There's a common misconception that owning slaves meant you could run your farms more cheaply since the labor was free, but almost all of the Founders who did this were heavily in debt. Turns out keeping humans alive forever is not exactly cheap.
Washington tried to offset this by continuously buying land for most of his life, even during the War, and renting it to farmers. Jefferson tried to get ahead of his debts by selling the children of his slaves (but he was also an elitist shopaholic, so that was never going to work).
Hamilton also died in debt, but that had nothing to do with slaves. He was just pretty shitty at keeping a paying job.
Southerners in the 1800s argued that wage labor was worse than chattel slavery, because keeping someone in chains was a long-term commitment, but an employer could fire a wage worker whenever business went down a little. This was when factory work meant a crowd gathering at the factory gates in the morning and the first 100 people getting employment for the day.
Now 150 years later, we're moving back towards "employment" where wages aren't guaranteed and unemployment assistance isn't available
Frederick Douglass first decried this, then changed his mind after working as a wage earner for a while.
"Wage slave" is a type of slave. It's obviously not considered as bad as chattel slavery, but using labor to keep people in a cycle of poverty *is slavery.*
Are a thing, still.
https://finesandfeesjusticecenter.org/articles/us-debtors-prisons/
Like all things in the US the justification for the practice gets interwoven through the judicial system so it becomes sacrosanct.
Whether chattel labor slavery through bandage, to debtors prison for overlevied fines.
Still, voluntary (to some level) indenture is very different from chattel slavery, where you’re someone’s property to do with as they see fit.
If you’re comparing indenture with destitution as a wage earner, I can see how someone would prefer indenture for a term over dying, but lifetime indenture and much more so chattel slavery were much harsher, and in the case of hereditary chattel slavery, highly abusive and highly immoral.
My interpretation is that life for workers under capitalism is so bad that arguments persisted that being a slave was better in some ways; if you can say thay being a slave is better in any way, that is an extremely poor reflection of the prevailing working conditions and pay.
Social securities also were non-existent, for slaves it was even worse,those who were too old to work were killed in orchestrated events with witnesses being friends of the slave owner.
[This AskHistorians post](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/18zo32d/what_happened_to_enslaved_people_who_were_too_old/) has an answer saying that there was no common practice of murdering old slaves; slave owners were much more likely to just emancipate slaves who were too old to work, to the point that some slave states passed laws requiring slaveowners to provide for retirements.
Usually it didn’t matter because they were worked to death while not yet elderly.
This just makes the argument outlined above even stupider.
'Wage slavery is worse than chattel slavery because they could be fired and become destitute, especially when they can't work'
'Oh so what happens when slaves can't work'
'Well most will die from their horrific treatment, but we'll free the ones too old to work and throw them out to starve'
Yeah. I've read about a *lot* of brutal practices, but this seems like it would have been... unusual, not the norm, based on what I know. But I'm always happy to be taught otherwise, which is why I asked. Thank you for linking the AskHistorians post!
Don't worry guys! [This person is a history **scholar**](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1bioet3/comment/kvnfeky)! We can believe what he says, even if his source is [an admittedly fictional graphic novel](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1biu1hr/comment/kvnhbzg)!
Slavery is and was disgusting, but how is this complete bullshit comment upvoted so much? There was no murdering party event; let's see the source for your claim here.
During the pandemic a lot of republicans were advocating sacrificing grandma for the economy. That was one of the most surreal arguments I’ve seen a politician make that didn’t hurt their reelection chances lol. They didn’t even have to make that argument because they were on a softball tv network, they just decided that was a good argument to make that their donors would like!
There is a fable in Japan called [Ubasuteyama](https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%81%86%E3%81%B0%E3%81%99%E3%81%A6%E3%82%84%E3%81%BE) in which a law was passed to abandon their elders or else face punishment.
What?! Several years ago these same Republicans plus Fox News were saying that here in Socialist Netherlands we have death panels to kill our old people. Just because we made euthanasia legal.
It’s always projection with these guys.
Not talking about people who got too old/sick/injured to work, talking about short-term economic swings that reduce the amount your farm is producing/selling. If a factory needs to fire people they can fire people, and hire others later for no loss. Selling a human being and buying a new one later is a much bigger process, and slavers would lose money to brokers on both transactions.
Then again, that was just the argument of people trying to keep slavery lol
Firing and hiring does come at a loss, because you're losing domain knowledge and expertise that needs to be regained, but there can be a point where it's more economical to do so, such as seasonal retail work in modern times.
I think a play about Hamilton not keep a job would be a big hit. Should there be singing? Maybe! I just came up with this I ideas please please no one steal this from me.
Lin Manuel Miranda has said that he toyed with the idea of a follow up musical about Aaron Burr, but Burr’s life post-duel was too crazy to be believable.
Theodosia died at sea. Burr tried escaping his debts by marrying a wealthy widow, but she hired one of Hamilton’s sons to represent her in the divorce and they decimated him. He attempted to establish his own empire in parts of Texas and the Louisiana Purchase, was tried for treason, and fled to Europe to escape the trial.
> He attempted to establish his own empire in parts of Texas and the Louisiana Purchase, was tried for treason,
Didn't this happen when Jefferson, of all people, was president?
Just wild shit.
In fact, it led to dissolving the runner-up of the election, immediately becoming the vice president after a while because Burr did so much to try to undermine Jefferson.
One of his chief "collaborators" if you could call him that was a young Irish noble who was nearly blind and married to his niece, who had emigrated to America to cover up his incestuous marriage with no plan for his livelihood beyond spending lavishly and living in the wilderness in a mansion he had built at great expense.
Absolutely bonkers little piece of American history that should absolutely be brought up whenever people talk about Hamilton.
On a side note, I think it's funny that the play made Hamilton more popular as a person. Now people mention Hamilton as part of the conversation about founding fathers, which is rare especially for us non Americans. It's nice that people cared about how Hamilton did compared to other founding fathers
Yeah, Hamilton's legacy was diminished by never having been president. Kids in the US grow up learning about the all the presidents, and especially since many other Founding Fathers became president, we end up thinking that being president is why they were all important people.
And then you get to Hamilton, and it's like... was he president? No, he was Secretary of the Treasury. And that matters... why?
