Infamous Dred Scott slavery case decision took place 150 years ago this week

You might also try to account for the rich slave-owners who voted, in 1860, for continuation of the Union, by supporting Bell and the Constitutional Union Party.

That was sort of my point. The militant secessionists and fire-eaters didn't represent the only or the best alternative.

I don't know what you mean by "an alternative" .... are you saying they should have been arbitrarily empowered somehow, despite being distinctly in the minority in their States?

Listening to the dissenters and skeptics rather than rashly rushing into folly would have been a good thing.

Remember that Lincoln's first use of the slavery issue, was to attack Douglas and campaign for a U.S. Senate seat, the one eventually occupied by fellow Whig Lyman Trumbull.

"Use" prejudices things. It means your looking for an exploitation and you're only going to consider things that might be considered exploitation. If you take a broader view you can see Lincoln's support for the Wilmot Proviso during his congressional term as an expression of his views on slavery and its expansion.

And yet we teach 19th-century history as if we were Athanasius orating against the Arians, and we insist that the principal threads of American history were those that led here, and that the heroes of American history are the people who made the same choices celebrated by moderns, and that the drama of American history is these intellectual, moral, and political pioneers' valorous teleological struggle against all the Bad People who didn't believe as they did, as they heroically moved mountains to bring Ideological Purity to Oceania. Well, barf. History isn't just about the political winners or the folks that Tufts and red-diaper Columbia professors like to use as their favorite texts.

Actually it sounds like you're the post-modernist here, with all that rage against "teleology."

But I suspect that this celebration is something that you do yourself: Up with the heroic Jeffersonians! Down with the evil Federalists! It's only when things don't go your way that you get all pomo on us.

Also, why is it always the blessed and the damned? Celebration of our glorious past went on when we were younger, and it's obvious a lot rubbed off on you.

But I don't think we needed to curse out Cornwallis or Santa Anna as evil incarnate. We understood where they were coming from and why they felt as they did. We just disagreed with their wrongheaded policies. You don't seem able to make the same separation of judgment from emotion when it comes to your pet heroes.

The United States was founded as, and it was intended to be, a plural and federal system of many States, not a jackbooted national empire bound together with bands of steel.

More windy rhetoric. I might borrow your line and call it "zestfully obtuse."

Where we differ is that I favor, as Thomas Jefferson and the Confederates did, multiple social experiments choosing the road that best protects citizens' freedom by ensuring that they are never bound to a political machine that has the power and eclat to abridge their liberties, either by runaway political stratagems or by direct application of military force. Which is exactly what the Abolitionists had in mind.

And yet you dismiss alternative approaches to slavery and secession. I have to wonder: are you really against centralization and union, or just against union under certain conditions or centralization to certain ends. That's true of Jefferson Davis or Alexander Stephens: they were for centralization when it served their vision and interests, against it when it didn't.

Moreover there is that quotation about one tyrant far away versus many tyrants close to home. I wouldn't assume that a federal union was more tyrannical than a loose league of independent sovereignties.

If we want to understand the past, we have to understand how people saw things at the time. That's enough for me.

Well, I don't think it is, and that's my point. Which you proceed to demonstrate with your next words.

You want to judge, but in judging your favorites you want to throw out the idea of objective moral standards and look only at what they thought of themselves.

Well, I think you've misunderstood my intention. One can try to understand people's actions in light of contemporary values, which is different from imposing those of the current age. Either to judge or to exculpate is the same thing -- it's still judging. Attempting to lift judgments of attainder against this or that figure delivered with animus by another poster is not in itself judgment or absolution of the historical figure, it is correction of the modern polemicist.

We don't have to condemn past figures, but we can't pretend to judge them and simply excuse them because we like them.

Showing how things would be better now, if they had turned out differently, isn't "excusing" someone.

I don't say "Begone, your views on slavery or race are wrong, therefore I condemn you to the Inferno."

Excuse me, but reading some of your past posts, I certainly got that strong impression from what you wrote.

I can consider such people in light of the ideas common in their own day. But I'm not going to praise the people who poured fire on the flames simply because attitudes were different in their day.

It was all politics -- I don't understand why you would say that. And your choices about who was doing the pouring seem to me to be difficult to defend logically.

One has to make a distinction between the people who try to steer history and make trouble for the rest of us -- as Davis and his crew most assuredly did -- and those who get dragged along in the tumult.

