Slavery Myths: Life Expectancy

American South

Here’s the average life expectancy at birth for American slaves in 1850 compared to the life expectancy of various “free” populations around the world:

U.S. White – 40
England and Wales, 1838-1856 – 40
Holland, 1850-1860 – 36
France, 1854-58 – 36
U.S. Slave – 36
Italy, 1885 – 35
Austria, 1875 – 31
Chile, 1920 – 31
Manchester, England, 1831 – 24
New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, 1830 – 24

Note: This information also comes from Time on the Cross: The Economics of Negro Slavery.

What do you suppose the average life expectancy for a negro was in malaria-infested, yellow fever-infested, river blindness-infested West Africa and Central Africa in 1850? What do you suppose the healthcare system was like in, say, the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1850?

About Hunter Wallace 12379 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

50 Comments

  1. Just as I thought!

    Additionally this indicates low infant mortality.

    That today’s black has a significantly lower expectancy than whites is a result of “Freedom” and its consequences.

  2. The slaves on our plantations in the Deep South generally had better healthcare – universal coverage, Mastercare – than John Bonaccorsi’s “free” ancestors in Italy and Philadelphia.

  3. In 1850s the black could expect 36 years.
    In 1900s the black Expected 32 years.
    I wonder what happened?

    Nowadays they live 5-6 years less than whites on average.

  4. Hunter & John, would you rather live a long life as a slave, as someone’s literal physical property, or live a shorter life as a free man?

  5. Listen to this:

    “Comments of observers suggest that the most typical slave houses of the late antebellum period were cabins about eighteen by twenty feet …

    As late as 1893, a survey of the housing of workers in New York City revealed that the median number of square feet of sleeping space per person was just thirty-five. In other words, the “typical” slave cabin of the late antebellum era probably contained more sleeping space per person than was available to most of New York City’s workers half a century later.”

  6. And this:

    “The slave diet was not only adequate, it actually exceeded modern (1964) recommended levels of the chief nutrients. On average, slaves exceeded the daily recommended levels of proteins by 110 percent, calcium by 20 percent, and iron by 230 percent. Surprisingly, despite the absence of citrus fruits, slaves consumed two and one half times the recommended level of vitamin C. Indeed, because of the large consumption of sweet potatoes, their intake of vitamin A was at the therapeutic level and vitamin C was almost at that level.”

  7. That’s not the question, Chris. Simply comparing and contrasting living standards is very important.

    However 1/3 Black men spend their twenties in tiny tiny jail cells. They ain’t free. Natures slaves.

  8. You need to find a biography for an average Julius and an average Shitavious. Compare and contrast Negro Slavius with Negro Contemporaneous.

  9. Life expectancy isnt about living a long life per se. It is a record of childhood infant mortality and general nutrition. The nignogs actually had it very very good in comparison to Spaniards, Italians, Austrians, Russians, Irish.

    Only the Brits and Americans were better off. Surviving slavery? Hook me up to the bloody matrix.

  10. Just don’t think it’s effective political rhetoric to be defending, glorifying Black slavery as a campaign issue in this year 2012.

    White American GOP political candidates seem to insist in putting their foots in their/our mouths, alienating the (White) electorate by implying ridiculous nonsense such desiring to bring back Black slavery because it was better for the economy, better for Blacks as Blacks are capable of living healthy, productive lives as free American men.

    Yeah, there may be some truth in these statements, it just doesn’t sit well with voters in this year 2012.

  11. Made some typos there – should have read:

    “as Blacks are (supposedly) not capable of living healthy, productive lives as free American men.

  12. I hope everyone reading OD can accept the truth that bring millions of Black Negro slaves to the United States was a bad thing as bad as allowing, promoting the invasion of our country by tens of millions of low IQ, unskilled Mestizo illegal/legal aliens under the lie that we need these “hard working” Hispanics to do the work Americans won’t do.

    That White agribusiness owner – the Onion King of Georgia tried ( a few years back ) to make the same argument that he/America needs these illegal alien Hispanic workers because (White) American workers won’t work 6 days a week for long hours, sub minimum wage in the hot sun, (White) American workers want things like days off, air conditioning etc.

