The Real Cost of Slavery

 

I remember when I was first exposed to the sin that is uniquely ascribed to the Southern people- I was a boy in the fourth grade in East Tennessee when our history teacher, a portly, middle-aged spinster from some flyover state in the Midwest, regaled us with tales of that “peculiar institution”: horrific accounts of abuses by cruel slave masters, and on the other hand tales of the brave abolitionists who “risked their lives” to free the slaves out of nothing but the goodness of their own hearts, “heroes” such as Harriet Tubman- a criminal who nearly killed someone for daring to get cold feet in his escape, by the way- and finally the war that erupted so that America’s greatest President Abraham Lincoln could emancipate the Negro race from the cruel South, fighting to keep them bonded and beaten forever.  The fact that the entire month of lessons on slavery and the Civil War were designed to invoke shame and guilt in easily-impressionable nine-year-olds was obvious enough for me to tell, even at that young age.  I was certainly upset that I was being shamed for something that I had no part in, but the more absurd portion of this public-school guilt trip was that many of the children who were being lectured weren’t Southern- their parents had moved to my hometown from the North.  A few were not even White, yet were being treated as if they were George Wallace voters in 1962!

It was at that time that I first learned about propaganda.  Even as a young boy, the tales of slaves being beaten half to death by cruel masters for not picking cotton fast enough didn’t make a lot of sense to me, especially after we’d just read about how expensive slaves were- so much so that four-fifths of the Southern population, on average, owned none, and only one percent more than 200.  What sane man would ruin the equivalent of thousands of dollars in such a manner?  An injured man can’t work at all.  Would you intentionally cripple your mule for not being able to carry enough weight, or kill your cat for not catching enough mice, or, to use a closer example, light your combine harvester on fire for failing to meet a quota?  Of course not, and it’s patently absurd to suggest otherwise.  The image we gasped at in our textbook of a slave that had been whipped so much his back resembled tree roots under soil served much the same purpose as it did two hundred and fifty-some odd years ago, when yellow journalists in some Northern city published it in an abolitionist rag- horrifying the general populace by taking the worst outliers of any institution and equating them with the practice as a whole, just like they do nowadays whenever some nutjob shooting and killing children is used as evidence to conclude that all firearm owners are lunatics who will mass murder if stricter laws are not passed against them.  The propaganda machine has been at it for quite a while.  In America, the prevailing narrative on Southern slavery has reached the level of the absurd, such as with professional “social activist” (race hustler) Marcus Sanders- better known as Tariq Nasheed’s- claims of “Buck Breaking”, events in which he claims white, devout Christian Southern slave owners would hold parties for the purpose of committing group sodomy against male slaves.  It is funny until we take a step back and realize that a not insignificant number of blacks in America genuinely believe abuses of a similar manner that even the most strident abolitionist of the 1850s would find hard to believe happened to their ancestors.

Slavery is today a specific evil ascribed only to the South, even though it has been practiced, and in some cases continues to be practiced, by every single group of people on Earth.  Nor was the South’s form of slavery uniquely horrifying- the slave trade was abolished in the United States well before its colonial European neighbors, the Caribbean sugar plantations made Alabama cotton fields positively appealing by comparison, and Ottoman sex slavery made them look like five-star vacation resorts.  It was not even a practice that was solely unique to the states of the Confederacy- quintessential Yankee state New Jersey had slaves all the way until the end of the War.  But, nonetheless, because Lincoln so shrewdly attached the baggage of slavery to the South for their part in the War Between the States, it has become a blight that will haunt it until the end of time.

