And beyond that, it's tiresome to hear people argue that we must withhold judgment on slavery but morally condemn protective tariffs as the devil's work. Or to hear them pound away at the idea that Northern racism always makes Southern slavery or racism more excusable or pardonable without considering that sometimes perhaps the reverse is true, that the North may sometimes have the advantage in such things. Actually, I think the argument about racism was simply that nobody who was white could claim any moral high ground with respect to racial understanding, in the terms of that day, simply because there wasn't much anywhere in the society. We know fifty times what they did about anthropology, and we know that racial differences are not such as to subdivide Homo sapiens sapiens, although such differences, we know, eventually would produce biological differentiation to the point that, like some equids, people of one race could no longer reproduce with representatives of another. People knew about miscegenability, but they couldn't know that the story of Abel and Cain had nothing to do with racial differentiation or that Negroes weren't another kind of people in the varietal or subspecies sense. What they did know was that Negroes were not part of Western society -- they were Africans, no matter where born, just as genetically Iberian creoles born in the New World were European and not Incan or Aztecan in their genetic and social affinities. Race was identity all over the world, and I've posted some of the dozens of words Spanish-speaking genealogists used on baptismal certificates to fix newborns' ethnic patrimony and their places in society.
Or that late 19th century expansionism or Indian wars (conducted by Republican Presidents) are wrong, while the expansionism and Indian wars conducted by Jeferson, Jackson, Polk (and other Southern Democrats) earlier in the 19th century were justifiable and excusable.
As I understand the argument, the comments offered about Phil Sheridan and Billy Sherman were offered a) to emphasize complaints people had about their zeal in killing (the war-crimes argument, which was recognized if not formalized as misconduct, even then -- the revulsion of Santa Anna's officers at his orders to massacre Texians is part of the record), and b) to skewer the Abolitionist moral attack against the South for having been racist and persecutory, by recriminating against the U.S. Army's campaigns against the Plains Indians.
The primary moral argument we've been discussing basically says that, then and now, Southerners were and are homophobic racist Nazi wife-beaters etc., in a peculiarly Southern sort of way -- by which we're to understand that nobody in the South is exempt from this group guilt (can you say, "Christ-killers"?), and nobody in the South can ever answer the charge that the Civil War was justified by Southern moral retrogradation, which called for and completely justified a therapeutic war of liberation to save the Union and human freedom and deliver up the Negro out of the hands of his endogamously hateful oppressors, who can never be forgiven in this world or the next because their race-hatred, their moral malformation if you will, is an enduring social hallmark (can you say, "mark of Cain"?) whose eradication now justifies the total reorganization of Southern society, with or without its People's permission, for the wholesome public purpose of stamping out Southern culture and identity forever, and reshaping its pupae as Northern liberals-manque'. (Can you say, "New Soviet Man"?)
I've vituperated against this form of argument extensively in my posts above to M. Espinola and Non-Sequitur, so I won't go into the details again. I think I explained why the Northern attack on the South is null and void -- it's basically an attack on policy previously agreed to justified by moral representations that are made in isolation and laser-focussed on the South very purposefully, to produce action on the proponents' agenda without effectual resistance. It's a power play, in other words, of a particularly and viciously Sovietizing kind: we're supposed to sign the confession and then sign the invoice for the bullet used to execute us. Which some people like Non-Sequitur like just fine and find hugely entertaining and morally gratifying, but which I've continued to point out is an injustice overall, since Southerners are treated in this argument much differently from anyone else and are in fact getting The Treatment.
In other words, most people don't share your kind of extreme relativism.
Please show that I'm indulging in relativism. I don't think I am. Rather, people who apply one standard to Northern racial codes and another to Southern ones, would seem to be the people expediting situational solutions lit by situational ethics.
They use it to excuse what they've already come to disapprove of, and discard it to condemn what they approve of -- and that is clearly a double standard.
If you think recrimination against someone else's argument using his own standards of moral judgment is a double standard, I think your confusion is understandable. But it isn't really a moral equivocation, when someone attempts to subvert the authority of a morally-based attack by attempting to show hypocrisy in the attacker's argument.
Northerners who nearly exterminated the Plains Indians haven't the moral authority to complain about Southern lynching-parties, is the form of the argument. So to say is not to erect a defense of lynching, or even to sympathize with the Indians really, or even to deplore the disappearance of the buffalo.
If you keep arguing that one institution is forever to be removed from the possibility of condemnation, are you not in some way supporting or promoting or protecting it?