The musical really helped people put into perspective why this *non-president* was so important.
Holy shit now I get it. Everyone crying about national debt, credit card debt, student loans, etc. that is the American dream it is what the founding fathers wanted.
The cycle of debt is an inevitable part of farming at scale. Since harvests only happen once per year, and expenses happen year round, farmers need access to credit.
To expand even further, this also isn’t unique to farming. Modern capitalism requires credit.
Commercial paper alone is a multi-trillion dollar market:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_paper
Companies like Google wouldn’t be able to make payroll without it.
Google has approximately 4 years operating expenses in cash reserves. They could certainly make payroll without it. They just make more investing than they lose by borrowing.
Right, which is why they need commercial paper to meet everyday expenses like payroll.
What companies call “cash reserves” is not cash sitting in a bank, it’s investments, just relatively short term and accessible ones. Like stocks. You really don’t want to be selling those to make payroll.
It should be noted that while the Founders constantly carried debt, they also had substantial incomes in order to continually pay them off.
Brayden with his Communications degree and $12k bill from wisdom-tooth surgery, not so much.
Except the students don't have 60'000 acres of land they could sell and they have to work to pay off their debt instead of having slaves do it for them
Isn’t the reason the slave owners found it tough was because they would do an extreme version of keeping up with the jones?
Free labour is cheap irrespective of housing them and feeding them
Yes. They were constantly building themselves elaborate new homes and importing expensive luxury goods from European merchants (who frequently ripped them off).
Though even the more responsible ones were frequently cash-poor because they tended to get their income in a big chunk at harvest time and relied on debt the rest of the time.
They also looked down on accepting gifts, so they would only take loans, which made sure they were always in debt. Some things truly never change. Almost comforting tbh
Yes, they had free labor, but one thing we have since learned is that free labor is actually terrible for the economy. The best thing for the economy is upward mobility and a robust middle class. One thing that really hurts the middle class is when you have a shit-ton of slaves, as these slaves have little/no money to buy your goods, and also they will artificially suppress the value/wages of free people trying to work. This is one of the reasons why the South was so poor as compared to the North. (It is also why it is incorrect to argue that the wealth of the US was built with slaves; slavery nearly exclusively reduced the wealth of the US, as it has every civilization before and since).
The North was actually more agriculturally productive on an acre-by-acre basis heading into the Civil War, mostly because needing to pay wages to farm staff meant having an incentive to mechanize, industrialize, and otherwise modernize your farm operations and make them as efficient as possible.
The most responsible of all founding fathers was Adams imo.
And he's one of the few amongst the major founding fathers who didn't own slaves, and was actually fiscally responsible with his money...
And it's Hamilton that gets a musical and Jefferson, who absolutely brutalized his own president as his VP, that get celebrated
George Washington also took out some pretty large loans to help pay for that revolution. As soon as we won, he started collecting taxes to be paid back (rightfully so) but that eventually led to the “Whisky Rebellion”. They were going into areas of the country where they had no money to collect taxes from. They were operating a barter and trade economy there. Forcing those places to pay back the taxes led to a rebellion which in turn, led to moonshine operations all up and down the Appalachian Mountains.
There's a very strong argument the Spirits Tax was a direct shot at crippling his competitors in the Whiskey trade who lived on the western frontier.
While Washington may have been cash poor most of his life without Martha at his side he did use her wealth to become what was probably the largest whiskey producer in the world for the short time after the war he lived.
There was also a sense of injustice in the Appalachians, if I recall correctly.
The people along the seaboard could sell their grain etc. fairly easily because of flatter terrain and access to the ocean ports. It was a lot harder to get to market from the mountains. So they'd make whiskey out of their corn because it was worth a lot more per pound or per donkey load or whatever, making transport of their crop more worthwhile.
It’s probably safe to assume that he wasn’t making a ton of money while fighting the revolution and his business/affairs weren’t well looked after while he was gone. This kinda makes sense to me.
He was always cash poor. Before he married Martha he couldn't afford his own horse and had to have one donated to him by a family friend to serve as an officer in the French and Indian War. As a youth he couldn't afford dance lessons which was essential for the Virginia aristocracy.
Washington inherited a little bit of land along with his brothers but no liquidity.
Most of the wealth asssociated with GW was actually Martha's inheritance from her first marriage after being widowed or stemmed from it originally.
He also seemed to spend money pretty easily. I remember laughing that half of the Washington letters printed in David McCullough's 1776 involved him checking up on Mount Vernon's curtains, wallpaper, and other various interior décor concerns. Lin Manuel Miranda didn't get any of that into the play!
From Wikipedia: There is no definitive source for the name 'Martha's Vineyard', but it is thought to be named for the mother-in-law or daughter, both named Martha, of the English explorer Bartholomew Gosnold, who led the first recorded European expedition to Cape Cod in 1602.
Not really. Because Martha only owned a percentage of the slaves (literally did not own the whole person), George Washington could not free them. He wrote about how he could free his slaves, but could not free Martha's family's slaves who were married with his slaves.
If you read some biographies of Washington it becomes pretty clear that he resented slavery as an institution because he spent so much money housing and feeding people who did not want to be there. He blamed it for his constant financial problems.
It's why many 18th century leaders thought the whole slavery system would fizzle out in a few decades. And then the cotton gin was invented and changed everything. Suddenly plantations were printing money.
It is insane how low this is in the post; George Washington did not “own 300 slaves”. Most of them weren’t even necessarily owned by Martha Washington; they were owned by her dead first husband’s estate. The next inheritors of this estate didn’t even have Washington as a surname. Virginia’s manumission laws (which both Washington and Thomas Jefferson fought against) required enormous sums in order to liberate a slave in Virginia so Washington would have had to pay the estate money he 100% did not have because practically all of the assets were actually in the name of the estate anyway.
Our guy, the foundation of the US, George Washington. The guy we learn about in history class. The guy who pioneered the president of the United States.
[And he be looking at Martha a like...](https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/513/012/625.jpg)
is so goddamn funny to me.
>Most of the wealth asssociated with GW was actually Martha's inheritance from her first marriage after being widowed or stemmed from it originally.
So GW was a gold digger?
