Posted on 11/13/2004 11:12:00 AM PST by LouAvul
GWTW is a definitive account of the Civil War from the point of view of the Southern planter class. Historians will tell you that there are almost no errors in the book (as far as how people lived, what they wore, how they worked, played and ate). It is responsible for inspiring many people to become scholars and teachers of the War.
It is also a hell of a good tale. Luckily, I collect copies of it as a hobby, so when they start banning or burning it, I'll still have mine.
Well, of course there was hereditary slavery. The race-based distinction is a subject for scholarship. People who like to say "it was all about slavery" also like to say "it was all about race", and then when we get into the details, things get a little more complicated.
For example, your statement gets into trouble if you apply your statement to Jamaica, which recognized some people as "statutorily white", others as "colored" -- and neither were necessarily slaves, either. There were free blacks in the South, including the Virginian I just spoke of, who forged the first lifetime bonds for his servants.
My considered answer is that the identification of slavery with race was in part an accident of history and geography -- Africa was the big slave emporium -- and in part a firebreak for whites, the poorer members of white society being anxious not to be confounded with (black) slaves.
Aesop, for example, was such. Greek slaves were often the teachers of Roman youth.
Yes, yes, and Polybius the historian was another, and Narcissus and Palladius, the Greek slaves who grew great in Claudius's service, fortunately becoming freedmen before they were paid the compliment of assassination by Agrippinilla, Nero's mommy dearest and Claudius's poisoner.
But so what? House slaves always had different duties and easier work than slaves in quarries and fields.
This was totally different than the degraded condition Southern slaves were kept in partially through laws which made teaching them to read a crime....No, of course not but it also did not prevent you from trying to exculpate the Slavers from their guilt.
You still don't get it. I'm not trying to exculpate anyone -- you, on the other hand, are trying to inculpate them on a bad beef just as hard as you can.
In the first place, 19th-century American slaveowners were under no obligation to free their slaves on the representations of English and American abolitionists. There was no consensus informed by anthropology on the equation of black with white humanity: that had to await science. There was Biblical precedent and sanction for bondage, and there was legal sanction in the United States Constitution. So get over your after-the-fact sanctimony and deal with the situation as it existed. The Abolitionists and Abraham Lincoln owed the Southern slave owners an explanation in measured arguments and conversational voices why they wanted to abolish slavery, respect for the slave owners' property rights, and a fair price in redemption of the slaves they wanted to liberate. They also owed it to slave owners, to accept "no" for an answer.
So to say is not to say that in our modern perspective slavery isn't malum in se. Like indentures and other unequal working relationships, it's an old form of labor exploitation and ought to be illegal everywhere. What we are talking about is the legal and moral environment of 140 years ago, however, and the landscape was very different, when child-labor laws in the North bound grasping employers to work their young wards only 10 hours a day, and when it was perfectly legal to lock the fire-escape exits to keep young women workers from sneaking out for pee breaks, as they did at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company.
Besides you wouldn't recognize ignorance if it bit you in the ass.
I recognize you.
Clarity bump.
I think you've got these guys dialed in pretty well......talk a big moral issue, but at the end of the day it turns out they're all Straussians -- "I believe that it is good for society for you to believe this!" Keeping intellectual and moral autonomy for themselves, but trying to force moral values on others, in order to manipulate them more easily. They're all Henry f'ing Kissinger.
Well, bite me, Henry!
Good call, amigo.
Come on, that isn't what happened. Cyrus McCormick invented the cotton gin, and ag labor's productivity shot to the moon. It created a cotton boom and demand for labor (slaves).
Jefferson had slaves that were white by all appearance but the point is that they were considered black by law and thus treated that way by society. Never the less there was not ONE ship which arrived carrying white slaves. It was completely race based and totally different from ancient slavery. Much more inhuman.
The issue isn't about House vs field slaves but about the race based nature of the institution.
History has "inculpated" the Slavers I have to do nothing but kick away the trivial roadblocks to truth erected by their defenders. The fact remains that the attitude of Southern leaders changed from recognizing the evil of the institution and hoping that it could be ended to glorifying it and deciding to destroy the Union rather than have it ended. Slavers loved slavery more than their country. A new philosophy of freedom was stated in the DoI and made the justification for revolt from England, that philosophy was negated by slavery. It was incompatible with America's birth and meaning and in unavoidable conflict with Freedom. It had to go.
There were plenty of people who recognized this two hundred twenty eight years ago so the regression the South underwent for the next 85 years is of no interest to any but excuse makers. I suppose you will defend the Nazis for not knowing that the Jews were not bent on destroying Germany.
What you believe you recognize is a twisted image of your own fantasies.
Thanks for telling me what anyone who has looked into this issue knows. What's next thrilling information about Jamestown?
The work was the same but the circumstances vastly different. An indentured servant could work off his contract or buy it off even marry the bosses daughter. A black slave would find himself dead as a hammer and mutilated for voicing such ideas. After freedom the ex-endentured would have all civil rights the society allowed free men the slave never would enjoy those rights. If they ever obtained their freedom they could be forced to leave the state and their homes.
These are obviously totally different situations. Slavery vastly worse.
It is no contradiction to call some cynical calculations lunacy and this case is still lunacy. When your view of political and economic realities are so twisted that your aims are crushed that is lunacy. Megalomania was the condition of the Slaver leaders.
Slaver propaganda is still put forth by apologists here and worked in the South until the 1960s.
"They made no serious effort, because there was nothing attractive to them in those vast stretches. And the proof of this stubborn fact is that in 1860 there were no slaves at all in the New Mexico, Utah, and Washington Territories, none in the Indian or Oklahoma Territory, none in the Dakota Territory, virtually none in the Kansas Territory which entered the Union as a free State in 1861, and barely more than a dozen in the Nebraska Territory, nor was there a prospect that more would ever arrive."
nc: Thanks for the post -- worth repeating!
Actually the "real" problem with slavery was not that to remove it was an attack on property rights. The real problem was that defining humans as property contradicted everything the American revolution stood for.
Your inability to comprehend this simple point allows you to blather endlessly on defending the Slavers.
This was common verbiage in the Slaver's organs and had been for a decade-long agitation for secession.
That's Eli Whitney, not Cyrus McCormick that told his wife, "Keep your cotton picking hands off my gin."
Of all your insane ravings the last portion of this post takes the cake. It is hilarioius in its dementia and takes excuse-making to new heights.
|Not true. The "Civilized" Cherokee owned many slaves. Read up on Stand Watie and the Ross factions.
nor was there a prospect that more would ever arrive."
Also read Jeff Davis' 1850 speech in the Senate lamenting the fact that California was admitted as a free state when slaves could have been working the gold mines instead of white men. Without the Civil War, the western territories of the Dakotas, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Arizona would have filled with slaves when the gold and silver mines were discovered just a few years later.
Cyrus McCormick? I hope that is a joke.
At any rate the fact remains that the attitude of the Founders was repudiated by Southern leaders and turned on its head. Just because it was profitable to do so matters not.
It's called an agenda. He's pushing one. If they admit to the legality of secession, it makes their war one of aggression against innocents.
So you advocate deportation or sterilization?
There are those that wear the swastika and the US flag. Anti-Americans. Not a nice crowd to run with.
Lincoln had 9 million slaves.
Actually, there was quite a bit of leftist film critique showing how "Star Wars" created its own little slave class with the droids, thus validating the western patriarchical blah blah blah blah blah! It's out there, folks.
Thanks for the post. Bumping....
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