You mean, leadership of a losing cause is a moral crime? But that is surely teleological thinking. I don't see how you can say it isn't.

And you certainly seem to have some judging in mind here -- and you seem to know whom you want to judge: "The usual suspects."

You have so many value judgments about who did what to whom planted in your premises that your statement looks like a virtual rock garden of judgments. Your statement discounts completely any idea that the people who led the South were animated by any feeling of responsibility to the people they led, or that they attempted to give leadership and guidance according to their education and moral lights to the political events of their times and the people who looked to them for that leadership. Your statement credits them with none but the most irresponsible motives and impulses. So to say as you do, or even to imply it more subtly, is suspicious for prejudice and proof of bias.

What you're doing is presenting a false dichotomy: either "Megadeath" or slavery -- presumably here and everywhere, now and forever.

No, I am showing the two endpoints of possible resolution, at one of which -- megadeath -- we actually arrived. It isn't a hypothetical, it's a result. With a known price tag in lives, which is my point. It is not a false dichotomy, it is a true dichotomy.

You ignore the possible alternatives between the two.

No, I don't. I address the moral choices implicit in your side's condemnation of the South, its leaders, and its society -- and me. You say that the worse choice would have been to let the South go, or accommodate the South, or any outcome that included the continuation of slavery. You were very insistent and vociferous about this moral judgment, which you tried to hang around my neck.

As for other possibilities, your moral defi would condemn implicitly the various compromise attempts, such as the Corwin Amendment, since they might have resulted in the continuation of slavery somewhere. That would include Lincoln's 1864 offer of partial compensation -- how dare he temporize so! Death to slavery, right? I note this point along the way.

Let's look at the conflict in a different light: say France and Britain are on a collision course. Do we give our approval to those who forever sharpen the conflict or to those who try to reconcile the two countries if possible?

Your case is hypothetical, unless you'd like to tie it to a known cause of conflict, such as the Spanish Succession.

But going along with it, "blessed are the peacemakers," up to a point. Peace with honor, that is.

If conflict is inevitable and we do have to take sides, don't we take a serious look at what the different parties are offering? Or do we just pick the one that makes an emotional appeal to us, as you apparently have?

Yes (demurring from the planted axiom), no, and no I didn't.

My apparent adhesion to a dead cause is really a preference for outcomes based on the better interests of people alive today. And that rests on the condition of the People's liberty and sovereignty, which was corroded and compromised, if not totally overthrown (it may have been) by the triumph of the Northern cause in the Civil War.

So I speak up for compromise solutions that open the way to future change and I'm accused of opposing such solutions? Life is strange in lentulusland ...

That's an extremely tendentious understanding of "the People's liberty and sovereignty." What about those who weren't included in your "People"? You only regard one particular type of unit as "the People," what other units larger or smaller decide doesn't fly with you. So much for "the People's liberty and sovereignty." It would be better if you just called it "state's rights" or "the powers of the states" since individuals, families, local communities and the nation don't have greater sovereignty in the lentulusphere than in the real world.

You mean, leadership of a losing cause is a moral crime? But that is surely teleological thinking. I don't see how you can say it isn't.

Your quarrel is with Aristotle, not with me. Apparently you want to live in a world without consequences, so you rail against "teleology." But really a world without purposes and consequences is as artificial and unreal as any other ideological construct.

Your statement discounts completely any idea that the people who led the South were animated by any feeling of responsibility to the people they led, or that they attempted to give leadership and guidance according to their education and moral lights to the political events of their times and the people who looked to them for that leadership.

I wouldn't dispute that a Robert E. Lee felt "some feeling of responsibility to the people" he led. I'm just saying that that's not the last word to say about such a movement. If you want to say that word, it's not going to be, "Gee, they meant well." If you want it to be "They were human and fallible just like us," you can't go on to try to make out that their opponents were inhuman.

Is this discussion really going anywhere? Isn't it just the same thing over and over again?

[Me] As for other possibilities, your moral defi would condemn implicitly the various compromise attempts, such as the Corwin Amendment, since they might have resulted in the continuation of slavery somewhere.

[You] So I speak up for compromise solutions that open the way to future change and I'm accused of opposing such solutions? Life is strange in lentulusland ...

No, you made the willingness to do whatever it took to extinguish slavery the moral pivot of your judgment of me and others, earlier in the thread, and I just called you on it by applying it to someone else.