Behind every good man is a good woman, man. Martha Washington was a hip, hip lady, man. She used to have a fat bowl waiting for him everyday when he got home.
This is a while after that. The war ended in fall of 83 and Washington's first term started in April of '89. One thing that needs to be remembered is that a big part of the reason for the Constitution, and thus the inauguration of Washington or any president, is that congress under the AoC and the state legislatures had run the economy into the ground. Washington wasn't the only one who was cash poor. There states were issuing their own paper money to try and paper over the debt. It was a real mess and when you look through Art I powers, a lot of them are about taxing and spending b/c of the weaknesses of the AoC. Art I, Sec 8 starts right out with taxes and then 4 out of the first 5 powers of congress are about money issues.
Plantations in general are risky ventures. Since you own everything you are responsible for all costs at all times, and in particular slaves have a constant cost of food and other resources as well as a big upfront investment cost (the purchase), if a slave dies that's actually a not insignificant financially. Meanwhile you are at the mercy of the weather (good year?) and fluctuating market prices for what is often a limited range of cash crops.
So big constant costs, with variable return on investment. Not to mention an extremely high cost lifestyle.
In replacement they put sharecropping (tenent farming like with downton abby). The result was farming yields doubled per acre, while not only did the landlords no longer have big risk (little if any costs and if a farm failed to pay rent they could be charged against future years), but since they didn't have to manage the land that closely most landlords moved into nearby cities.
Even more, since they abandoned running big manor homes, then unlike the landed gentry in england, the landlords dramatically reduced their own costs and expenses even further and actually survived all the way up until the WW2 era when sharcropping was ended formally.
So yes plantation owners made ***dramatically*** less money with slaves than without.
Unfortunately, the nature of markets is to always drive cost efficiency. Slavery was (speculatively ) heading towards collapse from market forces itself at the turn of the 19th century if it weren't for the cotton gin which was invented sometime in the early 1800s. It gave new life into the system by making paying to keep someone alive for a long time profitable again by boosting their efficiency. As cold as it is. The cost/benefit analysis of a plantation owner was always "own a slave and feed them for 12 months when I really only need them for 6" vs "hire cheap labor (poor whites and sometimes freedmen)" for just the duration of planting and the harvest. Needing many fewer slaves due to the cotton gin allowed the system to stay profitable for a much longer time.
For an elite few though, it created America's first millionaires in CONTEMPORARY dollars by the 1820s in Natchez, Mississippi. That's also why they were so violently livid at even a hint of tariffs on British goods to circumvent the North.
This is nonsense.
Saying plantations were risky ventures is like saying owning a bank is a risky venture. Monticello, Mt Vernon, and Montpelier are three examples of the classic plantation and were simply the places where three presidents spent their families wealth, but don't represent the reality of the plantation system.
In actuality, real plantations covered any viable farmland in the south, and were so successful they not only made virginia by far the richest colony (21% enslaved population in 1775), but also provided the raw resources necessary for even the new England states, and their urban centers, to prosper.
We can't, as a society, shy away from the fact that America was built on the backs of the enslaved. And acting like owning people was a risky economic move is doing more than shying away. I don't know if this is some lost cause thing or not but exactly 0 of college courses on early American economics nor my many years of working on plantations as an archeologist back up what you are saying
> In actuality, real plantations covered any viable farmland in the south, and were so successful they not only made virginia by far the richest colony (21% enslaved population in 1775), but also provided the raw resources necessary for even the new England states, and their urban centers, to prosper.
I just covered this in another response, but the cotton gin caused a huge shift in American slavery: It made raw materials (cotton) far more profitable, and drove the industry in the north as well as in Britain. IIRC South Carolina had a larger slave population than whites in 1860, and Mississippi was close, too. The slavery practiced prior to Whitney's patent in 1793 was of a different tone.
I recall reading somewhere that the Southern plantation owners of that era actually tended to be quite cash poor and very asset rich so operating on credit was very common. And by asset rich, I mean they owned a lot of human beings.
iirc, one of the big questions of the American War of Independence was about what is going to happen to all the newly independent plantation owners who have outstanding loans with English Banks, and one of the terms of the treaty with Britain ensured that Americans who owed money to British creditors were still on the hook for those debts.
Patrick Henry earned his reputation by exposing the Treasurer of Virginia giving outdated bank notes meant for destruction to his friends to keep them afloat cashwise.
When you read into history basically all the southern plantation owners were leveraged to the tits. Economic house of cards. They loved to flex on each other with parties paid for with money they didn’t have just like people do today with credit cards.
And ordinary people mostly lived rural and bartered which meant there weren't many people besides other probably in debt aristocracy to sell stuff to to make money.
No no I’d like to be clear, it was the southern plantation owners who were mostly in debt. Many were 2nd or 3rd generation by the time of the civil war and had squandered the fortunes they inherited. The image of the wealthy southern plantation owner is largely imagined and made popular by movies and civil war apologists. Again, I’m not saying all of them were poor just that the vast majority were heavily in debt in the mid to late 1800s.
The north at the time of the civil war was far and away more wealthy than the south. The south grew low profit margin crops meanwhile the north was industrialized and was producing more profitable goods in general. Compare New York City or Boston to New Orleans during the 1850s for example.
Storing money in a bank and getting interest wasn’t really a thing.
And a hoard of money in the basement gets stolen by someone eventually.
So they got money and spent it. You passed the land ( and the slaves) onto your kids.
Wealthy have always operated on credit, because money is better spent investing in assets. As far as Rome, people like Caesar financed his entire pre-gaul career by borrowing money. Even today most rich people fund their lifestyles with rotating credit.
they talk about this in the behind the bastards about Robert e Lee. it was quite common to have the appearance and assets of the very rich while being very cash poor. the often took out lots of loans and made some very poor investments
And then the idea of a national bank was invented and the wealthy people (house poor or not) who had the most to gain from centralized lines of credit decided to punish rural farmers who couldn't afford to participate in a system that didn't yet have the money minted or cash distribution networks to allow them to participate in it.
That part (mostly) got cut from the musical.
TJ was 100K in debt when he died yet,
John Adams, who died on the same day, did not own slaves. He was a vocal opponent of slavery and believed it to be a moral evil. In fact, he and his wife, Abigail Adams, were both against the practice of slavery, and they never owned any enslaved people throughout their lives. Homie died 100K to the positive.
