tend to have higher job satisfaction, and this includes farmers. Most fugitive slaves were relatively young when they escaped.The security of plantation life had an ironic side, too. Commitment in all its forms is liberating. The committed person does not hesitate or doubt his or her own actions or place in the world. The person with an achievable task takes satisfaction in its accomplishment. With our many freedoms, we forget the strain of decisions, inner misgivings, regrets, divided loyalties, career changes and failures, self-discipline, transience and getting our priorities straight.Paupers, now known as “homeless people,” appear in our cities today just as they did in earlier American centuries. Paupers existed in Northern cities when slavery was thriving in the South, but paupers did not appear much in Southern cities during slavery. “Pauperism is prevented by slavery. This idea is absurd, no doubt, in the apprehension of many at the north, who think that slaves are, as a matter of course, paupers. Nothing can be more untrue. Every slave has an inalienable claim in law upon his owner for support for the whole of life. He can not be thrust into an almshouse, he can not become a vagrant, he can not beg his living, he can not be wholly neglected when he is old and decrepit. . . Thus the pauper establishments of the free States, the burden and care of immigrants, are almost entirely obviated at the south by the colored population. . . . In laboring for the present and future welfare of immigrants, we are subjected to evils of which we are ashamed to complain, but from which the south is enviably free. . . . I thought of our eleven thousand paupers . . . of our large State workhouses, which we so patiently build for the dregs of the foreign population.” The Census of 1850 shows significantly fewer paupers in the South than in the North. Statutes secured care in their old age after some slaveholders discarded aged and infirm slaves. None of the slaveholding states wanted older slaves to become a charge on the public, nor did they want them begging in the streets.No one expected slaves and free blacks to go to war as combatants in any wars prior to 1865, though some did so voluntarily. The civilian status they enjoyed within the United States was in addition to their escaping African tribal warfare, including slave raids conducted by other Africans. Plantation life was very peaceful compared to warfare. When they enlisted in the Union Army to fight for freedom, it was because they wanted to fight, not because they were required to do so. When they were on the Confederate side with their masters, they were not expected to take combatants’ roles. “When de war broke out ol’ marster enlisted an’ he took me ‘long to wait on him an’ to keep his clothes clean,” Benjamin Johnson said. “I had plenty o’ fun ‘cause dere wus’nt so very much work to do. I ‘members seein’ ‘im fightin’ in Richmond an’ Danville, Virginia. I had a good time jes’ watchin’ de soldiers fightin’. I did’nt have to fight any at all. I used to stand in de door of de tent an’ watch ‘em fight.” William “Billy” Lee, George Washington’s body servant, went everywhere with General Washington during the American Revolution. Uncle William Mack Lee served as body servant and cook for General Robert E. Lee all through the War, and attended Confederate veteran reunions for many years thereafter.There are advantages to living in the country as opposed to the urban environment. Edgar Bendy remembered, “Us has lots of meat, deer meat and possum and coon and sich, and us sets traps for birds. . . . I used to be . . . de best hunter in Tyler and in de whole country. I kilt more deer dan any other man in de country . . .” Increasing urbanization undoubtedly created nostalgia for antebellum times, regardless of race. “Going back to slavery times,” George Patterson “said that on most plantations were kept squirrel dogs, ‘possum dogs, snake dogs, rabbit dogs and ‘nigger’ dogs. Each dog was trained for a certain kind of tracking. . . When asked about hunting, he said that hunting in slavery days was not like it is now, for a man could hunt on his own place then and get plenty of game.”Irrespectice of race or condition of servitude, people in the country live longer than urbanites. Less stress, more physical exercise, cleaner air, safety from crime, better diet, fresher, cleaner, and more abundant food, proximity to animals and a slower pace generally explain the disparity. This was particularly true right after Emancipation, according to someone who was there, Liney Chambers: “People whut went to the cities died. I don’t know they caught diseases and changing the ways of eatin’ and livin’ I guess what done it. They died mighty fast for awhile.” The familiar pastoral environment was so much healthier, and their new urban living conditions so bad, the federal authorities helped force newly freed blacks back to their plantations by arresting as vagrants those without labor contracts. Agrarian societies differ markedly from industrialized, urban societies and have several advantages in terms of family stability, closeness and traditional roles. Prison authorities noticed that prisoners allowed to work in nature, returning to the soil and working with animals, caused fewer problems.Fairly recently, scientists found that the smell of newly cut grass or hay induces happiness. Fresh air, fields and sunlight were healthier and more cheerful than the prison described by Charles Dickens: “A prison taint was on everything there. The imprisoned air, the imprisoned light, the imprisoned damps, the imprisoned men, were all deteriorated by confinement. As the captive men were faded and haggard, so the iron was rusty, the stone was slimy, the wood was rotten, the air was faint, the light was dim. Like a well, like a vault, like a tomb, the prison had no knowledge of the brightness outside; and would have kept its polluted atmosphere intact, in one of the spice islands of the Indian Ocean.”Plantations surpassed dirty, unhealthy, industrialized Cottonopolis, where slave-raised cotton was shipped for manufacturing. Manchester, England mill workers including children put in 14-hour days for low wages, lived in dirty dwellings, worked in dangerous factories, contracted diseases of all descriptions, breathed heavily polluted air, drank unsanitary water into which sewage ran, and lived short lives. Alexis de Tocqueville called 1835 Manchester the “new Hades . . . a filthy sewer.” Friedrich Engels observed in The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 that mortality in Manchester, England was several times higher than in the surrounding countryside. Engels and Marx thought Manchester the pinnacle of capitalist misery. In 1848, Elizabeth Gaskell published Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life, a best-seller depicting the difficult life of the mill worker. The terrible conditions in Cottonopolis gave communism more credibility and strength than it deserved.The pastoral plantation environment undoubtedly had something to do with the vastly fewer black prison inmates in the South, on a percentage basis, compared to the free blacks in the North. Slaves had a negligible or non-existent chance of going to prison compared to free blacks or whites. By restricting their servants to the plantation most of the time, planters kept them away from groups and situations likely to cause problems – which is strangely similar to the thoughts of modern American parents who try to keep their children at home and out of the streets. Today, released American prisoners usually gravitate towards the worst crime-prone neighborhoods in 20 large American cities, and simply do not have anywhere else to go.Reflecting upon the suffering African-Americans have undergone is often followed by thoughts of making it up to them. It’s assumed in this logic that suffering is bad, that people should not be made to suffer, and that the best thing we can do is to stop people from suffering. But some very distinguished people have written that suffering can be good in the long run.British historian Arnold J. Toynbee wrote A Study of History, a massive multi-volume treatise dealing with different civilizations throughout history, their rise and fall, their interaction with other cultures, and astute observations about the progress or retrogression of civilizations. Toynbee held that penalizations such as slavery actually acted as a stimulus to the penalized class or race. Toynbee wrote that penalized classes or races put extra effort into, and developed exceptional capacities in, the endeavors left open to them. Arnold Toynbee showed that persecuted groups often respond positively by improving their performance, re-organizing themselves, succeeding at things they are permitted to do and confounding attempts to suppress or limit them. Toynbee cites the slave world of the Roman Empire, which eventually developed a powerful segment of capable freedmen and which also gave rise to Christianity.The penalization of the black race in North America resulted in African-Americans succeeding in a number of areas: African-Americans succeeded at trades, at agricultural production, as laborers, drivers, and overseers and as plantation managers when they were given the chance. Although some states required a white to be in charge of plantations, planters like Jefferson Davis often ignored this requirement or skirted it. During the War, slaves were even more important in running plantations. Athletics opened up before other trades and professions, and African-Americans immediately began making huge contributions to athletic teams, eventually dominating some sports. American blacks practically invented rock & roll, jazz, the blues, and from those sources, music in the world has progressed. Accomplishment in music was foretold by Rev. Nehemiah Adams in 1854: “One development of African talent hereafter will no doubt be in music.”“With few exceptions,” Booker T. Washington wrote, “the Negro youth must work harder and must perform his tasks even better than a white youth in order to secure recognition. But out of the hard and unusual struggle through which he is compelled to pass, he gets a strength, a confidence, that one misses whose pathway is comparatively smooth by reason of birth and race.” