[jmyeet]

Considering there's no such thing as a "free market" I've been laughing for a real long time. Markets require regulation and enforcement to function.

The US government was created to protect the interests of rich, white, male slave owners. And if you look at Louisiana State Penintentiary (often called "Angola"), which is essentialy a Southern plantation with forced labor, you realize not as much has changed as you might otherwise think.

[paulddraper]

The it did a pretty shit job of it. Within 100 years it was killing hundreds of thousands to fight against that purpose.

[jmyeet]

Lincoln disagrees [1]:

> My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.

While chattel slavery ended when the 13th Amendment was ratified in 1865, slavery continued through debt bondage and convict leasing up until 1941 where FDR suddenly decided to aggressively prosecute the practice for fear of the Japanese using it for propaganda value. I'm referring to Circular 3591 [2]. And while that heavily curtailed abuse (eg by locking people up essentially indefinitely for "vagrancy" or imaged debts), forced prison labor continues to this day, including private companies profiting from prison labor.

Also, while the Confederacy lost the Civil War, the South arguably won. Reconstruction saw severe curtailment of newly-established civil rights for former enslaved people. And after Reconstruction came Jim Crow until the 1960s.

[1]: https://www.loc.gov/collections/abraham-lincoln-papers/artic...

[2]: https://www.endslaverynow.org/blog/articles/state-imposed-fo...

[mullingitover]

The point of slavery was money, and the point of money was power. By the time of the civil war the real power for the ruling class was coming from industrialization.