amphibian, on 25 October 2017 - 03:02 AM, said:
Are you kidding me? For the umpteenth time, slavery is and was horrid. I would never consider it. It would feel like a piece of my soul was dying. I know right from wrong. I believe many white men felt the same way.
The speed bump I was talking about was the amount of wealth and power worry attributed to slavery. Cotton is not oil. Cotton is not steel. Cotton was not what paved the way to America's first real money men.
Chinese men built long stretches of the western railroads, but came here on their own. We're they treated Well? No. Not even like men.
I'm saying this early era of the cotton gin and it's products- slow to produce, were not the boon to our economy in retrospect compared to the industrial period, for example.
English ships land on the western banks of Africa, and what do they find? Black men selling black slaves. Slavery was an old institution all the way to the time of the Great Pyramids, and I'm sure further back, but African slaves were sold by African slavers.
I'm not saying this makes it right. It doesn't. They packed men into boats with horrid conditions, and that if I could, I'd love to be able to raise the dead responsible, and let them walk a mile in someone's shoes, or lack thereof.
I draw the line when someone says that ALL white men would have owned slaves if they could. No one can answer that in the affirmative. I trust my ancestors to know better. In fair turn, no one can affirm that, either. It's a moral dillema.