Links - 14th October 2019 (3) (Slavery in the US)

The New York Times surrenders to the left on race - "a note from NYTM editor Jake Silverstein informs his readers that it is wrong to trace the true origin of the United States to the founding of the English settlement in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, or to the landing of the Puritans at Plymouth Rock in 1620, or to the publication of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Instead, the Times proposes to overturn such mythmaking in favor of an effort to "reframe American history," treating 1619 as "our nation's birth year." Why 1619? Because that's when the first ship carrying African slaves arrived on American shores, and the Times intends to place "the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country." This reframing is necessary because out of slavery "grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional."... Achieving that goal has required the Times to treat history in a highly sensationalistic, reductionistic, and tendentious way, with the cumulative result resembling agitprop more than responsible journalism or scholarship. Putting aside any pretense toward nuance or complexity, the paper has surrendered to the sensibility of left-wing political activists. The result is unpersuasive — and a sad comment on the state of our country's public life. Throughout the issue of the NYTM, headlines make, with just slight variations, the same rhetorical move over and over again: "Here is something unpleasant, unjust, or even downright evil about life in the present-day United States. Bet you didn't realize that slavery is ultimately to blame." Lack of universal access to health care? High rates of sugar consumption? Callous treatment of incarcerated prisoners? White recording artists "stealing" black music? Harsh labor practices? That's right — all of it, and far more, follows from slavery.The most impressive authors, like Times op-ed columnist Jamelle Bouie, are honest enough to admit that their chosen subject (Bouie writes about the hardball tactics of congressional Republicans since 2011) may have "nothing to do with race at all." Yet in the end even Bouie comes back around to asserting that Republican "methods of action … are clearly downstream of a style of extreme political combat that came to fruition in the defense of human bondage." The least persuasive, and unintentionally comical, contribution to the issue is a relatively brief essay by Princeton University's Kevin Kruse, a historian who's justly gained a large online following for his deft skewering on Twitter of Dinesh D'Souza and other know-nothing pundits of the far right who like to publicly display their ignorance of the American past. For the 1619 Project, Kruse writes about how notoriously bad traffic jams on Atlanta highways are — you guessed it — the legacy of "a century-long effort to segregate the races."... Desmond tells readers, for example, that the fraud, greed, and even deployment of dubious financial products that we associate with the economic meltdown of 2008 originated with and carry with them the stain of slavery... the publication of the 1619 Project represents the definitive triumph of left-wing activism over journalistic skepticism, circumspection, and restraint at The New York Times"

New York Times' 1619 Project & Black History in America - "In the seven times African-American soldiers mentioned, they are generally described as victims who have merely shifted from one system of subjugation and exploitation to another.There’s no mention of the Harlem Hellfighters fighting in World War One, and no mention of Dorie Miller’s heroism at Pearl Harbor. The horrors of the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male are discussed, but the Tuskegee Airmen are never mentioned.African-American heroism on the battlefield doesn’t really fit the narrative that the 1619 Project is trying to tell. In fact, you could argue that the essays are so wedded to a narrative of white brutality and black victimhood that they seem to fear that spotlighting any example of a successful African-American defiance of oppression would undermine their argument.  In the reframing of the 1619 Project, African-American success stories disappear. There’s no mention of Jesse Owens at the 1936 Olympic Games. There’s no mention of Jackie Robinson. There’s no mention of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, the African-American mathematicians who worked for NASA as depicted in the film Hidden Figures. Wilberforce University in Ohio, the first college owned and operated by African Americans, is not mentioned... Frederick Douglass is mentioned twice. W.E.B. du Bois is quoted once. Thurgood Marshall is mentioned once. Harriet Tubman is never mentioned. Nor is Booker T. Washington... The 1619 Project argues, with considerable justification, that most of us been seeing only one part of the portrait of the founding, formation, and growth of our country . . . and then “reframes” the portrait to leave out some of the most consequential and under-discussed African Americans in our history."

