Quote Originally Posted by Seamus Fermanagh View Post
total:

I was not making my statement as an out-and-out disagreement with your opening post. Your comments are pretty well sourced and DO represent some of the thinking on the issue of slavery then current. So while I am taking a different tone than you, do not think I am dismissing what you say.

You are certainly correct that human bondage has been an accepted norm for the bulk of human history and in a majority of human polities over time. Were countries able to decide for themselves today --absent outside economic pressure -- I suspect that slavery would still be viewed as acceptable practice in a significant minority of polities.

I am wondering however, if you view of slavery is colored too much by slavery as practiced in the Empire under the laws of divus IIlius than in the American South.

Manumission tended to be something given as a gift by the slave owner (whether to salve their own conscience or for whatever reason). It was not usually "earnable" in the American South -- or the New World in general -- as it documentably was in the Roman Empire. There certainly was no analogous cliental system or implicit system for progressing from slave to freedman to possible citizenship as there certainly was in Imperial Rome.

So, if you wish to assert that that depiction of slavery in Uncle Tom's Cabin was a cherry-picked effort that combined all of the nastier aspects into one story that was at best atypical, then I am in full agreement. Mistreatment and abuse would have been the exception, not the norm, or the whole thing would have gone the way of Nat Turner in a hot minute.

My problems are with the inherent inequity of the servile condition as a whole, and I do not consider its historic commonality to be adequate justification for it.
And more to the point, slavery was definitely not regarded as the norm by Europeans by the time of the ACW, hence the Confederate cause being anathema to the European countries from whom they wished to gain recognition. InsaneApache has posted in the monastery about the Lancashire mill workers who refused to work cotton imported from the south, who suffered unemployment and starvation as a result, yet who held firm in their convictions. Whatever historical commonality t_r wishes to claim, it certainly dd not apply to Europeans and their descendants by 1860.