Daily Inspiration Quote by Albert Bushnell Hart

Hart’s sentence does a quiet kind of historical damage while pretending to be a neutral inventory. The opening move, “Besides paid white laborers,” establishes whiteness as the baseline category of legitimate work: paid, contractual, recognizable. Everything after that is arranged as a ladder of degradation that still keeps white experience centered. White “servants” are “bound without wages for a term of years” - a blunt description of indenture that acknowledges coercion but also smuggles in an exit ramp. “For a term” signals temporariness, a future reentry into freedom and citizenship. The misery is real, Hart admits, but it is framed as a condition that ends.

Then comes the pivot: “and a more miserable class of Negro slaves.” The phrase “class” launders a system of racialized violence into an economic taxonomy, as if slavery were simply the bottom rung of a labor market rather than a legal regime built to make people property and make that status inheritable. “More miserable” is both comparative and curiously bloodless; it grades suffering instead of naming the machinery that produces it - sale, family separation, rape, criminalization of literacy, the everyday terror that made the system function.

Context matters. Writing in an era when professional historians often favored “social order” narratives and took white institutions as the main protagonists, Hart is mapping labor categories in early America. The subtext is hierarchy as common sense: different kinds of unfreedom, neatly sorted, with whiteness still carrying presumptive personhood. The line reads like a ledger entry, and that’s the point: the rhetoric of management turns moral catastrophe into administrative fact.