Would YOU be a Slaveholder?

They LIVED it, though. We only read about it. So all old people are senile, eh?

 

At 96, my grandfather could still preach so hot that you would wish for a popsicle sonny!
I find it incredible that folks will do anything to tear down the evidence that, most of the time, slave owners treated their slaves decently. After all, who in their right mind would abuse their cattle? Same concept to those folks of that time. Slaves were an investment, and no sane man would treat their investment poorly.
So naturally we would find slave who loved their masters. I find that not to difficult to accept. Many slave owners taught their slaves the gospel. Why wouldn't the slave be grateful for THAT?
Comments like Churchboy's (above) are absolutely moronic.
Yes, the INSTITUTION of slavery was evil, but MANY slave owners were not.
In HIS servcie;
Jim

 

We sure love throwing our adjectives around on this posting, don't we? And, PLEASE, put down your broad paint brushes!

I'm waiting to see which one of you will come forth and conclusively and uncontestably PROVE for all of us the side which God Himself unilaterally favored to the mutual exclusion of the other.

As I said in an earlier posting, each side had more than a sufficient amount of blame and guilt and has suffered the consequences for it.

I'll leave you with that for now. I need to e-mail my late aunt's brother who lives in Gettysburg to see if he still has any of those Confederate battle flags that are made in Japan...southern Japan I suppose.

 

First of all I see no where in the Bible that prohibits slavery. Since that is the case I would say that it would all depend on where God put me. If God's plan for my life would have been a wealthy slave owner, then I hope he would have given me the grace to be the best master I could have been.
Remember that slave labor is not FREE labor. The master had every responsibility of modern besiness owners now. He has to provide "benifits" and everything else.

Today it is like owning a company vs being an employee. It is much easier to be an employee. It takes a lot of hard work and responsibility to own a company.

It takes a lot of hard work to own a plantation with slaves.

Remember that if at the end of a year, there was not enough supplies to go around, the master still had to take care of the slave BEFORE himself, just as today, employees must get paid BEFORE the owner takes out his.
Of course most of the time the owner makes much more than the worker or servant but there are exceptions.


Anyway, someone please show from the Bible where slavery is wrong???? All I see is servants obey your master. In return, the master takes care of the slave. Similar to modern business.
Slavery will always be around in some form or fashion because not everyone can make it alone. This is the way God created.

If you disagree, please show me from the Bible where it is wrong, I just don't see it.

 

Well, it's all really nice to blame the Americans for slavery but the fact is that black Africans sold black Africans into slavery which were sold again to Americans. Let's put the Roots (pun intended) of the problem where it lies. And, to make matters worse, African blacks are still selling African blacks into slavery this very day.

 

LadyEagle
My new years resolution is that I must become less cynical. [snipped]

At first I had some doubts about the source you sited, but it's certainly genuine (even if it overstates the number of positive experiences a little).

Some more examples of those WPA narratives LE mentioned.
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/wpa/index.html

[ December 29, 2004, 07:58 PM: Message edited by: Dr. Bob ]

 

That's all well and good, but that's kind of like blaming a drug problem on the pusher instead of the user. Ultimately, we must take responsibiulity for our own actions. Otherwise, we end up making the same mistake as Adam when he said "the woman made me do it". Didn't work too well for Adam.

 

I'd probably have been a sharecropper, a factory worker or a shopgirl if I even survived childhood (scarlet fever). I like to think I'd be an abolitionist and a suffragette.

What were the laws then in the various slave states as to women owning property? Women were often considered property of their fathers, then of their husbands. Supposing it were allowed and supposing I were a woman of independent means who inherited land with slaves (ie. came to be a slaveholder through no fault or action of my own)...My fantasy is that I would be like Tolstoy or, at the very least, like Washington. More probably, I'd queasily go along with the status quo.

 

I'm getting to this discussion late since returning from the Deep South for Christmas Vacation.

My family still has the letters my Great Grand Father wrote home to his wife from the Civil War instructing her on how to care for the slaves on their plantation.

The other side of my family was dirt poor and sharecroppers.

None of us can say for surety what we would have or would not have done had we lived during the Civil War Era.

I grew up in the segregated South and can tell you first hand that what you grow up with is what you accept as normal until you see life from another perspective.

 

Since my family were always sharecroppers, I have no doubt that I would have been one also.

These days, I think a lot of black Americans have sold themselves into the slavery of greed and trying to get something for nothing. Too many young black males want everything handed to them and when it isn't, they take it, then wonder why so many wind up in prison. They kill each other over turf wars and drugs and blame whites for keeping them down. You have several generations that need to get real and realize that they are their own worst enemy. It's time to get over playing the role of victim all the time.
Being poor is no excuse. Too many fine young black people have worked their way out of poverty and fatherless homes to make something of themselves because they realize that the world owes them nothing and they have to work for what they want.