What 'The Times' Got Wrong About Slavery in America - "1619 was not, in fact, the date of the first African slaves in the English colonies — those Africans were brought in under indenturement contracts, not bought as slaves. They were contracted to a fixed period of labor (typically five years) to pay for the cost charged by the Dutch slavers, at which point they were freed with a payment of a start-up endowment. This was not unusual or limited to Africans – approximately half of the 500,000 European immigrants to the thirteen colonies prior to 1775 paid for their passage with indenturement contracts. Anthony Johnson, a black Angolan, was typical – he entered Virginia as an indentured servant in 1621, became a free man after the term of his contract, acquired land, and became among the first actual slaveholders in the colonies... Ironically, a freed black man initiated the court case that moved slavery to a race-based institution. The Angolan immigrant Anthony Johnson was the plaintiff is a key civil case, where the Northampton Court in 1654 declared after the expiration of the indenturement contract of his African servant John Casor that Johnson owned Casor “for life,” nullifying the protections of the contract for the servant and essentially establishing the civil precedent for the enslavement of all African indentured servants by declaring that a contract for such servants extended for life, rather than the fixed term in the contract... Relatively speaking, the United States was a minor player in the African Slave Trade — only about 5% of the Africans imported to the New World came to the United States. Of the 10.7 million Africans who survived the ocean voyage, a mere 388,000 were shipped directly to North America. The largest recipients of imported African slaves were Brazil, Cuba. Jamaica, and the other Caribbean colonies. The lifespan of those brought into what is now the United States vastly exceeded those of the other 95%, and the United States was the only purchaser of African slaves where population grew naturally in slavery – the death rate among the rest was higher than the birth rate.While the institution, even in the United States was a brutal violation of basic human rights, it tended on average to be far more humane than in the rest of the New World. The Trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean African slave trade, which began by Arabs as early as the 8th Century AD, dwarfed the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and continued up to the 20th Century. Between the start of the Atlantic Slave Trade and 1900, it is estimated that the eastern-bound Arab slave traders sold over 17 million Africans into slavery in the Middle East and India, compared to about 12 million to the new world – and the Eastern-bound slave trade had been ongoing for at least 600 years at the START of that period.The Western-bound Atlantic slave trade, contrary to the misrepresentation in “Roots,” did not involve the capture of free Africans by Europeans or Arabs, but by the trading of slaves (already a basis for the economy of the local animist or Muslim kingdoms) captured in local wars to Western merchants in exchange for Western goods. The first such slaves brought to the Western Hemisphere were brought by the Spanish to their colonies in Cuba and Hispaniola in 1501, almost a century and a half before the first slave in the English colonies that became the United States. The last African state to outlaw slavery, Mauritania, did not do so until 2007, and if the institution is illegal on the continent de jure, it still is widespread de facto in Mauritania, Chad, Mali, Niger, and Sudan, as well as parts of Ghana, Benin, Togo Gabon, Angola, South Africa, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, Cameroon, Libya, and Nigeria. The contradictions slavery posed on the rebel colonies during the Revolution sparked a backlash against slavery and the slave trade... the first law in the European world to outlaw the slave trade was, in fact, the US Constitution, which in 1787 banned the slave trade as of 1808. In Massachusetts, a 1783 court decision ended slavery, and all of the Northern States had passed emancipations laws by 1803... Economically, the institution of slavery, rather than develop the economy of the new nation, stunted its development. Although bonded labor, whether slave or indentured servant, clearly played an important role in developing a labor force in the early colonial days, its role in the advancement of the economy in the newly established country is questionable. Gavin Wright, in his classic book The Political Economy of the Cotton South, shows in fact that slavery hindered the development of the economy in those states where it remained legal. The artisans, tradesmen, and unskilled labor pool necessary for developing a thriving, diverse economy was discouraged by competition from bonded labor, and the slave-owning class showed little interest in such an economy... the ideals of the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment and political beliefs shaped by the English Civil War and Glorious Revolution created an environment that exposed the immorality of slavery and established the political grounds for ending the slave trade, and eventually the institution of slavery in areas of Western European influence."