    Whenever White Indo Europeans allowed/promoted the use of mass Non White slave labor, low wage labor it resulted in the genocide of our people.

    Whites can do our own work, we can and have done like the Japanese – used machinery, just accepted for expensive fruits and vegetables.

    What’s the alternative? Los Angeles? Chicago where the White public school populations are under 10%?

    Lenin was (sadly) right when he said:

    “the (White American) capitalists will sell us (Communist Soviets) everything, including the rope which we/they will hang us with”

  13. That’s not the question, Chris.

    Yes, it is, John.

    Hook me up to the bloody matrix.

    Don’t worry, John. The Democrats are exerting themselves daily to do just that.

  14. It’s just amazing to me. HW starts out defending slavery, and now this blog is turning into Communist central. Occidental Conformity.

  15. Eh?

    The stats prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Americanized blacks were not oppressed by slavery. It looks like a fluffy cushion by comparison to contemporary Europe.

  16. In the conclusion, the authors assert that the pecuniary income, diet, health, life expectancy, skill acquisition and other material aspects of the lives of the ex-slaves had declined significantly by 1890 after thirty years of free society.

    This would be consistent with the new book Sick From Freedom which claims that 25 percent of free negroes died after the abolition of slavery due to the destruction of the healthcare, social security, and slave diet of large plantations.

  17. Mr. W. —

    I’ll state your view, as I understand it.

    1 — Work is a disgrace. A white man of worth avoids the status of worker, whether as serf, slave, sharecropper, or hireling.

    2 — Throughout most of history, it was not possible for all whites to avoid work, because whites knew only whites and work had to be done. White men of worth exerted themselves to form stratified polities, in which work was done only by other whites (the lower orders).

    3 — A major problem in those stratified societies was that the lesser whites were not tractable; there was constant tension between them and the rulers, the whites of worth.

    4 — After millennia, this problem was met with an unexpected solution, in the form of the Negro, a tractable humanoid of whose existence whites of worth became aware via the Jews. It is not enough to say that the Negro’s tractability yielded the possibility of a world in which whites of worth would no longer have to struggle politically with workers; the Negro’s climatic adaptability enabled him to perform work of a range greater than the work that, prior to his being discovered, had been done by whites. To put it in homely parlance, the Negro was an answer to a prayer.

    5 — Because the sites where Negroes were first employed by whites were outposts of the European monarchies, the range of action of the whites who ruled the Negroes in those places was limited by royal charters; but at last, in the United States, or a part thereof, whites who ruled Negroes enjoyed full liberty of contract under republican government. It was a glorious blend of capitalism and manorialism.

    6 — The area in which this height of felicity was attained was the American South–Dixie. It was a wondrous place, even for the Negroes, who enjoyed there a well-being they had never known before Dixie and have not known since it. Why, the mere increase there in their intake of protein would have been enough to persuade any reasonable man that their being enslaved by whites of worth was a great benefit to them.

    7 — Unfortunately, brutes called the Yankees destroyed Dixie, because, for “moral” reasons, they found the enslavement of the Negroes by whites of worth objectionable; but whites of worth have not abandoned the dream of Dixie, which, they hope, will rise again.

    Nothing in the preceding is intended as a joke, Mr. W. I think it is your view, which I will dub Dixieism. As a Dixieist, you do not share the view of Occidental Dissent’s followers who say that Negroes should not have been brought to live among whites. Such followers have no idea what your Dixieist symbol–the Confederate flag–means. What it means is what I have just detailed. You envision a world in which all workers will be black slaves and all non-workers will be white.

    This explains why, in a manner redolent of Communism, you routinely and scornfully refer to hirelings as “free” laborers, in quotation marks. It is certainly not the case that you envision a dictatorship of the proletariat; rather, you really do see no difference between slaves and, say, free factory workers. To you, they’re all just workers, pitiable at best, dangerous at worst. No white man should have to be one of them.

  18. There was nothing inherently wrong about the institution of slavery.

    Liberal economics are inextricably linked to liberalism. Both are predicated upon false assumptions such as equality, etc…

    Outdated 18th century notions that were always more moonshine than reality.

