Slavery enabled the political principles which helped end slavery

[ronburgundy]

The thread title refers to the irony the founders like Thomas Jefferson were able to distill the ideas of the Enlightenment into the founding principles within the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights, due to all the leisure time afforded them by slavery.

Jefferson was incredibly well read and consumed much of what had been written in six different languages before and during his life. This is what allowed him to distill powerful Enlightenment ideas about individual liberty into the founding documents.
All of that constant reading, learning, and thinking was made possible by all of the leisure time he had due his owning of slaves which gave him wealth without having to work.

In fact, the works that he other founders read were themselves often the product of wealth and leisure time of those authors (such as John Locke) enabled by slavery or other forms of inhumane abuse of others (Locke benefited indirectly from his own and his fathers association with the English Kings whose wealth was based in the slave trade).

Yet, the ideas and coherent principles of government they lead to were what laid the foundation for the ultimate end of slavery and other unjust servitude, and to ultimate voting rights for all people within those nations that embraced the Western Enlightenment. Locke explicitly opposed slavery on the same principle that opposed inherited nobility. Jefferson himself, despite being a hypocrite, saw that his own words and the government he helped create would lead to the end of slavery. His refusal to free his slaves doesn't imply his words were insincere or that he didn't understand that slavery violated those principles. It just means he was also too greedy to give up his life of luxury that depended upon slavery.

Thus, slavery created the conditions that enabled the kind of thorough philosophical and political reformations and progress that would ultimately help bring an end to the practice of slavery and at least marginalize the ideology that rationalized it (though that mentality is seeing a resurgence).

Of course, this unintended positive byproduct of slavery for moral and political progress does not lessen the immorality of those who engaged in and supported it. Its just an interesting ironic fact of history, although it does imply that slaves "built America" in more ways than commonly thought of, and that everyone who enjoys personal liberty today owes the former slaves a greater debt than they realize.

 

[untermensche]

There is the phenomena of totally accepting the conditions you are born into and having a moral blindness to any problems.

Most humans lead an unexamined life.

Jefferson knew slavery was immoral which makes him immoral. Period.

The worship of that sick slave owner needs to end.

If you need a hero Hamilton never owned a slave and was an abolitionist.

 

[rousseau]

My main argument here would be that it's a bit simplistic to say that slavery, in of itself, enabled the political principles that ended slavery, and instead it would have been a complex set of causes, including, but not limited to innovations in agriculture, the printing press, the scientific revolution, other political revolutions - yadda yadda. But I think you could argue that slave-like conditions are something like a pre-cursor to modern, robust nation states.

This is kind of the eternal question in history, about evolutionary vs revolutionary change, but imo this type of discourse thinly veils that the real progression of history is more or less fixed, and nothing is a true cause, but rather small components of a larger, evolving picture.

In other words - can you envision a situation where people didn't organize themselves into nation-states, or was this just an inevitable part of our history?

 

[untermensche]

What enabled slavery to end in the US was the introduction of capitalism and the discovery that wage slaves were cheaper than actual slaves.

 

[Politesse]

Are you suggesting that unless one has abundant free tine, one cannot recognize that owning a human being is wrong?

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

It certainly wasn't slavery. It was the exploitation of resources and growth in human population that brought about large scale civilization. Slavery is an unfortunate expression of competition among humans, nothing more. So is genocide and war. Rousseau has it right. There are innumerable institutions and inventions and accidents that have happened over human history that have increased leisure time and therefore affected change.

 

[Sarpedon]

Absurd. Slavery had died out in Europe prior to the age of colonialism. Serfdom, which was bad but not the same, was dying, it was entirely gone from England by 1500. Colonialism brought a rebirth in slavery. There's no shortage of pre-colonial philosophers and legal cases that rejected the notion.

The lethal combination of the Colonial/Capitalist society, which regarded everything as a commodity, the availibility of vast tracts of agricultural land with no prior legal owners or covenants in the new world (quite unlike Europe) and the underdeveloped African society that had slavery created the conditions for 17th, 18th and 19th century slavery.

 

[Politesse]

Absurd. Slavery had died out in Europe prior to the age of colonialism. Serfdom, which was bad but not the same, was dying, it was entirely gone from England by 1500. Colonialism brought a rebirth in slavery. There's no shortage of pre-colonial philosophers and legal cases that rejected the notion.

The lethal combination of the Colonial/Capitalist society, which regarded everything as a commodity, the availibility of vast tracts of agricultural land with no prior legal owners or covenants in the new world (quite unlike Europe) and the underdeveloped African society that had slavery created the conditions for 17th, 18th and 19th century slavery.