I also notice that you don't regard the Corwin compromise as having had any value except as a doorway to screwing the South later. You sound like a liberal -- completely tactical, and completely unwilling to abide by a bargain. You try to excuse your retrogradation from the original compromise in the Constitution by explaining that it was a horrid compact with the ~~Devil~~ South, and so its abrogation and honoring in the breach morally imperative for any self-respecting person (including, I suppose, the hellbound Bostonians who set up a gibbet for William Lloyd Garrison in their annoyance at him, and anyone who failed to vote for Mr. Lincoln in 1860).

But you give the impression that any deal's a fool's gold, and bound to be broken by, ahem, practical people later on anyway the first chance they get. Which kind of "deal" the Constitution was supposed to be better than.

That's an extremely tendentious understanding of "the People's liberty and sovereignty." What about those who weren't included in your "People"?

The People were self-defining. They chose a racially very limited definition of who could be a citizen of the United States, by statute and by constitution. Moderns may dislike it, but that was the nature of the polity 210 years ago, and others were allowed in only grudgingly and in limited categories. In all the speechifying about Southern racism, I've never read a thoughtful reflection on the meaning of Northern imposition of black citizenship by amendment in the 1860's, and then only because it would be confined (they thought) to the South, to be followed by citizenship for white women and Asians only in the 20th century. That's a significant sociopolitical fact, but I never see that juxtaposition discussed. Perhaps I should read hostile lesbian writers more.

You only regard one particular type of unit as "the People," what other units larger or smaller decide doesn't fly with you.

Well, that is what "the People" is. It's the polity of a State, and the State is that polity expressed as a geographical and demographical entity. It's ingrained in the nature of the colonies and their historical evolution into independent allied States. We've really discussed that at length, and the remaining issues outstanding revolve around whether one accepts the Websterian reinvention of American political and constitutional history -- a feat he performed for the interests of his own State.

So much for "the People's liberty and sovereignty." It would be better if you just called it "state's rights" or "the powers of the states" since individuals, families, local communities and the nation don't have greater sovereignty in the lentulusphere than in the real world.

As I said, it was the States that achieved independence from King George. There were no masses of Carolinians and Georgians in the Minutemen's ranks at Concord Bridge, and damn few Rhode Islanders at Cowpens and King's Mountain. It was just the nature of the Colonies and the United Colonies that determined what they would become.

Hamilton tried to remake the country into an arcwelded, unitary whole, and the People's representatives in convention rejected his proposal, pace the later mutterings of John Marshall. The People did not want, and explicitly rejected, a monolithic national government and a monolithic nation-state. And they had damn good reasons for doing so, as Lincoln, with Hamilton's and Webster's rejected doctrine written on his battle-standard, later proved to our cost.

[Me] You mean, leadership of a losing cause is a moral crime? But that is surely teleological thinking. I don't see how you can say it isn't.

[Your reply] Your quarrel is with Aristotle, not with me. Apparently you want to live in a world without consequences, so you rail against "teleology." But really a world without purposes and consequences is as artificial and unreal as any other ideological construct.

No, Aristotle isn't posting the moral judgments here. And I do believe your formulary about "a world without consequences" is just really a rationalization of assault and battery on the grand scale.

I really do think that people ought to enjoy the blessings of peace without being "legislated against" in a spirit of partisan advantage-taking and despoliation, and on the other hand without being invaded by vast armies.

I'm just saying that that's not the last word to say about such a movement. If you want to say that word, it's not going to be, "Gee, they meant well." If you want it to be "They were human and fallible just like us," you can't go on to try to make out that their opponents were inhuman.

I would say that the last word on the Confederacy would have to be that indeed they meant well for the most part (some people like Braxton Bragg and possibly Ed Ruffin excepted), but that despite their best, or middling, or muddled, efforts, they failed to sustain their rights and freedom against relentless propaganda and brute force; and their failure has had unfortunate consequences for us that they indeed foresaw, and tried to forestall. Many of them lost their citizenship and their civil rights for life, some their homes, and some their lives; but all of us have lost a part of our civil rights, and a part of our noble patrimony of freedom, possibly forever.

I think that the Pennsylvania law continued for life the bondage of persons who were then already slaves, but abolished slavery and limited service for the children of persons born to those persons, and for persons indentured to service thereafter.

