Interesting fact about slavery (or the abolition movement, rather)

Did you know?

That the abolitionist movement, which started because of moral and humanitarian values, didn't become a political force until they started making an economic argument against it?

God bless capitalism! God bless America! Fuck suffering and injustice unless it's unprofitable!

This country, while I love it, is the most hypocritical in the fucking world!

it better to have eliminated slavery for hypocritical reasons than not at all? And what country ever did elimiinate slavery as long as it was still an economically viable method of doing business, or they weren't forced to? and what countries still have slavery to this day.

America isn't perfect, but then what country is?

it's just sad, because it never changes

money is God, the rest is just details

and yeah no country is perfect, I think this is the greatest country in the world, but sometimes i just have to shake my head

on edit: one of the major forces in eliminating slavery in the UK was, in fact, for moral and humanitarian reasons. economics played a part, but it didn't dominate like it did here in America

Frankly, I think that if it was economically efficient we'd have slavery again. In fact, in some ways we still do. Sex slavery is a huge business, all over the world, including the USA. It isn't legal, of course, but it exists. Trafficking of young women and children. A lot was going on in Kosovo.

I'd also like to see your sources for it, since it goes against what I have learned in the past. There was both a moral and an economic argument against it, but it seems that the moral argument was pre-eminent throughout.

Lincoln publicly argued for the Free-Soil approach - that new states will not have legal slavery. Still, he was making the moral argument case, not the economic one. It may seem hard to square the moral argument with permitting slavery to continue in the south, but it was also well understood that the Free Soil approach would - in time - end slavery throughout the nation. The idea, I believe, was to do so without the violence that eventually did result.

Drew Garrett

it WAS conducted primarily on moral and humanitarian grounds from pre-Revolutionary times until the mid-1850's. William Lloyd Garrison warned that to turn their appeal from the conscience "to the pocketbook" from "the duty of Christian reformation" would inevitably corrupt and subvert the moral principles on which the movement was based. the shift, however, did occur, between 1854 and 1856 and the political success was immediate and spectacular. before, the abolition movement was a minor political factor that all of a sudden shifted into a powerful political force that could control the national agenda.

paraphrased from "Without Consent or Contract" by Robert William Fogel (a Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences)

Adams argued that when one works for subsistence and cannot acquire property, the focus is on obtaining the maximum possible subsistence for the minimum possible work, IOW they will not work unsupervised and will never do anything beyond what they are ordered to do.

Slavery remained profitable in the south, of course, but I don't know any economic interest of non-slaveholding states that would have been hurt by it.

Slavery was profitable but not as profitable as paid labour. In the South the difference was narrower because there was plenty of work to do year-round, while in the North it was more economical to hire labour on a seasonal basis.

a whole. It drove down the price you could charge for your labor if you were white. It stopped money from flowing to the hands of people, free or slave, who only had their labor to sell to make money.

FDR and Keynes can tell you that that is very bad for the economy as a whole. Ford couldn't make money if people who worked for a living couldn't make money.

Slavery would have ended eventually with or without the war because it had ceased to be profitable.

The Emancipation Proclamation freed no one; it applied only to the states of the Confederacy and exempted several counties. It did not apply to the entire slave state of Maryland. It took an act of Congress to officially end slavery.

And for those of you who don't know, everyone in the South did not own slaves. Slavery was for the wealthy. The working class did not own anyone, at least this working class family didn't.

Only one source for it mind you, but I heard that slavery was prohibited under the constitution of the Confederacy. If true, then the South was the first to abolish slavery. BTW Kentucky remained a slave state until the end of the civil war- the Emancipation only applied to states that were in rebellion.

"slavery was prohibited under the constitution of the Confederacy"

If that was true, then there goes the argument about the war being fought over slavery.

I had heard it was more of an economic issue, raw materials from south to north -- No tariffs or taxes; finished products from North to South heavily taxed. Taxes, Taxes, Taxes, Sounds a little like the cause of the Revolutionary war all over again.

(DC still has taxation without representation.)

and let the workers borrow themselves into slavery than to actually own them and be responsible for them.

The cost centers of housing and feeding slaves all of a sudden become profit centers as you rent them land and houses.

Or today, rent them money to buy houses and consumer shit

Welcome to wherever you are.

And Gandhi wasn't successful until he made anti-imperialism an economic movement (salt march to the sea, homespun cotton).

Money is power. And that's OK.

Liberalism is all about getting power down to the people, and you do that by getting money down to the people, and you convince other people to go with you when they realize there's more power in it for them when we all have power, and not when it's concentrated in the hands of a few people.