    John B., despite our differences, you seem intellectually honest. What’s your take on the following video as it relates to HW’s “defense” of slavery and the traditional white perspective on the races?
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKkJi8xorac

    Slavery was the best thing that ever happened to negroes. It wasn’t bad for whites until the spectre of liberalism showed up with its emphasis on all forms of “emancipation.” Emancipation was a greater evil than slavery.

    Deo Vindice

  19. Re: John Bona

    I will state my view in my own words:

    (1) In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, there was a propaganda campaign in Britain and the Northern states to glorify “free” labor.

    The rise of industrial capitalism in Britain and the North opened up a huge class division between the capitalist class – who reaped the vast majority of the benefits of industrialization – and the White industrial proletariat whose life expectancy and standard declined in the earliest stages of industrialization.

    Materially speaking, the niggers on Southern plantations objectively had a higher standard of living than the White working class in cities like Manchester and Philadelphia. Slaveowners took better care of their workers because under slavery the planters and non-planter slaveowners had a vested interest in the welfare of their slaves.

    (2) Plantation slavery was a type of capitalism. It was a peculiar type of capitalism though in that investment in slaves increased the leisure time of masters while softening the impact of market forces on black.

    Compared to industrial capitalism, slavery was more egalitarian. The typical White man in the South had a much greater chance of entering the slaveholding class – for example, in the Lower Chattahoochee Valley, around 46 percent of White families were slaveowners – than the typical White Northerner had of rising into the plutocrat class.

    The attack on slavery in Britain and the North was motivated in large part by anxiety over the class division and labor conflict between Whites closer to home.

    (3) Compared to the Britain or the North, there was greater racial solidarity and less class division in the South, before and after slavery. There was more resentment against “the rich” in the North because in the South far more Whites had a stake in slavery than Northerners had a stake in Wall Street.

    (4) There were about 4 million slaves in the South in 1865. The vast majority of the slaveowners owned less than 20 slaves. About half the slaves were owned by planters. Southern slavery was a middle class institution that increased the leisure time of slaveowners while elevating the standard of living of blacks.

    (5) Slavery took on aspects of manorialism in Brazil long before arriving in the United States.

    (6) We’ve already seen that Southern slavery was peripheral to the wider plantation complex and had many unique features. The subtropical climate was better for slaves because of the colder falls and winters. The vast majority of Southern slaves didn’t work on sugar plantations either.

    (7) Since the early 1970s, mainstream historians have already dismantled most of the myths about slavery.

    (8) My view is that the South would have been infinitely better off if we had not made the mistake of joining the Union.

    (9) I understand why the British and Yankees spent so much time denouncing slavery in the nineteenth century – to deflect attention away from the plight of the “free” White working class at home, who were exploited harder and treated worse than niggers by their employers.

  20. In the South, whipping was used as a negative incentive to coerce the slaves – the average field hand on the more disciplined plantations received an average of 0.7 whippings a year.

    In the North, starvation was used as the primary negative incentive to coerce the “free” White working class. OTOH, starvation was almost never used as a negative incentive on slaves in the South. Even slaves that faked illnesses were well fed and given at least a day to rest.

  21. Let it be said that only 25% of households in the South owned even one slave regardless of the particular circumstances of the Chattahoochee Valley.

  22. A parody scene in Spielberg’s new Lincoln movie would be quite funny. Have the movie intercut with Lincoln’s histrionics and some Trayvons beating people on the buses. Five minutes of the local news from South Chicago… All that good stuff. Some reports on ghetto lobster and Knoxville horrid too. Then the fakery of the Duke Lacrosse case.

    Sentimental hypocrites.

  23. I thank you for the link, Apuleius, but I confess I can’t make any sense of the Evola quotations in that video. Whether that’s because Evola is prattling or because, alternatively, his statements are beyond my comprehension, I don’t know. Here’s one of the quotations:

    “A worldview is based not on books, but on an inner form and a sensibility endowed with an innate, rather than acquired, character … In every civilization but the modern one, it was a ‘worldview’ and not a ‘culture’ that permeated the various strata of society; where culture and conceptual thought were present, they never enjoyed primacy, for their function was as simple expressive means and organs in service of the worldview.”

