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Feb. 19, 2021 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor

07:59

Did Slavery Make America Rich?

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	Hello, I'm Jared Taylor.
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	One of many silly ideas about race is that black slaves built the wealth of the United States.
	In The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates explains that slavery made America, and that justifies reparations.
	Vox explains that American prosperity was built on slavery and torture.
	And here's The Guardian explaining that the West's wealth is based on slavery, and reparations should be paid.
	And here's what Democrat candidate Beto O'Rourke said just last night.
	We can mark the creation of this country not at the 4th of July 1776, but August 20th, 1619, when the first kidnapped African was brought to this country against his will and in bondage and as a slave, built the greatness and
	the success and the wealth that neither he nor his descendants would ever be able to fully participate in and enjoy.
	And
	This is going to be promoted as the clincher argument for reparations.
	You owe blacks something even if you showed up in the U.S. last week because slavery made America rich.
	But if slavery made us rich, what about the other British colonies?
	How'd they get rich without slavery?
	And what about other New World colonies that did have slaves?
	The Emory University Transatlantic Slave Trade Database is the most detailed in the world.
	It says the total number of slaves shipped to what became the U.S. was 305,000.
	That was, believe it or not, not even 2.5% of all the Africans who were forced across the Atlantic.
	Here's the breakdown.
	Brazil imported 19 times as many slaves as we did.
	The British Caribbean, that's just Jamaica, Barbados, and a few other little islands, imported 11 times as many.
	Even the Dutch colonies in the New World, can you even name one, imported more slaves than we did.
	If slavery was so productive, why aren't these places rich?
	And something else.
	The rest of the New World basically imported men and worked them to death.
	It was horrible.
	But if slaves brought wealth, wasn't that the most efficient way to use them?
	Buy grown men and work them until they died?
	In North America, there were male and female slaves and they had children.
	Children didn't work, but owners still paid for their upkeep.
	Masters also.
	Looked after slaves who were too old to work.
	In the rest of the New World, there were no unproductive slaves.
	And if slavery was such a source of wealth, the American South should have been much richer than the North.
	It wasn't.
	According to one estimate, Southern per capita income in 1840 was just three-quarters of the national average, and the gap had widened by 1860.
	There were a few very rich slave owners in the South, but remember, only one in four or five households had any slaves at all, and most had just a few.
	Frederick Law Olmsted, the man who laid out Central Park in Manhattan, spent five years studying and writing about the Antebellum South.
	He found that nine-tenths of Southern whites, in his words,"lived in a manner which, if witnessed in the North, would have made them objects of compassion to the majority of our day laborers." The myth about slavery is that with the threat of punishment you could squeeze a fabulous amount of work out of a slave.
	That's not what Olmstead found.
	He estimated that slaves worked only about one-third the hours of a hired hand on a farm in the North.
	Another Northerner who studied slavery wrote in the September 1849 issue of DuBois' Review that it was"a vain attempt to force the Negro to do even half as much as a hireling in New England is compelled to do." He added: Every attempt to force a slave beyond the limit that he fixes himself only tends to make him unprofitable,
	unmanageable, a vexation and a curse.
	Slaves were notoriously slow moving.
	As one owner complained, it takes two slaves to help one do nothing.
	Employers in the North looked forward to abolition so they could put blacks to work efficiently, like free laborers.
	As Princeton historian Ann Norton writes, estimates of the increased hours which freed slaves would be obliged to work and the consequent rise in national productivity abounded in anti-slavery works.
	The South invested so heavily in agriculture that it basically missed the Industrial Revolution.
	About one-third of the U.S. population lived in the South, but at the start of the Civil War, the North had 90% of the country's industrial production.
	The North produced 20 times more pig iron than the South and 32 times as many firearms.
	Northerners were four and a half times more likely to live in towns of more than 2,500 people.
	In 1860, there were 321 public high schools in the whole United States.
	Guess how many there were in the South?
	Thirty. So where does this idea that slaves built America even come from?
	It comes from cotton.
	And it's true that leading up to the Civil War, cotton, almost all of which was grown with slave labor, accounted for fully half of all of America's exports.
	But in 1860, exports were just 6% of GNP, which means cotton exports were 3%.
	Does that sound like the driving force of the U.S. economy?
	When Southerners seceded, they thought Britain's mills were so dependent on Southern cotton that Britain would recognize and support the Confederacy.
	Wrong. Britain just switched to India and Egypt for their cotton.
	And it wasn't as though you had to have slaves to grow cotton.
	By 1870, just five years after the end of the Civil War, the South was producing as much cotton as just before the war, but with hard labor, not slaves.
	Even if slavery had been a great source of wealth, what was the cost of ending slavery?
	A civil war that killed 700,000 white men.
	The direct financial cost?
	of fighting is estimated at one and a half to two full years of GNP.
	And that doesn't even include the cost of the devastation of the South.
	This is what Atlanta looked like.
	There are a lot of photos like this taken right after the war.
	Was slavery a source of wealth?
	Here's a humorous answer from Michael Moore's movie, Canadian Bacon.
	Two Americans are talking about Canada.
	Practically the 51st state.
	We admired them.
	Clean streets, no crime, no minorities.
	Yeah, they do that.
	No slavery.
	A lot of people are going to tell you blacks and slavery made America rich.
	Don't believe them.
	And please visit our website.

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