Update: this item is from 1996. [hides scarlet face]
There’s an Alabama State Senator (Republican) running for Congress, who says slavery was a good thing for the people who were slaves.
Mr. Davidson referred to Leviticus 25:44 — “You may acquire male and female slaves from the pagan nations that are around you” — and quoted I Timothy 6:1 as saying slaves should “regard their own masters as worthy of all honor.”
“The incidence of abuse, rape, broken homes and murder are 100 times greater, today, in the housing projects than they ever were on the slave plantations in the Old South,” he wrote. “The truth is that nowhere on the face of the earth, in all of time, were servants better treated or better loved than they were in the Old South by white, black, Hispanic and Indian slave owners.”
Is that a fact. That’s what it was all about, was it? Being kind and loving to “servants”?
Like hell it was. It was about money. Slavery exploded as farmers started settling in Mississippi and raising cotton there. It was horrible, unhealthy work, and it could be hugely profitable provided you could get the labor. Cotton and slavery combined to make slaveowners rich. There was no love involved.
Speaking of the issue at a news conference, Mr. Davidson said today that although his ancestors fought in the Civil War, they did not own slaves.
“The issue is not race,” he said. “It’s Southern heritage. I’m on a one-man leadership crusade to get the truth out about what our Southern heritage is all about.”
Well that’s what the slavery part of “Southern heritage” is about – gouging cheap labor out of black people, first via slavery and then via Jim Crow laws. And by the way it’s insulting to a lot of Southerners to call that “Southern heritage.”
I would hate to see servants who were treated worse.
Charles Davidson is an apologist for monsters.
I smell plagiarism:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/05/jon-hubbard-arkansas-slavery-book_n_1943661.html
But I don’t suppose republicans have an honor code…..
For anyone who is interested in accurate history and is tired of the usual fictional causes for southern state secession and the civil war, please check out The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader: The “Great Truth” about the “Lost Cause.” Amazing enough, it comes from the University Press of Mississippi in both print and e-reader format:
http://www.upress.state.ms.us/books/1338
This book is collection of primary historical sources from pre-civil war, during the civil war, and post-civil war that document the primary causes of the civil war (slavery, white supremacy) and jim crow laws (white supremacy). It also talks about the neo-confederate attempts to hide this history by talking about “states’ rights,” “tariffs,” and “southern tradition.”
I am speechless, there should be some minor requirement that political speeches be fact based. This man needs to try and find some statistical data about life expectency of the average field slave to measure the amount of caring they received. He might want to try picking cotton by hand from dawn to dark, it gives you a new perspective. How much love do you feel when you breed people like animals and then sell them?
I can top that. Recently a Spanish politician said “laws are like women, they exist to be violated.”
He is, of course, right that both Old and New Testaments endorse slavery. If you’re an anti-slavery Christian, you may wish to reflect on why exactly it is that what “Saint” Paul took for granted is no longer acceptable.
Wilberforce was a Christian conservative, but so were centuries of slave owners, so where do we go from here?
Yeah, those silly black folk had it good but just didn’t realize it! After all, what mother doesn’t want to see her children sold to someone who can give them good long hard outdoor work and a lash to keep them in line?
I’m convinced that keeping slaves–or just being a slavery apologist–does something to your soul. The anti-Abolitionists knew that slavery had to grow or die, and were notorious for their murderous tactics in the territories.
I’m reading Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred right now. It’s set in the antebellum South. The white characters are completely invested in their ignorance and racism. Their unfettered power over blacks is essential to their identity.
Of course slavery is no longer an issue today. Perhaps we can look to the views of Romney campaign worker Clifford Russell of Bedford Virginia. He has the solution to poor folks with kids: “give all the kids up for adoption and execute the parents.”
Another great book on Jim Crow laws and cheap labor is David Oshinsky’s Worse Than Slavery. It was much worse. No capital investment to lose, so if they died, so what?
Turpentine processing. Absolutely lethal.
On a global scale, slavery is becoming more and more common.In the Sahel region of Africa there are huge numbers of Black slaves and those numbers are increasing.
Quick, somebody tell Romney! I can’t wait to hear him weave the compassionate slave owner meme into his next interview, right before walking it back the next day!