    To say it again: I have no idea what that means. It starts out with disparagement of books– other than those written by Evola himself, presumably; after that, there is a stream of abstract nouns that mean nothing to me. Maybe I would be able to make some sense of the statement if I were to read it in context.

    A number of the other statements that are quoted in the video involve reference to “quality” or dismissal of things “economic.” Noted: quality good, money bad. In the meantime, I’m pleased I can afford, occasionally, to take a fun little drive to a nearby fast-food place and buy a bacon cheeseburger. I enjoy my car, I enjoy the traffic lights. As you know, I would prefer to be living in an all-white country–but that’s a separate question. For the things that I do enjoy, I must credit, I think, the eighteenth century notions you think–or, at least, pretend to think–are outdated.

    Again: the thinking of Evola might simply be over my head. Now that you’ve brought him to my attention, I’ll have to make a point of reading at least one of his books. (As I’ve told you before, I have a personality disorder that makes reading arduous for me.)

    For some reason, one of Nietzsche’s notebook statements has just come into my head. Maybe you’re familiar with it, but I’ll mention it because it seems to have something to do with this exchange of ours. I must ask you not to hold me to the wording, because I’m quoting from memory:

    I wish that men would begin by respecting themselves; everything else would follow from that.

  24. So, am I right, Mr. W.? Your dream is of a world in which all workers will be black slaves and all non-workers will be white?

  25. Economic interests are connected to the basest part of human nature, the realm of the physical, traditionally regarded as the lowest part. Reductionist modern post-Enlightenment liberalism rejects any but these basest concerns and is blind to any other.

    So you get your morally incompetent corporate capitalist nanny state that satisfies physical needs while ignoring all other human needs, such as those connected to any higher aspirations or purpose. Teleological bankruptcy.

    As an example: what is wrong with this picture?
    http://www.nisd.net/studentlocator/

    Additionally, why is it that so many white people can be convinced that integration is a necessity in their societies, while other races clearly do not? Is it because we really need “cultural enrichment” by noble savages or is it for the sake of “economic advantage?”

    The summum bonum of human existence is driving an automobile to get a cheeseburger? The ultimate end of the Enlightenment is to transfer everyone into Homer Simpson?

    Here is a good rundown on Evola:
    http://www.alternativeright.com/main/the-magazine/julius-evola-radical-traditionalism/

    Deo Vindice

  26. No.

    We’re having a historical discussion. In the 21st century, it would be nonsensical to reenslave blacks and recreate cotton plantations.

    I’m surrounded by cotton fields here and the only thing more beautiful than the cotton in full bloom is the total absence of negroes in the fields who have been replaced by a more efficient and less troublesome race of machine slaves.

    In some situations, slave labor is superior to free labor. In other situations, free labor is superior to slave labor. The question of which form of labor is superior depends on the task to be performed.

    Cotton farmers wouldn’t go back to slave labor even if the 13th Amendment was repealed tomorrow.

  27. I can see why slavery worked.

    The negro doesn’t have the same level of intelligence or character as the White man. In a slave society, a master has the title to the human capital of the slave. In a free society, a negro is his own manager.

    Because the slave is a capital investment and because the labor of the slave is synonymous with capital of his owner, the master has a vested interest in seeking out the most profitable form of employment for his slave to maximize his earnings. He also has the option to use force to compel his slave to labor.

    The control of the master over his slave and the ability to use force solves the Negro Question by compensating for racial differences in intelligence and character. Slavery alters the character and behavior of negroes by using force to instill discipline. The greater intelligence of the master is put to use managing the labor of the negro which is part of his financial portfolio.

    Left to his own devices, the free negro is a poor manager of his own labor. He is a slave of his passions. The master breaks that relationship because he is motivated only by financial self interest.

    The symbiotic relationship worked to the advantage of both parties. The planter only earned a 10 percent return on the slave. The 10 percent profit was significantly less than the level of expropriation of “free” laborers by the federal government in our own times.