I do believe, however, that Southern slavery ended up being a negative for this country and people- but before you get the torches and pitchforks out, I do not believe that there’s anything morally wrong with it.  Today, you will hear arguments that “the Bible condemns slavery”.  This is one that is never made in good faith- a cursory readthrough of the Scriptures will inform you of that.  Just ask someone making this argument to read Leviticus 25:44 and ask him what that means- if he argues that this part of Mosaic Law no longer applies to Christians, just ask him if he believes in supersessionism and watch his head spin as he justifies himself.  Likewise, you will find no condemnation of the practice in the New Testament.  There are some that like to claim that Paul condemned slavery- he did not.  The only line that he ever wrote that could be in any way interpreted to be such can be more easily read as a prohibition on kidnapping.  Paul does not command Philemon to immediately free Onesimus and do penance for his evil- instead, he simply asks that the former forgive the latter and receive him as a brother.  Christ Himself used the metaphor of the slave and master to reflect mankind’s relationship with God- certainly a strange choice if you believe, as liberal theologians do, that God treats slavery as inherently wrong.  The prohibition that the Scriptures does contain is on masters committing abuse of slaves, which lines up neatly with the Bible’s similar commandments to husbands and parents.  A final argument that my fellow Orthodox Christians (such as the modernists at Fordham) will sometimes use the decisions of the Council of Constantinople in 1872 as further proof that the Church condemns slavery.  That decision is nothing of the sort- it is a condemnation of national politics infecting the Church and proves that the Church is above worldly ethnic nationalism.  It has as little to do with slavery as a football game does.  Likewise, although many Church Fathers have offered their opinions on slavery, and some have condemned it, that is their own position as private theologians- the Church as a whole remains silent on this issue.  But that is enough of this topic.

Those who actually acknowledge that slavery existed in other places on earth- such as in the Roman Empire, for instance- may point out that the South’s version (helpfully denoted as “chattel slavery”) is uniquely evil because it was done on the basis of ethnicity instead of debt or war.  Such arguments rarely take into account the Irish laborers in various parts of North America who had their “indentured servitude” contracts bought, sold, or indefinitely extended, or the free blacks who themselves owned slaves, but this is neither here nor there- New World slavery was largely of an ethnic character.  I do actually agree with this insofar as I believe creating a caste system and assigning one group the permanent status of “slave” is a purely pragmatically terrible idea, and it’s responsible for most of the ills that have plagued the South ever since the end of the War.  For certain, Southern slavery was not the only caste system to exist in the world, nor was it the most brutal- for instance, there was no freedom for Dalits in India, Cagots in France or burakumin in Japan- but inevitably, caste systems end, and what results is never a positive for the nation.

What makes slavery stand out among the caste systems of antiquity is that it is temporary by design- it is only a system that is feasible in a pre-industrialized, agrarian society.  The institution would have ended no matter what the results of the War were- it was already growing unprofitable and impractical by the time hostilities kicked off at Fort Sumter, as cotton exports from British colonies such as Egypt flooded the market and technological advances in agricultural harvesting made it an increasing money drain to purchase, feed, and house humans.  Virginia was already seriously considering ending slavery in 1838 due to the increasing unprofitability, before the actions of one Nat Turner put an end to that discussion.  The last country in the world to abolish slavery was Brazil in 1888, and at that time the practice was basically dead anyways, as former slave-owners found that it was much more practical to employ some of the many European immigrants flooding the country to farm, cook, or do whatever slaves could do, as they would happily work much harder for wages that added up, in the long term, to be less than the cost of buying, feeding, and housing a slave.  If the South had won the War, it is likely slavery would not have lasted any longer.