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. echoed, in a more personal way, the effects of social affliction when he wrote about the value of unmerited suffering.The interaction between peoples and races is not a zero-sum game. There are benefits in most peaceful interchanges, be they in commerce, education, religion, culture or any form of communication. If a people keep on trying and never quit, they will succeed. Dr. Thomas Sowell observed that one of the most important moral legacies of slavery was a better appreciation of freedom. Comparing antebellum slavery to mass incarceration provides needed perspective. Potential offenders ought to abhor modern state slavery more than they hate the thought of antebellum times.Of the slaves brought to the Thirteen Colonies or United States, not all remained slaves. Some earned their freedom after completing the period of their indenture, others were manumitted and some slaves bought themselves out of slavery. The number of free African-Americans in just the 14 Southern states grew from 52,190 in 1800, to 160,063 in 1830, and then to 230,958 in 1860. As of 1860, 11% of all blacks in the United States were free; in 1830, 13.7% of blacks were free in the United States. For free blacks, life was often better than for black slaves or their relatives left behind in Africa, though the life of free African-Americans carried significant disadvantages and discrimination.Self-purchase was relatively common. While the slaves’ property was technically their owners’ property, wise slaveholders realized that their servants would work harder and smarter if they had this incentive open to them. A variant of self-purchase was “buying time.” For a set amount of money, a servant worked on their own, away from the plantation, paying their owner a set amount of money every week, month or year, and retaining any earnings above the cost of “buying their time.” Semi-freedom sometimes allowed servants to save enough to purchase their full freedom. Many of the fugitives interviewed by the AMERICAN FREEDMEN’S INQUIRY COMMISSION in Canada had previously purchased their time, which indicates buying one’s time encouraged thoughts of full freedom. When working in relative isolation, a servant did not enjoy the companionship, team spirit, social events, family togetherness and community atmosphere, which softened the servile condition of plantation workers.White owners who fathered slave children often freed them, sometimes with their mothers. Frederick Douglass alludes to this in reference to a slave son of Colonel Lloyd’s who wound up free in Baltimore. The vengeance of the plantation mistress might be painful prior to manumission. Biracial children reminded their white fathers of sexual transgressions, caused feelings of guilt, provoked white wives to anger and created social embarrassment. Many white slave-owning fathers felt genuine love and familial attachment to their children and wanted to help them. The majority of free blacks in the South prior to 1860 were free because of their white ancestry. Many free blacks in the North or Canada obtained freedom due to white parentage. Abolitionist propaganda characterized slave owners as so lacking in decency that they sold their own children. While this occurred, it was more common for the children to be helped in some way and to live better than the average slave. If slaveholders sold their children, they might condition the sale upon good treatment, as Isaiah Green remembered about his grandmother, Betsy Willis: “My grandmother was half white, since the master of the plantation on which she lived was her father. He wished to sell her, and when she was placed on the block he made the following statement: ‘I wish to sell a slave who is also my daughter. Before anyone can purchase her, he must agree not to treat her as a slave but as a free person. She is a good midwife and can be of great service to you.’ Col. Dick Willis [“a very kind man”] was there, and in front of everyone signed the papers.” Those papers may have included a reversionary provision, whereby Betsy would revert to her father in the event of mistreatment. Isaiah Green became his master’s pet.Anthony Johnson arrived at Jamestown in 1621, became free, married and acquired land and indentured servants of his own. Blacks owned black slaves, though not in large numbers. The 2003 novel The Known World contains some interesting details and ironies about African-Americans owning slaves. Today, it is common to assume that blacks are entirely descended from slaves, but they were sometimes descended from free blacks and white people. In Louisiana, the free blacks had their own social circle and a lifestyle very similar to the white planters. Some free Louisiana blacks were extremely wealthy, went to Europe, and most spoke French.Manumission was a moderately common practice, especially in the wake of the American Revolution. “Manumissions were in fact so common in the deeds and wills of the men of '76 that the number of colored freemen in the South exceeded thirty-five thousand in 1790 and was nearly doubled in each of the next two decades. The greater caution of their successors, reinforced by the rise of slave prices, then slackened the rate of increase to twenty-five and finally to ten per cent per decade. Documents in this later period, reverting to the colonial basis, commonly recited faithful service or self purchase rather than inherent rights as the grounds for manumission.”When Robert E. Lee’s father-in-law, George Washington Parke Custis, willed that 196 slaves be freed within five years of his death, Robert E. Lee carried out this instruction to the letter, freeing the last of his deceased father-in-law’s slaves in 1862, during the War. Robert E. Lee sent those who wished to Africa, to settle in Liberia. Those manumitted slaves wrote affectionate letters to Robert E. Lee, and some of the letters made it through the U.S. naval blockade, telling Lee of their new life in Liberia. Sometimes testator’s heirs defeated testamentary manumissions on legal technicalities, results that contradicted the intent of the deceased and seem very unjust today.Some faithful slaves were freed, such as Uncle Joe, according to his grandson Uncle D. Davis: “Marse Tom he up en sot Uncle Joe free, en gib him er home en forty acres, en sum stock kase Uncle Joe done been good en fathful all dem years, en raise Marse Tom all dem seben chillum, en one of dem seben wuz my own mammy.”Tom Molineaux, the first well-known African-American boxer, earned his freedom in a prizefight, with his fists. Born a slave in 1784 into a family known for their bare-knuckles fighting ability, Tom Molineaux’s master placed large bets on one of his boxing matches, promising him his freedom if he won. He won. Tom Molineaux then became a free man, eventually moving to London, England, where he fought professionally before large audiences in 1810.Freed slaves often faced more ill-treatment in the North because the personal relationships were not close between blacks and whites in the North. Freedom up North was not the paradise many would suppose, just as Emancipation would later disappoint many. A host of discriminatory laws affected free blacks in the North. Ohio, Illinois and Indiana passed laws discouraging the immigration of free blacks and required blacks to post a bond when entering their states. Runaways made their homes in Northern states, but were not as law-abiding or normal as the slave population in the South. Some blacks returned to the South after a trip up North, because the South was more humane to them.Holidays, Dances, Frolics, Corn Shuckings, Hog Killings, Weddings, Log Rollings, Music and Barbeques. Slaves enjoyed regular good times on most plantations. Special occasions, especially corn shuckings and log rollings, made work fun. Frederick Douglass believed holidays prevented slave insurrections more than any other factor. Although he doubted the motives of slaveholders in granting holidays, Frederick Douglass remembered good times. “The days between Christmas and New Year's day are allowed as holidays; and, accordingly, we were not required to perform any labor, more than to feed and take care of the stock. This time we regarded as our own, by the grace of our masters; and we therefore used or abused it nearly as we pleased. Those of us who had families at a distance, were generally allowed to spend the whole six days in their society. This time, however, was spent in various ways. The staid, sober, thinking and industrious ones of our number would employ themselves in making corn-brooms, mats, horse-collars and baskets; and another class of us would spend the time in hunting opossums, hares and coons. But by far the larger part engaged in such sports and merriments as playing ball, wrestling, running foot-races, fiddling, dancing, and drinking whisky; and this latter mode of spending the time was by far the most agreeable to the feelings of our masters. A slave who would work during the holidays was considered by our masters as scarcely deserving them. He was regarded as one who rejected the favor of his master. It was deemed a disgrace not to get drunk at Christmas; and he was regarded as lazy indeed, who had not provided himself with the necessary means, during the year, to get whisky enough to last him through Christmas.” Christmas was generally a holiday of from three to five or more days, with “constant partying,” presents for the slaves, barbecues, visits from and to other plantations, singing, dancing, and alcoholic refreshments. New Year’s was typically celebrated. Other holidays might include Thanksgiving, Easter Monday, the completion of the harvest, the Fourth of July and sometimes a slave’s birthday. One slave-owner, Hiram B. Tibbetts, wished the abolitionists could see how happy the slaves were at these times. During festivities, food was usually plentiful.No positive aspect of slave life shines forth brighter than the frolics, Saturday nights, holidays, corn shuckings, hog killings, dances, music, weddings, harvest feasts, cadences, candy pullings, barbeques, quiltings and parties enjoyed by slaves. “My mother went to cornshuckings, cotton pickings, and quiltings,” said Minnie Davis, and “They must have had wonderful times, to hear her tell it.” The slaves did not have to worry about whether they were invited, the clothes they wore, the costs, how they would get home, who they would go with . . . they were always invited, it did not cost them anything, nearly everyone would be there, the food was good, alcohol was sometimes distributed – but usually not imbibed in excess – and they did not usually have far to go to be home in bed. Easter Huff said, “Dere was allus somepin’ to do on Sadday night – frolics, dances, and sich lak.” Lina Hunter spoke at length about the good times, too. Plantation slaves likely attended more dances, feasts and festivities than modern Americans, irrespective of race. A key element of festivities on the plantation was that they could always look forward to them, and not just on their own plantation. Invitations issued to neighboring plantations for various festivities. Attendance might include up to a dozen off-plantation events per year. Paul Laurence Dunbar’s character Rev. Silas Todbury, pastor of a New York City church attended by African-Americans from the old Confederacy, “knew that when Christmas came they wanted a great rally, somewhat approaching, at least, the rousing times both spiritual and temporal that they had had back on the old plantation, when Christmas meant a week of pleasurable excitement.”Music. Music accompanied African-Americans at work, play and worship. Most sang or chanted in the fields, and choral performances were common. Many plantations had a fiddler who would play the violin for Saturday night dances, holidays, special occasions of all types, and church. Sometimes the master was the fiddler, as Easter Huff remembered: “Marse Jabe Smith was a good white man. He was a grand fiddler and he used to call us to de big house at night to dance for him.” Slaves to make music and rhythm would rattle bones, play triangles, blow the quills, beat tin pans, play the banjo, slap their legs, knock tin buckets, clap hands, scrape wood, shake tambourines made of cowhide over cheese boxes, knock cow bones together as a drum, use broom straws on fiddle strings, or use any other means they could.Slaves developed the banjo from a similar instrument they knew in West Africa. The name “banjo” is derived from a West African name for the instrument, which was generally a large gourd with a round hole over which leather was stretched, and then over which strings attached to an extension were played. African-American musicians abandoned this slave invention, perhaps due to the minstrel show stereotype and their distaste for the antebellum era. The minstrel show portrayed the Old South as benign, which some say the country needed at the time, but the NAACP eventually objected to federal funding of minstrelsy in 1935. Justified as opposition to racism, the NAACP objections also reflected the denial of good things associated with slavery. Anti-black racism contaminated much pro-slavery minstrel show material, literature and thought. Nevertheless, blacks enjoyed minstrel shows, too. Positive reflections on race relations, slavery and blacks were rejected with the bad.Music with the slave’s instruments is not played today, not like the slaves did in the past. It would be fascinating to see it re-enacted. The “quills” were very popular before the War, but today there are only a handful of sound recordings of the quills, and few of the actual instruments exist. The quills were a homemade pan flute made on an African design, a series of cane or other wooden pipes, open