Being Classically Liberal - Posts - "John Adams never owned a slave, represented slaves in their suits for freedom, and was the driving force behind Massachusetts abolishment of slavery in 1780. Alexander Hamilton was stridently abolitionist and "publicly condemned Americans who demanded freedom for themselves as a God-given right, while depriving others of freedom and profiting from that deprivation."  His efforts paved the way for the abolition of slavery in New York. In 1790, Quakers from New York and Pennsylvania presented their petition for abolition to Congress. Their argument against slavery was backed by the Pennsylvania Abolitionist Society and its president, Benjamin Franklin. Of the Founding Fathers who owned slaves, almost all of them recognized the hypocrisy of slavery and advocated for gradual abolition. Thomas Jefferson, for example, owned slaves but also signed laws banning the importation of slaves when he was President. They were flawed men, but they put the tools in place for the barbarous practice's abolishment in the Founding documents of our country. The Constitution, for example, was implicitly an anti-slavery document, as pointed out by Frederick Douglass, former slave and one of greatest abolitionists in American history. When faced with claims by other abolitionists that the Constitution was a pro-slavery document, Douglass said, "how dare any man who pretends to be a friend to the Negro thus gratuitously concede away what the Negro has a right to claim under the Constitution?""

The 1619 anniversary: 5 things people still get wrong about slavery - "One of the greatest myths about slavery is that it ended. In fact, it evolved into its modern form: mass incarceration. The United States has the highest prison population in the world. More than 2.2 million Americans are incarcerated; 4.5 million are on probation or parole. African Americans make up roughly 13 percent of the general population. But black men, women, and youth have outsize representation in the criminal justice system, where they make up 34 percent of the 6.8 million people who are under its control. Their labor is used to produce goods and services for businesses that profit from prison labor."
Strange how if you say the Irish were slaves too, you're denounced as racist and told it wasn't slavery because it wasn't chattel slavery. It seems you're only considered a slave if you're black (which is why even though prisoners aren't chattel slaves, it's still considered slavery). And this is before we consider 'modern slavery' outside the US prison system

Was America Built By Slaves? - "Was slavery some kind of platform upon which the modern American economy was built? That would be the politically correct question to study these days in the academy, especially if the answer can be made to come out “yes.” This is not surprising. In the present context, with the United States still struggling to build a multiracial society 150-odd years after the Emancipation Proclamation, the economic history of slavery is obviously a politically freighted issue. But it always has been to one extent or another, and American scholars and intellectuals have never ceased arguing over the question. For every Oscar Handlin who downplayed the evils of slavery, and even argued that slavery caused racism rather than the other way around, there has been a Nate Glazer who has stressed the singular evils of the American form of slavery compared to every other form known to history. Only someone unfamiliar with the literature can be surprised that, even aside from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s call for reparations payments, much of the current crop of books on the topic slides rather quickly from scholarship into advocacy... Of every hour of useful work done in the Southern states, roughly 40 minutes was performed by a slave. Given the obvious importance of slave labor, it may come as something of a surprise to find that, as already noted, the early historians of slavery judged it to have been a burden on the South’s economy rather than its strength... The slave-run gold mines of Peru, Mexico, and the sugar islands also produced impressive fortunes in their day. Their legacy is modern Peru and Haiti. Edmund Phelps, in his recent book, Mass Flourishing argues that long-term growth requires continuous innovation; not just the big discoveries, but the steady flow of cost savings and improvements that come from an engaged workforce. Slaves, looking over their shoulder at the overseer’s whip, don’t get many innovative ideas. They were deprived of the benefits of freedom, and so the country lost the fruits of their genius. Jazz music is exactly the type of thing Phelps has in mind. African Americans always had it in their bones as they toiled in the fields, but it took freedom for it to flourish... At some point, even the slave-owners had to realize they were depreciating their own capital, and Fogel does point out that they did a fair amount of experimentation with the length of the work week. It settled in at about 58 hours per week, which meant slaves worked about 400 fewer hours per year than the average yeoman farmer on his own land."

