Liberal Forum

Skans » 14 Feb 2023, 2:42 pm » wrote: ↑

14 Feb 2023, 2:42 pm

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.  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, in the South, that process took a very long time.

It set the stage. Slavery was still in the conscious of the South...and in the North to some degree. Even though the wealth was lost, the mental paradigm wasn't. The idea of using blacks as cheap labor continued because of how well it worked before. They could only build back up because they were able to hire blacks far below what whites were paid. The factories were filed with black laborers because of it. The South built an empire on slaves. That empire collapsed. But the idea of exploitation of blacks remained. This led to them being able to rebuild.