  28. The logic of the enlightenment is a mestizo shooting an aspiring black astronaut in a gated cummunity that is itself half Hispanic and a quarter black. Then blaming it all on white devils. That’s actually what Jefferson, Robespierre, Lincoln, Wilberforce, WEB Dubois, Skip Gates, Kennedy and MLK dreamt about.

  29. I knew my cheeseburger remark was a slow pitch over the plate to you, Apuleius, but I figured I’d go with it. Whether Evola would approve of a civilization that has made room for the likes of Homer Simpson and me, I can’t yet say; but as long as the subject has come up, are we really just talking about a cheeseburger? Well, probably we are–but just for the heck of it:

    When I take that drive, I am able to appreciate the infinite decisions that lie behind everything I experience: the roads, the automatically-operating traffic lights, the cars, the shops and restaurants and all of their equipment and signs, the clothing on the persons I see. If I take a thirty-minute drive to the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania, I can see, in a display case, say, a hairpin from ancient times; and besides appreciating that little artifact itself, I can appreciate all the work, scholarship, organization, and expenditure that enabled it to be retrieved from ruins and understood and displayed. Am I to spit on all of that? Would Julius Evola spit on that hairpin simply because it met just a base, physical need? I doubt it. Am I not to consider the fact that the traffic-light controllers amid which I move might one day be in museums, too–deservedly? While I’m en route to that fast-food place, I might be driving past some person who’s about to undergo a modern medical procedure that will spare him or her tremendous suffering. In the hospital where he or she is going, there will be bottles labeled with ink made by the same companies whose ink adorns the delightful little bag in which my hamburger will be presented to me? That same ink was used in the medical schools and scientific laboratories where the training and inquiry that yielded that medical procedure took place. Is all the exertion that lies behind all of those things base? “Merely economic”? Maybe it is, and I am too dull to see it.

    The preceding is disjointed, I recognize, but it reflects my aversion to scorn of moneymaking or wealth or things that are supposedly merely economic or material. The essay you linked was very interesting, and I will make a point of reading some of Evola’s material. Probably, there are, in his writings, several things that would resonate with me, as they have resonated with you, but I’m not sure the argument can be made that everything that has happened over the past three centuries has been a terrible mistake. Why, you ask, is the white race not preserving itself? I would emphatically reject, as you would, any suggestion that the race is being enriched by the creation of populations in which it is dispersed amid non-whites, but I am not persuaded that its self-destruction is a consequence of a misguided pursuit of economic gain. I really don’t know what the answer is; if I discover it, I will be eager to share it with persons such as you. Until I do, I will continue to avoid anything that, it seems to me, would further that self-destruction.

  30. like it or not slavery was the economic engine of the nation. yankees would nit have had their manufacturing bidness with out cheap raw goods, protective tariffs, a lock on shipping or a protected domestic market without the Southron slave economy. Saying it was a mistake leaves out a lot of questions. Questions those who say it was a mistake don’t ask or address

  31. “The control of the master over his slave and the ability to use force solves the Negro Question by compensating for racial differences in intelligence and character. Slavery alters the character and behavior of negroes by using force to instill discipline. The greater intelligence of the master is put to use managing the labor of the negro which is part of his financial portfolio. Left to his own devices, the free negro is a poor manager of his own labor. He is a slave of his passions. The master breaks that relationship because he is motivated only by financial self interest.”

    This almost Objectivist “pursuit of financial self-interest happens-to-be-most-benevolent-to-others” benevolence argument for slavery ignores the question of whether they really are human just as we are (share the same human nature) and have the same right and desire for freedom. Whereas Hunter has stated that Negroes are human, Fr John seems to posit another, DIFFERENT nature, which would be more consistent with these arguments for their enslavement.

    “Like it or not slavery was the economic engine of the nation (…) Saying it was a mistake leaves out a lot of questions”: I don’t think it was a mistake in many cases, not just a traditional way of life that was followed, but in many cases a well reasoned plan to maximise profit.

  32. “Slavery alters the character and behavior of negroes by using force (…) Left to his own devices, the free negro is a poor manager of his own labor.”