I'm also tired of being blamed for something that I did not do and something my family had no hand in. Through the generations, my family were always sharecroppers. They raised kids to help make a living, not slaves. I know, because my parents had eight kids and we worked the Landlord's fields side by side with blacks. We also gave half of everything we made on our crops to the Landlord. We lived in run down houses, had no modern conveniences and only modest transportation, wore hand me down clothes, and raised our food.
Someone once asked me what century I lived in. He didn't believe any white folks grew up like that. I told him he needed to have been out there and he would realize that a lot of whites were in that situation.
We were dirt poor. Now we all have good paying jobs, nice houses and well educated families because we were willing to work for those things.

I have cousins who were raised in a log house built in the early 1800's. One of them used to be head of the Human Services dept. in Memphis. She got tired of hearing this one black guy talking about how good white folks had it and how we always kept the blacks down. She went to her purse and took a picture of the log house where her parents still lived and showed it to him. He couldn't believe that any white person would live in such a house. After that he had a little more respect for her, knowing that she had raised herself up out of near poverty to be head of Human Services. Some of these people think that all whites lived in big columned house with 25 rooms and slave cabins out back. They need to get real.

I was raised to treat all people with respect and dignity and I have always tried to do that even when I was reprimanded by white people who were not raised with that principle.

It's not where you come from that counts. It's where you are going; In this life and the next.

delly (Dale)

 

I would not own slaves. Statistically, though, there were more Southerners who had a few slaves as well-treated farmhands (they worked alongside the "slaves") or who didn't own slaves at all. Most of those who fought were fighting to preserve their states rights not slavery as prominent Southerners predicted the decline and ultimate end of slavery in the Confederate States of America. To the victor goes the spoils, and so goes the writing of history. Thus the South has been demonized in many people's minds. There were wrongs on the Southern side as were on the Northern side, but there were rights on both sides as well.

 

You didn't give me anything from the Bible that prohibits slavery. I don't claim to be an expert on the subject, but please show me from the Bible where it is wrong...don't just say that it does because I am not buying it.

slavery is all though the Bible....I did find this verse that should be well known:
Col. 3:22 Servants, obey in all things your masters according to the flesh; not with eyeservice, as menpleasers; but in singleness of heart, fearing God:

Ok...I have given you one verse that clearly does NOT prohibit slavery but at least implies that it is a practice that God accepts.

Slavery CAN be abused but that doesn't mean that the institution is wrong.

 

I have seen some data that shows, before the troubles in Kansas, there were more abolitionists in the South than in the North.

As it became clear that a conflict between the industrialized North and the Agricultural South was going to be a fact regardless of slavery, people in the South tended to support it on patriotic grounds.

Ironically, the presence of cheap labor that could be legally stolen from so many people, made it economically advantageous for the few who could own many human beings, but also made it economically ruinous for the many whites who could not.

Slavery was not the true cause of the Civil War, but it did make it virtually certain that the South would lose.

If I was a white southerner at the time, and if I knew what I know about the economic effects of slavery, I would work to abandon it, no matter what my upbringing had been.

I would like to think that I'd reject it on moral grounds, but it seems many did not. Custom, even as criminal as the theft of labor, is very strong.

 

Galatian, I think if we all lived back then, knowing what we do now, that we all would have been against slavery, even had we been in the South and been for secession.

Hindsight is 20/20, you know.

I think most of the Southerners back then, could they see what lay in store for them, and that they would lose anyway, would probably not have seceded in the first place and just used the political route to make the times less drastic for them.

I also doubt that Lincoln, and the federal government in general, would have become as strong as it has had the Southerners stayed the course and stayed in the Union.

Principles are the best thing we have, but when an end is inevitable, we would almost always do better just to make the best of a bad situation.

Now, had the South had the numbers that the North did...well, let's just say Lee Greenwood would have been singing "God Bless the CSA".

 

I read a book recently, apparently a scholarly book, that said that it took about 90 percent of the production of a black slave to maintain a black slave. The remaining 10 percent of production was taken by the owner. You can look at that at least two ways. One is that the standard of living of blacks would have been only 10 percent higher if they had received wages equal to the full value of their work. Another way to look at it is that the slaveowner was willing to hold slaves even if it paid a relatively small amount (10 percent) in the form of profit. There is no end to the greed of humans. Anything can be justified by someone if there is profit in it.

 

>>>>>>Slavery CAN be abused but that doesn't mean that the institution is wrong.<<<<<<<<

Dale, do you really think that slavery is morally right?

As a general question, do you think that the bible is the ONLY source of morality? If something was seemingly approved in the bible, does that automatically make it right today?