crazy-pages: Let’s lay this out in cold, soulless economic terms. Each year plantation slavers typic
crazy-pages: Let’s lay this out in cold, soulless economic terms. Each year plantation slavers typically made about 4.5~6.5% of what they’d spent to buy a person from that person’s forced labor each year. That’s 15~22 years before a slaver could even break even on what they’d spent buying another human. That means they need to be so wealthy that they can provide food, clothing, housing, equipment, farming land, and all other basic necessities for a person for a fourth of their own life before seeing a return on investment. Anyone who inherited the ownership of people must also have such massive enough capital and asset stores to feed, clothe, and house those people, and land equivalent in value to whatever that many free people who farm for themselves would pay to own their own land. Anyone in slavery era America who might inherit or might consider enslaving people by definition has enough wealth and assets to be totally and absolutely secure in their own status independently of enslaving others, or else they couldn’t sustain that kind of ‘investment’. That’s the kind of wealth which enables choices. Absolutely any inherited slaver could have freed all their slaves and found another line of profit and, no matter what that might have cost them, still had enough money to do just fine. Any prospective slaver could have shrugged and invested in something else, or not at all, and still been totally insulated from any imperiling financial consequences.The cold soulless numbers of buying and selling humans do not leave any room for it to have been anything but a choice. There were abolitionists in slavery era America, in all corners of the country. Some who inherited slave plantations did free their slaves and find other work. There were priests who decried it, philosophers who decried it. Almost immediately after the American revolution Haiti (San Domingo at the time) had its emancipation and revolution. Had had a population of free black citizens who had been trading with Americans since before the American Revolution. Every single slaver in the US knew black people could be free, knew they preferred to be free (no shit), and absolutely had the economic freedom to recuse themself from the institution of slavery.And. They. Chose. Not. To. -- source link
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