Not true, there were always slaves in Europe. Sometimes ilegally, as now (there are more than a million at present), but slavery was never successfully extinguished, and indeed had the official sanction of the Popes by 1500. At the time when the Europeans started pushing out across the Atlantic, mutually retributive international slavery had already been on the rise for centuries. And of course it was a part of American colonization from the first week Columbus set down at La Navidad. You really think he invented the concept off the top of his head? Europeans had never seen themselves as obliged to pay non-Christian subjects for their work - the enemy conquered were part of the spoils of war, whether they were American, African, or Arab.

I note that there were always abolitionists and objectors to this practice, also, and they weren't all wealthy plantation owners with time to kill.

 

[ronburgundy]

Absurd. Slavery had died out in Europe prior to the age of colonialism. Serfdom, which was bad but not the same, was dying, it was entirely gone from England by 1500.

Completely false. In the late 17th century, King Charles II led a highly actively slave enterprise and which paid for a large % of the crown's income. He went to war with the Dutch (who continued slavery until 1863) to gain access to the slave trade, and he put his brother in charge of the Royal African Company who got help from the British navy and army in building it's slave trading outposts and preventing any other English ships from competing with them. When a lost their monopoly, a highly active slave trade involving around 500 English merchants continued to profit from the slave trade throughout the 18th century up until the trade was abolished in 1807, which still did not free existing slaves in England who remained enslaved until 1833.

While huge slave plantations did not exist in England for purely economic (not moral or legal) reasons, there were plenty of slaves in England right up until 1833, when records show there was still a minimum of 800,000 slaves living in England freed by the new law. Slaves were used in Scotland for coal mining, throughout Europe in work houses, and as domestic servants, and researchers found 800 newspaper ads from the mid 18th century offering rewards for runaway slaves in England. This shows that there were not only many thousands of active slaves in England at that time, but that there was little shame in it.

IOW, there was nothing close to any kind of widespread rejection of slavery on principled grounds in England until more than a half century after the Declaration of Independence in the US.

There's no shortage of pre-colonial philosophers and legal cases that rejected the notion.

There was clearly a serious shortage of such people, such that they had little impact on their current culture and law which allowed widespread slavery in England and profiting from the slave trade until the 19th century. And the few philosophers and lawyers who argued against slavery likely benefited in their well educated easy lives from slavery, as did the vast majority of those with means in England, especially those who could afford to spend their time on such unprofitable activities as philosophy. That included John Locke. And those early writings were what later philosophers and political thinkers would spend their slave-based leisure time reading and thinking about, eventually culminating in formal documents that created a national identity for the US based on ideas logically incompatible with slavery and other forms of inequality.

Of course other factors were involved in reducing the profitability of the practice, but it would not have formally been abolished and thus would still exist on smaller scales if not for explicit political legal principles that lead to it being outright abolished, and in the US, gave the Federal government the moral authority it needed to wage a war against the states that did not want to end the practice.

The lethal combination of the Colonial/Capitalist society, which regarded everything as a commodity, the availability of vast tracts of agricultural land with no prior legal owners or covenants in the new world (quite unlike Europe) and the underdeveloped African society that had slavery created the conditions for 17th, 18th and 19th century slavery.

IOW, prior to the late 18th century there was nothing in English law or widely accepted philosophy that suggested there was anything objectionable about slavery in principle. So, the English and others in Europe continued to profit from slavery, and as soon as new lands or new people to exploit became available, they greatly escalated their involvement with and profiting from slavery.
Which shows that slavery would still exist today, if not for those who took Enlightenment ideas and synthesized them into formal political principles that helped reshaped the public's consciousness about the inherent injustice of doing that to any human being, no matter how profitable or how much lesser they are viewed.

 

[ronburgundy]

Are you suggesting that unless one has abundant free tine, one cannot recognize that owning a human being is wrong?

There were always some people who thought slavery was wrong and it had no impact on the practice for centuries.
I'm suggesting that the formal nationwide abolition of slavery wouldn't have occurred without a principled philosophical basis to tie its end into the same principles that gave slave owner and other non-slaves their personal freedoms and rights. And that most of the people who laid that intellectual groundwork and those who worked to distill it into principles of personal liberty benefited from education and leisure that slavery helped bring them.

 

[Sarpedon]

I never suggested the concept didn't exist, or even cases on the fringes where it did exist. My claim is that the conditions for large scale slave enterprises did not exist, and it was deeply uneconomical, and falling into disuse. And I would point out that the slavery inflicted before colonialism was, as you said, entirely for non-christian prisoners of war, and was not inheritable, and thus is quite different from slavery as it existed in Roman or Colonial times.

Since the specific example used was Jefferson and the British colonies, I pointed out that in England, the disuetude of slavery was particularly well advanced; more so than in the Catholic regions who were more exposed to the Ottoman Empire. One of the common objections that early Abolitionists used was that slavery was contrary to English law and custom, which it definitely was.

