My reading is that the slaves did a hell of a lot of work (and in hell) but that a lot of went wasted, because the Civil War destroyed the South. With Northern occupation preventing the normal process of rebuilding that takes place after wars (fixing the railways), with Southern white insistence on the most reactionary politics after Reconstruction, with an economy overly concentrated on cotton agriculture in an era with low cotton prices, the South became a backwater, so that most of the slave's contributions were for nought, allowing the slaveowners to live high on the hog for a few decades before the Civil War. The slaveowners mostly invested in owning more land and more slaves; they didn't do much in the way of capital investment, while they avoided educating the slaves. After the Civil War, they ended up with landholdings, a lot of desperate freedmen who became debt peons, and a stagnant economy. Do people agree with this interpretation? At 12:11 PM 5/25/99 -0400, you wrote: >http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/polipro/pp9905.htm > >The Atlantic Monthly > >May 12, 1999 > >Slaves' Wages > >A work of history puts a price on slave labor -- and could be used to >determine modern-day reparations > Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/jdevine.html Bombing DESTROYS human rights. Ground troops make things worse. US/NATO out of Serbia!