You're doing it again: making slavery THE issue, and sliding past the issue of the rights of the Southerners engaged in it. The fallacy in your argument is that, if I allow myself to be led to a condemnation of slavery, "slavery being bad......," that all the other consequences of the Civil War must therefore flow, unimpeded and uninspected, from my one concession, and I must accept those consequences as necessarily entrained. That's begging the question, "....shall the South be flattened?"
That's the hustle Harriet Beecher Stowe originally retailed to the public in her call to war (and Lincoln himself laid the war at her door), which hustle Abraham Lincoln in turn concretized in policy, and in violence to the Constitution, and on the South.
My question to you still stands unanswered: how would your view of 19th century American history be different if you were avowedly "pro-slavery" than it is with you being whatever it is that you think you are?
I'm sorry if I failed somehow to answer one of your questions; it certainly isn't for lack of activity on the keyboard. Trillions of spinning electrons scream out in agony, and still you are unappeased. Very well.
And again, you're at it again: trying to trap me into admitting, yes, yes, yes! I AM Simon Legree! I admit it!
But I won't admit it, because it isn't true, no matter how you try to close the gap and put that funny-looking Klan hat on my head.
Talking to you is sometimes like talking to a professional poisoner who keeps asking you, "how do you feel?" After a while, it begins to dawn on you: it wasn't the coffee, it was the Tootsie Roll.
Your proposition is that agreement in substance with a Southern "fire-eater" of 1860 makes me the moral equivalent of a slaver -- a moral leper, and someone about whose arguments you'll never have to worry again, because I'll be a marked man -- a pariah, the ultimate ad hominem victory over an opponent. After that, I could say, "Two plus two equals four", and you could simply retort, "Eichmann! Beast!" and that would be that -- discussion over, you win. Yeah, well. Forget it, I'm not eating the Tootsie Roll.
To answer your loaded question, what distinguishes my position from that of an advocate of slavery in the 1850's is that, first of all, I'm a 20th-century man not a 19th-century one, so my bias is against slavery as a matter of public policy. That is, I don't think, objectively, it's a good thing overall as policy, and I don't think a case can be made even for "voluntary" slavery (such as debt-slavery, or sale of self to satisfy debts after the manner of the ancient Germans). Certainly the brutality with which agricultural and mining slavery has been typically administered from antiquity to the early-modern period wasn't justified by educated men's lights in the 19th century or now, a point I made to your side above, in quoting the 1822 letter of the President of the state Baptist convention to the Governor of South Carolina, posted in part and linked above, here. . In fact, let me quote the relevant passage again,
The result of this inquiry and reasoning, on the subject of slavery, brings us, sir, if I mistake not, very regularly to the following conclusions:--That the holding of slaves is justifiable by the doctrine and example contained in Holy writ; and is; therefore consistent with Christian uprightness, both in sentiment and conduct. That all things considered, the Citizens of America have in general obtained the African slaves, which they possess, on principles, which can be justified; though much cruelty has indeed been exercised towards them by many, who have been concerned in the slave-trade, and by others who have held them here, as slaves in their service; for which the authors of this cruelty are accountable. That slavery, when tempered with humanity and justice, is a state of tolerable happiness; equal, if not superior, to that which many poor enjoy in countries reputed free. That a master has a scriptural right to govern his slaves so as to keep it in subjection; to demand and receive from them a reasonable service; and to correct them for the neglect of duty, for their vices and transgressions; but that to impose on them unreasonable, rigorous services, or to inflict on them cruel punishment, he has neither a scriptural nor a moral right. At the same time it must be remembered, that, while he is receiving from them their uniform and best services, he is required by the Divine Law, to afford them protection, and such necessaries and conveniencies of life as are proper to their condition as servants; so far as he is enabled by their services to afford them these comforts, on just and rational principles. That it is the positive duty of servants to reverence their master, to be obedient, industrious, faithful to him, and careful of his interests; and without being so, they can neither be the faithful servants of God, nor be held as regular members of the Christian Church.
Freehold Southern farmers of that period would probably agree more with my position than the reverend's in droves, inasmuch as slavery was a social and economic threat to them, as well as a security threat in counties that had very large slave populations concentrated on relatively few estates. It needs to be borne always in mind that slavery had many opponents in the South, whose economic well-being was threatened by it and by the economies of scale of plantation agriculture.
And I'll make the point one last time before desisting for a while: it is your own hostile bracketing technique that has introduced most of the confusion on this and every other thread that has discussed the American Civil War, as the apologists for Lincoln, the North, the Union cause, and for the Northern industrial class reliably resurrect, dust off, and (cynically, IMHO) deploy anew the moralizing attack used 150 years ago by the ideologues of the Abolitionist movement, for the same reasons and for the same purposes.
