Bad analogy. 

Slavery is a good many things, but among them it is an economic transaction.

Economic transactions, considered broadly and systematically, require the existence of a market.  A market is simply the systematic arrangement of buyers and sellers.  For a market to exist in slaves, there had to be people willing to buy slaves, just as there had to be people willing to sell them.  Supply and demand are inextricably linked.  

If plantation chattel slavery is a bad thing--and I think it is objectively evident and true that it *is* a bad thing--then both buyers and sellers are equally implicated. 

The analogy you propose is sequential--one person does a bad thing, by poisoning the well, and others who later drink of it suffer the consequences.  But that is not how economic markets  work--markets represent a reciprocal relationship, that develops over time.

Now there is a grain of truth here to your observation nonetheless.  Market relationships can adapt and change over time.  The market in African slaves pre-existed the development of plantations in the New World.  The story of how the market in and for African slaves changed and adapted over the centuries is complex and interesting, although scholars argue that convincingly that it decisively expanded and dramatically intensified as the New World plantation economy developed.  Still, without the demand from the plantations of the Americas, the malevolent consequences of slavery would not have played out the way that they did, either in Africa or in the Americas.  Supply expanded to meet demand.



---- Original message ----
>Date: Wed, 20 Feb 2008 19:07:17 EST
>From: [log in to unmask]  
>Subject: Re: Slave owner or slave  
>To: [log in to unmask]
>
>So whomever poisons the well is not responsible for those who draw water  
>from the well and give it to others to drink, and whom thereafter  die?

Kevin R. Hardwick, Ph.D.
Department of History
James Madison University

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