"The South Collapsed because the freed slaves didn't come back to help out their plantations"

[Taverner]

Seriously - I just heard this fucking SPASTIC CRAZY ASS THOUGHT

Like yeah, after all the abuse, the slaves should have come back to their plantations to help out their abusers.

Are Republicans just fricken crazy or what?

[Happyhippychick]

1. "Their plantations"?

[babylonsister]

2. Who are you listening to? nt

[Taverner]

4. Oh I'm trolling around at a message board I have nominal interest in

I got sucked into the political den, and my jaw dropped

[pacalo]

26. Could you provide the link?

[billyoc]

3. THEIR plantations

:rofl:

[Taverner]

6. I know - as if they had any part in ownership of said plantations

[Orrex]

7. Actually, I like that meme

Acknowledging that the plantations belonged to the slaves is a good first step toward reparatations. I'm glad to have the Repubs on board at last!

[Taverner]

11. Oooh you gave me such an idea

I'm going to post back that "yes, they should have taken over THEIR plantations and kicked the owners out on their asses!"

[ret5hd]

14. Not "owners". "Squatters"

[Taverner]

15. I like the way you think nt

[sui generis]

5. he's right though

if only those ex-slaves had a stake in the profits of the south, things woulda been different.

They're not crazy - sharks aren't crazy. Primordial ooze ain't crazy. It just is what it is, mostly to be avoided.

[Taverner]

8. Forty Acres and a Mule...

Honestly, the North should have seized all of the plantations South of the Mason Dixon - under the Trading with the Enemy act - and redistributed it among the slaves

Yeah, people would have been pissed, but they were (are) our enemies. I don't mind pissing off my enemies so much.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

10. Otherwise known as ...

LAND REFORM!

Why not? The U.S. imposed it on Japan and strongly suggested it to Taiwan, which adopted it.

[sui generis]

12. agreed -

as it was the woah butween thuh states was as much about commerce as it was about noble principle.

In reality they would have faced the same issues any generation faces with "reparative" action though; what's fair, what's documented, and who is really responsible?

The south "fell" because the south relied on forced labor for its manufacturing and production capacity. When it had to compete against paid labor like everywhere else and when it no longer could monopolize farming, it entered a more level playing field.

It fell because it couldn't cheat any more.

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

18. Do some historical fact-checking and you will find...

That "40 acres and a Mule" never existed. Never. Ever. It was a lie propagated to enrage poor whites who had been the foot soldiers in The Army of The Confederacy(Remember: in many ways, the social structure of the south was very feudal. There were strong class divisions, and they were essentially inviolable). In fact, much effort was made, after the war, to re-engage the former slaves in a new system that was indistinguishable from slavery, except for the terminology, and probably more brutal.

"40 Acres and A Mule" rates right up there with "The Blood Libel" and "The Protocols of The Elders of Zion" when it comes to lies that will not die, but have killed a lot of folks.

[Taverner]

20. No it never existed. But it would have been a damn good idea

That's why I threw it out there

Land Reform would have done the South, and the Country a world of good

[HamdenRice]

24. Actually, it did -- on some of the coastal islands of the Carolinas

Some Union generals carried out land reform as an emergency measure to get the economy going again. It was considered to expand that model to the rest of the South, but it was defeated.

But it's not correct to say, it never existed. It existed in small areas and was considered seriously as a proposal.

[RoyGBiv]

29. Correct, but ...

There is a "lie" of sorts here in that the notion of "40 Acres and a Mule" was actually an established policy that was never carried out is quite a bit more popular than the reality of the situation.

I'm not disagreeing at all, just suggesting that the matter is complex.

There was, as you say, a very strong basis to this and a very good argument for implementing, if not that specifically (one mule for forty acres?), then something comprehensive to provide the formerly enslaved a sounder economic footing than the "you're free now ... figure it out on your own" policy that was adopted. As usual, the wealthy classes played up this fear of land confiscation to make poor whites, many of whom didn't own a damn bit of land, believe they would feel the brunt of the burden. What would have worked and should have been implemented was a wholesale confiscation of land from a certain strata of landowner who actively supported the rebel government, i.e. officers, politicians of any level, etc. That pool of land could have been managed in several ways, either with direct redistributions to freedmen or some more conservative plan that returned that land to federal control to be sold at auction or according to some definite pricing scheme as a funding source for a Freedmen's Bureau with vastly expanded powers.

[TheWraith]

25. Uh, the Trading with the Enemy Act wasn't law until 1917. nt

[Wickerman]

9. Alcatraz would still be open today had the prisoners only defied the

administration and stayed on in their cells.

