Bill Mahar on Slavery

Bill Mahar went on a bit of a rant about slavery that some "progressive" sites have labeled as horrendous. I watched the clip and I didn't see anything horrendous about it beyond some truths that some folks don't want to acknowledge.

The whole point Maher is making is that slavery was a common horror all over the word and that's true. Modern "progressives" seem to think that slavery was unique to North America. OK, when he started talking about "you have to cancel Jesus" because he never spoke out against it, that was a little weird I'll give you that. 

He then went on to complain about people wanting to cancel historical figures because they owned slaves. Yes, people have demanded that statues of Washington, Jefferson and even Ulysses S. Grant, because he had a slave that he freed, be torn down because they owned slaves in an era where lots of people, including black people in the US, owned slaves. Can you spell "presentism?" 

The authors of the Constitution mistakenly thought that slavery was on the way out and would disappear within the next ten or twenty years. Even the slaveholding states thought that this was the case which is why they didn't get too upset over Article 1, Section 9 which allowed Congress to make the importation of slaves illegal in 20 years. That's exactly what happened on January 1, 1808 based upon an 1807 bill signed into law by Thomas Jefferson. 

In the meantime slavery was either abolished or being phased out in all of the northern states by 1808.

Unfortunately, the gods laugh at the foolishness of mortals and the invention of the Cotton Gin in 1793 suddenly made an institution of questionable economic value into one that appeared to be enormously profitable. Cotton production exploded from 700 hectares in 1790 to 17,000 hectares in 1800 and then to over a million hectares in 1861. 

The ironic thing was that slavery was still a millstone around the southern economy. It made a handful of people rich but generally kept the entire area as something of an economic backwater. Free labor would have been much more productive and improved things for everyone including the plantation owners.