Were American Slaves Happy?

Jim Crow Laws Facts - Were American Slaves Happy?

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Many today deny that antebellum slaves in America were happy. They presume that, because slavery was an laberious and unfair institution, contrary to the spirit of the American Revolution, and because the cause of abolition was on the right side of history, that slaves must have been miserable. The exploiters had it good, the slaves had it bad, and material wealth and free time equate to happiness. Every aspect of slave life is disparaged, including food, clothing, shelter, marriage, family, sex, religion, education, friendship, workload, health and occupation. Slave rebels and runaways are upheld as heroes. Protests can arise when citizen try to teach that slaves were commonly happy.

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Jim Crow Laws Facts

But facts are stubborn things. For starters, modern happiness research finds that happiness is 50% genetic. It has all the time been the case, before and after slavery, that African-Americans commit suicide at markedly lower rates than white Americans. Suicide rates are one very principal measure of happiness. We know that depression and mental illness are genetic and tend to run in families. That same research reveals that only 10% of our happiness is due to life circumstances. Most today are surprised at the relatively small role played by life circumstances, although our religions have been condemning materialism for centuries.

When we look at the midpoint slave's lifestyle objectively, a different photograph emerges. Slaves worked hard on a quarterly schedule, and this was good for them in terms of bodily conditioning, stress, mental health, endorphins and happiness. They were married early, about age 16 or 17 in many cases, and began normal sex lives and procreation earlier than their white contemporaries. Most lived on good agricultural land and worked in sunshine, which is known to fight depression. Slaves never starved to death and had adequate cusine as adults. They had a sense of security and did not have to worry about bills, taxes, financial concerns or money, and instead lived in a largely cashless society. Curative care was equal to their white owners, and sometimes better, because slaves were not bled by doctors like whites were in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In economic terms, we know slaves were exploited, but the flip side of this is that they were extremely valued. Lynching did not start until the Jim Crow era, after Emancipation, when this economic value disappeared. Unless their owners were unwise, alcoholic or mentally ill, slaves were not abused much and commonly opinion their masters were kind or good. The presume for this kindness is easy to understand: citizen love their money, and about half of a planter's wealth was in slaves. The interests of the planters and the slaves coincided most of the time.

Many horror stories originated in the West Indies, Brazil or Middle East, where slaves had it much rougher than American slaves. Other parts of the world kept importing male slaves from Africa after the U.S. And Britain banned the slave trade, which unbalanced the sex ratios in those areas and decreased the value of slaves there. In the Middle East, young African boys were castrated to make harem guards, and African women were discouraged from having babies due to Islamic law. Arab slave traders killed more slaves in transit over the Sahara than the Middle Passage. African-Americans dramatically increased their numbers through natural procreation.

Many antebellum Northern and foreign observers wrote that slaves were just as happy as their owners. Some slaves looked back on their slave days with nostalgia. It's true African-Americans are a misrepresented people. One of those misrepresentations concerns the happiness of American slaves. Our "new age slaves" in prison are misrepresented, too, in the opposite way. Many think prison life too easy, but they are wrong. modern American prisoners, idle most of the time, are 20 times more likely to commit suicide than antebellum slaves. As a society, we'd best re-direct our outrage against the chattel slavery of yesteryear to the worse form of slavery today. The U.S. Has 5% of the world's citizen and 25% of the world's prisoners. Mass incarceration in the U.S. Is massively expensive, ineffective, wasteful of human resources and socially catastrophic. We need change. Abolition of new age slavery will require adopting some aspects of American slavery before 1865. Inspecting the mess we are in, that's not all bad.

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