For that matter, not all Wiccans are granola eating bisexuals with nipple rings who campaign for gay rights.  

I've been all over the North, I know better.

Wow! That was really big of old Andy wasn't it? In the end, they were still slaves, just so much property.

In ancient egypt, they would just kill and bury the pharoh's slaves along with him/her.

Do not deny that there was a paternalistic system in place.  The slave-owners were just as much human as we are today.  Right and wrong were still the same as today, but the paradigm of acceptability and justification changed.  We reason the benefits of illiegal immigrant labor as just in the same manner today.

Others have spoken for both of us, so I'll do you the respect of responding directly.


You state "facts" as if you were there.  Please explain how your education in these matters is somehow superior to mine, a subject you cannot possibly know anything about?  For example, I grew up in SC and was educated there.  The only "whitewash" I got about the civil war was a glossing over of the horror of slavery.  It was not until I started reading about it and weighing differing opinions that I formed a view that is unassailable:  regardless of the "cause" of the civil war, the practice of slavery was an abomination that could not be justified in a democratic representative republic founded on freedom.  It had to end.  The civil war ended it.  


Way ahead of ya, grandpa.   Not everyone on this board other than yourself is a basement dwelling youtube-watching 19 year old.

Agree with the first part.  As to the relationship between slaves and owners...  I've read enough to know that the relationship could run the gamut.  But every slice of that spectrum was based on the primal evil of slavery.  Even the best treated of slaves knew that to walk away, to seek freedom, could mean whipping and death.


The tone of your posts suggests different.  I'll refrain from putting words into your mouth, an apologize if that has been how my remarks in this thread have been interpreted.  But I feel reasonably confident that from my reading  I have a pretty good understanding of what slavery in pre-war slave states was about.  

slaves were so happy-go-lucky and well treated that they never actually aged.

I shit you not

Yup. That's why none of them died until after Reconstruction, because slavery ended.

Fucking Abraham Lincoln killed 'em all!

And General Sherman lit them on fire, eh ?  

For Taffy's benefit:

I grew up in Indiana in the 60's and 70's, and left for North Carolina in the 1980's, and came to Maryland in the 1990's after being in NC for 10 years.

My experience with modern America is that in the North, school kids were taught that the Civil War was fought over slavery, and there was some stuff about the different kinds of economies and States rights that factored into it, somehow, but nobody seemed to perseverate on it very much.

When I was in North Carolina, I remember being with a group of doctors, one of whom said "If it weren't for (some disease or another, I can't remember which)", we would have won the Civil War". I was startled and thought we HAD won the Civil War. It was the first time I really thought about it as a division that still mattered in the modern era.

When I was a kid, I read Time, Life, and Look magazines, and watched the news religiously and read the newspaper every day. I saw the civil rights movement unfold throughout the 1960's. I also saw the long hot summers in Watts (CA), Detroit (MI), Newark (NJ) in the 1960's, and saw the racists in South Boston in the 1970's, and Chicago as well, particularly when the school busing got going in earnest. I saw major new towns and communities spring up overnight outside Indianapolis when whites fled the court-enforced busing in the 1960's. I read about Bensonhurst (NYC) and Crown Heights (NYC) in the 1980's, with all their racial tensions. In Indianapolis, when I was a kid there were major swimming clubs/pools that overtly barred blacks even into the 1970's. In short, there were lots of problems in the North that were as bad as anything that happened in Alabama, Mississipi, or North Carolina in the 1960's.

My experience with North Carolina was that it seemed to me that race matters were better than in the north in terms of how well black people did, and how much white people would associate with them. The Dick Gregory line about the Southern whites not caring how close the blacks got, as long as they didn't get too big, versus the North where they didn't care how big they got as long as they didn't get too close really rings, true, at least throught the 1970's. I remember my uncle (an unapologetic racist who grew up in small white farm town) just about jumped back three feet to keep from making contact with a black man coming through a door in a fast food restaurant, one time. I think that by the 1980's, Southerners had pretty much gotten over the "don't get too big" aspect far better than Northerners had gotten over the "don't get too close" thing. By that time, a substantial number of elected officials were black, and many were in major leadership positions (mayors, governors, Speakers of the House, etc).  I think the majority of all elected officials are/were black in some states like MS.

