[From "The Real Cost of Slavery"]

I was a boy in the fourth grade in East Tennessee when our history teacher, a portly, middle-aged spinster from some flyover state in the Midwest, regaled us with tales of that “peculiar institution”: horrific accounts of abuses by cruel slave masters, and on the other hand tales of the brave abolitionists who “risked their lives” to free the slaves out of nothing but the goodness of their own hearts, “heroes” such as Harriet Tubman- a criminal who nearly killed someone for daring to get cold feet in his escape, by the way- and finally the war that erupted so that America’s greatest President Abraham Lincoln could emancipate the Negro race from the cruel South
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Even as a young boy, the tales of slaves being beaten half to death by cruel masters for not picking cotton fast enough didn’t make a lot of sense to me, especially after we’d just read about how expensive slaves were
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Southern slavery ended up being a negative for this country and people- but before you get the torches and pitchforks out, I do not believe that there’s anything morally wrong with it
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What makes slavery stand out among the caste systems of antiquity is that it is temporary by design- it is only a system that is feasible in a pre-industrialized, agrarian society. The institution would have ended no matter what the results of the War were
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That is not to say that the War and the abrupt end to Southern slavery didn’t matter[…]It made the problems that faced post-slavery states such as Brazil and various Caribbean islands thousands of times worse. The main downside of caste systems is that they breed resentment[…]The end of slavery created a ready-made fifth column- a population of malcontents who have every incentive to be malcontented
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The solution here is to leave them alone as we wish to be left alone[…]Self-determination is the most peaceful way to go