Being Classically Liberal - Posts - "Did Slavery cause the US to become an economic super-power?I will explore this question more in depth in future posts, but I wanted to ask a relevant question: If slavery made America rich, why isn’t Brazil even richer?This South American country received more African slaves than any country in the Americas (40% of the number of Africans brought to the continents, compared to 10% for the US.)For hundreds of years, slave labor was the driving force behind Brazilian exports like sugar, gold, and coffee. Brazil was also the last country in the West to abolish slavery in 1888.If export-led growth from slavery were really the key to the industrial revolution as some claim, then the industrial revolution would’ve started in Brazil and its colonial master Portugal. If slavery were the key to setting up nations to be economic giants today, Brazil would be far wealthier than the US.But this is not the case whatsoever.The US economy surpassed both countries in every year since 1800, before and after slavery was abolished. Today, per capita incomes in the United States (~$59,000) dwarf that of Brazil (~$8,800). The per capita income of Portugal is less than half of the US (~$25,000)... (Oh, and in the long-run Brazil and the US did much better economically after slavery was abolished.)"

No, Slavery Did Not Make America Rich - "In 1847, Karl Marx wrote that
    Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry…cause slavery to disappear and you will have wiped America off the map of nations.
As with most of his postulations concerning economics, Marx was proven wrong. Following the Civil War and the abolition of slavery in 1865, historical data show there was a recession, but after that, post-war economic growth rates rivaled or surpassed the pre-war growth rates... raw cotton produced by African-American slaves did not become a significant import in the British economy until 1800, decades after the Industrial Revolution had already begun. Although the British later imported large quantities of American cotton, economic historians Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode note that “the American South was a late-comer to world cotton markets,” and "US cotton played no role in kick-starting the Industrial Revolution.”...
'the vast literature on the industrial revolution that economic historians have produced shows that it originated in the creation and adoption of a wide range of technologies, such as the steam engine and coke blast furnace, which were not directly connected to textile trading networks'...
although cotton exports comprised a tremendous share of total exports prior to the Civil War, they accounted for only around 5 percent of the nation’s overall gross domestic product, an important contribution but not the backbone of American economic development... in the pre-war South, “investments were heavily concentrated in slaves,” resulting in the failure “to build a deep and broad industrial infrastructure,” such as railroads, public education, and a centralized financial system.Economic historians have repeatedly emphasized that slavery delayed Southern industrialization, giving the North a tremendous advantage in the Civil War. Harvard economist Nathan Nunn has shown that across the Americas, the more dependent on slavery a nation was in 1750, the poorer it was in 2000 (see Appendix Figure 3.). He found the same relationship in the US. In 2000, states with more slaves in 1860 were poorer than states with fewer slaves and much poorer than the free Northern states"

3. Slavery Reconsidered - "“U.S. slaves had much longer life expectations than free urban industrial workers in both the United States and Europe”... We are now prepared to ask, at least, if not answer, three questions about American slavery. First, did the slaves want to be free? Second, did the slaves try to become free? Third, were the slaves glad to be free?"
Among other things, the author makes a utilitarian argument for slavery, but just dismisses deontological arguments against it as religious in character, without recognising his own a priori assumptions (ironically, there is a chance that the author is against socialised healthcare on principle even if that leads to worse outcomes)

How the end of slavery led to starvation and death for millions of black Americans - "After combing through obscure records, newspapers and journals Downs believes that about a quarter of the four million freed slaves either died or suffered from illness between 1862 and 1870. He writes in the book that it can be considered "the largest biological crisis of the 19th century" and yet it is one that has been little investigated by contemporary historians. Downs believes much of that is because at the time of the civil war, which raged between 1861 and 1865 and pitted the unionist north against the confederate south, many people did not want to investigate the tragedy befalling the freed slaves. Many northerners were little more sympathetic than their southern opponents when it came to the health of the freed slaves and anti-slavery abolitionists feared the disaster would prove their critics right."