The probable reason why rates of rape, abuse, and murder were supposedly so much lower (which I call BS on anyway) was most likely because back then black people weren’t considered people subject to those definitions. They were considered property by the courts. That in itself should tell you why the system was wrong. Here’s a question, you Republican a-hole, were those rates only 3/5s as much as they are today?
And broken homes? Seriously? Back then, they were only allowed to get married with the owner’s permission, and he could just sell the family off one member at a time to different people.
Anyone who thinks slavery wasn’t the primary cause of the Civil War is either ignorant or deluded.
Even though 3/4s of Southern families weren’t slave owners, slavery was the basis for the Southern economy. Cotton was the primary export of the South and cotton was inseparable from slavery. While there were other disputes between the North and the South, i.e., protective tariffs, states rights and nullification, none of these were important enough to cause a war. Slavery was the major point of contention between the two sections of the country.
After the election of Lincoln in 1860, it became obvious that the South had lost political control of the U.S. Lincoln won no electoral votes in any slave-holding state but had a majority of 180 electoral votes to 123 for all other candidates (Democrat John Breckenridge of Kentucky won all the Southern states’ and Maryland’s 123 electoral votes, the other two major candidates, John Bell and Stephen Douglas, split the remaining 51 votes). The 1860 election was seen as a national referendum on slavery and the South had lost.
In my post #12, I said that Breckenridge won 123 electoral votes. He actually won 72. All of Lincoln’s opponents combined won 123 votes.
Oops. Hold the phone. Someone who passed this on to a Google group noticed that it’s dated 1996.
It’s Paul Fidalgo’s fault!
[Mr. Davidson also] quoted I Timothy 6:1 as saying slaves should “regard their own masters as worthy of all honor.”
Imagine a slave trudging home in the dark after working from dawn to dusk chopping cotton, only to find that his wife and children have literally been sold down the river in his absence. Surely he can find some spare moments before sinking into sleep to obey the exhortations of scripture and sing praises which confer all honor on the bastard who owns him.
Erm. Imagine a slave being sold down the river while her children are sold separately.
“The incidence of abuse, rape, broken homes and murder are 100 times greater, today, in the housing projects than they ever were on the slave plantations in the Old South,” he wrote. “The truth is that nowhere on the face of the earth, in all of time, were servants better treated or better loved than they were in the Old South by white, black, Hispanic and Indian slave owners.”
Oh ha ha. All this rape and abuse…You’d think it never happened before. Oh, well, it did, but it was NOT AS BAD, because, you see, we really loved our slaves, and we only abused them a little bit, you know, as people do, and it’s all in the family and really friendly, sort of.
“The issue is not race,” he said. “It’s Southern heritage. I’m on a one-man leadership crusade to get the truth out about what our Southern heritage is all about.”
Glad you quoted this bit. When I hear people saying that the issue isn’t about anything whatever (you know, not really) I know I’m hearing a pack of self-justifying rubbish. And then we hear that our beloved speaker is a one-man (ten points) something on a “crusade” (twenty points) about what “our” (thirty points) “Southern (forty points) heritage (fifty points) is all about”. Oh well, if it’s all about what it’s all about… Never mind what it IS, just consider what it’s ABOUT. That (whatever it is) has to be something meaningful and true and right and old-fashioned and good-old and — well, you know, it must be, well, a GOOD THING. Obviously. So why bother to argue the point? Point? No, dammit, it’s a good thing and damn right and that’s that.
Heritage. Right. *sigh* And the Confederate
flagrag “isn’t racist”, and the KKK is just a friendly neighborhood boys’ club….ttch@7—I read that article a little earlier this evening. Clifford Russell has truly boggled my mind. 🙁
After working in the fields from dawn to dusk, chopping wood for a fire and feeding her children, a slave might be required to spin a skein of thread before each night before she could sleep. She might be required to provide sex as well.
Plantation owners stopped working their [mostly male] slaves to death only after Britain embargoed the slave trade and kept them from getting cheap replacements. After that they wanted women as well, who could have children (link).
As for rape, I’m guessing he’s just deciding that you can’t rape your slaves the way a man can’t rape a wife, since he owns either one.
Wasn’t there a Lincoln quote that he wanted to see slavery tried on any person who thought it wasn’t so bad?