Ye olde slave house

I was reading a post on Occidental Dissent about the condition of slaves in the antebellum South when I remembered that I wanted to share some photos from my latest visit to Kentucky. According to local tradition, the home shown below housed slaves and then sharecroppers. Now it’s overgrown and neglected. Not far away is a (also overgrown) slave/sharecropper cemetery. People and pigs dwelt together in the same house – which is not unusual even today in third-world countries.






A fixer-upper I know. But as Hunter Wallace points out, the lot of whites of that era may have been even worse. At least the slaves were property and, as such, their owners had an interest in keeping them alive and healthy. A sick slave isn’t very useful. Poor whites, on the other hand, may have had only other poor whites to help them out in difficult times.

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5 Responses to Ye olde slave house

  1. Gorbachev says:

    Um, don’t try to apologize for slavery. I’m with you generally about the whining, but there was no excuse for slavery – there’s no way to redeem it.
    I know you don’t mean what a lot of activists might accuse you of, but it comes off that way.
    It’s like holocaust jokes. Just not a good idea.

    • jewamongyou says:

      It was never my intention to apologize for slavery. I can’t do it anyway since I never owned a slave. Besides, anything one says about blacks/slavery will be attacked anyway so I just speak my mind and don’t worry about it.

  2. Naikpopa says:

    cry moar

  3. That house is in excellent shape, considering it must be a minimum of 147 years old. I remember thinking as a child that certain structures behind my hometown’s various old mansions were old “slave’s quarters,” but they were probably just derlict storage sheds.
    I notice you go to KY a lot. Business, or do you have family there?
    I grew up in west KY–the Miss. and Ohio River delta areas, and still have a vague pride in places like Owensboro and Paducah as my “homeland.” I’m not sure what there is to see in those towns, but nearby Reelfoot Lake (mostly in TN) is somewhat worth seeing, if only because of the lake’s unusual origins (techtonic) and to see how a relatively-impoverished county functions on an almost-entirely lake-based economy. There used to be a village there built out into the lake (a tiny, Tennessean Venice) but eminent domain was leveled against it in the 80s and now this interesting piece of TN history is lost.
    I remember west KY having a substantial Jewish (and Lebanese) population as a child. Or perhaps it just seemed large to me; maybe they stood out more. At any rate, I occasionally pass through west KY, and the demographic fate of the regional Jews has not been pretty. The remnant is elderly, many in poor health, with their children either having moved away or fallen to worse fates (drug abuse, suicide). Both the local synagogues have long since shut down. I wouldn’t like to call them a microcosm of what’s happening to the West as a whole, but frankly, they probably are. It’s depressing.

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