    Being left alone and free in their home environment, the natural selection process might improve their character over a long period of time. The best managers of their own labour and the most intelligent would naturally tend to survive longer, reproduce more, etc., in their natural environment (Africa) and perhaps advance more rapidly than in the “coddling” artificial environment of the institution of slavery.

  33. Suppose that eugenics in the institution of slavery could improve their character much more rapidly than the natural process in Africa. That might result in the enslavement of full equals, after a long time, and in any case it would be “playing God,” too unnatural, and considered immoral under almost any moral system. But then, “eugenics” in the institution of slavery would select for physical attributes that maximise profit rather than those that would seem to create moral and intellectual equality.

  34. “The slaves on our plantations in the Deep South generally had better healthcare – universal coverage, Mastercare – than John Bonaccorsi’s ‘free’ ancestors in Italy and Philadelphia (…) ‘The slave diet was not only adequate, it actually exceeded modern (1964) recommended levels of the chief nutrients. On average, slaves exceeded the daily recommended levels of proteins by 110 percent, calcium by 20 percent, and iron by 230 percent. Surprisingly, despite the absence of citrus fruits, slaves consumed two and one half times the recommended level of vitamin C. Indeed, because of the large consumption of sweet potatoes, their intake of vitamin A was at the therapeutic level and vitamin C was almost at that level.’ ”

    This Talmudoid argument of benevolence as the side effect of the pursuit of wealth for its own sake in Negro slavery, doesn’t agree at all with our wild and free Celtic nature that “despises and abhors” even the most benevolent of despotisms. We admire even the free roaming of beasts, where they don’t harm our crops and livestock. Rather let the Africans alone in their land, and we’ll hew our own wood and draw our own water in ours.

  35. “The summum bonum of human existence is driving an automobile to get a cheeseburger?”

    No, the summum bonum of human existence was riding along when I was a kid in my uncles Chevy convertible with my sister and cousins in the summer and with the top down to get an ice cream cone.

    You’re going to have to marshal stronger arguments than Evola’s appeals to metaphysics and superstition in order to defeat utilitarianism.

  36. If the summum bonum is pleasure, and freedom and dignity are illusions, then the benevolence argument is valid.

  37. The masters have their maximum of “good”, which fortuitously (for the slaves) happens to maximise the good of the slaves. It is all about creating wealth, and hence, pleasure, the summum bonum.

    Jack Ryan has the correct view on this thread.

  38. “No one rises to the challenge here, indicating the critical position is considered unassailable.”

    Nonsense, I assailed it with irrefutable ice cream and convertibles logic. Please substitute beer or cocktails if you are over 21.

    I remember when it was perfectly legal to drive while drinking (although not to drive while drunk which was defined as blood alcohol as .12 or higher in some states) in this country before the great emasculation took place.

  39. If the summum bonum is pleasure, and freedom and dignity are illusions, then the benevolence argument is valid.

    Are you sure about that, Mosin? I would think many persons would prefer freedom to enslavement, regardless of consideration of, say, life expectancy or nutrition, precisely because being enslaved is not pleasurable.

  40. Neither is starvation.

    I know that, Rudel; but don’t you think virtually all persons would choose freedom over slavery, no matter how well they might be eating as slaves? I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the slaves who escaped from the South actually did end up eating less well in freedom than they’d eaten in slavery; but still, they would have resisted being enslaved again. Freedom is a supreme pleasure; it might be the prerequisite of pleasure.

  41. “I know that, Rudel; but don’t you think virtually all persons would choose freedom over slavery, no matter how well they might be eating as slaves?”

    No I don’t. Let’s suppose one is pressed into service as a galley slave in the Mediterranean say in 1500. Most people would row for quite a bit hoping to escape at some point or at least to be able to take out some of your captors. Same is true if you worked in a company town mine and had a family to feed. You would probably work rather than let your children starve. All depending on the particular era and system there are usually a lot of options besides death. There were many helots in ancient Messenia who were agricultural workers by day and bandits by night, at least until the Krypteia caught up with them. In Rome many slaves earned their freedom. Some people actually put in 30+ years at the Post Office. It’s all relative.

  42. Plenty of people would prepare for revolt while tipping their hat in the meanwhile.
    That’s what Special Branch was invented for.

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