More Africans suffered and died during Middle Passage on Yankee slave ships than in the heart of the Confederacy, Old-Twerp: the Prophylactic Man.
Originally Posted by I B Hankering
I have just caught a little of this ongoing insanity. But I caught this post about the middle passage.
First: the development of slavery in the new world, and the exploration to find the new world was primarily about the quest for sugar. Sugar was only available from the Muslim areas because the processing of sugar was first developed by the Muslims.
Land was claimed, slaves imported, land cleared and rapidly planted in sugar cane. The sugar was taken to Europe to satisfy the building demand. Trade goods were bought and taken to Africa and traded for slaves; the slaves were taken to the Caribbean where they were traded for sugar. The triangle trade existed for over 300 years. It is estimated that today the average person consumes 150 pounds of sugar per year which is the cause of the spread of obesity and diabetes.
Slavery spread to America for the cultivation of tobacco and cotton. The cotton gin was invented prior to the civil war which means that slavery in America was set to die by itself because the slave labor was not needed to nearly the extent that was previously required.
Technology changes everything.
The claims that state rights were a cause (major or minor cause is not stated here) has validity because of the predatory practices of the Northern States on the Southern Economy; e.g. it cost much more to sent Souther cotton to the Northern textile mills than it cost to ship Northern Steel to the South at higher steel prices. Thus, the South suffered economically due to disproportional pricing. The result was that the South shipped most of their cotton to England textile mills when it could. All of it would have been shipped if there had been a better transportation system that would take the inland cotton to the coast. But the South had very few railroad miles that would carry the goods. The North had many more railroad miles, and manufacturing capability - including the production of gunpowder that the South lacked.
When one says the the Civil War was all about slavery, they are responding to emotional thinking about their justified hatred of slavery.
I wrote a paper in college titled "The Economic Causes of the Civil War"; the research concerning actual facts opened my mind about what really caused the hostility between the North and the South. Some of it was about Slavery, but not all of it. The Slavery issue was used to justify the actions of the North in the conflict. Because the North won the war, the slave issue has been used by the victors to justify their actions of subjecting the south to oppression and blame slavery as the only cause for the war. The bad feelings that resulted lead to problems that had a major impact on the US for 100 years, and which we are still working out.
The lesson to learn is that we live in a different time. This is not the 1490's when slavery started in the new world, or the 1860's when we had the civil war.
In the last 150 years we have made great changes. We should look forward to where we can be, not backward and blame the past for what was.
JR