Involuntary servitude

About 10 years ago I wrote an historical novel about the US Civil War. (All Out of Heart, by a fictional Civil War journalist named Nicholas Canfield. It's at Amazon.com). I spent about a year writing it, but more than five years researching it and found out a few interesting things along the way.

Some people, even today, are fond of asking, "If slavery was so bad, why didn't the slaves revolt?" I suppose this feeds their position that: 1) slavery really wasn't all that bad; 2) the slaves somehow deserved to be slaves.

Well, let's look at this.

The antebellum south witnessed a couple really horrifying revolts, such as the Stono Rebellion, which occurred while the colonies were still colonies, and Nat Turner's rebellion. Turner was a self-made preacher who apparently believed he was acting on the will of God to go out and kill as many white people as he could, including women and children. Then there was Denmark Vesey, a freeman in Charleston, S.C., who organized a slave rebellion involving an "army" of slaves from several different plantations. One of his soldiers, a slave, actually ratted out the whole operation before it had a chance to get underway.

Slaves often simply ran off for a while and hid in the woods -- or even somewhere on the master's property. The slaves often conducted casual work slow-downs, and in a history class one professor told of statistics taken from a large plantation that showed a really absurd number of broken tools. This seems to have been a kind of deliberate sabotage, at the personal level at least, to secure some freedom from labor.

Frederick Olmstead, who was an agriculturist, and who, by the way, designed New York's Central Park, made several trips across the slave south in the 1840s and 1850s to study southern agriculture. He reports in the book King Cotton a lot of inefficiency in the slave system, to the point where meals were rarely on time, slaves treated stock carelessly or even cruelly, and that though slave owners seemed to unilaterally condemn this type of thing, they also tolerated it. They blamed it on the slaves, claiming that it was evidence of the slaves' inferiority, laziness, stupidity, and their general incapacity to take care of themselves. All of this became part of the rationale for slavery. Many slave owners genuinely believed they were benefactors for their human chattel, and that the slaves couldn't survive without them.

Many slaves believed this, too. That's what they'd been taught all their lives. They'd been treated -- at best -- like hapless children in need of direction, and at worst, like dangerous criminals, also in need of direction, often in the form of vigilant and brutal supervision.

And slavery was quite brutal. Whippings were pretty commonplace; less common was the practice of publicly burning alive rebellious slaves. One account from the WPA Project (I think) tells of a slave whose wife was raped by a white overseer. The slave went to the overseer to try to secure some justice for it. He was whipped, and his ear was nailed to a board and lopped off. He wasn't supposed to complain and served as an example to other slaves who might also take offense to rape.

But these are extreme cases. Consider that in parts of South Carolina, Mississippi, and Alabama, the black slave population outnumbered the whites -- and not all of the whites in the area were slave owners. So why didn't the slaves rebel?

The slaves weren't armed; they weren't organized. By and large, they didn't know they held an advantage in the population. They weren't familiar with military tactics. They didn't have leaders. They'd very literally been beaten into submission. Many of them internalized and believed that they were inferior, incompetent, stupid, lazy, and on their own would surely be seduced by gambling, drunkenness, profligacy, crime and violence.

Most slave states had laws against teaching slaves to read. In addition, postmasters in the slave states were charged with the task of censoring incoming mail, including books, magazines, and newspapers that even considered emancipation. This was regarded as "outside agitators" hoping to "incite servile rebellion." And it's my personal opinion that the censorship was directed toward the white population rather than slaves. After all, could slaves receive mail without their masters knowing about it? And most slaves couldn't read, anyway.

So the slaves -- along with many poor whites -- remained in a kind of subhuman condition, and were deliberately kept clueless about how to free themselves from it.

Some ran away. Most were captured. Because of the Fugitive Slave Law, which compelled even free states to hunt down and return runaways, any slave in search of freedom had to get to Canada. That's a long, long way from Georgia or Louisiana.

The slaves developed all kinds of cultural mechanisms to survive in this situation. Most simply accepted the hopelessness and desperation of their condition and tried to make the best of it somehow. They played by the rules -- at least so far as ol' massa' knew about it -- and many found comfort in religion. If you listen to the slave songs, the most hopeful are those that portray death as a joyful release from the burden of life.

This is not to say that slaves didn't embrace the concept of freedom. During the Civil War, anywhere the Union lines moved into slave territory, the army was inundated with runaway slaves. One southern lady, Kate Stone, who lived on a plantation in Mississippi, reported in her diary, Brokenburn, how as the Union army moved south down the Mississippi River, she and her neighbors every day "lost" a couple slaves. And not only that, but the slaves who remained often became very difficult to control. Stone talks about her trusted cook chasing her mistress around the kitchen with a butcher knife in response to some criticism. The next day, the cook was gone; she liberated herself and took off for the Union lines.

