IUBio

Time Magazine: Man of the Millennium

Craig Burley burley at tweedledumb.cygnus.com
Fri Sep 25 16:34:51 EST 1998


peter at baileynm.com (Peter da Silva) writes:

> In article <y6u31xr16o.fsf at tweedledumb.cygnus.com>,
> Craig Burley  <burley at tweedledumb.cygnus.com> wrote:
> >(It's my impression that it's fairly easy to eliminate slavery,
> >especially my legislative fiat, once the major task of building
> >is completed, the population is relatively stabilized, and the
> >available land relatively well-colonized.  Otherwise I'd assume
> >there'd be difficulty convincing people to stay and work on
> >building infrastructure or doing the hard work of feeding those
> >who did, when freedom permitted them to find their fortunes
> >elsewhere.)
> 
> It's my impression that most of the infrastructure building was done
> by free men in the course of their finding their fortunes. The main
> reason slavery hung on was because cotton production was so labor
> intensive, and too many people were running off finding their fortunes
> in the process of extending the infrastructure.

Well, I guess "African slaves built this nation" was another one of those
lies my teachers taught me.  (Not that I entirely believed it anyway.)

(Note I did say "...or doing the hard work of feeding those who did",
by which I meant to include farming and, I guess, cotten production.)
-- 

"Practice random senselessness and act kind of beautiful."
James Craig Burley, Software Craftsperson    burley at gnu.org



More information about the Neur-sci mailing list

Send comments to us at biosci-help [At] net.bio.net