That is not to say that the War and the abrupt end to Southern slavery didn’t matter, because of course it did.  It made the problems that faced post-slavery states such as Brazil and various Caribbean islands thousands of times worse.  The main downside of caste systems is that they breed resentment.  For groups located toward the bottom of the totem pole, that status, and that anger, becomes part of their founding myth as a people.  This is especially true in ethnic caste systems, and even worse with New World slavery because it, as mentioned above, is guaranteed to end at some point.  Though “equality” is a noble goal, it never works out in practice.  Raising a group at the bottom of the pyramid to the same level as everyone else does not mean that peace and cooperation will follow- you cannot heal a wound that has been festering for centuries with one band-aid.  If a group’s identity is based around being wronged, as lower-caste groups’ identities nearly universally are, all elevating them to the same legal and social status as the group that they believe wronged them will do is provide them with the means to get their vengeance on the group that they perceive, rightly or wrongly, as having been their oppressor.  It is even worse when the lower-caste group is given legal advantages in order to propel them to the same status as higher-caste groups- they will use these advantages not to advance their own group but instead bring down the group that they hate.  We have seen this in the First Reconstruction- groups of newly freed blacks, enabled by corrupt Radical Republican governments, committed murder, rape, robbery, and arson against the men and women who had once been their masters (and many more who had not) on a wide scale, and we saw it again as gangs of blacks set Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, Washington, and many more cities alight two summers ago.  We have seen it in South Africa, where elderly Boers are being stabbed to death in their homes while the government that Nelson Mandela founded on the principle of equality for all seizes land from whites and bans the old flag for being “hate speech”.  We see it in Japan, where Zainichi Koreans constantly demand more government assistance despite the fact that they receive more than a living wage even though they do not possess Japanese citizenship at all, and routinely profess their support for North Korea.  We see it in India, where Brahmins are reduced to begging on the streets of Calcutta and living underneath tarps while Dravidian tribes and Dalits demand even larger quotas at public universities.  Their anger will never be sated no matter what the government or private citizens do for them, because their enslavement is their very ethnogenesis, and for blacks the Southerner is the Egyptian to their Israelite.  The end of slavery created a ready-made fifth column- a population of malcontents who have every incentive to be malcontented.  Many slimy politicians have taken advantage of the fact that you can still whip American blacks into a violent frenzy today by pointing the finger at someone and accusing them of racism or Confederate sympathy, and that you can keep them voting for policies that are objectively terrible for them by accusing the opponent of the same things.  Even many blacks, such as the great economist Thomas Sowell, have pointed out how self-destructive this mindset is.  Comedian Chris Rock bemoaned the absurdity of blacks treating O.J. Simpson being acquitted for double murder as if it was some sort of triumph for his race.  Rodney King pleaded for “everyone to get along”- it didn’t stop four of his supporters from nearly killing Reginald Denny.  People are not a monolith, but singular voices alone cannot change a culture.

Perhaps the system of slavery that was practiced by the Greeks and Romans would have been better for this country, as it did not discriminate- slavery was an unfortunate condition that anyone could find himself in with enough bad luck, but it was also something that it was possible to earn one’s way out of, instead of being something that you are born in and die in due to your skin color or national origin (Of course, you could also earn your way out of New World slavery, but that detail is often deliberately overlooked).  It certainly would have been more in line with the way that proud Southerners Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and many others modeled the government of the United States off of Athens and Rome.  But it is no use wondering about how things would have been different if the world had taken a slightly different course- the effects of slavery are here with us to stay.  Neither is it useful to fantasize about things such as deporting all the blacks in America on the first ship to Monrovia- nothing would invite the attention of a UN “peacekeeping force” more than that.  Violent fantasies are the territory of lowlifes such as the Bowl Patrol idiots and federal agents.  The opposite solution- attempting to court the black population- is as much of a pipe dream.  It has not worked for Republicans for decades, and it will work even less for Southern Nationalists.  No article or statue or outreach effort will change the fact that our heroes are their boogeymen, and vice versa.

Rather, the solution here is to leave them alone as we wish to be left alone.  Our movement and their group ideology are diametrically opposed- that’s okay.  We don’t have to get along, but we do need to not mess with each other.  Self-determination is the most peaceful way to go.  And it goes without saying that violence that is not in defense of your home, property, or family/community is absolutely unacceptable.  Unprovoked violence against innocents is both morally wrong and the stupidest thing that followers of an ideology could ever do.  The things you do need to do, if you ever encounter a member of the black community attempting to shame or guilt you over slavery, is to gently remind him that you will not apologize for something that you took no part in and he was not victimized by, and that you are proud of your ancestors and will not apologize for their actions, either, and that he would be better served taking those complaints elsewhere.  If he actually has an interest in peaceful coexistence, then the message will be understood.  If not, and he is just using it as an excuse to cause trouble, it’s fair to say that the civilized world is not going to look highly upon him.  The effects of slavery are still with us today- we can’t change that.  What we can change is our mindset toward it, and how we react to it.  I hope you can, as well.