Where there was hope of successful escape from bondage, there's considerable evidence that the slaves took advantage of it.

The main thing, and the most horrifying thing, that I learned about slavery was that slave owners made a deliberate and calculated effort to cripple the spirits of their slaves, beginning at a very young age. The more gentrified white owners despised the brutality this required, so they hired others to do it for them. Often these "others" were slave drivers, who were slaves themselves. Given this privilege and social status a cut above other field hands, they were even more cruel and brutal than most white overseers would dare to be.

And slavery worked.... for some. The slaves remained slaves from one generation to the next. The white antebellum south included some of the wealthiest people in the world, and very often these people and their counterparts held all the key political positions in their counties, states, and in the US Congress. Some of them were presidents and Supreme Court Justices.

I don't want to get into all the issues and arguments surrounding slavery and the Civil War. Plenty of other blogs, mailing lists, and web sites provide more in-depth discussion on all of this.

The point I'm trying to make is about slavery -- involuntary servitude -- and why people are willing to put up with it.

It starts with regarding yourself as a victim in need of help, or deliberately placing yourself in this kind of situation. Like teenagers having kids, and even regarding this as some kind of virtue or significant indication of adulthood and responsibility. Or maybe just the hope that your dolt boyfriend will marry you and you'll live happily ever after. Stupid and wrong -- and just about impossible.

Or failing to find yourself ignorant, impoverished, and a victim of one thing or another, you go out and adopt unproven and alarmist perils -- like the myth of Global Warming. Right now, the US lives by some potent cultural myths that are not only pure fantasy, but absolutely destructive to human life. If you're more concerned about the fate of owls or fish than about the human race, you definitely fall into this category.

Some things may well be done best by the government (depending upon the government) or by some kind of collective effort -- including corporations -- like building roads and bridges, or providing local police and fire departments. But health insurance? Child care? Deciding where your kids go to school and what kind of education they get? The food you eat? The work you do? Where you live? Your income? The charities you support?

Personal freedom means making these decisions for yourself and paying for them by yourself, then enjoying and/or suffering the consequences of them by yourself.

For US citizens, the scope and range of what we're "allowed" to do for ourselves is getting narrower and narrower.

Oh, but then health care will be FREE!! Yeah... but what kind of health care? If you're over 70 -- or maybe even 50 -- you probably won't get a heart valve replacement because the government will decide that this type of "investment" should go to someone with more productive years left. You won't have anything to say about what books your kids are reading or what kind of information they're being fed every day in school. You're going to pay astronomical rates for electricity because of a misguided and factually WRONG assessment that human beings are causing the earth to self-combust.

And you'll work and work and work and see half or more of your income go to other people for one reason or another. A good many of these others won't be "needy" at all; they'll simply be legislators and bureaucrats and their pals -- the very source of your oppression.

Is this the world the you want to live in? Is this what you want to leave your kids?

I have a hard time with the idea that so many people -- driven by what? greed? delusions? guilt? -- could wish this on anyone. I have a hard time believing that they don't see that there's no advantage for them in any of this, only pain and yes.... involuntary servitude. And if they understand the truth about it, why on earth would they promote it? It's the worst of all possible options for the human race.

If you look at history, usually it's the intellectuals and the artists who are the first to go. They are the ones who threaten the authority of totalitarian government. The general population just might listen to them instead of the local ward boss. And it's the intellectuals and artists right now who are the staunchest supporters of all of this. No doubt, they think they'll be part of the new ruling class. Well, look at history....

My God, even the European semi-socialists are shocked and appalled at what the current president and congress are doing to the "Free World." I'm curious to see the outcomes -- if any -- from the upcoming world economic conference. Right now, the USA has considerable clout because of its wealth and productivity (the results of our freedom). With that being systematically diminished by mountains of public debt, increasing taxes on productivity and infrastructure, and the constipation of more and more governmental regulation, how long will that wealth and political clout last?

Do you really want to live in a Third World country? There are plenty of places you can go right now for that -- some people in Hollywood actively seek out the Third World adventure vacation to broaden their horizons and to provide themselves with flawless "liberal" credentials. But why destroy the USA when you can go almost anywhere else to wallow in poverty and despair?

I'm perfectly happy with allowing anyone to make him or herself a slave. But please leave the rest of us out of it.