at one end, and played by blowing across the open end in some manner. Knowledge of the quills might have died out but for an early bluesman, Henry Thomas, who recorded their sounds in the late 1920s. The woodworking and metalworking abilities of enslaved Americans created good musical instruments. Slaves did not wallow in envy for lack of the standard orchestra instruments white people enjoyed. They developed their own instruments and music, crafting their own stringed instruments.At harvest time, there would usually be a festive corn shucking on each plantation, where two competing groups would race each other to see which group could shuck their massive pile of corn first. Each massive pile of un-shucked corn was surmounted by a “general” or “captain,” each with a special cap or hat, who led the chants, singing and fun, enhanced by great amounts of food, alcoholic beverages most of the time, music, visitors from neighboring plantations and a general atmosphere of fun. James Bolton would sometimes attend 10 or 12 corn shuckings in one year. The work of shucking the corn was fun – and it got the job done.Elisha Doc Garey considered days off because of inclement weather to be holidays, too. “De only other holidays us had was when us was rained out or if sleet or snow drove us out of de fields. Everybody had a good time den a frolickin’. When us was trackin’ rabbits in de snow, it was heaps of fun.” The slaveholding states all received above average rainfall and much of the Deep South lies in extremely wet territory. For several days each month, slaves were not expected to work in the fields, although sometimes they would have indoor work such as corn shelling in the corncrib to perform.Experiences varied widely, of course. Annie Hawkins didn’t like slavery, but said, “I know lots of niggers that was slaves had a good time but we never did.”Food, Clothing, Shelter & Work. The supposition in abolitionist and neo-abolitionist literature is that slaves were forced to do things they did not want to do . . . mainly work. From the abolitionist’s cozy library, the idea of a long, hard day of manual labor was horrendous. But people generally like to do what they are good at, and the slaves were good farmers. Yes, many or most enjoyed farming, weaving, cooking, sewing, animal husbandry, blacksmithing, tailoring, plowing, carpentry, masonry, managing others, picking cotton, serving aristocrats, childcare, lumberjacking, driving teams of horses and mules and gardening. Berry Smith at 116 years old confirmed longevity through hard labor, saying “I’d ruther pick cotton dan eat, any day.” Getting up before sunrise is characterized as something tough. Anyone who has worked outside in a Deep South summer will appreciate the advantages of rising early during the growing season, the main advantage being that it is much cooler.Slaves in the fields did not work in isolation. They worked with their families and friends, sang and told jokes. Tasks went faster and easier when the work gang sang songs. Music lifts the spirit, creates a fun atmosphere and satisfies an inner need. Exercise reduces emotional stress and anxiety. Mollie Williams’s mammy preferred fieldwork to housework. Field hands worked under less supervision than factory workers did. Factory-hands were “worse slaves than the Negroes in America, for they are more sharply watched,” according to Friedrich Engels.One of the favored occupations was that of a coachman, a driver of the family’s carriages. The coachman visited homes, towns and plantations, enjoyed a close relationship with the planter’s family, kept up the horses and carriages, wore nice clothes and enjoyed being around horses. The British royal family enjoys coach driving, Prince Philip having been a competitor in four-in-hand events.A favorite pastime of modern Americans, the one that occupies the greatest share of their leisure time, is gardening and yard work. Most slave families either had their own garden patches or a large garden fed the entire plantation. Just as Russian collective workers cared for their gardens better than the fields of their agricultural collectives, antebellum servants cherished their gardens and livestock, too.Some slaves enjoyed plowing. Others preferred to work in timberlands or as boatmen, away from direct supervision and close to nature. Sewing, a favorite pastime for many Americans, was the dedicated career of seamstresses and tailors on the plantation. According to ex-slaves, most chief plantation seamstresses could simply look at a man and prepare a fitting coat and pants for him. Quilting was another festive activity enjoyed by the slaves, often in their own quarters. Arrie Binns of Washington-Wilkes loved to hear the old spinning wheel, loved her plow horse ‘Toby,’ and was “glad she knew slavery, glad she was reared by good white people who taught her the right way to live, and . . . glad I allus worked hard an’ been honest – hit has sho paid me time an’ time agin.”By the time they reached adulthood, all slaves had job training, job experience, and were usually working hard. While they might be sold away, they were not isolated long from co-workers. While the continuous hard work performed by slaves is most often characterized as an oppressive aspect of slavery, unemployment is worse. Unemployment is highly correlated with a host of problems. Many Americans suffer a devastating job loss at least once in their lives. For breadwinners, it is awful. Egos shatter, social status dives, finances tighten, situational depression increases, homes are lost and the school grades of a displaced worker’s children drop. Modern workers who are fired or layed off usually sever ties to most co-workers, people they have worked with for years, and then become more socially isolated. Unemployed felons often return to prison. Employment, a job, is one of the main things that reduces recidivism among new age slaves.Slaves usually occupied the middle and sometimes upper management positions on plantations. The overseer of Jefferson Davis’s Mississippi plantation was his trusted James Pemberton, a man who helped Davis clear the land for Brierfield Plantation. While some states attempted to enforce white supremacy by requiring white overseers, planters routinely ignored this law and had African-American managers of the entire plantation. Blacks were often elevated into the ranks of a specialized trade. Slaves were promoted to drivers (i.e. foremen), tradesmen making more than the average field hand, coach driver and other skilled or favored positions. Slave drivers were very commonly field hands with the strength to enforce work discipline and achieve results from their fellow slaves. Field hands became artisans, drivers, head drivers, coachmen and overseers of the plantation. Women, for example, would start out bringing in wood, move up to maid or waitress, and perhaps ultimately become a cook if they progressed satisfactorily. Uncle Robert Henry was proud that his Pa was the butler at the big house and that his mother had been head seamstress. In the hot months, whites might leave plantations in malarial environments to the sole sovereignty of a slave overseer with greater immunity to tropical diseases.Planters employed many different incentives to boost production and profits: prizes for the best cotton picking, unscheduled holidays, trips to town, extra pay for overtime work, proceeds from work on their own account, yearly bonuses based on performance, patches of land to grow their own crops (which they could use or sell), promotions to artisan, house servant, driver, or overseer, allowing artisans to move to town and assume a freer lifestyle, improvements in food, clothing and shelter, and manumission. Some planters even used detailed profit-sharing plans whereby the slaves earned a percentage of the crops they grew and harvested. It was emphatically untrue, as abolitionists claimed, “that FEAR is the only motive with which the slave is plied during his whole existence.”Plantation visitors gave servants tips for their services, which put servants in the role of mediating Southern hospitality. Guests would be uncomfortable offering money to their hosts, but payment to plantation servants in the form of tips allowed the guests to repay hospitality.Plantation discipline taught the advantages of hard work. Alabama freed-woman Jane proclaimed, “I raise my chillums jes’ lak Ole Mistis raise her’n en’ dats de way to raise ‘em, to wuk en’ keep outen debilment.” Sam Polite of South Carolina gave slavery credit for his work ethic: “W’at I t’ink ‘bout slabery? I t’ink it been good t’ing. It larn nigger to wuk. If it ain’t mek nigger wuk, he wouldn’t do nutting but tief (thief). . . Me – I slabing for self right now. I don’t want nobody to mek me wuk, but slabery larn me for wuk. . . Slabery done uh good t’ing for me, ‘cause if he ain’t larn me to wuk, today I wouldn’t know how to wuk.” Hard work was not in itself bad. “Work never hurt nobody,” said Charles H. Anderson. On her deathbed, Julia Cole’s mother asked their master to make men out of her two sons by making them work hard, and he did what she asked. Many slaves in their later years appreciated learning to work hard and disdained the generation of their people born in freedom. Perhaps as important as specific trades, antebellum methods inculcated the culture of productivity found in successful organizations today.“Overdriving” slaves to the point of ill health or shortened life expectancy was bad business. Published accounts of successful slave owners and slaves repudiate the common misconception that slaves starved or worked past the point of exhaustion or to death. Slaves were productive until their very old age, often learning valuable trades, and working into their 70s if they lived that long. The dark legend that Southern slaves were worked to death was propagated by Harriet Beecher Stowe and then by Karl Marx in Das Kapital: “Hence the negro labour in the Southern States of the American Union preserved something of a patriarchal character, so long as production was chiefly directed to immediate local consumption. But in proportion, as the export of cotton became of vital interest to these states, the over-working of the negro and sometimes the using up of his life in 7 years of labour became a factor in a calculated and calculating system. It was no longer a question of obtaining from him a certain quantity of useful products.” As with many of his “facts,” Marx had it wrong. Rev. Dr. Nehemiah Adams wrote after his 1854 journey that the slave’s workload was “no more toilsome than is performed by a hired field hand at the north.” Dr. Ulrich B. Phillips successfully disproved the myth of slave exhaustion from overwork. But the misconception persists. In 2008, the Public Broadcasting System website proclaimed, “The diets of enslaved people were inadequate or barely adequate to meet the demands of their heavy workload.” William L. Dunwoody remembered differently: “The slaves ate just what the master ate. They ate the same on my master’s place. . . He had hogs, goats, sheep, cows, chickens, turkeys, geese, ducks. . . My old master’s slaves et anything he raised.” The sweeping generalization of PBS cannot be true; there was wide variation in the way slaves were treated. Many accounts of plenty in the Slave Narratives clearly refute PBS’s blanket proclamation. Rias Body said, “No darky in Harris County, [Georgia] that he ever heard of ever went hungry or suffered for clothes until after freedom.” While food was usually “allowanced” at regular intervals, some had free access to food supplies. “Food was there in abundance and each person was free to replenish his supply as necessary,” said Pierce Cody, who also remembered an abundance of fish and wild game. Slaves didn’t always have to wait for fish to bite their lines, because they often used seines to bring up substantial quantities of fish and turtles. “Our white folkses b’lieved in good eatin’s,” said Carrie Hudson, who expressed the view of the majority of slaves. Mama Duck said, “I