To David Vitter: You know what else cost the South a lot of jobs? Ending slavery.

Yup, a whole industry collapsed, and a hell of a lot of slave traders were suddenly unemployed. Boo fricking hoo.

about manufacturing and textile workers... funny, didn't they tells us they would all find other jobs?

People up North have not forgotten that.

That's rather dismissive of the reality of slavery. Your premise and subsequent dismissal of the brutality of slavery is just short of revolting

The parallel is between the defense of the destructive fossil fuels industry by saying that suspending offshore oil drilling will cost oil workers their jobs, just as emancipation cost many their jobs as well.
In this case, the oil workers are analogous to those whites who made their living working as sailors on slave boats, transporting slaves from the boats to the bidding locations, and "managing the cargo". The actual owners of the slave trade companies are analogous to the executives of BP and other oil companies, reaping profits off the destruction and suffering of others.
The slaves are analogous to all the victims of this horrible, dirty industry. In the immediate case of the BP Oil Gusher, those who will lose their livelihood, their land, and their health because of this atrocity. An even better, yet more broad, analogy would be to all those innocent civilians who suffer and die daily in Middle-Eastern wars over oil.
200+ years of enslaving Africans and their descendants is the worst human rights atrocity in our nation's history, in my opinion, rivaled only by the genocide of Native Americans. I do not bring it up lightly.

are outweighed by the needs of the few.