Figure 1.--There are not very many photographic images of slaves before the American Civil War. Slave owners were not all that interested in spending money to photograph their slaves. The first large number of slave images comes with the Civil War. This Matthew Brady photograph was od laves on the Aiken's plantation, probably about 1862. Aiken's Landings was on the James River. The Penknsular Campaign was fought here (1862). This woukd have been before the Emacipation Proclamation (1863). We are not sure what the building in the background was. The Aiken's plantation mansion was alarge brick building.

While child laborers were paid very low wages, they did receive wages. They also had some alternatives, although poverty often restricted those option. There were many children many children that had no options at all. This was the case even before recorded history. The vast majority of the people who worked the land, did not own the land. This was not only the case in Europe, but Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Slavery was not, however, the social system that dominated human society. Here ancient Greece and Rome were aberation, even in the ancient world. frican slavery was rge major exception. Captiver fricans were enslaved in both the Islmic world (8th-20th century) and the Christian New World (15th-19th century). Slavery existed, but usually involved only a small portion of the work force. Until the 19th century, the ecomomy was dominated by agriculture. Yet the people who worked the land did not commonly own the land. Most of the land was owned by kings and aristocrats or religious institutions. The land was worked by serfs under some kind of feudal system. The Feudal System dominated Europe for millenium (6th-17th century). While feudalism declined, especilly in Wesrern Europe, the conseqyuences persisted. And similar social institutions were prevalent in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. This only began to change (late-18th century), and America played a major role in this tectonic change.

Slavery

In our modern world there are few human practices that inspire such profound outrage as the practice of one human being enslaving another. This is, however, a very modern sentiment. The institution of slavery probably predates civilization itself. Slvery was an accepted institution and central to the economies of most major world civilization. The onset of Christianity meant and end to widespread slavery in Europe, although feudal serfs were only slightly more elevated than slaves. The European countries which conquered native American civilizations in the 16th century enslaved millions in Brazil and South America to work in mines and the tremendously profitable sugar plantations. The conditions were so brutal and European disesases so virlulent that native American populations were descimated. The Spanish and Portuguese turned Africans. Millions of Africans were transported across the Atlantic and sold into slavery in the Americas. Slavery in earlier epochs had no racial connotations. With the growth of the African slave trade, slavery in the Western mind became associated with race as with the collapse of Native American populations, it was Africans who were enslaved in huge numbers. European Christian who would not have tolerated the enslavement of other Europeans found little objecting to enslaving black Africans.

Peasant Agriculture

The dawn of civilization was created by agriculture. We know very little about the first steps (about the 8th millennia). Anthropologists can only speculate. But we begin to have some idea of what was happening (4th millennium BC). Because at this time humans were designing and constructing monumental architecture and writing systems that anthropologists can study. And by his time, the people who worked the land did not own their land. The land was owned by emperors, kings, pharaohs, generals, priests, aristocrats, and other powerful people who had created a landless peasantry--the primary form of firced labor. Thus for up to 10 millennia, beginning in Sumeria, the great bulk of human society consisted primarily of a landless peasantry. This of course meant that the huge proportion of human society did not in a fair way benefit from their labor. This was the case of almost all ancient and medieval civilizations on all continents: Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and Oceania. The only real exception was primitive people, hunter gathers who had only partially made the transition to agriculture. It was this landless peasantry that produced the harvests that supported the great civilizations. For years it was thought that the pyramids were built by slaves. They were not. They were built by a peasantry, but one that was paid wages. This is misunderstood because for the most part the ancient civilizations we know most about are Greece and Rome which did have substantial slave populations. But most ancient civilizations did not. There society was based on a landless peasantry. We see the same pattern in Britain, China, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Italy, Mexico, Peru, Russia, Turkey and other countries and that landless peasantry continued into the 19th and even 20th century. England tried to implant the same landless peasantry system in the 13 American colonies, but failed. America was the first country in world history to create a system in which the average person who actually worked the land could own it. Thus the American Revolution was the central turning point in world history. And within a little over a decade the American example began to change the world. The French peasantry finally got their land. We rarely hear this today, in part because there are so many left-wing professors in our universities. Instead the focus is all on slavery which never was the real limitation on human society. Now the framers of the Constitution did no end slavery, but they also did not recognize or legitimize it. Slavery only affected about 10 percent of the population. Is it really fair to castigate the founders who after 10 millennia finally for the first time corrected 90 percent of the problem? And usually not mentioned is the fact that the Founders created a system that would first end the slave trade (1808) and then finally end slavery itself (1861-65). Remember that at this time in the vast portion of countries, the peasants who worked the land still did not own it.