reckon I a heap bettah off dem days as I is now. Allus had sumpin’ t’ eat an’ a place t’ stay.”Agricultural work is exhausting by its very nature, and requires substantial sustenance, but there were times of the year when agricultural work was necessarily less strenuous. Agricultural workers in pre-modern times typically worked very strenuously on a regular basis. As Mary Rice observed, “De fiel’ han’s had a long spell when de crops was laid by in de summer and dat’s when Massa Cullen ‘lowed us to ‘jubilate’ (several days of idle celebration). I was happy all de time in slavery days, but dere ain’t much to git happy over now . . . Niggers dese days ain’t neber knowed whut good times is. Mebbe dat’s why dey ain’t no ‘count. And dey is so uppity, too.” Cotton growing itself only takes four months, about one-third of the entire year. Preparation and other crops took up an additional two months. The entire growing season was only for about half the year. The planters had other work for the slaves to do in the late fall, winter, and early spring, but it was during the growing season that work took on urgency. Statements that slaves worked 6 days a week from sunup to sundown did not refer to the winter months or rainy days. “All of de hard work on de plantation wuz done in de summertime,” Mrs. Amanda Jackson said, “In rainy weather an’ other bad weather all dat dey had to do wuz to shell corn an’ help make cloth.” On rainy days, which are very common in the South , the slaves could rest from their heavy manual labor. Rule 13th of published Rules of the Plantation states: “The overseer is particularly required to keep the negroes as much as possible out of the rain, and from all kind of exposure.” During the summer, the slave workforce often went to the river to eat, swim, cool off, and be with their co-workers and friends. A mid-day break, often in the highest heat of the day, was common, and slaves were thus allowed rest during the daylight hours.Slaves took breaks and naps in the field or back at their cabins. Breaks are not usually mentioned when the working hours are stated in the popular media. One TV mini-series, a more balanced soap opera, depicted these down-by-the-river mid-day breaks. On small plantations, whites worked alongside blacks. In those more intimate work relationships, it was even less likely that slaves would be overworked.Task Systems. Under “task systems,” slaves had tasks to do, which allowed them to finish early and enjoy some free time. In North Carolina, “The slave lumberman then lives measurably as a free man; hunts, fishes, eats, drinks, smokes and sleeps, plays and works, each when and as much as he pleases. It is only required of him that he shall have made, after half a year has passed, such a quantity of shingles as shall be worth to his master so much money as is paid to his owner for his services, and shall refund the value of the clothing and provisions he has required. No "driving" at his work is attempted or needed.” On South Carolina and Georgia cotton and rice plantations, “These tasks certainly would not be considered excessively hard, by a Northern labourer; and, in point of fact, the more industrious and active hands finish them often by two o'clock. I saw one or two leaving the field soon after one o'clock, several about two; and between three and four, I met a dozen women and several men coming home to their cabins, having finished their day's work. Under this "Organization of Labour," most of the slaves work rapidly and well. In nearly all ordinary work, custom has settled the extent of the task, and it is difficult to increase it. The driver who marks it out, has to remain on the ground until it is finished, and has no interest in overmeasuring it; and if it should be systematically increased very much, there is danger of a general stampede to the " swamp" - a danger the slave can always hold before his master's cupidity. In fact, it is looked upon in this region as a proscriptive right of the negroes to have this incitement to diligence offered them; and the man who denied it, or who attempted to lessen it, would, it is said, suffer in his reputation, as well as experience much annoyance from the obstinate "rascality" of his negroes.” In yet another system, tasks “were light enough so that a worker could complete them in three or four hours. His time was his own when his task was done, and it was not uncommon for slaves, in their free time, to work the acres that were uniformly allotted to them by their masters and thereby to accumulate personal property. It was more common for slaves to double up on their work — to do two or even three tasks in a day — and then to take several days off, during which they might travel many miles by horse or boat to visit friends, family, or lovers on other plantations. The task system became the norm in low country plantations, allowing slaves to grow crops on their own account, sell the produce to their owners or others and accumulate significant personal property.”The age of the slave largely determined the job they performed. While the field hands were the hardest working, the older slaves gravitated to more sedentary jobs, or were promoted to drivers of work gangs, carriage drivers, house servants, shoemakers, nurses, blacksmiths, baby-sitters, machine operators or artisans.African-Americans played a prominent antebellum role as jockeys. One jockey, Uncle Robert Coltin of Louisiana, spoke fondly of riding the stallion Equinox in a big race he won, competing against an English jockey named Kilpatrick and the fastest horses in Louisiana. Winners filled his cap with money after the big race, tips from those who won their bets on Equinox. Successful African-American jockeys enjoyed a good lifestyle with much more freedom and higher status than ordinary slaves. Some were freed because of their victories. After jockeying, these athletes would typically become jockey and horse trainers. Horseracing was the only American sport for many early years of our country’s existence. Later, African-American jockeys would win most of the early Kentucky Derbies, until forced out of the sport well after the War, proving again that for decades, in several ways, slaves had it better than freed people. The “Jocko” lawn jockey, to the extent is represents the prominent role African-American jockeys played earlier in history, is not as racially insensitive as it is sometimes regarded today.The skills learned in slavery helped after Emancipation, according to Booker T. Washington. “For two hundred and fifty years, I believe the way for the redemption of the Negro was being prepared through industrial development. Through all those years the Southern white man did business with the Negro in a way that no one else has done business with him. In most cases if a Southern white man wanted a house built he consulted a Negro mechanic about the plan and about the actual building of the structure. If he wanted a suit of clothes made he went to a Negro tailor, and for shoes he went to a shoemaker of the same race. In a certain way every slave plantation in the South was an industrial school. On these plantations young colored men and women were constantly being trained not only as farmers but as carpenters, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, brick masons, engineers, cooks, laundresses, sewing women and housekeepers.”Many slaves purchased their freedom by making money at various trades. “Mr. Adams, in a large degree, derived his unusual power of mind from the training given his hands in the process of mastering well three trades during the days of slavery. If one goes to-day into any Southern town, and asks for the leading a most reliable coloured man in the community, I believe that in five cases out of ten he will be directed to a Negro who learned a trade during the days of slavery.”“In later years, I [Booker T. Washington] confess that I do not envy the white boy as I once did. I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed. Looked at from this standpoint, I almost reach the conclusion that often the Negro boy’s birth and connection with an unpopular race is an advantage, so far as real life is concerned.”“I was free now,” Uncle William Baltimore explained, and “I went to Dersa County and opened up a blacksmith shop. I learned how to do this work when I was with Dr. Waters. He had me taught by a skilled man. I learned to build wagons too. . . I made my own tools.” The prized skills and trades learned on the plantation, which could support freedpeople included blacksmithing, building, carpentry, cooking, masonry, sewing, shoemaking, tanning, weaving and midwifery. Once servants learned these valuable skills, they did not go back to the fields, according to Uncle William Jones of Vicksburg, because their time was then too valuable.Food. Contrary to widespread belief, adult slaves received adequate nutrition. They would be sold before they ever starved to death. The Slave Narratives indicate most slaves ate well, which is not surprising in rich agricultural regions. “Was Marse Moseley good to us? Lor’, honey, how you talk. Co’se he was! He was de bes’ white man in de lan’. Us had eve’y thing dat we could hope to eat: turkey, chicken, beef, lamb, poke, vegetables, fruits, aigs, butter, jmile . . .” said Aunt Clara Davis. “Our food den was a-way better dan de stuff we eats today,” Emma Jones said . . “Ole Massa had a big garden an’ we useta git de vega’tables we et f’um his garden. De folks was plenty good to us. Sometimes de mens would hunt . . . Us had eve’ything” Ellen Claibourn agreed: “De food peoples eat these days, you couldn’t have got nobody to eat.” Smart slave masters kept the bellies of their servants full and made sure their human property received proper nutrition. On Sack Gee’s huge Louisiana plantation, Isaac Adams noticed that the field hands “looked pretty clean and healthy” and his master “fed them all good and they all liked him.” “Us sho et good dem days, said Georgia Baker, but “Now us jus’ eats what-some-ever us can git.” The variety was impressive on some plantations. “Dere wuz always plenty to eat ‘cause dey raised everything dat you c’n think of,” said Mrs. Amanda Jackson, “Dere wuz all kinds o’ vegetables an’ big fiel’s of hogs an’ ‘bout fifteen or twenty head’a cattle dat had to be milked everyday.”Modern research shows that slaves consumed 88% of what they produced economically, that slavery was economically profitable, and that it was efficient, too. The FEDERAL WRITERS’ PROJECT Slave Narratives prove that slaves ate well . . . better than after the War. While victim-oriented ex-slaves typically complained of their owners taking “everything” they made or produced from them, the financial and economic reality was that they consumed most of their output. Detroit, Michigan Congressman John Conyer’s official website continues this assertion as part of his claim for reparations: “It is undisputed that African slaves were not compensated for their labor.” In actuality, slaves were paid with food, clothing, shelter, good medical care, free burials, festivities, a safe neighborhood, the use of country estates, mates, security and other benefits.In prime growing conditions, Southern plantations – whose mission it was to grow and raise things – produced an extremely wide variety of food. “’Course dey had a gyarden,” said Rachel Adams, “and it had somepin of jus’ about evvything what us knowed anything ‘bout in de way of gyarden sass growin’ in it.” Abolitionist Fanny Kemble bemoaned the slaves on Butler’s Island not having much “meat,” meaning pork, beef and mutton, but noted the slaves were surrounded by waters teeming with fish, oysters, shrimp, and prawns – enough to attract dolphins from the Atlantic Ocean – kept their own fowl in abundance, and ate chicken, ducks, pigeons, turkeys, venison and wild game. Some of the slaves who remembered mistreatment still thought those days were better, for the reasons Henry Cheatam articulated: “Fact is, I believe I druther be alivin’ back dere dan today ‘caze