Virginia Protestors Get Lesson on U.S. Slavery

Attorney Antonio Moore answers the comments and questions to his last video regarding American Slavery from Virginia Protestors and their supporters. Prior Video https://youtu.be/-YZgE_TnrBA

1) Slavery Wasn’t the Engine that Drove the American Economy
Gilder Lehrman American Institute One crop, slave-grown cotton provided over half of all U.S. export earnings. By 1840, the South grew 60 percent of the world’s cotton and provided some 70 percent of the cotton consumed by the British textile industry… slavery paid for a substantial share of the capital, iron, and manufactured good that laid the basis for American economic growth..
“In 1860, slaves as an asset were worth more than all of America’s manufacturing, all of the railroads, all of the productive capacity of the United States put together,” “Slaves were the single largest, by far, financial asset of property in the entire American economy.” Yale historian David W. Blight has noted.

2) White Irish Were Slaves
Myth #1: There were Irish slaves in the American colonies.
As historian and public librarian Liam Hogan has written: “There is unanimous agreement, based on overwhelming evidence, that the Irish were never subjected to perpetual, hereditary slavery in the colonies, based on notions of ‘race’.” The enduring myth of Irish slavery, which most often surfaces today in service of Irish nationalist and white supremacist causes, has roots in the 17th and 18th centuries, when Irish laborers were derogatorily called “white slaves.” The phrase would later be employed as propaganda by the slave-owning South about the industrialized North, along with (false) claims that life was far harder for immigrant factory workers than for slaves.

3) Confederacy Seceded over states Rights
Myth #2: The South seceded from the Union over the issue of states’ rights, not slavery.
This myth, that the Civil War wasn’t fundamentally a conflict over slavery, would have been a surprise to the original founders of the Confederacy. In the official declaration of the causes of their secession in December 1860, South Carolina’s delegates cited “an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery.” According to them, the Northern interference with the return of fugitive slaves was violating their constitutional obligations; they also complained that some states in New England tolerated abolitionist societies and allowed black men to vote.

4) Myth #3: Only a small percentage of Southerners owned slaves.
Closely related to Myth #2, the idea that the vast majority of Confederate soldiers were men of modest means rather than large plantation owners is usually used to reinforce the contention that the South wouldn’t have gone to war to protect slavery. The 1860 census shows that in the states that would soon secede from the Union, an average of more than 32 percent of white families owned slaves. Some states had far more slave owners (46 percent in South Carolina, 49 percent in Mississippi) while some had far less (20 percent in Arkansas).
But as Jamelle Bouie and Rebecca Onion point out in Slate, the percentages don’t fully express the extent to which the antebellum South was a slave society, built on a foundation of slavery. Many of those white families who couldn’t afford slaves aspired to, as a symbol of wealth and prosperity. In addition, the essential ideology of white supremacy that served as a rationale for slavery, made it extremely difficult—and terrifying—for white Southerners to imagine life alongside a black majority population that was not in bondage. In this way, many non-slave-owning Confederates went to war to protect not only slavery, but to preserve the foundation of the only way of life they Charlottesville Virgina