America has always had condensed wealth to the few. Post #172709 • Liberal Forum

Vegas » 14 Feb 2023, 2:02 pm » wrote: ↑
14 Feb 2023, 2:02 pm
First, this is way too long for most, if not all, lefties to read. It's above your garde level, so don't even bother. Just skip down to the last sentence.

7% of the South's population, in 1860, owned 3 million of the 4 million slaves. There were 5 million whites, in the South, that were dirt poor. They are rarely mentioned, but their conditions were just as deplorable as the slaves. In fact, many of these poor whites worked for the 7% to police the slaves. It was work, so...

Before the civil war, from the beginning, this has mostly been the case. Planters and industrialists were the few, slave labor pitted against white labor was the mass. The few ruled the mass. This has always been the case since before America broke free of Britain.

The real question is, can we draw a straight line, from the accumulation of wealth we enjoy today, to the exploitations of slavery back then? We say that slavery was centuries ago, it has no effect on the wealth we have today. I say, that is incorrect. A straight line can be drawn:

Exploitation of slavery lead to enormous profit of the few.
The few hired millions of dirt-poor whites to police the slaves.
Poor whites emerged to middle class due to this new work.
Middle class whites now accumulated their own land, homes, modest luxuries, and even some slaves.
The middle class rolled on to the present day rooted in the exploitation of slavery, and exploitation of black labors after the civil war.

In short, we inherited the wealth from the back of slaves.

While slavery did lead to profits of plantation owners pre-Civil War, all of that wealth was completely lost, destroyed and/or confiscated through:

The cost of engaging in a war paid to the southern states to fight the North
Loss of slaves after emancipation - the slave owners were never compensated for the loss of their property
Loss of plantation owners' business and crop production
Destruction of property during the invasion from Northern aggressors
Loss of many white southern men during the war, leaving families completely destitute.
Raping of what little wealth and property remained by carpetbaggers
Northern military taking "spoils of victory" from the South

Whatever the South did build, whatever wealth southern land owners did accumulate disappeared. Southern banks went bankrupt and out of business. Entire cities were destroyed and buried, like Atlanta. And, confederate currency was worthless. The South went bust after the war. So, it's a complete fallacy to say that America was built on the backs of slaves. It wasn't., America was re-built after the demise of slavery from the ground up. And, while blacks over time may have been a part of that process, they were not slaves. The South that was built pre-Civil War simply ceased to exist in any shape or form whatsoever.