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Comment by barry-cotter | Hacker News Reader

Nobody cared much for slavery in the US until Uncle Tom's Cabin came out back then among other gruesome real life accounts.

UTC was propaganda, not a real life account. Slaves were much too valuable to be treated in the way depicted in the book. Horrible treatment sure, but what's in the book makes no sense on a commercial/economic level.

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"UTC" was literature ;-) based on real people. My sentence was a little misleading though: I meant that the other accounts were "real life".

You sound like a slavery supporter though. You should look up some history books. Slaves were treated like cattle or pets basically. House slaves were pets and plantation slaves were cattle.

Acknowledging that slaves had real economic value is in no way a declaration of support for slavery. The fact that you can make such a jump in logic is profoundly disturbing to me. Those sorts of conclusions take away from honest discussion.

I think he means that that argument sounds similar to the ones actually given by slavery's supporters. I've heard an old economic argument that chattel slavery is better than wage slavery (what we have now), because you treat something you own better than what you merely rent.

(So an anarchonistic example is that a car you own will remain in better shape than one you rent. That's actually not such a terrible argument, though of course we'd reject it nowadays.)

That said, I don't personally know either way, and Wikipedia does mention that _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ is popularly seen as propaganda. (I personally haven't read the book, but it wouldn't surprise me if it were 'propaganda' in the sense that it was biased and promoted a political point of view. Apparently, before the Nazis, propaganda didn't have such bad connotations.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_Tom%27s_Cabin#Literary_si...

Exactly. This is the way slave holders in the south argued. You should read the actual book. It's very moving, one of the greatest American literary works. I read it in my first semester of American Studies.

You just argued that slavery wasn't that bad. In your opinion slaves were treated quite well because they had some monetary value, which is simply not true. You rewrite history in favor of slavery and then you accuse me of being dishonest? Not even fascists nowadays support slavery. This is more than disturbing. I simply can't believe how you can actually support slavery while the US has an African American president.

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