The vast majority of the population owned no slaves. No, Slaves Didn't Build This Country First things first, we need to torpedo this idea that slaves built this country. While it’d be unrealistic to say they weren’t a part of the nation’s development, putting them as the prime constructors of an entire nation is like saying the guy who crafted the axle at the car factory built your vehicle. He was definitely a part of it, but he hardly gets to take full credit. So many kinds of people came to the new world and worked their own land, built their own towns, and established their own societies without the help of slaves. For one, the Trans-Atlantic slave trade transported well over 12 million slaves, but only a little over 300,000 made their way into the United States. This didn’t happen all at once. Slavery did officially begin in 1619, but it began with just over 20 slaves. To think that over the course of time that singular group of people built an entire nation — even a burgeoning one — by themselves is the height of fantasy. Especially as you continue to plug in the numbers.
Oh my this was a bold post. The exact percentage of the country that slaves built changes nothing about the fact that people were brought here and enslaved, then treated as second class citizens for the majority of our country's existence.
An old colleague of mine & obscure nobel prize winner's claim to fame was exploring the role of slavery on economic development.
Most of our GDP is produced in the last few years, so of course if you calculate GDP it is not built by “slaves”. Not African American ones anyway. I’m guessing Chinese slaves are worth a few points of positive GDP compounding annually through our imports. Need an economics professor to crunch the numbers. When people say “built by slaves” they mean the foundations of early American society. I know much of Washington D.C. was, how many state capitols (esp in the South)?
This seems to me like it's probably swatting down a straw man. How many people are literally arguing that only slaves built the country, much less entirely dismiss the efforts of Chinese and others? What is without a doubt is that the labor of slaves not only made the country and many families far more prosperous than they would have been but that those slaves and their descendants did not get to benefit from and enjoy the fruits of their labor. Literally, I'm sure you can find people saying "slaves built this country," but I doubt many people are saying that in an exclusive way as the article suggests.
How embarrassing that someone would post this tripe. Why? No one thinks ALL of the US was built by slaves outside of a very very select few. Has anyone on here ever made such a claim or posted someone who made such a claim? This is awful white supremacist propaganda.
About 18-20% of the U.S. population was slaves in 1750, and it gradually reduced to 18% by the early 1800's, mostly from immigration and white population growth. By 1860, the percentage of slaves was down to 12%, mostly due to immigration and expansion of the white population, which almost tripled from 1810 to 1860 (the black population increased 70% during the same time). Slavery in the United States I would say that the slaves did more than their fair share of the physical labor involved in maintaining the U.S. economy in the 1800's up to the Civil War. Some of the white men were bankers, lawyers, business owners, and others that did very little manual labor. Many white women raised their children or worked as teachers. Some whites, of course, did a significant amount of manual labor. But they did so knowing, in most if not all cases, that they could stop work when they got tired without fear of getting whipped. So there's that. If blacks want to say that they built the country (by doing the physical labor to create the U.S. economy and the buildings, roads, railroads etc.) they would probably be more right than wrong, although there is certainly an over-simplification to it.
Yeah, I was going to post the same thing. I’ve never once heard a person claim slaves built this country… I’m sure someone will now a find a quote to prove me wrong, but it’s really not a common claim… hopefully we can all agree on that. What slavery did was provide generational wealth to a few families while putting black people 200 years behind in their own wealth building. That is the long lasting and lingering effect of slavery.
....well....except that they were already enslaved. Europeans showed upon on African shores with commodities to sell, and Africans had nothing to offer--except slaves. Their own enslaved ppl. That doesn't excuse the perpetuation of slavery, but it is a salient point that *we* didn't show up on the shores of Africa, and hunt and capture free African men and women, then ship them stateside (or to Europe). They were already *property*, and the European traders simply adopted their existing characterization, which was imposed from conquering tribe to conquered tribe, before they were brought to market at the ports of Africa, then sold to European merchants.
I’ll ask…. Is this stemming from Disney’s Proud Family Louder and Prouder? I know nothing about it but saw an ad for it that had this theme if not very words.
"But your honor, she was already kidnapped by that other guy, so you see I didn't technically kidnap her. I just continued to keep her kidnapped."
It's a point that adds context, particurly vis a vis reparations angle, which is the endgame of the the 1619 project. Especially since the ppl they seek reparations from not only weren't the ones who enslaved them (Africans), nor the ones who perpetuated slavery (the long defunct Confereate States of American, and the vanquished leadership of their composite states), but the entity that freed them--the Unites States of America. What's more, IF we're to actually entertain any actua notion of reparations, the black anscestors of slaves here, would have to get in line behind the ancestors of the native americans, who were free, then disavowed of their homes, their land, their freedom, their families, etc, etc...., by that very same entity (the one that freed the black slaves)--the USA.
Jefferson and Washington lived lives of thought from the first and action for the second. Without slaves they would have had to work. The slaves certainly impacted us.
That wasn't really the sole source of slaves. The European slave traders showed up and offered money. This led people in Africa to sell their existing slaves or those that they conquered. But it also led to a rash of kidnappings and the sale of "convicts" and other such undesirables. BTW, slavery in Africa was not inheritable nor even necessarily individually a permanent condition as it was here.
