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."
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. One obvious difference is that the rhetoric mobilized Northern opinion in a way that 18th-century antislavery discourse did not, and led directly to dissolution of the society and war.
That is the point that I was trying to make, citing the academic psychologist's study of Abolition rhetoric (among other rhetorics). Her point was, her study led her to the creeping suspicion, bordering on conclusion, that violence has played a much bigger role than we, in our democratic "free-speech" propaganda bath, would like to admit. I would stipulate to it, as regards the civil-rights movement, which was a confrontation solved by one side's successful enlistment of the power of Northern elites to use the latent violence of the State against dissenting Southerners. Legally, ending segregation was a law-enforcement problem -- once the law was changed. Politically, it was a strategic paradigm change enforced by National Power deployed against the People.
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.
No, I don't "approve of hot-headedness". I've been quite explicit in my disagreement with, and disapproval of, the intemperateness of e.g. Edmund Ruffin and Robert Toombs; Ruffin closed out his side of the conversation by, if you will, American seppuku, even if Ruffin probably intended his suicide only selfishly (to avoid the Yankees), or possibly symbolically, in emulation of Cato the Younger, whose suicide rankled Caesar mightily because it stigmatized his domination of the optimates by civil war and bloodshed. (It's an idle speculation whether Lincoln, had he lived, would have faced a similar deconstruction of his carefully-manicured aura of legitimacy by latterday dissenters. He certainly avoided the collision with Congress that Johnson endured.)
But, classicizing gestures aside, Ruffin and the other counsellors of rash action who pressurized Jefferson Davis into accepting the proffered war bear, as I've said, a grave responsibility for the war's outbreak and their People's subsequent prostration by the dictator.
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.
I think you're naive about Lincoln. I disagree that he was really a moderate. I think he was just as committed to the total abolition of slavery as the Grimke sisters or Frederick Douglass. But the difference between them and him was one of deadly effectiveness. Within six weeks of taking office, Lincoln led the country to war. How moderate was that?
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 agree that there was a great deal of inflexibility in the positions a lot of Southerners took, and nothing like the flexuous adaptiveness, popular touch, and farsightedness that Lincoln displayed in measuring and slaying the South. He was the better politician, in the worse cause. The Southerners, for their part, seemed to want to prosecute their politics according to code duello, and they were excessively quarrelsome and demanding in the face of the greater emergency: their need for mutual assistance cooperation was much greater than Lincoln's, but their conduct in pursuing their own lights (and I am thinking of General Bragg and his circle here, and the state governors) often made adversaries like General Halleck look like paragons of perspicuousness in comparison. Jefferson Davis, too, fell short of the mark by many people's estimation, even allowing for his greater burden, and was particularly lacking in Lincoln's virtues like flexibility and charm. His failure not merely to balance the needs of the theater commanders, but even to detect and eliminate the hoarding of vast supplies by his own commissary in the face of exigent need in the field, is one of the central failures of the Civil War.
But having said all that, I don't think that obduracy on the part of the Confederates was the determinant of the outbreak of war. Given their obduracy, other things happened that caused the war to break out. But to imply that they owed it to the public peace to lay down their rights is to say too much, and I think you'll concede the fact that rights held to only when they are uncontroversial aren't really rights, but only concessions or usufructs.
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.
Stop it. I'm damned tired of these sneaking imputations of racism -- you keep doing that. No, I don't give a damn about Liberty Place -- but I do give a damn about Orwellian views of history, and you seem to have one, as do PC black politicians. Correct me if I'm wrong -- you one of these "usable history" buffs?
The answer for history you don't like is, make some more history that you do. Tearing down other people's monuments just isn't American, it's totalitarian and vindictive.