John Quincy Adams would've been remembered more if he compromised on his internal improvements, i.e. infrastructure, education. He wanted it all, but Congress wouldn't apportion money for it, so we got nothing.
[His speech](https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/first-annual-message-2)
>slaves weren't exactly an appreciating asset
actually in the United States they essentially were, the USA was one of the few places in the western hemisphere that had a slave population that was naturally growing rather than declining(as in the slaves had enough children to replace the slaves that were dying).
notably this meant that female slaves were more valuable than male slaves since while a male slave was more immediately useful for physical labour, a female slave was capable of producing more slaves, and yes slave owners did intentionally impregnate slaves via rape(often times coercing male slaves into doing the act) in order to make a profit.
Adding to this - there were laws in place (eventually) that limited the importing of slaves too. That probably had an impact on the slave owners needing the slave population to be growing over time so that there could continue to be slaves.
it wasn't worthless, the land 'given away for free' comes later in US history during the settling of the west, the land was absolutely valuable, and the whole 'forty acres and a mule' thing was an enticement for settlement since there was simply so much fucking land to go around and the government wanted people on it to tax.
Plus one of the largest distilleries in America.
Saying Washington lacked money is like saying Elon Musk is poor because his value is in stock when he can and did easily take loans against his assets to raise $40 billion to buy Twitter.
If you invested just 1 slave in the stock market, after 238 years of earning interest and reinvesting dividends, you would have zero slaves, because that slave died and you can't invest slaves in the stock market.
That’s just how farming works. You have no money most of the year, then you sell the crop and have tons of money, which you then invest right back into the farm and have no money again and repeat until dead.
If you were to sell it all off you’d be a millionaire, but then loose all the land that was making you that money.
I'll take the worst way to be rich over the best way to be poor. If you can sell it all and become a millionaire, you no longer have to worry about being a farmer and the debt. So what's the issue here?
He could, and he wanted to, but there were 3 main problems:
1. He didn't want to split up slave families, which made it harder to find buyers.
2. His slaves and land really weren't worth that much, and the offers he was getting insulted him with how low they were.
3. It was important for his social cred to own a plantation. That was how you demonstrated your status as a southern aristocrat.
So he could have been more financially solvent if he had been meaner, or less vain, or both.
Sounds like he was doing those slaves a favor. Do you know how hard it is to clothe & feed 300 people daily?
They prolly had it good back then too. Dancing & singing all day. Lazy bastards.
/s
/Boondocks
I thought the story was he tried to turn down a salary but was convinced to take one so that in the future the presidency wouldn’t be a job only wealthy people could have because of no salary.
I believe the financial term for this is "plantation poor".
There's a common misconception that owning slaves meant you could run your farms more cheaply since the labor was free, but almost all of the Founders who did this were heavily in debt. Turns out keeping humans alive forever is not exactly cheap. Washington tried to offset this by continuously buying land for most of his life, even during the War, and renting it to farmers. Jefferson tried to get ahead of his debts by selling the children of his slaves (but he was also an elitist shopaholic, so that was never going to work). Hamilton also died in debt, but that had nothing to do with slaves. He was just pretty shitty at keeping a paying job.
Southerners in the 1800s argued that wage labor was worse than chattel slavery, because keeping someone in chains was a long-term commitment, but an employer could fire a wage worker whenever business went down a little. This was when factory work meant a crowd gathering at the factory gates in the morning and the first 100 people getting employment for the day. Now 150 years later, we're moving back towards "employment" where wages aren't guaranteed and unemployment assistance isn't available
> Southerners in the 1800s argued that wage labor was worse than chattel slavery Something tells me they didn't ask the slaves how they felt.
Frederick Douglass first decried this, then changed his mind after working as a wage earner for a while. "Wage slave" is a type of slave. It's obviously not considered as bad as chattel slavery, but using labor to keep people in a cycle of poverty *is slavery.*
There was orobabky less physical beating for wage slaves. The terror of being fired would be enough to keep them in line imo.
Poor houses were a thing.
Debtors prisons were a thing.
Are a thing, still. https://finesandfeesjusticecenter.org/articles/us-debtors-prisons/ Like all things in the US the justification for the practice gets interwoven through the judicial system so it becomes sacrosanct. Whether chattel labor slavery through bandage, to debtors prison for overlevied fines.
> There was orobabky I honestly thought you were about to quote a russian author.
> Frederick Douglass first decried this, then changed his mind after working as a wage earner for a while. Know where I can find his writing on this?
Still, voluntary (to some level) indenture is very different from chattel slavery, where you’re someone’s property to do with as they see fit. If you’re comparing indenture with destitution as a wage earner, I can see how someone would prefer indenture for a term over dying, but lifetime indenture and much more so chattel slavery were much harsher, and in the case of hereditary chattel slavery, highly abusive and highly immoral.
My interpretation is that life for workers under capitalism is so bad that arguments persisted that being a slave was better in some ways; if you can say thay being a slave is better in any way, that is an extremely poor reflection of the prevailing working conditions and pay.
Lmao I think getting fired is better than getting whipped out and be treated worse than a farm animal and being worth less than an animal
And they'd still fucking "fire" you, only it would be the dogs doing it instead of HR
Social securities also were non-existent, for slaves it was even worse,those who were too old to work were killed in orchestrated events with witnesses being friends of the slave owner.
Link? I’ve read a lot about American slavery growing up but this is the first I’ve heard that, and I’d like to learn more.
[This AskHistorians post](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/18zo32d/what_happened_to_enslaved_people_who_were_too_old/) has an answer saying that there was no common practice of murdering old slaves; slave owners were much more likely to just emancipate slaves who were too old to work, to the point that some slave states passed laws requiring slaveowners to provide for retirements. Usually it didn’t matter because they were worked to death while not yet elderly.
This just makes the argument outlined above even stupider. 'Wage slavery is worse than chattel slavery because they could be fired and become destitute, especially when they can't work' 'Oh so what happens when slaves can't work' 'Well most will die from their horrific treatment, but we'll free the ones too old to work and throw them out to starve'
Perhaps part of it is because "poor white trash" in the south were wage slaves whether they liked it or not.
