The school-taught U.S. slavery oppression narrative is riddled with flaws, and in this OP I will address some of them. Firstly, I'd like to say that I don't condone slavery and I actively will speak out against it. However, in regards to the slavery conditions of the United States, slaves were treated quite well, relative to the bogus official narrative peddled in U.S. schools.
Your thesis promises to contrast your research against the bogus official narrative peddled in US Schools but you never provide any examples of the narrative taught in US Schools. When I google about how slavery gets taught in US Schools, the consensus seems to be that slavery gets glossed over (I certainly feel that way looking back on my fairly good US public school education). So- I expect I'd probably argue the point if I knew what narrative you claim is wrong.
Certainly, we Americans all fundamentally agree that all people are born with the equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and that none of these are rights are properly respected by slavery. We should agree that all slaves had it at least as bad as the Northern merchants and Southern slavers who found their fortunes so unacceptable that they risked a war against the srongest nation in the world to secure better liberties for themselves, when we might argue by the same cliometric measurements used by Fogel and Engerman that the thirteen colonies were at the time about as prosperous and happy a colony as any in history. And yet we rebelled because we could not stand to live without more autonomy.
It seems to me that any American worthy of the name understands that no slave is treated well- the fact of slavery itself precludes any sense of well-being in the hearts of Americans. "Give me liberty or give me death" we Americans like to say or put another way- who cares whether any slave was less abused than we might suppose- we'd rather die than be a slave. That means you are imposing a fate worse than death by force upon my right to freedom. Any claim to good treatment of any kind is false- a tale spun to comfort the descendants of slavers with no meaning at all to the descendants of slaves.
I'm not surprised that slaves were healthier than their masters. They had access to the freshest food. Many were restricted to mostly vegetarian diets. They weren't addicted to smoke and drink the way their masters were. They weren't allowed to sleep around so a lot less venereal disease. They weren't allowed to leave the property so they weren't picking up the flu in town. And so forth. I suppose an enforced healthiness is a sort of benefit but what are the psychological costs of a life deprived of pleasure? and its not as if the motives of the slavemasters weren't entirely corrupt. A pimp might beneficially slap a Big Mac out his hookers hand but he doesn't get any points for it because he' thinking fiscally not benevolently.
In the 1870 census, African American slaves had a literacy rate of over 20%
There were no slaves in 1870 so this is false. In the latter days of slavery, when cheap newspapers became commonplace enough to foment rebellion, black literacy was illegal in half the South and no black could do any job that required reading or writing in most Southern States. By 1860, better than 10% of African-Americans were free and literacy was an essential skill for employment in the North. I'd estimate that slave literacy was no better than 10% at the end and most of that came from cities, not plantation slaves. Few if any outdoor slaves were likely ever literate.
The claim that Africans were "whipped" if they didn't learn English, flies in the face of logic: why would you buy a slave to abuse and whip him/her? Similar to how well we treat cows, despite owning them, whipping your cow/slave would cause injury and thus stymie his/her ability to produce milk/work for you. Also, data on the brutality of slave owners to slaves is very hard to find (perhaps because it doesn't exist).
That is, the data doesn't exist.....not that slave owner brutality didn't exist because it certainly did. Let's take George Washington, for example. By most historical accounts, Washington was a merciful master who treated his slaves much better than average. He wrote some on the subject in letters and accounts and criticized an overseer in his employ for beating a slave named Charlotte who was good enough to have not required a whipping in 14 years. So, 14 years was considered a very long time to go without whipping. We can then estimate that a female slave whipped three of four times in her life was a much better than average rate of incident. There are several reports in history of Washington losing his temper with a slave in public. If Washington was unsatisfied with the condition of his boots in the morning, he apparently made a point of slapping his valet with as little emotion as possible. If a good and generous master like Washington felt free to slap a slave for shoddy work, then I think we must generally assume that some physical and sexual abuse was part and parcel of the lives of most slaves.
it's true that slaves were expected to perform, but that doesn't mean they were whipped and worked hard. A study in 2015 by Trevor Logan found that his children were able to pick cotton at 95% the rate of the average, same-age slave *child* https://i.imgur.com/xnAtnnS.png . Add to this the fact that the average free farmer worked 3,130 hours a year, whilst the average black slave worked 2,798 (Fogel and Engerman, 1977). Thus, slaves worked fewer hours than White free farmers and weren't worked particularly hard.
Well Fogel and Engerman would be the first to point out that these efficiencies were forced by whip and chain. Yes, gangs of thirty men under an overseer can plant and sow and harvest with far more efficiency than a single Northern farmer, probably smoking and drinking as he works. Still, working 55 hours a week in a field in exchange for nothing and the promise of nothing for the whole of your life seem like pretty shit hard work to me.
Can you give a couple of examples where US Schools teach it wrong?
