General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: I'm surprised how many DU'ers think aknowledging white male privilege is somehow bigoted [View all]billh58
(6,635 posts)to me. Plantation owners, on occasion, "rewarded" their non-land holder employee slave masters with gifts of slaves -- especially female slaves. The Southern "custom" of having "house slaves" often extended to non-land owners who lived and worked on plantations.
In the antebellum South, almost ALL white people benefited in one way or another from the institution of slavery whether they actually "owned" slaves or not. There was a profitable bounty system which paid for the return of escaped slaves. Slaves were "borrowed" from plantations by townships for civil construction projects and managed by white non-land owners.
I understand your logic, but the truth on the ground was not as cut and dried. Slaves were, in fact, treated the same as as livestock, and in some cases worse. In a very real sense, and under the Pottery Barn rule, every white person in the antebellum South owned slaves.