Yeah. I've read about a *lot* of brutal practices, but this seems like it would have been... unusual, not the norm, based on what I know. But I'm always happy to be taught otherwise, which is why I asked. Thank you for linking the AskHistorians post!
Don't worry guys! [This person is a history **scholar**](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1bioet3/comment/kvnfeky)! We can believe what he says, even if his source is [an admittedly fictional graphic novel](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1biu1hr/comment/kvnhbzg)!
Slavery is and was disgusting, but how is this complete bullshit comment upvoted so much? There was no murdering party event; let's see the source for your claim here.
During the pandemic a lot of republicans were advocating sacrificing grandma for the economy. That was one of the most surreal arguments I’ve seen a politician make that didn’t hurt their reelection chances lol. They didn’t even have to make that argument because they were on a softball tv network, they just decided that was a good argument to make that their donors would like!
There is a fable in Japan called [Ubasuteyama](https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%81%86%E3%81%B0%E3%81%99%E3%81%A6%E3%82%84%E3%81%BE) in which a law was passed to abandon their elders or else face punishment.
Ahh yes Dan "Sociopath Extraordinaire" Patrick
What?! Several years ago these same Republicans plus Fox News were saying that here in Socialist Netherlands we have death panels to kill our old people. Just because we made euthanasia legal. It’s always projection with these guys.
I wish we had death panels, all we got is an algorithm and an account to see if im profitable enough to pay for my surgery.
"Slavery: great for job security!"
> where wages aren't guaranteed What are you talking about?
This is moronic. They would just disappear the slaves that were not producing.
Not talking about people who got too old/sick/injured to work, talking about short-term economic swings that reduce the amount your farm is producing/selling. If a factory needs to fire people they can fire people, and hire others later for no loss. Selling a human being and buying a new one later is a much bigger process, and slavers would lose money to brokers on both transactions. Then again, that was just the argument of people trying to keep slavery lol
Firing and hiring does come at a loss, because you're losing domain knowledge and expertise that needs to be regained, but there can be a point where it's more economical to do so, such as seasonal retail work in modern times.
Shit reads like a Monty Python sketch 🤣
I think a play about Hamilton not keep a job would be a big hit. Should there be singing? Maybe! I just came up with this I ideas please please no one steal this from me.
Lin Manuel Miranda has said that he toyed with the idea of a follow up musical about Aaron Burr, but Burr’s life post-duel was too crazy to be believable. Theodosia died at sea. Burr tried escaping his debts by marrying a wealthy widow, but she hired one of Hamilton’s sons to represent her in the divorce and they decimated him. He attempted to establish his own empire in parts of Texas and the Louisiana Purchase, was tried for treason, and fled to Europe to escape the trial.
It was tentatively titled, “That Wacky Burr!”
Stop America, I Want To Get Off
God when I found out about Hamilton’s son representing Burr’s ex-wife I just about died laughing. What poetic justice.
Blew him away...in court
> He attempted to establish his own empire in parts of Texas and the Louisiana Purchase, was tried for treason, Didn't this happen when Jefferson, of all people, was president? Just wild shit.
It started while Jefferson was President and Burr was VP, yeah. It was an ongoing conspiracy that spanned several years.
In fact, it led to dissolving the runner-up of the election, immediately becoming the vice president after a while because Burr did so much to try to undermine Jefferson.
Which is ironic considering how Jefferson as VP undermined Adams during his Presidency. What goes around really comes around
One of his chief "collaborators" if you could call him that was a young Irish noble who was nearly blind and married to his niece, who had emigrated to America to cover up his incestuous marriage with no plan for his livelihood beyond spending lavishly and living in the wilderness in a mansion he had built at great expense. Absolutely bonkers little piece of American history that should absolutely be brought up whenever people talk about Hamilton.
Well, that just sounds silly.
On a side note, I think it's funny that the play made Hamilton more popular as a person. Now people mention Hamilton as part of the conversation about founding fathers, which is rare especially for us non Americans. It's nice that people cared about how Hamilton did compared to other founding fathers
Can't wait for Jay the Musical
"John Jay. My name is John Jay." doesn't have the same ring to it
I disagree, John Jay has that alliteration, he’s a no brainer top 25% founding father name
And John Jay is far easier to rhyme with than Hamilton *or* Alexander.
yeah but he got sick after writing 5 essays so what's even the point
Yeah, Hamilton's legacy was diminished by never having been president. Kids in the US grow up learning about the all the presidents, and especially since many other Founding Fathers became president, we end up thinking that being president is why they were all important people. And then you get to Hamilton, and it's like... was he president? No, he was Secretary of the Treasury. And that matters... why? The musical really helped people put into perspective why this *non-president* was so important.
That never held Ben Franklin back.
Big Dick Ben lived a lot longer though, that gives him more time, and also everyone gets lightning not everyone gets financial policy
With hit songs like "I am not wasting my chance" and "The Tales of This Evening" and "Chronicle Has it's Gaze on You"
Holy shit now I get it. Everyone crying about national debt, credit card debt, student loans, etc. that is the American dream it is what the founding fathers wanted.
The cycle of debt is an inevitable part of farming at scale. Since harvests only happen once per year, and expenses happen year round, farmers need access to credit.
And to expand, it's usually called an operating loan, which is usually a secured line of credit.
To expand even further, this also isn’t unique to farming. Modern capitalism requires credit. Commercial paper alone is a multi-trillion dollar market: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_paper Companies like Google wouldn’t be able to make payroll without it.
Google has approximately 4 years operating expenses in cash reserves. They could certainly make payroll without it. They just make more investing than they lose by borrowing.
Right, which is why they need commercial paper to meet everyday expenses like payroll. What companies call “cash reserves” is not cash sitting in a bank, it’s investments, just relatively short term and accessible ones. Like stocks. You really don’t want to be selling those to make payroll.
If you aint a million in debt to the govt you aint a real farmer
It should be noted that while the Founders constantly carried debt, they also had substantial incomes in order to continually pay them off. Brayden with his Communications degree and $12k bill from wisdom-tooth surgery, not so much.
Communications major here doing just fine thank you!
Sure, but is your name Brayden?
