05-09-2011, 12:44 PM
Grateful11 wrote:
For the life of me I don't understand what people were thinking
when they started bringing slaves into this country. My wife and I have talked about it many times and just can't
figure out what the heck they were thinking. Supposedly Christian people buying, selling and trading human beings
like they were cattle. Makes me sick to my stomach when I think about it.
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/history...onomic.cfm
Presents this thesis:
Nevertheless, slavery was indispensable to European development of the New World. It is inconceivable that European colonists could have settled and developed North and South America and the Caribbean without slave labor. Moreover, slave labor did produce the major consumer goods that were the basis of world trade during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: coffee, cotton, rum, sugar, and tobacco.
In the pre-Civil War United States, a stronger case can be made that slavery played a critical role in economic development. One crop, slave-grown cotton provided over half of all U.S. export earnings. By 1840, the South grew 60 percent of the world's cotton and provided some 70 percent of the cotton consumed by the British textile industry. Thus slavery paid for a substantial share of the capital, iron, and manufactured good that laid the basis for American economic growth. In addition, precisely because the South specialized in cotton production, the North developed a variety of businesses that provided services for the slave South, including textile factories, a meat processing industry, insurance companies, shippers, and cotton brokers.
And from academialand:
http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/wahl.slavery.us
Consensus That Slavery Was Profitable
This battle has largely been won by those who claim that New World slavery was profitable. Much like other businessmen, New World slaveowners responded to market signals -- adjusting crop mixes, reallocating slaves to more profitable tasks, hiring out idle slaves, and selling slaves for profit. One well-known instance shows that contemporaneous free labor thought that urban slavery may even have worked too well: employees of the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond, Virginia, went out on their first strike in 1847 to protest the use of slave labor at the Works.
It appears there is some pretty hot contention still, but the evidence that slavery was driven to a large extent by economic gain for the slave-holders is pretty strong.
Christians could look to parts of the Old Testament where there are descriptions of God saying it's okay to have what is essentially slaves:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bible_and_slavery