As I reflect on the recent news of Mississippi Governor Reeves proclaiming Confederate Heritage Month, I can’t help but feel a sense of disbelief and disappointment. How can a state in the 21st century still be celebrating a heritage rooted in racism, slavery, and treason? It’s baffling to me that in a country as diverse and progressive as the United States, there are still people clinging to a past that represents the worst aspects of humanity.
The Confederacy was a failed traitorous uprising that lasted a mere four years, yet Governor Reeves and others are intent on glorifying this dark chapter in American history.… Continue reading
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-economic-history/article/abs/long-shadow-of-slavery-the-persistence-of-slave-owners-in-southern-lawmaking/98B62393860C0F1B5A6E3A9F870F8C61
Cotton was still an important crop, even if they couldn’t produce at the same ridiculously high margins as when they had slaves working the fields. If you still had the cotton fields then you still had a means of accumulating wealth (and thus power). They also had the wealth accumulated during legal slavery, wealth creates more wealth. They had wealth to buy slaves and farmlands before ie they were wealthy to begin with. The georgia colony trustees didnt give out 5000 acre plots of land on the savannah river to colonists from english debtors prisons.
Here, the settlers would have to conform to Oglethorpe’s plan, in which there was no elected assembly.… Continue reading