Last edited Wed Jul 17, 2024, 07:02 AM - Edit history (3)
The rich white slaveowners functioned as an Aristocracy, with a social structure very much like the Feudal society of medieval Europe. Ulysses S. Grant, in his Personal Memoirs, mentioned how he secretly observed the confederate army building ramparts, etc., and he could tell that the tools furnished to the lower-ranking laborers were not very good and that the laborers actually understood more about building than the aristocratic officers who were riding around shouting useless orders and mostly just getting in the way.
Eugene D. Genovese recently wrote The Political Economy of Slavery, after doing extensive research which included computerized calculations of the economic figures recorded in the records of rich plantation owners. His research backed up descriptions by northern travelers to the antebellum south, who had noticed that the poor white people of the south were also oppressed by the rich slaveowners. Genovese found that southern bankers routinely used questionable banking practices that unfairly favored the rich slave-owners, and that the rich slave-owners dominated the economy so much that it was difficult to obtain decent tools because the stores mostly stocked the cheapest tools available.
The poor Black slaves were mostly treated horribly. Genovese found that they also were furnished mostly with the cheapest tools, which made their work insanely difficult, and were punished when these tools did not work very well. In addition, he found that the caloric output of the food slave-owners admitted giving their slaves did not come close to matching the caloric output of the work they admitted obtaining from their slaves. That was how he discovered the underground economy that was secretly run in the midnight hours by a few slaves (and a few other poor people) who fortunately were able to function on 3-4 hours of sleep. The book Twelve Years a Slave, written by a free Black man (Solomon Northup) who had been kidnapped into slavery, mentioned how some slaves fed themselves by setting fish traps after they woke up in the morning so they could eat some kind of supper at night.
= new reply since forum marked as read