douchebag?
Out of context: Reply #8
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The reading I did on slavery horrified me and, I think, permanently altered my understanding of what humans are capable of. I don’t use the most lurid or sensationalistic stories in the two Octavian books – there’s no need, because the routine cruelty is more the point. But, for example, an English overseer on a West Indian plantation, discovering that his enslaved concubine was having sex with one of his other slaves and considered herself married to that man, had the man dragged before him, had another slave shit into his mouth, and then wired the man’s mouth shut. This was a literate and sophisticated overseer, one considered in the period to be very friendly with his enslaved charges, going fishing with them, building houses for his various concubines, and so on.
But what really got to me were not the individual atrocities such as this – or the ingenuity exhausted in devising tortures unnecessarily – but simply the fact that the whole society could subsist on slavery with so little real opposition. At the time of the Revolution, about one fifth of the population of America was enslaved. And by and large, those who fought for what they called “liberty” fought to keep that fifth enslaved. For example: Later in the war, South Carolina offered each new soldier in its Patriot army ranks a free slave for enlistment. And in the larger body of the Patriot army, General Thomas Sumter worked out a gradated pay scale by rank, which went from a private – for ten months of service, a private received a single adult black male – up to a colonel – each colonel received three and a half enslaved men (the half, presumably, being a woman or child).
Such people believed that they were fighting for liberty, and that “liberty” meant the right to own any property they had purchased – which included their fellow humans.
I guess what haunts me is not simply these facts about the past, but the growing suspicion that still, our leisure and our little luxuries are only possible through the exploitation of others we don’t allow ourselves to look at. We live the way we do – as the most luxurious society our world has ever known – at a murky, dirty cost we hide from ourselves. Americans account for 4.5% of the population; we absorb, annually, roughly 25% of what the planet produces. This is not a sustainable proposition. It is leading us into incredible international complications. A look at the systems in place to produce garments for us at wildly cut-rate prices demonstrates that the brutality of international slavery is far from extinct.
And the non-human costs of our lifestyle are high, too. We all know now, for example, that our consumption of oil – beyond being stupid for purely strategic reasons – is shoving us with incredible swiftness to the brink of an unprecedented climatic and environmental collapse. But we do not choose to alter our patterns, because that would be mildly uncomfortable. Some time ago, our President turned down a set of regulating protocols on emissions because he felt they would hurt American big business; he joked at the time that when the waters rose, we could just sand-bag the cities. Five years later, the city of New Orleans was destroyed. Now people are starting to take notice, but still, we don’t want to change the way we live our lives, the size of our cars or (more harmful than our automotive exhaust) the energy-use required for the way we live.
This is just one area where I see quite precise parallels in the 18th C treatment of slavery: People laughed at the absurdity of emancipation, or were horrified by the thought of it. They said arguments for freeing African-Americans were economically irresponsible. They said that people who advocated freeing African-Americans were impractical dreamers without an understanding of real business. The first Congresses were so stacked with slave-holders – or with men who profited from the industry of slaves – that no discussion about whether there was a moral basis about the continuance of slavery could be held. And so slavery persisted in this country for a hundred years from the time that Colonial Bostonians first took up their cries of “Liberty and property!” and claimed the King of England wished to make slaves of them.
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