Slavery helped build nation, fueled its most divisive war and still torments it

Ron Formisano
FEBRUARY 12, 2016 5:38 PM

... The slave trade’s history is important because the wealth it produced played a key role in the rise of industry, not causing industrialization but accelerating the process ...

It’s important, too, because we live increasingly in a fact-free political circus in which a candidate for president — not long ago high in the polls — can assert that the Affordable Care Act is “worse than slavery.”

Slavery was a system enforced by whippings and cruelties inhibited only by the owner’s self-interest in not damaging valuable property; slave sales routinely broke up slave families ...

Racial slavery and the caste system that followed are the “wound that has never healed in the nation’s soul,” and influence the present in many ways ...

http://www.kentucky.com/opinion/op-ed/article60106041.html