re: #145 mmmirele

I am strongly recommending this Twitter thread, which is first, about how much capital you needed to have in today’s money to own a slave in 1860, and then about Confederate military service and whether lower-class whites supported it. The writer is a historian of labor and Reconstruction.

[Embedded content]

I read somewhere once, that at a conservative estimate, the capital tied up in human slaves in the antebellum South was something like $2.5Billion - at contemporary dollar values: in an era when $1000/year was a decent skilled-artisan’s annual salary.
(Something like 2-1/2 million (?) slaves conservatively representing an investment of about $1000 or so each in the 1850s)