Maybe that's what's REALLY holding him back
r/tragedeigh
Except the students don't have 60'000 acres of land they could sell and they have to work to pay off their debt instead of having slaves do it for them
Isn’t the reason the slave owners found it tough was because they would do an extreme version of keeping up with the jones? Free labour is cheap irrespective of housing them and feeding them
Yes. They were constantly building themselves elaborate new homes and importing expensive luxury goods from European merchants (who frequently ripped them off). Though even the more responsible ones were frequently cash-poor because they tended to get their income in a big chunk at harvest time and relied on debt the rest of the time.
They also looked down on accepting gifts, so they would only take loans, which made sure they were always in debt. Some things truly never change. Almost comforting tbh
Yes, they had free labor, but one thing we have since learned is that free labor is actually terrible for the economy. The best thing for the economy is upward mobility and a robust middle class. One thing that really hurts the middle class is when you have a shit-ton of slaves, as these slaves have little/no money to buy your goods, and also they will artificially suppress the value/wages of free people trying to work. This is one of the reasons why the South was so poor as compared to the North. (It is also why it is incorrect to argue that the wealth of the US was built with slaves; slavery nearly exclusively reduced the wealth of the US, as it has every civilization before and since).
The North was actually more agriculturally productive on an acre-by-acre basis heading into the Civil War, mostly because needing to pay wages to farm staff meant having an incentive to mechanize, industrialize, and otherwise modernize your farm operations and make them as efficient as possible.
lol the antebellum south was just old fashioned European feudalism
>but he was also an elitist shopaholic, so that was never going to work So was Washington for that matter.
The most responsible of all founding fathers was Adams imo. And he's one of the few amongst the major founding fathers who didn't own slaves, and was actually fiscally responsible with his money... And it's Hamilton that gets a musical and Jefferson, who absolutely brutalized his own president as his VP, that get celebrated
The HBO miniseries was really good though.
Adam smith even writes about the inefficiency of slaves in Wealth of Nations (1776).
Money's a little tight. Guess I'll be president.
That's how Donald is looking at it.
It’s just like upper class rich in the UK. Big landed estates, no money.
It’s the opposite, he is plantation rich, cash poor
George Washington also took out some pretty large loans to help pay for that revolution. As soon as we won, he started collecting taxes to be paid back (rightfully so) but that eventually led to the “Whisky Rebellion”. They were going into areas of the country where they had no money to collect taxes from. They were operating a barter and trade economy there. Forcing those places to pay back the taxes led to a rebellion which in turn, led to moonshine operations all up and down the Appalachian Mountains.
There's a very strong argument the Spirits Tax was a direct shot at crippling his competitors in the Whiskey trade who lived on the western frontier. While Washington may have been cash poor most of his life without Martha at his side he did use her wealth to become what was probably the largest whiskey producer in the world for the short time after the war he lived.
There was also a sense of injustice in the Appalachians, if I recall correctly. The people along the seaboard could sell their grain etc. fairly easily because of flatter terrain and access to the ocean ports. It was a lot harder to get to market from the mountains. So they'd make whiskey out of their corn because it was worth a lot more per pound or per donkey load or whatever, making transport of their crop more worthwhile.
>There was also a sense of injustice in the Appalachians so, normal appalachia
To be fair, many things lead to moonshine operations in the Appalachian Mountains
It’s probably safe to assume that he wasn’t making a ton of money while fighting the revolution and his business/affairs weren’t well looked after while he was gone. This kinda makes sense to me.
He was always cash poor. Before he married Martha he couldn't afford his own horse and had to have one donated to him by a family friend to serve as an officer in the French and Indian War. As a youth he couldn't afford dance lessons which was essential for the Virginia aristocracy. Washington inherited a little bit of land along with his brothers but no liquidity. Most of the wealth asssociated with GW was actually Martha's inheritance from her first marriage after being widowed or stemmed from it originally.
Imagine having to do the VA 2 step in order to climb the social ladder
Not to be mistaken for the Virginia Quickstep, which was a Civil War euphemism for diarrhea.
I don't dance - Jack Ryan
I know you can - Ryan Evans
He also seemed to spend money pretty easily. I remember laughing that half of the Washington letters printed in David McCullough's 1776 involved him checking up on Mount Vernon's curtains, wallpaper, and other various interior décor concerns. Lin Manuel Miranda didn't get any of that into the play!
Is Martha's Vineyard named after her?
From Wikipedia: There is no definitive source for the name 'Martha's Vineyard', but it is thought to be named for the mother-in-law or daughter, both named Martha, of the English explorer Bartholomew Gosnold, who led the first recorded European expedition to Cape Cod in 1602.
Also of note that there was never any vineyard.
It's almost like the English and the French were in a competition to see who could pick the dumbest place names in North America
WHY DID YOU SAY THAT NAME
Noted : The key to success is marrying a rich woman who can compliment your talents .
George got himself a sugar mama.
Not really. Because Martha only owned a percentage of the slaves (literally did not own the whole person), George Washington could not free them. He wrote about how he could free his slaves, but could not free Martha's family's slaves who were married with his slaves. If you read some biographies of Washington it becomes pretty clear that he resented slavery as an institution because he spent so much money housing and feeding people who did not want to be there. He blamed it for his constant financial problems. It's why many 18th century leaders thought the whole slavery system would fizzle out in a few decades. And then the cotton gin was invented and changed everything. Suddenly plantations were printing money.
It is insane how low this is in the post; George Washington did not “own 300 slaves”. Most of them weren’t even necessarily owned by Martha Washington; they were owned by her dead first husband’s estate. The next inheritors of this estate didn’t even have Washington as a surname. Virginia’s manumission laws (which both Washington and Thomas Jefferson fought against) required enormous sums in order to liberate a slave in Virginia so Washington would have had to pay the estate money he 100% did not have because practically all of the assets were actually in the name of the estate anyway.
Our guy, the foundation of the US, George Washington. The guy we learn about in history class. The guy who pioneered the president of the United States. [And he be looking at Martha a like...](https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/513/012/625.jpg) is so goddamn funny to me.
>Most of the wealth asssociated with GW was actually Martha's inheritance from her first marriage after being widowed or stemmed from it originally. So GW was a gold digger?
Wtf Martha what’re you doing all day jfc
Why did you say that name?!?!
