Clayton Cramer, who knows a lot about antebellum history (he is the author of Black Demographic Data, 1790-1860: A Sourcebook (Greenwood Press, 1997)), has a detailed response to various statements Roberts has made about slavery. Readers of this blog know that I have many differences with Clayton Cramer; but I have always found him to be quite reliable and temperate in his historical claims about gun control (the field in which he has done the most writing), and I am quite disposed to trust him on the slavery points. A few key items that undermine Roberts’ claims, though read the entire Cramer post for more:
1. In colonial and antebellum America, slaves could buy their freedom, but only with the acquiescence of their masters. All property held by a slave was legally owned by the master. At any time, a master could confiscate any money that a slave had saved up, and the slave had no legal recourse. No agreement that a master made with a slave was legally binding . . . .
2. Especially after 1822, most slave states prohibited masters from freeing their slaves without approval of the state legislature. . . .
3. After 1740, many colonies prohibited teaching slaves to write; the slave states continued these laws, adding prohibitions on teaching slaves to read after Turner’s Rebellion in 1831. These laws were clearly not always followed, but they are another reminder that the slave states did not believe in private property rights–they did not allow masters to educate their property.
5. . . . Southerners certainly did enslave blacks–those children born to slave women . . . .
Oh yes, let me mention, only one slave state made it a crime for a master to rape his slaves, and that was Mississippi. If the slave was under 12. And even that law didn’t get passed until 1859. . . .
Given all this, is it really the case that, as Paul Craig Roberts writes, “It would require an empirical study to determine whether more people have suffered at the hands of the IRS or at the hands of 19th century slave owners”?
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