(07-07-2019, 07:41 PM)flsprtsgod Wrote:

(07-07-2019, 02:57 PM)jagibelieve Wrote: I just want to point something out here.  Was slavery wrong back then?  I'm talking about by 1700's/1800's standards not 2019 standards.  Back then it was an accepted practice and "normal".    It was also perfectly legal up until 1863.

Actually, there is some substance to the accusation that American Slavery was significantly different (for the worse) than slavery found in other countries. Nathan Glazer wrote about the distinction in the Introduction to the 1963 book Slavery :

“In Brazil, the slave had many more rights than in the United States: He could legally marry, he could, indeed had to, be baptized and become a member of the Catholic Church, his family could not be broken up for sale, and he had many days on which he could either rest or earn money to buy his freedom. The Government encouraged manumission, and the freedom of infants could often be purchased for a small sum at the baptismal font. In short: the Brazilian slave knew he was a man, and that he differed in degree, not in kind, from his master.”

“[In the United States,] the slave was totally removed from the protection of organized society (compare the elaborate provisions for the protection of slaves in the Bible), his existence as a human being was given no recognition by any religious or secular agency, he was totally ignorant of and completely cut off from his past, and he was offered absolutely no hope for the future. His children could be sold, his marriage was not recognized, his wife could be violated or sold (there was something comic about calling the woman with whom the master permitted him to live a ‘wife’), and he could also be subject, without redress, to frightful barbarities—there were presumably as many sadists among slave owners, men and women, as there are in other groups. The slave could not, by law, be taught to read or write; he could not practice any religion without the permission of his master, and could never meet with his fellows, for religious or any other purposes, except in the presence of a white; and finally, if a master wished to free him, every legal obstacle was used to thwart such action. This was not what slavery meant in the ancient world, in medieval and early modern Europe, or in Brazil and the West Indies."

Quite frankly American Slavery was the very worst form of slavery in recorded history. There was no hope for those people, ever. It doesn't really vary that much from the horrors of the Nazis, though the genocide they perpetrated was intended to produce a very different outcome.

Haitian slavery may have been worse.
All slavery varied in time and in place.
Everything you said is true, in terms of what the masters in the US could have gotten away with legally, but peer pressure meant that slaves would not work on Sundays, even if they were instead compelled to attend the church with the Master's preacher.
What you said about slavery in Brazil is also right, but more pertinent to the last century that it existed. The centuries before that, the social norm in most of South America and the Caribbean was to literally work the slaves to death, and keep bringing in massive numbers of new slaves to replace them.  Owners in the US South were never so careless; at the least they wanted their slave populations growing by reproduction rather than importation.

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