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Thursday 26 January 2012
Not All Slave Owners Were Rapine Beasts: Ron Paul's Musings on States' Rights and the "Tragedy" of the Civil War

Perhaps, most troubling for a two dimensional version of American (and Atlantic) slavery is that plantations were run like factories. Of course, there were yeoman whites who owned one or two slaves, and lived in close intimacy with them, as privations were shared, and struggles (if not successes) were experienced in common across the colorline. But the plantations that occupy American memory, The Gone with the Wind version of history, were in reality, based on detached principles of labor efficiency. The owners of these business enterprises exchanged journals, notes, and theories about how to improve the yield of their crops. Therein, rubrics about the relationship between the ideal amount of punishment (the whip) and selective incentives in order to produce the maximum amount of productivity were divined and ciphered.

For the most profitable slave-owning whites, chattel slavery was a business. In many instances, it was a very impersonal one (where on some plantations the owner would never dispense punishment personally as it was a distasteful act and would make his slaves resent and fear him, while on other plantations it was only the head of the house who could wield the whip or the lash—overseers were not to be trusted to act judiciously or fairly). In all, African American bondsmen and bondswomen were entries on a ledger sheet; they were “workers” whose productivity had to be maximized by any means available.

There is an odd intimacy here. On one hand, slavery on the largest plantations was business and never personal. As a practical matter, slavery could never be anything but the latter.

It is not Ron Paul’s piss poor understanding of the historical underpinnings of the Civil War and chattel slavery that is most disturbing. No, it is the idea that in his detached musings, I can hear in my ear the whisper of the assassin doing a hit, or a slave owner assessing the value of his latest purchase on the auction block, that this is “business, never personal,” just before they pull the trigger or sign the check.

39 notes

  1. awalt2069 reblogged this from azspot
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  5. cresscross reblogged this from buddhaspalm and added:
    i fully support every point
  6. buddhaspalm reblogged this from azspot and added:
    Holy shit. At some point during the 90’s i started believing America was racially progressive. Glad I got over that....
  7. This was featured in #Politics
  8. hairtrending reblogged this from azspot and added:
    Only one small quibble—rather than workers, I believe the concept of equipment (ie. manufacturing plant robots or...
  9. azspot posted this

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