us at least had plenty somp’n t’eat an’ nothin’ to worry about.”Adult slaves consumed adequate amounts of meat, and the energy value of their diet exceeded that of free men in 1879. The daily diet of slaves exceeded the modern recommended daily levels of the chief nutrients. Slaves usually settled in areas with the best soil, the Black Belt of the lower South, river valleys and other prime agricultural areas owned by the wealthier planters. Slaves were by no means evenly distributed across the South, as slave population density maps show. Good soil made these plantations more productive, and food easier to grow, raise and find. Malnutrition more often adversely affected babies and very young slaves (due to lack of protein, premature weaning, and feeding raw milk to infants), but when they grew up and started working, slaves grew rapidly and became healthy adults.Shelter. Slaves commonly lived in log cabins. A good case can be made that log cabins are superior to homes made of brick and plank, because log cabins are cool in the summer and warm in the winter. One planter, a former physician, built brick homes for his servants, noticed they were ill more often, and then replaced them with log cabins because of their superiority as human shelter. Clay, plentiful in the South, effectively chinks holes in log cabins.To read some accounts of slave quarters, one would think that all slaves lived in log huts with plenty of air coming in through the logs, but Frederick Law Olmstead, a Northern visitor, observed otherwise in his travels. “In the main the negroes appeared to be well cared for and abundantly supplied with the necessaries of vigorous physical existence. A large part of them lived in commodious and well built cottages, with broad galleries in front, so that each family of five had two rooms on the lower floor and a large loft. The remainder lived in log huts, small and mean in appearance; but those of their overseers were little better, and preparations were being made to replace all of these by neat boarded cottages.” On the Louisiana plantation belonging to Valcour Aime, “The negroes were well housed, clothed and fed; the hospital and the nursery were capacious . . “ While accounts of slave housing varied, several European observers and even some abolitionists noted that slave housing was as good as the homes of the poor in Scotland, England, and Europe, and generally equal to or even better than the homes of non-slaveholding whites. Some bondspeople improved the quality of their housing, and whitewashing parties in the spring became more common as time passed.Housing cannot be taken for granted by emancipated new age slaves today. “Securing housing is perhaps the most immediate challenge facing prisoners after release.”Clothes. Slaves did not walk around in rags the whole time. Their clothes were often appealing. Homespun cloth made stronger and more durable clothes than the “store bought” variety. Sallie Paul said, “de cloth was better wearin den . . .” Clothes made on the plantation were sometimes superior to those made elsewhere, although this varied from plantation to plantation. Experienced weavers on the plantation could make different kinds of cloth. Martha Colquitt said her grandmother “made heaps of kinds of cloth.” Slaves, especially those on large self-sufficient plantations, knew how to make their own cotton and wool threads, cloth, dyes, and clothes. Being able to make their clothes from scratch was a source of pride. Unlike the socially conscious world of high fashion, slaves were not likely under the same pressure to dress well, although many did. Slaves were dressed more or less uniformly, which focuses attention on more important things, eliminating superficial concerns. Former slaves fondly remembered the style and durability of homespun cloth and clothes. Plantation seamstresses and tailors possessed great skill. Despite all the advancements in textile technology, wool cloth is still hard to beat for keeping warm, and cotton cloth still keeps us cooler most of the time.Anti-slavery literature portrays young bondspeople as disadvantaged or humiliated because they wore long shirts as their only clothing in the summertime. This simple outfit was actually cooler than any other garment, a clear advantage in the hot and humid South. Most young slave boys wore these when they were not in the swimming hole. Some masters liked to dress up their servants. Lina Hunter’s master did not just dress his young slave boys in long shirts: “Our Marster had plenty and he did lak to see his Niggers fixed up nice” William Wells Brown said his mistress, “Mrs. Price was very proud of her servants, always keeping them well dressed.”Good Healthcare. From the perspective of the slave, a commonly named advantage of slavery was the healthcare provided by their owners. Sick slaves were attended to by the plantation mistress or master, other slaves chosen to nurse the sick person, and later by a physician if the illness was serious. The same doctor who cared for the white plantation family also treated their servants. Infirmaries, nurses, herbal and home remedies, bed rest, nutrition, childcare, mid-wives and the genuine concern of their owners were remembered positively by most former slaves. Whites on the plantation truly cared about the health of their slaves. If their concern was 100% selfish, they were anxious to preserve their valuable assets. Superior medical care helped the slaves overcome illnesses and prevented disease. Of the seven leading causes of modern African-American deaths – heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, accidents, homicide and HIV/AIDS – most were much less of a problem or non-existent during slavery.Doctors were concerned about the health, safety and the general well-being of everyone on the plantation. Physicians who travelled to many different plantations were a valuable source of information to planters about the healthiest conditions. They could easily compare plantations, seeing what worked and what failed. Physicians were also in a position to find and report illegal cruelty to slaves, which they sometimes did.Some slaves actually received medical care superior to their white owners. Whites and blacks received the same medical care, except that slaves were not typically bled, a discredited medical practice. For various reasons, after age 20, slaves lived about as long as whites did. We can compare the slaves’ generally good medical treatment to the constitutionally inadequate healthcare California inmates received in 2005, where a California inmate was dying needlessly every six or seven days. In 2009, because of its terrible prison healthcare, California was found guilty again of violating 42 U.S.C. §1983, the same 1871 statute intended to curb the Ku Klux Klan.One Southern medical doctor wrote on the subject of slave diseases. One of the “diseases” was preceded by the slave acting sulky and dissatisfied. Dr. Cartwright had the answer: “The cause of this sulkiness and dissatisfaction should be inquired into and removed, or they are apt to run away or fall into the negro consumption.” The primary recommended procedure was to ask the slave what was bothering him or her, and then eliminate the problem. To another mental illness, Dr. Cartwright also advised: “Remedies should be assisted by removing the original cause of the dissatisfaction or trouble of mind, and by using every means to make the patient comfortable, satisfied, and happy.” Under the guise of science, this medical advice sought to eliminate the sources of slave unhappiness.The African Physical Advantage in North America. Let’s face it: there are “population-based genetic differences” that have already been fully documented . . . and more will surface in the future. There is no reason for this topic to remain taboo. The topic of racial differences has more than a little to do with slavery.Africans had stronger resistance to Old World diseases and therefore survived better than Native American populations. Most Native Americans were cut down by the “virgin soil pandemic.” “Decimation” is too mild of a term, because decimation was the ancient Roman practice of only killing every tenth legionnaire in cases of cowardice or other unacceptable behavior. Native Americans lost the vast majority of their pre-1492 populations. Africans also had more resistance to tropical and semi-tropical diseases and climate than their white owners. Wherever diseases were most devastating, black slavery predominated. Black slaves filled a biological and economic niche after vast numbers of Native Americans were killed by disease, slaughter and the loss of their homelands.Africans are better suited, by virtue of their nostrils and hair, for example, to stay cool in hot climates. In addition to these physical advantages, doctors confirm that West Africans as a race are more muscular and have other physical and athletic advantages over Orientals and Caucasians. Blacks dominate college and professional football and basketball, extremely competitive environments, and obtain positions in those sports in percentages many times greater than their representation in the population at large. West African and African-American domination of sports like boxing is clear. Based on science, Jon Entine found that people with West African ancestry generally have leaner, more muscular upper bodies and broader shoulders, narrower hips, longer reach with their arms, more elongation of extremities, higher bodily density, a higher testosterone level, better capability for acceleration, and other noticeable physical differences. The various physical advantages enjoyed by African-American slaves was one reason Southern slaveholders – as opposed to Northerners who were ignorant of these physical advantages – did not feel deeply sorry for them and sometimes harbored, consciously or unconsciously, some degree of envy.With these physical advantages, blacks outperformed other races in physical labor, which was the role set for them as slaves. This is another reason slave plantations were efficient and successful. The physical advantage Africans enjoyed made their work in the fields, from the perspective of the intellectual white abolitionist, seem more onerous than it really was. Uninformed whites did not appreciate that African-Americans could perform the drudgery better than whites up North and in Europe thought they could. These physical advantages make Frederick Law Olmsted’s negative comments about Southern black labor ridiculous.Slaves were exploited by virtue of their relative physical superiority and immunological resistance, but at the same time, they were more prized because of these features. Their true value as slaves was higher than it would have been had they been Native Americans, Orientals or whites, for example. During slavery, this advantage worked to the ultimate benefit of the slaveholders, but to some extent, it also improved the lives of the slaves. The wealthier plantations treated their servants better, sometimes provided better clothes, sold them less often, probably had more varied food sources, and generally enhanced their lives more than less successful plantations, though much depended upon the owner being resident on the plantation.The physical advantages blacks enjoyed relative to the other races had several consequences: First, blacks were enslaved and brought to the North American colonies, which later became the United States. Second, blacks became part of successful plantation and industrial organizations and adopted Western civilization. Eventually, blacks as a race achieved legal equality and its attendant advantages.Plantation ManagementSlaves regarded their masters as kind if the slaves were provided sufficient food, clothing, shelter, and stable family units, and if there was infrequent use of the whip. Most slaves in their life had at least one kind master. It was in the master’s interest to be considered humane.Plantations were businesses subject to indebtedness, commodity prices, droughts, personnel