'More than just one of many reasons' is quite the ambiguous phrase. And why does Mr Stephens opinion count for more than the opinions of others who disagree with him? Did he fight in the war? Oh, no, looky here, he was a rich man who served as VP during the war.
Farming men, the majority of Southern soldiers by quite a bit, don't fight through the horrors of war to enable rich ***** to own slaves that drive him into the ground with zero labor costs.
You have bought into some pretty stupid shit and you would realize it if you would just stop and think about it.
But I wont hold my breath.
The entire economy of the South was based on slavery. The idea that non-slave owning whites had nothing at stake in slavery is utterly false, and the idea that slave ownership was restricted to the wealthy is also false.
No the entire economy of the South was NOT based on slavery,, only the cash economy was. Most Southerners were subsistence farmers and sold some crops for store cash, and that is it. They were the majority of the white participants in the economy and no, they did not and could not own slaves.
You go from one piece of ridiculous bullshit to the next one. Does it tire you at all, or is lying just so reflexive you don't even realize you are doing it any more?
"Most"? What proportion?
What would they typically buy with their cash?
And they did not fear the consequences of a slave rebellion?
Only 25% of Southerners owned slaves and most of them owned less than ten.
The 75% that were the majority were either Yeomen farmers, clay eaters or freed slaves.
"
Yeoman farmers. The largest single group of southern whites were family farmers, the “
yeoman” praised by Thomas Jefferson as the backbone of a free society. On farms of about one hundred acres or less, they raised livestock and grew corn and sweet potatoes for their own consumption, and perhaps tended a little cotton or tobacco to supply much‐needed hard currency. The yeoman families lived much more isolated lives than their counterparts in the North and, because of their chronic shortage of cash, lacked many of the amenities that northerners enjoyed. Some southern yeomen, particularly younger men, rented land or hired themselves out as agricultural workers. Small farmers did not own slaves, and their prospect for acquiring enough land or money to do so was nil, but they still supported slavery out of strongly held views of racial superiority and because a large free black population would compete with them for a decent living.
Poor whites. The lowest rung on the white social ladder was occupied by people who lived on the most marginal lands in the South—the pine barrens, swamps, and sandy hill country.
Poor whites, variously called “hillbillies,” “white trash,” “crackers,” or “clay eaters,” just barely survived as subsistence farmers, usually as squatters. Their reputed laziness was primarily due to an extremely inadequate diet; malnutrition left them susceptible to malaria, hookworm, and other diseases that produced lethargy. Slaves sometimes had better physical living conditions than poor whites.
Free blacks in the South. Not all African Americans in the South before the Civil War were slaves. More than a quarter million “free persons of color” were concentrated in the states of Maryland, North Carolina, and Virginia as well as the cities of Charleston and New Orleans. Blacks who managed to buy their freedom or were freed by their masters, a practice outlawed throughout the South during the 1830s, occupied a strange place in society. While a handful found financial success, even becoming landowners with slaves of their own, the majority were laborers, farm hands, domestics, factory workers, and craftsmen who never escaped poverty. Religion played an important role in the lives of free blacks, as it did for slaves, and black evangelical churches, particularly Baptist and African Methodist Episcopal (AME), flourished. Perhaps because planters felt sentimental toward children they had sired with slaves, mulattos accounted for a significant percentage of the free persons of color. As a group, mulattos tended to look down on those with darker skin, whether free or slave. "
Slavery the Economy and Society
They used their small amount of cash to buy guns, knives, axes, Sunday clothes, etc.
And not all American slaves were black.
"The English had been practicing a slow genocide against the Irish since Queen Elizabeth, but the Irish bred too fast and were tough to kill. On the other side of the Atlantic, there was a chronic labor shortage (because the local natives tended to die out too quickly in slavery conditions).
Putting two and two together, King James I started sending Irish slaves to the new world.
The
first recorded sale of Irish slaves was to a settlement in the Amazon in 1612, seven years before the first African slaves arrived in Jamestown.