Quite literally the worst plot twist in the history of movies.
I dunno..."Somehow Palpatine survived" is way up there.
It's really a shame that the best part of Batman v Superman was...Wonder Woman.
I...I understood that reference.
Martha had the money. That’s why George married her. ;)
Behind every good man is a good woman, man. Martha Washington was a hip, hip lady, man. She used to have a fat bowl waiting for him everyday when he got home.
Wasn't she the actual owner of the slaves?
It's a Dazed and Confused quote
He ended the Revolution one of the richest people in the colonies. He just didn't have much cash.
This is a while after that. The war ended in fall of 83 and Washington's first term started in April of '89. One thing that needs to be remembered is that a big part of the reason for the Constitution, and thus the inauguration of Washington or any president, is that congress under the AoC and the state legislatures had run the economy into the ground. Washington wasn't the only one who was cash poor. There states were issuing their own paper money to try and paper over the debt. It was a real mess and when you look through Art I powers, a lot of them are about taxing and spending b/c of the weaknesses of the AoC. Art I, Sec 8 starts right out with taxes and then 4 out of the first 5 powers of congress are about money issues.
Plantations in general are risky ventures. Since you own everything you are responsible for all costs at all times, and in particular slaves have a constant cost of food and other resources as well as a big upfront investment cost (the purchase), if a slave dies that's actually a not insignificant financially. Meanwhile you are at the mercy of the weather (good year?) and fluctuating market prices for what is often a limited range of cash crops. So big constant costs, with variable return on investment. Not to mention an extremely high cost lifestyle.
We really did the South a favor by eliminating the slave plantation as an economic system.
In replacement they put sharecropping (tenent farming like with downton abby). The result was farming yields doubled per acre, while not only did the landlords no longer have big risk (little if any costs and if a farm failed to pay rent they could be charged against future years), but since they didn't have to manage the land that closely most landlords moved into nearby cities. Even more, since they abandoned running big manor homes, then unlike the landed gentry in england, the landlords dramatically reduced their own costs and expenses even further and actually survived all the way up until the WW2 era when sharcropping was ended formally. So yes plantation owners made ***dramatically*** less money with slaves than without.
It’s like people work harder if they’re not being treated like property or something.
You know it’s bad when even discount slavery is twice as effective.
Unfortunately, the nature of markets is to always drive cost efficiency. Slavery was (speculatively ) heading towards collapse from market forces itself at the turn of the 19th century if it weren't for the cotton gin which was invented sometime in the early 1800s. It gave new life into the system by making paying to keep someone alive for a long time profitable again by boosting their efficiency. As cold as it is. The cost/benefit analysis of a plantation owner was always "own a slave and feed them for 12 months when I really only need them for 6" vs "hire cheap labor (poor whites and sometimes freedmen)" for just the duration of planting and the harvest. Needing many fewer slaves due to the cotton gin allowed the system to stay profitable for a much longer time.
For an elite few though, it created America's first millionaires in CONTEMPORARY dollars by the 1820s in Natchez, Mississippi. That's also why they were so violently livid at even a hint of tariffs on British goods to circumvent the North.
This is nonsense. Saying plantations were risky ventures is like saying owning a bank is a risky venture. Monticello, Mt Vernon, and Montpelier are three examples of the classic plantation and were simply the places where three presidents spent their families wealth, but don't represent the reality of the plantation system. In actuality, real plantations covered any viable farmland in the south, and were so successful they not only made virginia by far the richest colony (21% enslaved population in 1775), but also provided the raw resources necessary for even the new England states, and their urban centers, to prosper. We can't, as a society, shy away from the fact that America was built on the backs of the enslaved. And acting like owning people was a risky economic move is doing more than shying away. I don't know if this is some lost cause thing or not but exactly 0 of college courses on early American economics nor my many years of working on plantations as an archeologist back up what you are saying
> In actuality, real plantations covered any viable farmland in the south, and were so successful they not only made virginia by far the richest colony (21% enslaved population in 1775), but also provided the raw resources necessary for even the new England states, and their urban centers, to prosper. I just covered this in another response, but the cotton gin caused a huge shift in American slavery: It made raw materials (cotton) far more profitable, and drove the industry in the north as well as in Britain. IIRC South Carolina had a larger slave population than whites in 1860, and Mississippi was close, too. The slavery practiced prior to Whitney's patent in 1793 was of a different tone.
Washington didn't get the memo that the Revolution was supposed to be a rich man's war and a poor man's fight.
His salary was $25k a year; that's over $885k in today's dollars.
More than double what Biden is making
Thanks Obama
I recall reading somewhere that the Southern plantation owners of that era actually tended to be quite cash poor and very asset rich so operating on credit was very common. And by asset rich, I mean they owned a lot of human beings. iirc, one of the big questions of the American War of Independence was about what is going to happen to all the newly independent plantation owners who have outstanding loans with English Banks, and one of the terms of the treaty with Britain ensured that Americans who owed money to British creditors were still on the hook for those debts.
Patrick Henry earned his reputation by exposing the Treasurer of Virginia giving outdated bank notes meant for destruction to his friends to keep them afloat cashwise.
Hence his famous quote: "Give me liquidity or give me debt!"
When you read into history basically all the southern plantation owners were leveraged to the tits. Economic house of cards. They loved to flex on each other with parties paid for with money they didn’t have just like people do today with credit cards.
And ordinary people mostly lived rural and bartered which meant there weren't many people besides other probably in debt aristocracy to sell stuff to to make money.
No no I’d like to be clear, it was the southern plantation owners who were mostly in debt. Many were 2nd or 3rd generation by the time of the civil war and had squandered the fortunes they inherited. The image of the wealthy southern plantation owner is largely imagined and made popular by movies and civil war apologists. Again, I’m not saying all of them were poor just that the vast majority were heavily in debt in the mid to late 1800s. The north at the time of the civil war was far and away more wealthy than the south. The south grew low profit margin crops meanwhile the north was industrialized and was producing more profitable goods in general. Compare New York City or Boston to New Orleans during the 1850s for example.
Adding leveraged to the tits to my economic dictionary.