problems and other commercial hazards. As is the case with all property in a market economy, slaves tended over time to come into the hands of responsible and wise owners. Slave sales described in heart-wrenching terms – and they were often sad – mask the economic truth that most slaves went to better owners. On a statistical basis, permanent buyers (exclusive of slave traders) were more responsible, prosperous, intelligent, healthy and wise than the sellers of slaves. Compared to purchases, slave sales more often resulted from the sellers’ financial or medical problems, substance abuse, domestic or other crises, including the final illness leading to the owner’s death. Slaves recognized the advantages – all other things being equal – of purchase by a wealthy owner. Prince Bee was auctioned as a scared young boy, but took an immediate liking to his new master and his master’s oldest daughter Mary, who was the mistress of the plantation and kind to all of the black and white children.Directly contrary to the Marxist viewpoint, the profit motive assured most slaves of good treatment on a given plantation, especially after the slave trade ended. On more successful plantations, slaves were often treated better. Profit, not sadism, motivated their owners. The profit motive adversely affected slaves when sold, especially when sent to worse conditions, but remaining slaves benefited when troublemakers were sold. Flourishing planters tended to acquire more slaves and sell their own slaves less often or not at all. Successful plantation owners discovered the same principles that modern management experts have established: namely that a disciplined, happy, healthy, well-fed, valued, sexually active, hard-working, spiritually-connected work force, without free access to alcohol or drugs, remaining in their family units, with fighting discouraged, is by far the most productive. Abolitionist critics rarely credited slaveholders with common sense or decency. Happy slaves were definitely more productive, and abused slaves ran away and slowed down work on the plantation. Slaves worked harder for kind masters and overseers. Josiah Henson proved this when he got his overseer fired, took over as overseer, and doubled crop production on his master’s plantation. Masters realized that their personal safety increased when they made life more enjoyable for their servants. Management principles are universal through time. The ancient Roman writer Lucius Iunius Moderatus Columella discussed principles of positive rewards, friendliness and fairness as part of wise agricultural slave management.Power corrupts, and slavery was no exception. “Utter despotic power is not to be trusted in any hands.” While masters had power to inflict whippings, rape, degradation, deprivation and sometimes death upon their servants, those evils invariably hurt the value of their slave assets, harmed agricultural and industrial productivity, and gave rise to resistance and counter-attacks. Planters simply did not abuse their servants if they were rational. Plantation mistresses, white children who played with slaves, Christian ministers, physicians and other planters often championed the humane treatment of slaves. Yes, violence enforced the slave system, but that is true of all legal systems, and each plantation was its own legal system. Violence was exceptional when participants knew the law, rules and regulations then prevailing and had the common sense and training to avoid ignoring them. To say that slaves were whipped often implies that the slave or the person whipping, or both, were unwise or mistaken. The relative rarity of whipping gives credit to the intelligence, discipline, and adaptability of the black slave, more than does the myth that adult slaves were constantly in need of chastisement. Slaves had the sense to avoid whippings and maximize their own well-being under the prevailing circumstances, especially more mature slaves. They succeeded on the plantation, and were not dependent upon abolitionists, the Union Army or Abraham Lincoln to enable their achievements.Antebellum plantation owners studied publications explaining the most profitable methods of managing their labor. Instructions to Managers, in essence a management textbook of the slavery era, is a good source of objective evidence about the treatment of slaves. It advises against severity of punishment and recommends kindness. Southern Cultivator and Monthly Journal’s 1840 “Rules of the Plantation” typified the sound practices advised in these publications. De Bow’s Review responded to the planters’ interest in this topic by publishing articles and letters about proper slave management. In 1851, De Bow’s Review published a letter from an anonymous Mississippi planter, possessed of 150 slaves, who referenced an earlier valuable article on slave management. The humane Mississippi planter said, “Some very sensible and practical writer . . . has given us an article upon the management of negroes, which entitles him to the gratitude of the planting community, not only for the sound and useful information it contains, but because it has opened up this subject, to be thought of, written about, and improved upon, until the comforts of our black population shall be greatly increased, and their services become more profitable to their owners. Surely there is no subject which demands of the planter more careful consideration than the proper treatment of his slaves, by whose labor he lives, and for whose conduct and happiness he is responsible in the eyes of God. . . . when the negro is treated with humanity, and subjected to constant employment without the labor of thought, and the cares incident to the necessity of providing for his own support, he is by far happier . . . My first care has been to select a proper place for my “Quarter,” well protected by the shade of forest trees, sufficiently thinned out to admit a free circulation of air, so situated as to be free from the impurities of stagnant water, and to erect comfortable homes for my negroes. . . 24 houses made of hewn post oak, covered with cypress, 16 by 18, with close plank floors and good chimneys, and elevated two feet from the ground. The ground under and around the house is swept every month, and the houses, both inside and out, white-washed twice a year. . . good cisterns at each end, providing an amble supply of pure water. . . large under-ground cisterns, keeping the water pure and cool, are greatly to be preferred. . . beds with ample clothing . . . they are made to sleep. . . I allow for each hand who works out, four pounds of clear meat and one peck of meal per week. Their dinners are cooked for them, and carried to the field, always with vegetables . . . There are two houses set apart at mid-day for resting, eating, and sleeping, if they desire it, and they retire to one of the weather-sheds or the grove to pass the time, not being permitted to remain in the hot sun while at rest. . . each family being provided with an oven, skillet, and sifter, and each one having a coffee-pot (and generally some coffee to put in it,) . . . wood is regularly furnished them . . . Every negro has his hen-house, where he raises poultry, which he is not permitted to sell, and he cooks and eats his chickens and eggs . . .every family has a garden, paled in, where they raise such vegetables and fruits as they take a fancy to. A large house is provided as a nursery for the children, under the charge of a careful and experienced woman . . . suckling women come in to nurse their children four times during the day . . . four full suits of clothes with two pair of shoes, every year . . a calico dress and two handkerchiefs, extra . . . I give to each head of a family and to every single negro on Christmas day, five dollars, and send them to the county town . . . to spend their money. . . I permit no spirits to be brought on the plantation, or used by any negro, if I can prevent it; and a violation of this rule, if found out, is always followed by a whipping, and a forfeiture of the five dollars next Christmas. . . large and comfortable hospital . . attached a nurse’s room . . . very experienced and careful negro woman, who administers the medicine and attends to this diet . . . I have not lost a hand since the summer of 1845 . . nor has my physician’s bill averaged fifty dollars a year . . . I . . have as few sour looks and as little whipping as almost any other place . . . I have a good fiddler, and keep him well supplied with catgut, and I make it his duty to play for the Negros every Saturday night until 12 o’clock. . . Charley‘s fiddle is always accompanied with Ihurod on the triangle, and Sam to “pat.” I also employ a good preacher, who regularly preaches to them on the Sabbath day, and it is made the duty of every one to come up clean and decent to the place of worship. . . . I would gladly learn every negro on the place to read the bible . . .”The humane management of plantations was obviously a learned behavior. Simon Legree was a Yankee. Sojourner Truth said being “nursed in the very lap of slavery” made masters from families who had held slaves for many years more understanding, unlike those recently introduced to the institution, such as Sojourner Truth’s mistress Mrs. Dumont. Plantations were most often successful because the owners lived right on the plantation, took an active interest in the productivity and welfare of the work force, attended to details, identified problems and advantages, and most often knew the skills, personalities, strengths, and weaknesses of their labor force. They were right there.Abolitionist and neo-abolitionist writings and media supposed unjust punishment on mere whims. Plantation justice was more reliable than outside it, with the exception of the underlying oppression and intrinsic injustice of slavery itself. Crime inquiries were easier with numerous witnesses, not necessarily eyewitnesses, but people who had often known the suspects and the victims for many years, often all their lives. Slaveholders did not often accuse innocent slaves, because it would lower morale and likely harm production. Witnesses lived right there on the plantation. Slaves had every opportunity and incentive to tell the truth, for their masters rewarded honesty, and everyone on the plantation had a material incentive to avoid problems. Most importantly, like everyone, slaves were better off in the end when they did not commit crimes, but followed the instructions of their owners and the law. They knew that, if their crime was serious, a sale might separate them from their spouses, children, familiar surroundings and all of the people they had known in life. They might go to a place where nobody knew them. To avoid these negative things, most slaves simply complied with the law and their master’s instructions. A positive work environment resulted. The masters instructed their servants to work peacefully: a policy that helped their physical and mental well-being.Practical Remedies for Oppression. Slaves were not helpless victims on the job. Slaves usually outnumbered the whites on the plantation itself and had multiple opportunities to kill their masters, mistresses, overseers and drivers. On one very large Georgia plantation, “De marster done all de whippin’,” Jerry Boykins said, “‘cause dey had been two overseers killed on de plantation for whippin’ slaves till de blood run out dey body.” If things got too bad on the plantation, the slaves could kill the offending white person, often without detection. Slaves injured or killed many overseers. As one ex-slave said, “Marse Jim had ‘bout three hundred slaves, and he had one mighty bad overseer. But he got killed down on de bank of de creek one night. Dey never did find out who killed him, but Marse Jim always b’lieved de field han’s done it.” The field hands, male and female, teenagers and older slaves, were in superb physical condition, better than their masters and overseers. Slaves had ready access to knives, blades, tools, wood, stones, axes, saws, hoes, fire and