The Proclamation of 1625 by James II made it official policy that all Irish political prisoners be transported to the West Indies and sold to English planters. Soon Irish slaves were the
majority of slaves in the English colonies.
In 1629 a large group of Irish men and women were sent to Guiana, and by 1632, Irish were the main slaves sold to Antigua and Montserrat in the West Indies.
By 1637 a census showed that 69% of the total population of Montserrat were Irish slaves, which records show was a cause of concern to the English planters. But there were not enough political prisoners to supply the demand, so every petty infraction carried a sentence of transporting, and slaver gangs combed the country sides to kidnap enough people to fill out their quotas. The slavers were so full of zest that they sometimes grabbed non-Irishmen. On March 25, 1659, a petition was received in London claiming that 72 Englishmen were wrongly sold as slaves in Barbados, along with 200 Frenchmen and 7-8,000 Scots.
So many Irish slaves were sent to Barbados, between 12,000 and 60,000, that the term
"barbadosed" began to be used...
After Oliver Cromwell defeated the royalists in the English Civil War, he turned to Ireland, who had allied themselves with the defeated royalists. What happened next could be considered
genocide.
The famine (caused by the English intentionally destroying foodstocks) and plague that followed Cromwell's massacres reduced the population of Ireland to around 40%.
And then Cromwell got really nasty.
Anyone implicated in the rebellion had their land confiscated and was sold into slavery in the West Indies. Even catholic landowners who hadn't taken part of the rebellion had their land confiscated.
Catholicism was outlawed and catholic priests were executed when found.
To top it off, he ordered the ethnic cleansing of Ireland east of Shannon in 1652. Soldiers were encouraged to kill any Irish who refused to relocate.
Instead of trying to describe the horror, consider the words from the
English State Papers in 1742.
"In clearing the ground for the adventurers and soldiers (the English capitalists of that day)... To be transported to Barbados and the English plantations in America. It was a measure beneficial to Ireland, which was
thus relieved of a population that might trouble the planters; it was a benefit to the people removed, which might thus be made English and Christians ... a great benefit to the West India sugar planters, who desired men and boys for their bondsmen,
and
the women and Irish girls... To solace them." I can't help but notice that the exact same language and logic used to justify enslavement of the blacks was used to justify enslavement of the Irish."...
As for the Irish slaves, Cromwell
specifically targeted Irish children. “During the 1650s, over 100,000 Irish children between the ages of 10 and 14 were taken from their parents and sold as slaves in the West Indies, Virginia and New England. In this decade, 52,000 Irish (mostly women and children) were sold to Barbados and Virginia. Another 30,000 Irish men and women were also transported and sold to the highest bidder. In 1656, [Oliver] Cromwell ordered that 2000 Irish children be taken to Jamaica and sold as slaves to English settlers.” For some reason, history likes to call these Irish slaves as 'indentured servants'. As if they were somehow considered better than African slaves. This can be considered an attempt at whitewashing the history of the Irish slave trade.
There does exist indentured servitude where two parties sign a contract for a limited amount of time. This is
not what happened to the Irish from 1625 onward. They were sold as slaves, pure and simple.
In reality, they were considered by some to be
even lower than the blacks. “...the African slave trade was just beginning during this same period,” writes Martin. “It is well recorded that African slaves, not tainted with the stain of the hated Catholic theology and more expensive to purchase, were often treated far better than their Irish counterparts.” African slaves were still relatively new, and were expensive to transport such a long distance (50 sterling in the late 1600's). Irish slaves on the other hand, were
relatively cheap in comparison (5 sterling). If a planter whipped or branded or beat an Irish slave to death, it was never a crime. A death was a monetary setback, but far cheaper than killing a more expensive African. The English masters quickly began breeding the Irish women for both their own personal pleasure and for greater profit. Children of slaves were themselves slaves, which increased the size of the master’s free workforce. Because Irish slaves were so much cheaper, the loss of investment from torturing and killing them was not considered an effective deterrent. In an ironic twist, this caused some to
recommend importing African slaves instead for
humanitarian reasons."
The last Irish slaves sold into the Americas was in 1798.
The slaves that time forgot
