re: #565 Sharmuta

It required a lot of money and resources to maintain “free labor”.

I disagree. This is abolitionist revisionism for the most part. The Nazis obviously had absolutely no problems making a profit off the backs of slaves as one very recent example. Leopold didn’t have an issue with his Congo colony making massive wealth either. The Soviets only failed at it because of massive corruption and a flawed economic system that deliberately bleeds capital.

Slavery wasn’t profitable for some of the founding fathers, like Jefferson, because they were terrible business men. Other southern planters certainly didn’t have a problem making themselves rich when they weren’t preoccupied with philosophy, politics, funding a revolution and delegating their estate to be run by others.

Slave revolts weren’t very common, and slaves reliably worked 17+ hour days on the most brutal plantations. It was a very profitable enterprise for those slave holders that ran their plantations like the slave labor camps that they were. That Washington, Madison and their contemporaries showed such magnanimity towards their own slaves that was not required by law was choosing a bad business model out of moral pangs.

Abolitionists attempting to influence southern planters put out a bunch of bogus literature about the economics of slavery, and unfortunately a lot of neoconfederates hoist the canard that because slavery wasn’t really profitable it would have died out when the south became industrialized.