any number of other potentially deadly instruments. Many slaves used firearms to hunt deer, turkey, raccoons, o’possum, squirrels, wild hogs, bear, foxes, birds and other game. Slaves were intimately familiar with the habits of those who lived on the plantation. Southern newspapers carried stories of masters and overseers being killed in the woods or in the fields. Murder in the woods and fields helped conceal the identity of the slayer, and the slave community tightened in mutual support when a cruel oppressor was eliminated. “If a good nigger killed a white overseer,” Henry Banner believed, “they wouldn’t do nothin’ to him. . . It was just like a mule killing a man.” If religion did not make the slave owners kindly, believable threats of murder might. Slaves had plenty of opportunity to kill whites, and most whites were not interested in supplying the motive. Some slaves were so strong and mean that white and black people steered clear of them. Still, Old South slaves killed very few masters, a tiny percentage of all the whites killed, which supports the Plantation Myth a great deal more than any abolitionist myth.Isaam Morgan worked on a plantation where there were no runaways: “No’m none of our slaves ever tried to run a way. Dey all knowed dey was well off. We didn’t have no oberseer but once. He was a mean un too. He tried to fight an’ whup us slaves, an’ one night six big nigger men jumped on him an’ scairt him mos’ to death. Atter dat de massa wouldn’t never have no mo’ oberseers. He tended to dat business himself.” That master would not eagerly jail, kill or even punish six prime field hands worth about $250,000.00 in today’s money – and those six men knew it.Because slaves were involved in the preparation of meals, they had every opportunity to poison the plantation owners. Arsenic, other poisons, and ground glass were used. Arson and poisoning were the main fears of whites on the plantation. Unlike the Roman Republic and Empire, Southern states did not have a law that all household slaves were to be killed if the master was murdered by a household slave. Slaves had extremely detailed knowledge of every aspect of the plantation and knew the other slaves well. Slaves did not have to “case the joint” in preparation for a crime. While patrols rode the surrounding roads at night, the plantation itself was extremely quiet in the middle of the night. Proving who performed the plantation murder or arson might be difficult, especially if the master or overseer was unpopular.Slave owners were constantly worried about slave uprisings, though not usually on their own plantations. Mary Boykin Chestnut expressed no fear of being the only white person within 20 miles of her plantation, even after slaves strangled her nearby cousin.The possibility of murder or arson, perhaps by a mentally ill slave, maybe in reaction to physical or unjust punishment, or for some other motive, attracted planters to the use of positive rewards, which are more productive and effective than punishment in encouraging productive behavior. Diabolic possibilities and the greater physical strength of many slaves acted as a check and balance upon the severity of slave masters and overseers. The premature death of a cruel overseer witnessed by Frederick Douglass may have been caused by poison – we’ll never know.More common than murder were a number of other “weapons of the weak.” An appeal process was available. “[W]hen a slave had nerve enough to go straight to his master with a well-founded complaint against an overseer, though he might be repelled and have even that of which he at the time complained repeated, and though he might be beaten by his master, as well as by the overseer, for his temerity, the policy of complaining was, in the end, generally vindicated by the relaxed rigor of the overseer's treatment. The latter became more careful and less disposed to use the lash upon such slaves thereafter. The overseer very naturally disliked to have the ear of the master disturbed by complaints; and, either for this reason or because of advice privately given him by his employer, he generally modified the rigor of his rule after complaints of this kind had been made against him. For some cause or other, the slaves, no matter how often they were repulsed by their masters, were ever disposed to regard them with less abhorrence than the overseer.”Another grievance procedure was the “lie out” – a tactic whereby the disgruntled slave or slaves would leave the plantation by a few miles and send complaints or demands for better treatment back to the owners. “Lying out” worked because it was usually undertaken at planting or harvest time, when the planter desperately needed the labor and the slaves knew they had bargaining power. Of course, slaves could live in the woods, swamps, or caves and cease all communication with their owners, while receiving food from other slaves. Corporal Octave Johnson was treated “pretty well,” but one day he thought an overseer would whip him unjustifiably for not getting up on time, so he hid out in the Louisiana woods for a year and a half. The faked lie out worked, too. Slaves could change masters with the connivance of the new, more humane master, who bought the escaped-but-concealed slave for a fraction of the slave’s value. After the sale, the “fugitive slave” would show up at his old master’s plantation and be informed that he had been sold to the more humane master.If a slave greatly disliked his or her master, they could obtain a new master by running away, getting jailed, and refusing to tell the authorities the name or address of their true owner. After the statutory period, the slave would then be sold at auction, and would take the chance that their new owner was better than their old owner. Runaways were frequently sold after re-capture, passing the risk of escape to the next purchaser and removing the slave from the disfavored work environment. Some slaves ran away to remain in the same general location, rather than be sold out of state.Feigned illness was a way slaves avoided work. “I was on a plantation where a woman had been excused from any sort of labour for more than two years,” Frederick Law Olmsted wrote, “on the supposition that she was dying of phthisis. At last the overseer discovered that she was employed as a milliner and dressmaker by all the other coloured ladies of the vicinity; and upon taking her to the house, it was found that she had acquired a remarkable skill in these vocations.”Some slaves, particularly strong ones, physically resisted all whippings, or threatened to run away or stop working if they were whipped, and their masters accepted this resistance. Frederick Douglass understood the dynamic: “The old doctrine that submission is the very best cure for outrage and wrong, does not hold good on the slave plantation. He is whipped oftenest, who is whipped easiest; and that slave who has the courage to stand up for himself against the overseer, although he may have many hard stripes at the first, becomes, in the end, a freeman, even though he sustain the formal relation of a slave.” Richard Toler didn’t like slavery, but he was not mistreated, “And ah jus’ tell them – if they whipped me, ah’d kill ‘em, and ah nevah did get a whippin’. If ah thought one was comin’ to me, Ah’d hide in the woods; then they’d send aftah me, and they say, ‘Come, on back – we won’t whip you.’” Escaped slave and abolitionist William Wells Brown wrote of one strong slave, Randall, who was eventually whipped, but who resisted it for many years. A very strong slave was physically intimidating, and the master and overseer could never be sure the slave would not harm them in a fit of anger, which happened many times. A fistfight or other physical altercation might end up permanently injuring the white person who angered the slave. Strong slaves could resist physical punishment at the hands of overseers. Uncle William Baltimore’s master “Dr. Waters had a good heart. He didn’t call us ‘slaves’. He call us ‘servants’. He didn’t want none of his niggers whipped ‘ceptin when there wasn’t no other way. I was grown up pretty good size. Dr. Waters liked me cause I could make wagons and show mules. Once when he was going away to be gone all day, he tole me what to do while he was gone. The overseer wasn’t no such good man as old master. He wanted to be boss and told me what to do. I tole him de big boss had tole me what to do and I was goin’ to do it. He got mad and said if I didn’t do what he said I’d take a beating. I was a big nigger and powerful stout. I tole the overseer fore he whipped me he’s show himself a better man than I was. When he found he was to have a fight he didn’t say no more about the whipping.”Women also stood up to overseers. Fannie Alexander relates her mother-in-law’s story that “One day the overseer was going to whoop one of the women ‘bout sompin or other and all the women started with the hoes to him and run him clear out of the field. They would killed him if he hadn’t got out of the way. She said the master hadn’t put an overseer over them for a long time.” One woman with a hoe could intimidate an overseer: “The overseer couldn’t whip my old mother anyhow because she was a kind of bully and she would git back in a corner with a hoe and dare him in. And he wouldn’t go in neither.” Leonard Franklin’s mother was no pushover: “My mother had about three masters before she got free. She was a terrible working woman. Her boss went off deer hunting once for a few weeks. While he was gone, the overseer tried to whip her. She knocked him down and tore his face up so that the doctor had to ‘tend to him. When Pennington came back, he noticed his face all patched up and asked him what was the matter with it. The overseer told him that he went down in the field to whip the hands and that he just thought he would hit Lucy a few licks to show the slaves that he was impartial, but she jumped on me and like to tore me up. Old Pennington said to him, ‘Well, if that is the best you could do with her, damned if you won’t just have to take it.’” Alice Alexander’s aunt whipped an overseer half to death, and the master fired the overseer because he didn’t want an overseer who could be whipped by a woman.Women who had babies regularly were “special people” on the plantation, and whipping them was not often accomplished, especially when they worked as a group and had hoes in their hands. Slaveholders had special regard for prolific mothers, did not work them as hard, and were extra good to them. Little did their masters know that, from about 1838 forward, this prized investment in newborn slaves would be destroyed by the War and an 1865 amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The year 1838 is based on Drs. Fogel & Engerman’s calculations that individual slaves paid for their upbringing and investment, and started making money for their owners at age 27.A work slow-down would harm the master, and unjust cruelty to one of their slave brothers or sisters could encourage such behavior. Slaves could slow work down when one of them received unfair punishment. They were known to become very solemn, saying nothing. This sent the message to the slave drivers, overseers or owners that the slave group disapproved of the punishment, that the slaves were united in their thoughts, and if many slaves acted together, the psychological effect was significant. On the other hand, it is not hard to imagine some slaves rejoicing inside when a particularly unpleasant or obnoxious co-worker, who had angered them, or committed some crime against them, was punished by the master or overseer.There were six white people on the average Southern plantation. Adult slaves outnumbered adult white males on 100-slave plantations by a ratio of about 30 to 1. Outnumbering their owners by large margins, slaves on antebellum plantations possessed psychological and negotiating strength. While the master held the real power, the psychological effect and potential physical consequences of being outnumbered 10 to 1 or 20 to 1 