Feudalism

After the fall of Rome, the Feudal system developed in Europe. The Feudalism was an economic, social, and economic system based apportionment of land in exchange for the provision of fealty and service. The system was based on the king granting land to his important noblemen who became barons. These land grants became heritary. The king also granted land to the Church. These nobels in exchange pledged loyally to the king and to provide soldiers and supplies in time of war. The great nobels in turn divied their fiefdom among lesser lords or knights who became his vassals. This system ws based on the laborof the lowest rung of the social order. Most Europeans were peasant farmers working on the land of a Feudal nobleman--the lor of the manner. They did not own their land, but allowed to work it in exchange for a hare of the crop and labor when required. As the Feudal system developed, the peasants or serfs became tied to the land, not allowed to leave it without permission of the lord of the manner. The Feudal system began to weaken in Western Europe by the 16th century, but persisted much longer in Eastern Europe. The serfs in Russia werenot legal freed until the 19th century and it was not until the Revolution in the20th century that the still essentially Feudal estates were broken up. >br>

Serfdom

Roman slavery evolved into feudal serfdom. Here Christianity played an important role. Serfsee not slaves, but they were tied to the land and lived under many restrictions and obligations. As Western Europe emerged from the medieval era ans serfdom gradually disappeared, it grew in importance in the east. Serfdom ame to play a major role in Russian life through the 19th century when it was finlly abolished. Serfdom was more humane than American race-based chattle slavery, but serfdom as also a brutal system which tied millions of Russians to the land. Even freed slaves were descriminated against. The influence continued into the 20th century. An assessment of Russian boys' clothing would thus be incomplete withoutan assessment of serfdom. Some Russian boys even in the 19th century look much like European boys. Other Russian boys, especially serf boys and rural village boys dressed very destinctly.

Sharecropping

Sharecropping is an agricultural system which developed in the Southern states during the Civil War. It was a farm tenancy system in which families worked a farm or section of land in return for a share of the crop rather than wages. Sharecropping replaced the plantation system destroyed by the Civil War. The victorious Federal authorities which occupied the South did not seize plantations, but empancipation meant that the owners no longer had a captive laor force. The former planters, even those activly engged in rebellion, for the most part still had their land, but no slaves or money to pay wages. The former slaves on the other hand did not have jobs or land and because they had been denied education, had few options. Sharecropping developed because the former slaves and planters needed each other. The principal crop continued to be cotton. And the planters under the sharecropping system contnued to a large degree to control the lives of the blacks working their land. While the system at first developed to obtain black labor, eventually poor whites also entered the sharecropping system. The system varied, but in many cases all the cropper brouht to the arrangement was his labor. The planter provided the land, but also commonly animals, equipment, seeds and other items. The land owners also commonly advanced credits for the family's living expences until the crop was harvested. After World War II, migrtion to the North, farm mechinization, education, other employment options, and the Civil Rights movement brought the system to an end.

Work/Poor Houses

The 'workhouse' is a name given in England to establishments where the town poor were maintained at public expense, and provided with labor. It was also referred to as the poorhouse. They were facilities to segregate and maintain paupers. If you were poverty-stricken, or an unwanted orphan, or an impoverished widow, if you were too old to work, or you were sick or deranged, you could end up in a workhouse. The workhouse was in fact a ruthless attempt to solve the problem of poverty. The term is sometimes applied in the United States to institutions in which vagrants, drunkards, and other minor offenders are detained on short sentences and at labor, but which are usually and properly known as houses of correction.

Created: May 25, 2002
Last updated: 7:33 PM 10/16/2023