"The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation"

[maharba]

I've heard it said, and better than I can put it here, that centuries of Slavery including indentured servitude of whites acted as a great drag and brake on technological progress of the South. Why bother to invent or use any time saving or labor saving device when you can get the slaves to do it for free? Less use or need for machines or devices to manufacture items, when the slaves are there to do the same work for free. If a person had invented some machine to pick apples or split wood or package cigars, you wouldn't find many buyers because again they had all the slaves standing ready to do it all for free. At every level of human progress, slavery was insanity.