Perhaps the OP claim is trivially correct; in that it is hard to decide that something is bad if you don't have it in the first place. But the claim seems to go deeper than that, in that the idea is that modern society cannot have come to be without slavery; a common argument among certain people these days. Given that the northern states, with little and fast ending slavery developed their economy faster than the south, and England, where there was never slavery was the first to enter the industrial revolution, gives the lie to these arguments.

Perhaps not using slavery might have slowed the exploitation of the resources of the new world, and perhaps that, in turn would have slowed the accumulation of capital and delayed the industrial revolution (and, in turn, the ultimate replacement of the slave with the machine). However, I don't think so. Indeed, the very shortage of labor caused by not using slavery would probably have sped the coming of the industrial era, as the need for labor saving devices would have increased. Rome never had an industrial revolution, despite having everything else it needed for it, except for a shortage of labor.

 

[ronburgundy]

I never suggested the concept didn't exist, or even cases on the fringes where it did exist.

You claimed that it had "died out" (i.e. stopped existing) "prior to colonialism" (circa 1600) and suggested that this was because "there was because pre-colonial philosophers and legal cases had already established its inherent immorality.

This is proven false by the fact that the second there was clear profit in it, slave trading became a booming widespread practice in England throughout the 17th and 18th centuries with its government deriving almost half its income from slave related activities and a large % of England's wealthy benefiting. The ease with which slavery practices by the English (it's government and it's merchants and wealthy) were-accelerated during colonialism shows that any temporary dip in slavery in England was just an artifact of pragmatics devoid of any principled moral and legal foundation.

And 800,000 active slaves owned by 50,000 English households in 1833 is hardly "the fringes". And that number is 26 years after new slaves could no longer be traded and thus most slaves had died off in bondage. This suggests that in the mid 1700s, there were likely closer to 2 million active slaves living in England, with about 15% of the English households owning a slave. IOW, even as Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, owning a slave was still a common mainstream practice among the English upper class. And that doesn't include the many many more people in England who up until the 19th century profited either from the slave trade or economic activities involving slave labor.

My claim is that the conditions for large scale slave enterprises did not exist, and it was deeply uneconomical, and falling into disuse.

It was only fell into disuse temporarily due to pragmatics that change with time, and thus did reemerge and would still continue to do so where it was profitable, if not for its formal abolition on principled philosophical grounds, which did not occur in England or most of the world until the late 18th to early 19th centuries.

And I would point out that the slavery inflicted before colonialism was, as you said, entirely for non-christian prisoners of war, and was not inheritable, and thus is quite different from slavery as it existed in Roman or Colonial times.

Yeah, killing people so you can steal their resources and enslave the women and children you didn't kill (i.e., "prisoners of war") requires the same kind of dehumanization and lack of respect for persons and individuals as colonial slavery did.

Since the specific example used was Jefferson and the British colonies, I pointed out that in England, the desuetude of slavery was particularly well advanced;

In 1800, there were as many slaves owned by the residents of Britain as there were slaves living within the newly formed United States, about 800,000 in both cases. That isn't "well advanced desuetude by any stretch of the imagination. And you seem hung up an the irrelevant red herring of how many slaves were on large plantations in England tilling English soil. That is simply a matter of the land constraints and the types of crops. From the standpoint of whether England had rejected slavery on principle, there is no meaningful difference whether the English were having the slaves work on English soil or elsewhere, or even whether they owned the slaves or profited off of buying and selling them. It all requires the same kind of pre-Enlightenment inhumanity and failure to conceive of each person as having basic rights over their own person.

Perhaps the OP claim is trivially correct; in that it is hard to decide that something is bad if you don't have it in the first place. But the claim seems to go deeper than that, in that the idea is that modern society cannot have come to be without slavery; a common argument among certain people these days. Given that the northern states, with little and fast ending slavery developed their economy faster than the south, and England, where there was never slavery was the first to enter the industrial revolution, gives the lie to these arguments.

????"England, where there was never slavery."???? Are you on crack?
The English economy depended heavily upon slavery right up until the Industrial Revolution. They not only used millions of slaves as labor in the 17th and 18th centuries but additionally profited from buying and selling slaves to others. Both of these practices were a huge % of the British economy and constitutes free/stolen wealth that paid for much of the science, education, and technological development that allowed the Industrial Revolution to even happen. It is not a coincidence that the most accelerated period of scientific and tech progress immediately followed the two centuries of the most extensive worldwide slavery. In fact, slavery was widespread in 18th century Scotland in large part b/c most coal miners were slaves (not just African, but kids sold into slavery for life by their parents). This slave labor that existed until the end of the 18th century is who produced the "cheap" fossil fuels that enabled the Industrial Revolution, and slavery is what made it so initially cheap that it was worth mining lots of it, which in turn made it cheap to forge Iron, etc..

