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> I cannot fathom how one can convince oneself that this indicates the opposite. Honestly I can't fathom how saying the US was founded on slavery is a controve

• manfredo 7y ago
  > Honestly I can't fathom how saying the US was founded on slavery is a controversial point. Because it is incorrect. Slavery ran contrary to what the US was founded on, which is why those states that persisted in practicing slavery ultimately could not co-exist with the rest of the US. > The context of this thread is a discussion of the design of the British pound, and whether Obama being on the dollar would be seen as being notable by future generations because he's black given the deep history of slavery in the US. Yes, and in doing so the above commenter wrote that the US was "founded on the enslavement of black people". This is incorrect. > I think you're trying to defend a strawman when purely discussing the US's slavery practice in the context of the Americas. If we're only doing that we'd focus on countries like Haiti and Brazil instead, but we're not. Furthermore it's a given that it's not notable that a black person's on Haiti's money given their demographics. Some attempt to portray the US as uniquely persistent in its practice of slavery, and I pointed out that this is incorrect. > To say that a country is founded on something is to describe its overall character at the time. The US was overwhelmingly Christian at the time of its founding, and continued to be so for well over a century. The US was not at all founded on Christianity, it is an explicitly secular state (superficial things like the pledge of allegiance notwithstanding). This line of reasoning does not hold up to scrutiny. Most people would say that a country is founded on something if that something is foundational to the country. Sparta was founded on slavery, for example. Slavery was foundational to Spartan society - a Sparta without slavery was an impossibility. One of the reforms of Lycurcus (arguably Sparta's most important founding figure) was to make the people Sparta conquered slaves owned by the Spartan state. That is an example of a country founded on slavery. > Almost a 100 years after the country's founding almost 1/5th of the population was enslaved[1]. More than half of the US's export earnings were from the products of slavery, dwarfing any other sector. It is intellectually dishonest to cherry-pick exports as though it is indicative of all economic output, as you do below. Slavery did not comprise the majority of the US GNP. Even if the analysis is exclusively limited to the South, slavery only compromised just over a quarter of economic output [1]. The industrialized North had an outsized share of GNP as compared to the south - estimates I find put the north at 3/4 to 4/5th of the US's total GNP in 1860. > Comparing this to whaling would be comical if the subject matter wasn't so sad, and so is cherry-picking the early abolishment of slavery in a few northern states who didn't have a notable population of slaves to begin with. It would be like Nebraska having outlawed whaling while most of the US's population & economic output was supported by whaling. The majority of the US economic output was not supported by slavery. Slavery contributed about 25% of the South's economy, which in turn contributed 20-25% of the total US GNP, so the share of GNP produced by slavery was ~6%. Most of the output of slave labor was exported, so even if you want to expand the scope of what was "supported by slavery" to include manufactured goods produced from cotton picked by slaves it is still a slim share of the overall economy. The notion that "most of the US's population and economic output was supported by [slavery]" is not even remotely true. 1. https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-economics-of-the-civil-war/ https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-economics-of-the-civil-war/
  • avar 7y ago
    > Slavery ran contrary to what the US was founded on[...] My understanding of your argument is that because certain nice and lofty things were said in certain founding documents we should look at it as a matter of historical inevitability that practices like slavery and racial discrimination were ultimately abolished. I just don't buy that, and I think if you try to make this argument for any other country you'll see how silly it is. I could similarly argue that say the oppression of the Soviet Union of its own citizens didn't have anything to do with its nature or foundational structure, it was just some temporary mistake. If you read the Soviet constitution it's even more unequivocal about condemning that sort of thing than the equivalent American documents. For something like 1/3 of the history of the country millions lived out their lives as slaves, if we're being conservative for 2/3rds structural racial inequality was the law of the land. If you'd have talked to supreme court justices, and some of the authors of those founding documents (many of whom had slaves) they'd have been appalled by this modern reading of the text. "All men" is much closer to the contemporary reading of "all [male] citizens [who hold property/are head of households]". > The majority of the US economic output was not supported by slavery. The page you're linking to makes the opposite case if you take it as a whole instead of selectively quoting from it. It argues that a buyout of the slaves would have been impossible due to the high price. Furthermore it's talking about numbers at the time of the civil war, almost 100 years after the period we're discussing, at that time the country had a more diversified economy. If a sector of your economy is so integral to it that the government wants to get rid of it but can't see itself abolishing it without a war with itself it's pretty foundational to the economy. > The notion that "most of the US's population and economic output was supported by [slavery]" is not even remotely true.[...] Based on your reductive analysis of GNP by sector, but that's not how economies works. Low prices in one sector (e.g. due to slave labor) cascade to other sectors. The page you linked to explains this, it's like oil prices today. The benefit to the economy from reduced oil prices is higher than just the dollar value paid for the oil, it makes everything else cheaper. But really. I don't see how we're going to get anywhere here (although I'd love to continue the discussion in this increasingly stale thread). How much slavery contributed to the economy is a supporting fact, but it's clearly not the main point. Although I'd be curious at what percentage of GNP you'd concede it. 25%? 50%? The point is that a phrase like "built on slavery" accurately characterizes the country at the time both economically and socially as compared to other notable countries.