The 1780 Pennsylvania law did away with indentured servitude for life, but apparently didn't do away with indentured servitude. The law didn't prevent people from becoming indentured servants for lesser periods of time. The 45-year old Dutchman I cited above had been purchased in 1786 from shipboard.

Here is the 1780 law [1780 PA Law], and here are some words about Pennsylvania indentured servants [Indentured Servants in PA]. In Pennsylvania indentured servitude lasted into the 1820s. From the latter site:

Yet the passage of the 1780 act ending slavery in the state reversed this trend and started indentured labor on a sudden, sharp recovery. From fewer than 400 at the end of the Revolution, Philadelphia's indentured servant population reached 2,000 by the end of the century.

Many of these were manumitted slaves. Others were slaves' children born after 1780, who acquired this status under the state law. As an economic institution, indentured labor was not limited to blacks and mulattos, and there are examples of Indian, German, Irish, Dutch, and Scottish indentured servants in these years. But it was noted in contemporary sources that the institution had become strongly associated with blacks, and whites would consent to the stigma in only the severest circumstances.

The indenture system in Pennsylvania became more severe after 1780, because the terms of service were longer. Formerly it had been limited to about seven years, and it rarely exceeded four among immigrants. Indentures generally had not lasted past age 21, for males, and 18, for females. This allowed at least the pretense of the bondsman or woman learning a trade (housework, almost always, in the case of the women) in exchange for their labor and being sent out into the world with at least a decade of productive labor or family life ahead. This was no quibble in an age when debility at 40 was common and many laboring people did not live to see 30.

Yet in Pennsylvania after 1780, the bound labor contract began to take 28 as the age of freedom. The abolition act had made it so, setting this as the age of release of children of slaves, and it would have seemed unjustified not to also do so in other cases. Shortly after the act was passed, the overseers of the poorhouse in Philadelphia began binding out children of black paupers up to age 28. This further strengthened that age as the proper length of indentures. Previously they had done so only to the standard "majority" ages of 21 for males, 18 for females.

So you would like to have a Constitution (USA or CSA) that forever guaranteed the "right" to own slaves? Isn't that going a little too far?

I can't say that I ever made "the willingness to do whatever it took to extinguish slavery the moral pivot of your judgment of me and others." That's just your capacity for exaggeration.

What I would say is that you either move towards a resolution of a problem like that, or you move away from a resolution, or you refuse to move. People today (you know, all the people who don't respond to your outburts) are right in honoring those who tried to bring slavery to an end.

I certainly don't say that all means were justified to abolish slavery. I'm not going to make a hero out of John Brown. It's just that when we honor those who worked towards an end to slavery we're right in doing so. If we honor Jefferson Davis for something other than whatever good personal qualities he may have had, there are problems with that.

You play fast and loose with "state" and "State." I'm not sure that the "state" Alabama or Tennessee is the same thing as the sovereign "state" of France or Italy. But more to the point. It's obvious even to obtuse children that the "state" isn't the people. There was a Czech or Bohemian people when there was no Czech or Bohemian state.

There are an awful lot of complexities here that I can't get into (I'm not sure about them myself and wouldn't know where to start). But my hunch is that very few serious scholars would accept that the "state" or "people" however you want to define such things is absolutely sovereign, or that either is to be identified with a unit in a federal union like Mississippi or Arkansas. Sovereignty is a lot more complex than your theology would have it, especially in a system like ours.

I respond to your posts and others don't, in large part because you address them to me, but also because I used to think like you when I was in high school. I even went to the large central library to dig up James Kilpatrick's book The Sovereign States (this at a time when J.J. was still in the public eye and probably trying to live down his segregationist past).

But over time, I realized that "we" aren't our state politicians. They aren't the best representatives of our interests. "We" also aren't whatever agitators could scare a state convention into thinking and doing. I'm not saying that the federal government is. I'm just saying that we don't need to encourage state politicians to think that they are more representative or better or worthy of power than they are. That goes for federal politicians as well. We can (hopefully) use the courts and our votes and voices to check abuses on both levels. But romanticizing and idealizing state politics isn't the right path to take.

And why are you so down on Washington and Hamilton (and yes, you are down on Washington, the real George Washington, whether you want to admit it or not)? They loved our country. They, and many of their countrymen wanted what was best for America. 19th century America wasn't wholly composed of fanatical Jeffersonians or maniacal state's righters.

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