Greg Grandin Quotes

This is one of the major reasons that Slavery was so hard to end in the South. At the time, the dollar value of the Southern slaves was greater than the value of all the land, factories, inventory, and capital equipment of the South. Slaves were not only capital, they were the largest component of Southern capital and Southern wealth. There were numerous ideas of paying slave owners for the freedom of their slaves, and if this was done, it would have been far less expensive in money alone than the Civil War cost. However, the Southern leadership, like Fitzhugh, were totally intransient with culture and customs—indeed the Southern concept of manhood—was dependent in Slavery. The result was that no compensation was paid to slave owners and the South was impoverished as a result of its capital loss and it would not recover for 150 years.

depending on the term of the sentence Many criminals in England were sentenced to indentured servitude in America for a number of years depending on the crime.

Southern secession and the Civil War This is one of the major quotations with which historians rebut the revisionist view that the Civil War was about States’ Rights or other economic factors.

In the Jim Crow era and well into the 20th century, many school books and historians, wanting to minimize the enmity between North and South, tended to a historical revisionism where the real brutal and immoral edge of slavery was minimized and slave owners were depicted as being in error by modern standards but well-meaning and paternalistic. Foner, with this famous quotation, put the lie to the false image of paternalistic slavery. By the beginning of the 21st century, there were very few serious historians who still tried to characterize slavery in the South as “paternalistic” otherwise humane. See {584014} for another of Foner’s famous quotes regarding slavery

Many people are surprised that such an anti-slavery could have passed given the Southern states’ position regarding slavery. However, this resolution did not end slavery—just American participation in the slave trade. This would have actually increased the value of the existing slaves in the colonies as “cheap imports” would no longer depress the value of American slaves. The Southern perception was there were enough slaves for their needs and they could breed more. The other states, generally opposing slavery took what they could get---a ban on the slave trade. A major economic fact of the time was the vast majority of the slave trade imports were going to the British Colonies in the Caribbean. Cutting off the American slave trade would do much more harm to the economic interests of Britain than the United States where the only people economically hurt would be the Yankee captains and slave traders who were not very popular of politically connected except in Rhode Island.

As part of his sermon, Beecher would auction the freedom of a slave girl.

He was also himself a ship owner in the slave trade and he was the brother of the leading Rhode Island abolitionist, Moses Brown. See {585793}. Brown became the first American, prosecuted in federal court for illegal slave trading –-- a prosecution brought, in part, by his own brother. He was, however, acquitted.

After the civil war there was a concerted effort to shape American opinion away from the notion that the Civil War has mainly about slavery which we now know was a false notion. Slavery was the only significant issue for both sides. This quotation is cited by many who argue that the prospect of the end of slavery was tantamount to economic confiscation and impoverishment for the slave owning minority and hence it drove them to rebellion. Also, Davis and others argue that the value of the slaves was so great that there was no possible economic way to compensate the slave owners for emancipation at fair market value which was why that “compromise” never went anywhere.