So, for all the condescension of Northerners, especially white liberals, the South has gotten much further ahead with racial equality. I keep up email correspondence with one such guy I have known a long time who is originally from a Northern state. When we argue illegal immigration, his basic view is to let all the Hispanics in because they will "really kick the ass of the blacks". He would lose his job if that were widely known, and he is in the South.

The Maryland suburbs of DC are such a mish-mash of people from everywhere that it seems that the only tension I see is between the Mexicans who came here illegally recently and don't fit in, and everyone else. But that is probably unique to where I am. The western part of Maryland and the Eastern shore are pretty conservative, and probably more "Southern" than the rest of it. People who are Civil War buffs around here think that the course of the war would have changed fi the advances of the South through MD went a little more west than it did. Lincoln was not considered to be very safe in MD during the war, remember. A lot of sympathizers of the Confederacy.

I can't bring any original, real data to the discussion on what it was like to be a slave back then. It certainly sucked, but sucked more some places than others, and sucked more with some masters than others, etc. Most people's opinion is shaped by what they see on TV or in movies, or read in books, or heard from people in their families who almost certainly were not alive at the time. It is all laden with romanticied agendas (both ways).

I don't care about the Confederate flag(s), and I get that it is partly a way to stick it in the eye of liberals, and may have some undercurrent of family/cultural/tribal loyalty. And don't tell me how States rights are more important than individual rights. And don't tell me how people who have Southern accents are stupid and/or racists. Ok?

I just wish it all could be gone within another generation, and people could talk about it objectively. You know, like: are 1911s or Glocks better? AKs vs. ARs?

But I think it will be around until something bigger (like our next civil war) pushes it out of people's consciousness.


Now can you explain the Northern Ireland thing to us in a few sentences?

Wow, this one went downhill fast.

It never takes long.  

Southerners can't help but bring it up every five minutes.

Ok, that one made me laugh a little, I  envisioned "magical negros".

So you mean the cities full of people who contribute vast amounts economically to America are worthless unless you want us to all be hick farmers.

Nobody makes a bigger deal of it than some damn yankee that says "I just wish the ones who still make a big deal over the war get over it. Oh, by the way, we won."   Not you, of course.

Sounds pretty good to me.  




To the OP, I'm sure that there was as wide a variety of options for dealing with an aging slave as there were variations in treatment from one slave owner to the next.  Some were horrible bastards that treated their slaves worse than you can imagine and some were as nice as you can imagine and still claim another human being as property.  Some slaves were treated with respect and others with disdain.



Sure, some were sold down the river.  Some were probably just shot and buried or fed to pigs.  Others were allowed to tend a garden and fish for the plantation and some were probably assigned tasks more suited to their condition.  Once in a while, a slave was even set free––imagine that.



Yankees tend to demonize American slavery just as much as Rebels tend to minimize the evils of it.  The majority of southerners that fought in the War for Southern Independence were not slave owners and were not motivated to fight by the abolition of slavery.  Similarly, most Yankees that fought were not motivated by a desire to abolish slavery.



 

I know that in many instances families shared their family graveyards with their slaves. There was a story that spanned several weeks in our local paper that told the story of one group of people in our area who were ancestors of slaves. They showed where the slaves were buried in the family graveyard of their masters.

I used to do civil war reenactment and met a black man that was in a confederate cavalry unit. Later in the evening we were all sitting around the campfire sharing some shine and he told us about how one of his ancestors fought for the south. That was why he was into reenacting, to honor his ancestor.

Wow, somuch anger in this thread. So let me summarize
-Most old "retired" slaves were kept around to help do less back breaking work, i.e raising kids. However since this was the exception, not the rule in most small slave owning families/business's, the old retired slave was free'd or turned into glue.
-Slavery is not like we learned from watching movies and TV (OMG really?)
-Slavery was/still is bad
-Even though it was  bad, they were sometimes still treated better than factory workers in the north.
-Since they were valued property, they were kept out of places where they could be harmed. Dangerous jobs went to Irish immigrants since they were basically free.
-North hates the south
-South hates the north.
-The civil war ended 150 years ago and we are still arguing as if we fought the war ouselves.
-Fuck Obama

What do the children's books say slaves did after the war?

I remember reading about one of the largest plantations in south carolina. When the war ended the slaves went to the master and asked him if they could keep the work for food arrangement so they could stay alive. He kept as many has he could, but the war took a toll on the southern economy so he had to turn many away.

Be careful when you question his resume. He got his education before McGraw-Hill became the monopoly in textbook publishing.