[lentulusgracchus]

To continue our discussion -- or rather, your diatribal dissertation at #2629, let us resume where I left off my original reply. We were discussing Abolitionist propaganda and its moralizing, absolutist quality, which was no longer intended to debate or discuss, but precisely to demonize and incite to violence:

[You] So abolitionists tried to arouse sympathy for slaves and were accused of demonizing their opponents. You try to arouse sympathy for Southerners and demonize your opponents. What's the difference?

One difference is that I'm not trying to get anyone killed. They were. Doubt me? Explain "Beecher's Bibles", John Brown, and the Wide-Awake intrusions into Texas.

Another is that I am not trying to "demonize" Abolitionists, or you, but to show that their rhetoric, and yours, is at root fundamentally absolutist, inimical to reasoned discourse, and hostile.

They, like you, returned to the theme of slavery again and again, and for the same reason: they were playing "Blemish", which is not discourse but a dishonest transaction, and polemic. It isn't give and take: it's "bash the other guy's head in". Nobody is under any moral injunction to hold a "conversation" with a robber or rapist whose idea of discourse is "Down on the ground! Now!!" with polysyllabic obscenities mixed in.

By departing from Enlightenment standards of discussion and debate and repairing to red-meat polemic instead, Abolitionists ended the conversation about slavery. From that point on, their contribution to the subject was recrimination, bitter moral condemnation, propaganda and violence.

So to carry on was, for these New England-trained fanatics, more than just moral chutzpah, it was rank hypocrisy, inasmuch as their diatribe against slavery overlooked -- nay, blinked -- the Yankee participation in the slave trade; and their moral indictment of Southern customs and institutions overlooked conveniently New Englanders' own moral liabilities as the exterminators of the Pequod, Wampanoag, and Narragansett Indians only a little more than a century before. And let's not even start on the subject of labor relations.

How is your rhetoric any more rational or enlightened than theirs? For that matter, in what way was the abolitionists' rhetoric worse than anyone else's in 19th century America? Surely, Southern fire-eaters weren't more dispassionate and reasonable than others of that day.

Theirs was worse because a) they started it and b) by starting that kind of non-debating debate, coarsened public discourse to the point of failure and beyond. Indeed, they killed public comity and the spirit of reasonableness quite deliberately.

Certainly you will admit that the dissolution of the Union was not a success case for the idea of reasoned discourse in a free society. And I repeat -- the Abolitionists were the culprits. They were the ones who kicked over the table and dumped the punch-bowl, forcing everyone they could to take sides and square off for a civil war.

[x]

I scarcely know what to do with these diatribes coming a week or more after the original discussion. The 19th century style of rhetoric was far from what one would expect from Enlightenment rationalism. Mid-19th century abolitionism differed from late 18th century abolitionism in the same way that mid-19th century politics and culture differed from late 18th century politics and culture.

Was the change deplorable? It was. Did it make that much of a difference? That's doubtful. Some states would resist abolition as long as they could. Some reformers would get mad about that eventually. The slaveowners would respond in kind, hardening in attitudes in order to resist what they were already committed to resist.

It's too much to want everyone everywhere to simply accept slavery forever -- even if the vast majority of people did. Someone would object, and that would become the threat against which slave state communities would circle the wagons.

And the more time the vast majority gave the slaveowners -- the less most people cared about the slaves -- the more like the people who did object would do so in a desperately moralistic tone. It would have been preferable if they had kept their heads, but I'm not going to make the abolitionists the only villains -- if villains they are -- in the piece.

You approve of hot-headedness in the name of interests you agree with, but oppose passion when it acts in the name of other interests. The heritage of 1776 may have meant that when Southerners wanted independence they went about it in the most direct, least compromising way. That same heritage meant that when a small group of Americans began to think about slavery and its wrongs seriously, that they'd take a moralistic and immediatist stance.

I have to laugh at your saying that my way of arguing is "at root fundamentally absolutist, inimical to reasoned discourse, and hostile." You bundle together truly passionate immediatist abolitionists with more moderate politicians like Lincoln, who simply opposed the expansion of slavery to the territories and hoped, like the founders, that eventually slavery would be brought to an end.

But that's what Southern militants did in 1860. They made all opposition to their wishes part of a massive anti-slavery anti-Southern conspiracy. Ordinarily society survives fanatics of one sort or another by recognizing how few they are. When people come to portray all those on the other side of political divides as dangerous fanatics. That's when the trouble started.

I can't help but notice a parallel. You seem to think from the way you write that I am your worst enemy. But the fact that I've put up with your nonsense when many people wouldn't suggests otherwise. So it was in the old days. In the eyes of many Southerners, if you weren't fully for slavery, you were against the South. That's the mindset that produced the war. If we want to refight the war, you're all set and ready to go. But if we want to understand what happened and why, we may need to step back from such attitudes.

I don't blame Southerners of the 1850s and 1860s for acting as they did. In their place I would have done the same thing. I don't blame the Aztecs for fighting to defend their way of life either. But when we talk about the past today we recognize that a lot has changed in time.

I have sympathy for what happened to the Aztecs, but have to admit that Aztec values aren't absolutely the same as ours. We'd feel funny -- I hope -- about asserting "The Aztecs Were Right!" So while I do have some sympathy for the plight of the Old South -- more than a lot of people do -- I can't say that their fight was our fight or that their idea of what was right is ours. And that is apparently what you want. Fortunately for all of us. You won't get it.

You don't directly answer about whether you would have put up the Liberty Place monument or whether you favor keeping it in place. But I think anyone can read between the lines. I don't know if the monument is still there. Though it was there just a few years ago. Here's an old picture:

You can get a newer one (covered with Nazi or anti-Nazi slogans) by googling "Liberty Monument."