History of Slavery Part 3

This was slavery. I [the author] want to probe further the pro-slavery ideologies of the Democratic Party in the nineteenth century, but first I wish to give some account of how slavery was actually experienced, not so much by the slaves—I cover that throughout this book—but mainly by the Democratic master class. What were they actually doing throughout this period?

Turns out, not much, because they had slaves to do it for them. Booker T. Washington, born a slave in Franklin County, Virginia, reports that during his childhood servitude, “My old master had many boys and girls, but not one, so far as I know, ever mastered a single trade or special line of productive industry. The girls were not taught to cook, sew, or take care of the house. All of this was left to the slaves.”

The slaves, of course, worked not because they wanted to but because they had to. Slavery was, at its core, a system of labor extortion that took on a racist cast because the slaves were all black. (The slave-owners were not: some American Indians owned slaves, and between 1830 and 1860 there were approximately 3,500 black slave-owners who owned upward of 10,000 black slaves.) Yet the vast majority of planters were, of course, white, and inevitably this master class drew a sharp caste line between their own white community and that of the slaves.

These slave-owners never forgot what slavery was in its essence. “For what purpose does the master hold the servant?” asked Democratic planter John Tompkins in the North Carolina Farmer’s Journal in 1853. “Is it not that by his labor, he, the master, may accumulate wealth?” While historians would later debate whether slavery retarded the economic welfare of the South, it is indisputable that it advanced the economic welfare of the planters. As one of my college professors wryly said, it strains credibility to think that the planter class would have taken on slavery as a nonprofit venture.

With the wealth of slavery, the Democratic master class developed a lifestyle based on leisure. In the words of historian Gordon Wood, “They came closest in America to fitting the classical ideal of the free and independent gentleman.” Self-consciously imitating the English gentry, the upper tier of Democratic planters built country homes, traced family genealogies and held sumptuous banquets. Their day was designed for people with time on their hands. A good part of it was taken up with gambling and sports: croquet, cards, cockfighting and hunting. One magazine suggested that the most enjoyable way to hunt deer was to camp alongside a stream for a week.

At the same time, there was a dark underside to the culture of the Democratic slave-owning class, vividly exposed in Kenneth Greenberg’s Honor and Slavery. As Greenberg shows, the slave-owners developed a code of honor and respect based on values they took to be the inverse of slave values. Slaves were considered persons without honor and unworthy of respect. Not only did they lie and steal; the master class expected them to lie and steal.

Source: Death of a Nation: Plantation Politics and the Making of the Democratic Party (2018) by Dinesh D'Souza.