Walter Williams: Did blacks benefit from slavery? - "one of the Marxist professors asked me what I thought about the relationship between capitalism and slavery. My response was that slavery has existed everywhere in the world, under every political and economic system, and was by no means unique to capitalism or the United States. Perturbed by my response, he asked me what my feelings were about the enslavement of my ancestors. I answered that slavery is a despicable violation of human rights but that the enslavement of my ancestors is history, and one of the immutable facts of history is that nothing can be done to change it.The matter could have been left there, but I volunteered that today’s American blacks have benefited enormously from the horrible suffering of our ancestors. Why? I said the standard of living and personal liberty of black Americans are better than what blacks living anywhere in Africa have... I attempted to assuage the professor’s and his colleagues’ shock by explaining to them that to morally condemn a practice such as slavery does not require one to also deny its effects. My yet-to-be-learned lesson – and perhaps that of Rep. Hubbard – is that there are certain topics or arguments that one should not bring up in the presence of children or those with little understanding. Both might see that explaining a phenomenon is the same as giving it moral sanction or justification. It’s as if one’s explanation that the independent influence of gravity on a falling object is to cause it to accelerate at 32 feet per second could be interpreted as giving moral sanction and justification to gravity. Slavery is widely misunderstood, and as such has been a tool for hustlers and demagogues... Even the word slave is derived from the fact that Slavic people were among the early European slaves. Though racism has been used to justify slavery, the origins of slavery had little to do with racism. In recent history, the major slave traders and slave owners have been Arabs, who enslaved Europeans, black Africans and Asians. A unique aspect of slavery in the Western world was the moral outrage against it, which began to emerge in the 18th century and led to massive efforts to eliminate it. It was Britain’s military might and the sight of the Union Jack on the high seas that ultimately put an end to the slave trade.Unfortunately, the facts about slavery are not the lessons taught in our schools and colleges. The gross misrepresentation and suggestion in textbooks and lectures is that slavery was a uniquely American practice done by racist white people to black people. Despite abundant historical evidence, youngsters are taught nothing about how the founding fathers quarreled, debated and agonized over the slave issue."

Thomas Sowell: Poisoning present by distorting slavery's past - "The history of slavery across the centuries and in many countries around the world is a painful history to read - not only in terms of how slaves have been treated, but because of what that says about the whole human species - because slaves and enslavers alike have been of every race, religion and nationality. If the history of slavery ought to teach us anything, it is that human beings cannot be trusted with unbridled power over other human beings - no matter what color or creed any of them are. The history of ancient despotism and modern totalitarianism practically shouts that same message from the blood-stained pages of history.But that is not the message that is being taught in our schools and colleges, or dramatized on television and in the movies. The message pounded home again and again is that white people enslaved black people. It is true, just as it is true that I don't go sky-diving with blacks. But it is also false in its implications for the same reason. Just as Europeans enslaved Africans, North Africans enslaved Europeans; more Europeans than there were Africans enslaved in the United States and in the 13 colonies from which it was formed. The treatment of white galley slaves was even worse than the treatment of black slaves picking cotton. But there are no movies or television dramas about it comparable to Roots, and our schools and colleges don't pound it into the heads of students... Only the fact that the West had more firepower than others put an end to slavery in many non-Western societies during the age of Western imperialism. Yet today there are Americans who have gone to Africa to apologize for slavery - on a continent where slavery has still not been completely ended, to this very moment... Those who mine history for sins are not searching for truth but for opportunities to denigrate their own society, or for grievances that can be cashed in today, at the expense of people who were not even born when the sins of the past were committed. An ancient adage says: "Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof." But apparently that is not sufficient for many among our educators, the intelligentsia or the media. They are busy poisoning the present by the way they present the past."