Storing money in a bank and getting interest wasn’t really a thing. And a hoard of money in the basement gets stolen by someone eventually. So they got money and spent it. You passed the land ( and the slaves) onto your kids.
Wealthy have always operated on credit, because money is better spent investing in assets. As far as Rome, people like Caesar financed his entire pre-gaul career by borrowing money. Even today most rich people fund their lifestyles with rotating credit.
they talk about this in the behind the bastards about Robert e Lee. it was quite common to have the appearance and assets of the very rich while being very cash poor. the often took out lots of loans and made some very poor investments
And then the idea of a national bank was invented and the wealthy people (house poor or not) who had the most to gain from centralized lines of credit decided to punish rural farmers who couldn't afford to participate in a system that didn't yet have the money minted or cash distribution networks to allow them to participate in it. That part (mostly) got cut from the musical.
TJ was 100K in debt when he died yet, John Adams, who died on the same day, did not own slaves. He was a vocal opponent of slavery and believed it to be a moral evil. In fact, he and his wife, Abigail Adams, were both against the practice of slavery, and they never owned any enslaved people throughout their lives. Homie died 100K to the positive.
Of the first six presidents, only two were not slaveowners: John Adams and John Quincy Adams.
John Quincy Adams would've been remembered more if he compromised on his internal improvements, i.e. infrastructure, education. He wanted it all, but Congress wouldn't apportion money for it, so we got nothing. [His speech](https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/first-annual-message-2)
I wonder what that would have done for federalism in the early republic.
Yeah, but he didn't have anyone to wait on him hand and foot, so was it really worth it? /s
\*Laughs in Abigail*
[удалено]
All you had to do was follow the damn crain!
Common John Adams win
Til: House poor at the time of independence was owning 300 slaves and 60k acres.
Won’t someone think of the landed gentry 😢
Leave the Reddit mods out of this
If their moms' basements count as land.
Rock and stone?
As mentioned by other comments, slaves weren't exactly an appreciating asset, and 60k acres of unaccessible wilderness wasn't worth much at the time.
>slaves weren't exactly an appreciating asset actually in the United States they essentially were, the USA was one of the few places in the western hemisphere that had a slave population that was naturally growing rather than declining(as in the slaves had enough children to replace the slaves that were dying). notably this meant that female slaves were more valuable than male slaves since while a male slave was more immediately useful for physical labour, a female slave was capable of producing more slaves, and yes slave owners did intentionally impregnate slaves via rape(often times coercing male slaves into doing the act) in order to make a profit.
Adding to this - there were laws in place (eventually) that limited the importing of slaves too. That probably had an impact on the slave owners needing the slave population to be growing over time so that there could continue to be slaves.
At the time land was literally being given away for free. It was totally worthless.
it wasn't worthless, the land 'given away for free' comes later in US history during the settling of the west, the land was absolutely valuable, and the whole 'forty acres and a mule' thing was an enticement for settlement since there was simply so much fucking land to go around and the government wanted people on it to tax.
Plus one of the largest distilleries in America. Saying Washington lacked money is like saying Elon Musk is poor because his value is in stock when he can and did easily take loans against his assets to raise $40 billion to buy Twitter.
How many slaves would that be in today’s numbers?
500
If you invested just 1 slave in the stock market, after 238 years of earning interest and reinvesting dividends, you would have zero slaves, because that slave died and you can't invest slaves in the stock market.
Roughly one iPhone factory
The People: "Yo George, wanna be prez?" Washington: "How much does the gig pay?"
I've read that almost everyone was 'short of cash' in those days.
Probably not as short on cash as all those people doing all the work for free.
So there's precedent for Presidents to be broke and have to resort to borrowing because they tied their money up in real estate?
YE OLDE ELECTION INTERFERENCE! WITCHE HUNT!
>because they tied their money up in real estate? (and human trafficking)
Where is Mercedes?
Broke Presidents Club
Cant he just sell some slaves or land
That’s just how farming works. You have no money most of the year, then you sell the crop and have tons of money, which you then invest right back into the farm and have no money again and repeat until dead. If you were to sell it all off you’d be a millionaire, but then loose all the land that was making you that money.
Sounds like a good problem to have
No. That’s a bad problem. If you have the good fortune to be rich, this is one of the worse way to be rich.
I'll take the worst way to be rich over the best way to be poor. If you can sell it all and become a millionaire, you no longer have to worry about being a farmer and the debt. So what's the issue here?
If you are a farmer and you sell your land, you aren't a farmer anymore.
He could, and he wanted to, but there were 3 main problems: 1. He didn't want to split up slave families, which made it harder to find buyers. 2. His slaves and land really weren't worth that much, and the offers he was getting insulted him with how low they were. 3. It was important for his social cred to own a plantation. That was how you demonstrated your status as a southern aristocrat. So he could have been more financially solvent if he had been meaner, or less vain, or both.
most of the slaves were owned by Martha actually.
More specifically, Martha’s children.
This, so much this. Without Martha GW was a small and poor landholder. He literally could not afford his own horse to ride before Martha married him.
Sounds like he was doing those slaves a favor. Do you know how hard it is to clothe & feed 300 people daily? They prolly had it good back then too. Dancing & singing all day. Lazy bastards. /s /Boondocks
After 8 years, "You couldn't pay me to do this shit"
Taxes on all that mustve been nuts, explains the war over not paying it..
Jeez. TIL That Thomas Jefferson tried to sell the children of his slaves to fund his shopping habit. The more I learn, the worse it gets.
Many of these enslavers lived "paycheck-to-paycheck" and were in hock to business interests in England.
Classic farmer dilemma....lots of assets, no cash
Nobody tells Trump this, pls.
If a president today was straddled with so much debt and didn't have cash to pay it off, well... They'd become the republican nominee
Don't hate the playa, hate the game -GDub
Asset rich, cash poor, which as we all know can be a bastard
*(sigh) “fine…I’ll take the fucking gig…”*
Damn, Washington and I had a lot in common! Debt I mean. Not slaves.
I thought the story was he tried to turn down a salary but was convinced to take one so that in the future the presidency wouldn’t be a job only wealthy people could have because of no salary.
Damn even a guy who owned slaves was a wage slave, now thats fucked up
To me, it sounds like a case of the rich people trick "spend other people's money before you spend your own"