had to have had an effect on the mindset of planters, overseers and the white plantation families. The planters may not have even been aware of the unconscious or intangible crowd pressure, but modern social psychology literature proves the power of numbers in social interaction, decision-making, negotiation and thought patterns. Clearly, the slaves might have overthrown the slaveholding regime on numerous plantations if they had been so inclined. During the War, slaves had an even greater chance to rebel because the white men were away, but there were few extended slave revolts during the War. Slaves negotiated, directly or indirectly, verbally or non-verbally, for better working and living conditions. Reciprocal obligations arose in antebellum slavery.Angry slaves could easily defame their masters or overseers in the larger community, and there is no reason they could not conspire to defame their masters to make the slander more believable. Angered slaves might destroy or steal the property of their owners, damage or theft that would often be impossible to prove. One coordinated work slow-down could destroy an entire crop of cotton, financially ruining a planter. And of course, there was the chance to spit in the white folks’ soup when no one was looking, too.The folklore of slavery contains numerous instances of trickery by the slaves, which they loved to remember and embellish. Slaves loved to recollect these “slave tales,” many of which had to do with obtaining additional food from the master’s supply. Slaves often named the trickster in these tales “John.” Tales reflect widespread theft by the slaves, as well as other tactics to avoid work and punishment, fake injuries, or otherwise outwit their masters.Physical and human factors limited the power of slaveholders to extract labor from their servants. A slaveholder and overseer could not simultaneously watch all the workers on a 300-acre or 600-acre plantation. Slaves intentionally limited their work and masters usually had to acknowledge those limits by imposing lower standards.The moral and spiritual power of a true Christian conversion, by the master, by the slave, or both, would also provide a powerful instrument to check the evil impulses of the master. Masters would not always want their spiritual equals – slaves they expected to meet in Heaven – to see them play the hypocrite by acting contrary to Christian doctrine or tradition. Slaves could communicate with their masters regarding spiritual matters. Whites and blacks worshiped together in the Prayer Houses built on many plantations and in Baptist, Episcopal, Presbyterian and Methodist Churches. In communal church settings, especially in the eighteenth century, slave church members could bring criticism against white church members, as if in a court. Fans of Gone With The Wind remember that Mammy exercised considerable moral authority over Scarlett O’Hara. Whites and blacks together started new Baptist and Methodist churches, although as the nineteenth century arrived, the races separated more in their worship and church lives. Even after the races had segregated themselves more in church activities, the effect of their earlier interaction had a profound effect on both races.A prevailing theme in some literature about slavery is that slaves resented the control of their masters, were miserable, spent their time planning escapes to the North and longed to leave their plantations. None of these was true for the majority of slaves. Most slaves accepted the authority of their masters, were reasonably happy, did not plan to head to a free state and liked their plantation community, friends, and family. In 1825, for example, Ohioans repeatedly urged Josiah Henson to free himself, his family and 25 slaves under his control when the boat he commanded docked at Cincinnati. Black Ohioans assured him and his boatload of slaves they could be free simply by stepping ashore. Josiah Henson, although he would later regret it, insisted his boatload of slaves proceed to their new Kentucky plantation.Modern abhorrence with the idea of slavery is often projected onto all slaves, to characterize them as hating slavery, too. Modern writers look for slave rebel heroes. The slave rebel was most commonly a criminal, mentally ill, young and irresponsible or anti-social. The longing for freedom became stronger with the approach of the Union Army, but before that realistic hope of freedom, most slaves accepted their bondage as the only thing they knew. The psychic cost of being miserable was greater than simply accepting the inevitable. Yes, there was resistance in the slave labor-planter management relationship, just as there is now and always has been tension in any labor-management relationship; but that resistance was most often a form of negotiation, not a rebellion to the entire idea of slavery. The many voices of ex-slaves who longed for the richness of their slave life after it was over refute the blanket concept of resistance. Some slaves rebelled, and some did not. Most thought freedom would be good, but for many or most, it was not.While Frederick Douglass was “accustomed to consider white men as my bitterest enemies,” he was an exception, not the norm. The autobiography of Frederick Douglass weighs us down with constant oppression until the day Frederick Douglass fights his overseer Covey. He bests Covey in physical combat, intimidates him, is freed from Covey’s physical tyranny, and can then hold his head up with pride. After that, Covey chose not to flog Frederick Douglass. Frederick Douglass performed this act of defiance at great risk to himself, because striking a white man in antebellum Virginia subjected a slave to the death penalty. Covey, fortunately for Frederick Douglass, had a reputation as a slave-breaker to uphold, and thus was not inclined to let the world know that a slave had whipped him in a fight. This made Frederick Douglass’ triumph all the more glorious. Frederick Douglass’ owner would not have wanted Douglass scarred heavily, disabled or killed, though that stated preference may have been a secret. But, Frederick Douglass was an extraordinary individual, one of the few to transition from slavery to the upper middle class before Emancipation.Unlike most new age slaves, antebellum slaves typically possessed admirable qualities, including industriousness, sensitivity, cheerfulness, reliability, religious faith and a sense of humor. Humility was the most common trait learned, practiced and exhibited by slaves, though this was more common in the presence of the masters and overseers. Humility translates into excellent manners. Slaves had every incentive and right to have two different faces depending upon the master’s presence. Suffering often produces humility. Success and pride can produce hubris or vanity, which causes humans to err. At the same time, the Sambo image of slaves is not accurate. All humans are more intricate than the stereotypes we place on them. Slaves were just like any other people; they acted rationally within the given system to make their lives as comfortable as possible.Dr. Robin D.G. Kelley wrote about the “false dichotomy” between the stereotypical polar images of the docile Sambo and the slave rebel. The slave rebel image has been a favorite of the victim school. By honoring slaves who fought, escaped and offended, we send a mixed message to young people. Dr. Stanley Elkins pioneered the psychological description of the Sambo stereotype. The comparison of antebellum slavery to a concentration camp is highly inaccurate and misleading. American military schools may, with equal justice, be compared to concentration camps.Many are loathe to admit that slaves were reasonably happy, contented, and adapted to their lot in life. In liberal circles, this is sacrilege. Because we all know the story of Emancipation and most Americans regard it as right, just and inevitable, as I do, it is easy to deny the reality of the slave lifestyle. Abolitionists – and we all think we are against slavery today – naturally reasoned that the slaves thought as we now think. But the slaves had few non-plantation comparisons with others of their race, condition of servitude and community, and they were denied knowledge of the world as a whole. Therefore, slaves did the most rational thing they could do: they accepted their circumstances and made the best of it. Those circumstances and thoughts changed markedly with the onset of the War, but before the War, there was acceptance. Acceptance of things one cannot change is a key to happiness. No one can blame the slaves for wanting to be happy. Free blacks in the North and South did not always live well, which reduced the value of freedom to slaves. Many do not accept or recognize historical facts and instead project their own outrage about slavery onto slaves who were not outraged. Increasing anger is reflected in the N-word. Slaves and ex-slaves used this word very casually and without disparagement to refer to themselves. It became pejorative through use, after the Surrender, and not due to its original meaning.Harriet Beecher Stowe’s second anti-slavery novel, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, published in 1856, dealt with a fictional slave uprising, and gave that prospect more discussion than justified by actual conditions. Nat Turner’s slave rebellion is a favorite topic during Black History Month, but it was brought on by abnormal psychology, not ill-treatment. Nat Turner heard voices, and thought he was ordained by God to kill white people. It’s a stretch to refer to the “Nat” stereotype, because the “Nat” type of slave was extremely rare. Holding up a mentally ill slave as a hero, the treatment Nat Turner receives, overemphasizes the extreme, the aberrant. The Stono slave rebellion was carried out by newly enslaved Africans from Angola, who may have retained some of their African military ideas. Revolts just did not take place much in the Old South. “Slave insurrection or revolt was never successful in the United States and was often betrayed before it began.”Highlighting resistance to slavery necessarily slights the idea of a workable relationship. If treatment of the subject were even-handed, more time would be devoted to ordinary slave life and less to the minority who resisted it violently or experienced its worst abuses. It is embarrassing for victim-oriented thinkers to admit that the vast majority of slaves worked without loud complaints, and as Dr. Genovese noted, is sacrilegious to mention in their company. Some students of African-American history suspect modern empirical findings, those made by Drs. Fogel & Engerman. Dr. Fogel asked the question whether empirical findings of the type he made put a hole in the history of black resistance and portrayed slaves as agreeing to their own enslavement.Outrage is not something one experiences much when all of one’s life is within the same institution and one is reasonably happy with life. This is not the only way that modern Americans differ from enslaved Americans. Slaves and free blacks immediately prior to Emancipation, generations after their ancestors had arrived from Africa, had largely forgotten or rejected African culture, whereas now Afrocentrists embrace it. We should fully accept and appreciate the sacrifices made by the slaves that helped us be where we are now. The actual benefits derived from slavery, including benefits to the American descendants of slaves, are enormous.from Prison & Slavery - A Surprising Comparison; citations omitted, but most ex-slaves quoted from About this Collection - Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938. The purpose of my writings is not to praise slavery compared to freedom, but to contrast two forms of slavery: antebellum slavery in the U.S. versus modern massive incarceration. And in late 2019, I expanded the arguments to take in chemical slavery, modern drug addiction: Get Tough & Smart: How to Start Winning the War on Drug Addiction (contains comprehensive plan to reduce drug addiction in USA).