In the June 2 edition of the Prairie Press, our local newspaper, Michael Bennett of Vermilian proposed that it was slavery which made America great. There is indeed a school of thought, “The Williams Thesis,” that claims that the rise of industrial capitalism would not have been possible in Great Britain without the profits derived from slavery and the slave trade. To suggest that slavery itself in practice in America caused the rise of capitalism in the United States, however, is to ignore a number of other factors, although, of course, if you need not pay your workers, your profit will indeed be greater. But to suggest that slavery made this country great is both morally repugnant and wrong.
The greatness of a nation is more than its GDP. It encompasses the beliefs, the heart, the soul of its people. No people who believe that it is right to “own” another human being can rightfully be called great, and it was that very sense of wrongness that set the young nation on course for the bloody and devastating Civil War. And what was the result of the emancipation of the slaves? Did their loss on the plantations of the south plunge this country into mediocrity? No! It raised it into an even greater nation. One with a sure and true moral compass that enabled it to fight against and defeat the tyranny of Hitler’s Germany and Imperial Japan less than a hundred years later.
Mr. Bennett suggests that the work picking cotton and tobacco would not have been done by anyone other than slaves, and yet both crops are still grown in the south and harvested by paid workers, just as paid farm and ranch hands have always worked the land and run the cattle in the north and west. Slave labor was advantageous to the south, but not necessary. And Mr. Bennett’s description of the symbiotic relationship between slave and slave owner falls far short of reality. Were slaves housed, clothed, fed, and given medical treatment by their owners? Yes, but not in conditions any paid worker would have accepted. And they were also commonly beaten, raped, and sold away from their families at the whim of their “benevolent” owners.
The epoch of slavery in the United States is a part of our history and one that should not be forgotten. I do not hold with the destruction of statues of southern generals, because to destroy them is to forget them, and slavery must never be forgotten! Slavery did not make America great. Rather the recognition that to own another human being is sinful and wrong and the willingness of thousands upon thousands of young men to die to right that wrong. . . that is what set America truly on the road to greatness.
As for President Trump, he is indeed making America great again as the recent job numbers show. Unemployment is at 3.8%, the lowest it has ever been since 1969 and hundreds of thousands more jobs are available than the number of unemployed in the country. And for the descendants of those slaves, set free by the blood and determination of right thinking Americans, unemployment is lower than it has ever been!
Slavery didn’t make America great. The hard work of all Americans, of all skin colors and origins, that made us great. And that is what is making us great again!