Oh, that is one heavy dose of stupid.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

13. Ingrates! But, actually, many of the ex-slaves were forced back to the plantations.

After the war, in some states, the military cooperated with the plantation owners in forcing the ex-slaves back to the plantations. The travesty is that they ex-slaves were also forced to accept minimal wages and "support" themselves by paying rent to the ex-masters and buying their provisions - usually from the ex-masters. There was, of course, never enough so they became indebted and had to "work-off" their debt.

They became de-facto slaves once more.

Later, under Johnson and the "moderates" the troops were withdrawn and the ex-slaves were virtually tied to the land and the tender mercies of their former owners.

[Taverner]

17. I remember reading something about that in People's History

The history we get in High School is fantasy

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

22. The period after the war is one of our most disgraceful episode.

It you can call well over 100 years of frequently bloody exploitation an episode.

[kwassa]

16. They did. It was a form of near-slavery called "share-cropping."

and most didn't leave until the great migrations of the thirties up to the industrial jobs of the North were available.

I don't know who you're reading, but they know zero history of the era.

[Taverner]

19. Yes we don't get much in the history books about Share Cropping

I wonder why? :eyes:

[enlightenment]

27. Tavener, are you off your meds again?

The history is in the books. Even the sorry ass books they use in the high schools. It's in that section that deals with Reconstruction - the part that comes right after the Civil War and right before the Gilded Age, usually. Just because you slept through it doesn't mean it's not there. Unfortunately that's what most people do; they sleep through it in high school, ignore it in college, and then (especially on DU) 'discover' it through Zinn's Marxist interpretation and figure they know all they need to know.

I like The People's History; it's very accessible - but there is more to life and American history than Howard Zinn and anyone, ANYONE, who chooses to get all their 'facts' out of a single historical monograph is leaving themselves wide open to criticism.

History doesn't lend itself to pithy comments and snarky one-liners; it's fuzzy and messy and complex and if you know anything about history, you know that much at least. There are few absolutes and very, very little is black and white and trying to make it simple is not just bad history, it is an injustice to those that lived that past. They were living, breathing human beings with as much capacity for complex reasoning as we have - not paper cut-outs for people to dress up in whatever the latest P.C. stylization happens to be.

[Taverner]

28. Although Zinn has a Marxist bias, at least he admits it

I remember High School history. I remember the sorry textbooks. Try reading a book called "Lies My Teacher Told Me" or is that too Trotskyist for you?

I also remember the College courses, where I was introduced to Zinn.

Look - As far as Marx goes he had some amazing ideas. He truly defined class struggle, and it exists, whether you want it to or not. At the same time, his numbers were - well - asinine is the word that springs to mind. Labor Value Theory comes to mind.

Sharecropping is covered, but there is very little detail into the conditions. From a History book, you would think it was only as bad as say, the gas lines in the 70's. Until I read Zinn, I had no idea as to the gravity of the suffering.

Dick.

[Warpy]

21. Actually, a lot of them did, or went to "help out" other plantations

The plantation owners were always pretty cash poor, which is why they needed slave labor in the first place. Lacking a way to pay freed slaves, they came up with the sharecropper system, a modern take on feudal society.

Freed slaves and some poor whites "rented" the land they farmed by paying the owner a share of his crop. This was the best impoverished landowners could come up with at the time and it quickly degenerated into an abusive system. The land stayed productive but the cost to the producers was as harsh as slavery had been.

Of course, no Republican can ever be bothered to read books, especially history books, so yes, they always look batshit crazy when they try to talk about history.

[HamdenRice]

23. That statement is basically correct. The difference in interpretation is: that was a good thing

The best book on the subject imo is, "One Kind of Slavery," by Ransom and Sutch, which is about why the South became so poor after the Civil War and how share cropping arose.

Their basic argument is that the amount of physical destruction in the South was not enough to explain its long slide into poverty.

They discovered that the reason for the collapse of the economy was the withdrawal by African Americans of a massive amount of labor to which the South was accustomed, and this withdrawal was done through labor market power, which in turn led to a backlash and discrimination.

The southern planters wanted to create a "paid slave" system -- a return to gang labor paid by meager wages. But slavery had been the most labor intensive labor system (the most hours worked, the most calories expended) perhaps in human history, and the freed slaves weren't having it.

The freedmen first of all withdrew as much female labor as possible, allowing women to take care of children properly for the first time. Then they refused to work on gangs.

Sharecropping was the compromise. Although we think of it as an oppressive system today, it basically forced the planters to break up their plantations into family sized farms and rent them to the freedmen who attained a very high degree of personal autonomy compared to slavery, but not as much as, say, a midwestern white farmer had.

The sharecropping system grew until eventually it swallowed up even small scale white farmers. The system eventually proved to be terrible for lots of reasons -- most having to do with the greed and shortsightedness of the landlords -- and mired the South in generations of poverty.