Update: this item is from 1996. [hides scarlet face]
There’s an Alabama State Senator (Republican) running for Congress, who says slavery was a good thing for the people who were slaves.
Mr. Davidson referred to Leviticus 25:44 — “You may acquire male and female slaves from the pagan nations that are around you” — and quoted I Timothy 6:1 as saying slaves should “regard their own masters as worthy of all honor.”
“The incidence of abuse, rape, broken homes and murder are 100 times greater, today, in the housing projects than they ever were on the slave plantations in the Old South,” he wrote. “The truth is that nowhere on the face of the earth, in all of time, were servants better treated or better loved than they were in the Old South by white, black, Hispanic and Indian slave owners.”
Is that a fact. That’s what it was all about, was it? Being kind and loving to “servants”?
Like hell it was. It was about money. Slavery exploded as farmers started settling in Mississippi and raising cotton there. It was horrible, unhealthy work, and it could be hugely profitable provided you could get the labor. Cotton and slavery combined to make slaveowners rich. There was no love involved.
Speaking of the issue at a news conference, Mr. Davidson said today that although his ancestors fought in the Civil War, they did not own slaves.
“The issue is not race,” he said. “It’s Southern heritage. I’m on a one-man leadership crusade to get the truth out about what our Southern heritage is all about.”
Well that’s what the slavery part of “Southern heritage” is about – gouging cheap labor out of black people, first via slavery and then via Jim Crow laws. And by the way it’s insulting to a lot of Southerners to call that “Southern heritage.”