The uses of coal central to the Industrial revolution were sparked by attempts to make use of a product that was "cheap", but this extremely harsh and dangerous work was only so cheap b/c slave labor was heavily used to get it both in England and in the US. Even northern states like PA used slaves for coal up through late 18th century, and when they did actually hire workers they were often former slaves who they could get on the cheap b/c of their fear and desperation. Even after the civil war, the south still used a form of slaves to fuel their industry by falsely arresting blacks and them forcing them to work in mines.

Plus, the success of textile mills that were heavy in the north directly benefited from the cotton they got on the cheap due to the slaves that picked it. It isn't just slave owners that benefit but everyone they do business with and the people those people employ, etc..
For example, a northern tycoon like Vanderbilt who never owned slaves still made much of his wealth due to making of business of transporting slave-picked cotton to the northern textile mills via steamboat and rail. The size of that industry and profit margins he made were directly tied to the cheap slave labor of the cotton. That

In addition, the full role of slavery requires a much longer timescale. Industry in the northern United states was heavily funded by wealth accumulated by past slavery, and by ideas emanating from a culture of learning and scholarship made possible in part by centuries of slavery, in addition to genocidal killing and taking of other people's resources.

 

[Sarpedon]

In 1800, there were as many slaves owned by the residents of Britain as there were slaves living within the newly formed United States, about 800,000 in both cases.

And the relative populations? 800,000 in all of the British isles is a small amount vs the colonies. And it was me that pointed out that the land restrictions in Europe vs the new world triggered the vast growth of slavery. You are essentially stealing my argument and drawing the opposite conclusion. That's fine, but please don't be so insulting of me if you are going to just reuse my argument. If I'm so stupid, you can come up with a better argument.

Your argument is that slavery benefits areas where there are few or no slaves more than those areas where the slaves actually are. Not entirely a bad argument, but very hard to prove or disprove. After all, if your theory is correct, then it would be impossible to find a counter example: You can dismiss the prosperity of any place with no slavery as being dependent on economic gains from slavery somewhere else. I do not dispute that the non-slave north and england benefitted from capital accumulated from slavery: see my quote above about how not having it might have slowed the accumulation of capital. However, I stand by my belief that labor shortages drive technological progress, and slavery and unfree labor inhibit it.

The fact is that the value of slave products shrank in general proportion to the total GNP of the USA. You say that railroads made their money transporting slave goods? Well, there were vastly more miles of railroads in the North than the South, despite the South being larger in area. I doubt that all that northern rail was moving imported cotton back and forth, but was likely transporting northern goods.

Also, you seem to be equating exploitation of cheap labor with slavery, which is not correct. I abhor exploiting the poor as much as anyone, but it is a separate problem. I more or less agree with you that people will exploit one another at the drop of a hat, in any way they can get away with. People who inconvenience themselves for the sake of their principles are rare.

Reread my argument again: While I am guilty of making generalizations that are not entirely true, my point is that while slavery can speed up the accumulation of capital, it doesn't create it as efficiently as other economic forms. I also will never subscribe to any argument, which directly or indirectly implies that slavery was somehow necessary for civilization. Slavery was common because it made individuals rich and powerful, not because it benefited society as a whole. Nor will I believe that the rich and powerful people fostered by the system were the ones responsible for getting rid of it. Jefferson was a fluke, and a hypocrite, not a visionary, not the norm. Two things combined to destroy slavery: one is the self interest of the free workers, who were harmed by competing with slaves. That is what ended slavery in the north. The second is the machine, which the slave cannot compete with. Neither of these are the products of philosophy. Jefferson was the best that the slave aristocracy ever produced. The intellectual products of that entire class were dwarfed by what was produced by northern schools, which were largely paid for by northern taxes.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

The OP is a funny, almost conspiratorial argument. If it is true, then we can thank smallpox, diphtheria, cholera, tuberculosis, ebola, polio, bubonic plague, diabetes, cancer arthritis, anemia, gonorrhea, typhoid, syphilis, etc. for the advent of medicine. It's like saying we can never have peace without war.

Natural selection is certainly true, that those advantageous inheritable traits are passed on, but to argue that because of smallpox we have hospitals is rather canned.

 

[untermensche]

The OP is a funny, almost conspiratorial argument. If it is true, then we can thank smallpox, diphtheria, cholera, tuberculosis, ebola, polio, bubonic plague, diabetes, cancer arthritis, anemia, gonorrhea, typhoid, syphilis, etc. for the advent of medicine. It's like saying we can never have peace without war.

Natural selection is certainly true, that those advantageous inheritable traits are passed on, but to argue that because of smallpox we have hospitals is rather canned.

We're not talking about some natural phenomena.

We're talking about people getting rich owning other people and forcing them to labor.

And this lasted a long time.

But it ended when wage slavery was introduced.

The wage slave was cheaper. You did not have to house or feed or clothe the wage slave. If the wage slave got sick or injured so what? You just got another at no additional cost.