On Wed, Sep 06, 2006 at 11:58:38AM -0700, kelsey hudson wrote: > John Oliver wrote: > >The Industrial Revolution. Slaves were expensive and problematic... you > >have to pay for all of their upkeep, keep them from running away, etc. > >Machines came about twenty years later that quickly killed manual cotton > >picking. > > Except for the fact that most slaves were actually cultivating rice, > tobacco, sugar cane (especially), and legumes.
And most of those are also picked by machine. I can see no circumstance under which slavery would have survived the 19th century. Slaves were ridiculously expensive... hundreds or thousands of dollars each in an era when $1 would feed and house you for a week. It only survived for as long as it did due to ingrained habits and the much slower adoption of new industrial technology in the South. But once plant-picking machines were widely available, that would be that. > >Read "No Treason" by Lysander Spooner. Interesting stuff. > > I'll have to pick that one up. http://www.lysanderspooner.org/notreason.htm -- *********************************************************************** * John Oliver http://www.john-oliver.net/ * * * *********************************************************************** -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
