@Background Pony #8403
Yes, they believed it should be because they benefited from it. That’s why I’m hammering into you that it benefited the few with a system of false money. It was a racket. However, this is a massive goalpost shift from saying it was an economic backbone or that slaves built the country. In terms of what it brought to the overall economy it was very little and in terms of building this country it did nothing.
The South didn’t industrialise because of slavery, that’s a large reason why the South was so poor. The majority of historians and economists agree that the “modern period of the South’s economic convergence to the level of the North only began in earnest when the institutional foundations of the southern regional labor market were undermined, largely by federal farm and labor legislation dating from the 1930s.”
http://www.employees.csbsju.edu/jolson/econ315/whaples2123771.pdf
Historian Gavin Wright has said that the private investment of monetary resources in the cotton industry, among others, delayed development in the South of commercial and industrial institutions. There was little public investment in railroads or other infrastructure.
I’m not a fan of Thomas Sowell, but he was correct when he said the following:
In short, even though some individual slaveowners grew rich and some family fortunes were founded on the exploitation of slaves, that is very different from saying that the whole society, or even its non-slave population as a whole, was more economically advanced than it would have been in the absence of slavery. What this means is that, whether employed as domestic servants or producing crops or other goods, millions suffered exploitation and dehumanization for no higher purpose than the…aggrandizement of slaveowners.
A few got rich. But slavery was no economic backbone, economic figures reflect that. Slaves did not build this country, they slowed it down.