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Why do you invent some counterfactual like this? Do you have any evidence that ThJ ever did something like this?

First, I never said he did, I merely said he could. It was entirely within his rights as a slaveholder to dispose of his slaves for whatever reason he wished. Even for fripperies at Monticello.

Second, he, the great advocate of fiscal responsibility and solvency, was an undisciplined and profligate spender who, due to his own whims and his architectural monomania in building and rebuilding his temple to himself, accumulated at least $100,000 in debt. (Sort of like the way he, as the great advocate of separation of the races, apparently didn't mind knocking his revolutionary boots with Ms. Hemmings...) Upon his death, his slaves were sold to pay for his debts. So is it unreasonable to assume that he would have been so concerned about the welfare of people he owned as property that he wouldn't sell then to satisfy a passing fancy? Nothing in his history suggested that he wouldn't.

The idea that a coal miner's kid can do anything with his life is equally fanciful. History is about real stuff.

Slave children were slaves and had no opportunity to do anything but serve another and to exist at their pleasure. Coal miner's children experienced great hardships, but they were not legally required to toil in the mines. Sadly, many had little or no practical choices, but there was the hope that they could do more. Slavery means that there is no hope.

But what do I know? After all, history is unanimous on the subject. No child of a coal miner ever did anything with his or her life. There is not one singe instance of success of a coal miner's son or a Coal Miner's Daughter...

I can assure you that some of my great-grandparents, no doubt, wished they were someones slave.

Again, if one wishes he were a slave, that is his business. I think the clinical name for this is masochism.

There are many human conditions that are worse than slavery, but it just doesn't suit the revisionist history of northern aggression not have been fighting for the noblest of all causes.

Slavery is not objectionable merely for its brutality. (The manner in which the southern slave holders treated their fellow man should have determined, in a just Reconstruction, whether each slave holder met the gallows or the jail cell. But that's an argument for another day.) The fact that there are some people who are not slaves, but whose living conditions are worse than the conditions of the best-kept slaves, is really irrelevant. If one is not a slave, there is always the possibility of change, the possibility that a new life can be achieved. And maybe perhaps not even for yourself but for your descendants. A well kept slave has nothing but the fear that things will get worse and no way to insure that it will not.

I wonder if you could ask you great-grandparents if they would choose slavery over coal mining if, as a result that choice, they knew their children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, etc., would also be slaves. Wouldn't you endure the hardship of a life of coal mining if you thought that your children might not have to?

As for historical revisionism, it is willing blindness to history to believe that, after a period of eighty-odd years of fighting over slavery in every way possible (the fugitive slave laws, various Compromises over slavery, newspaper advocacy and agitation, John Brown, the cowardly assault in the Senate on Charles Sumner by that idiot Brooks, bloody murder in Kansas, etc., etc., etc.) that after all that history, one of the sides of that debate - an entire region - would rebel basically all at once because of the Federal Government's fiscal policies. Please.

Was slavery the only issue? Of course not. But to pretend that slavery was a side issue or a footnote is little more than an attempt to maintain an affection for people you admire in the face of the fact that they engaged in acts that you do, or should, find abhorrent and repugnant.

3 out of every 5

You really need to understand some history before you engage in these sorts of discussions. The northerners wanted to count slaves as 0 out of every 5; the southerners wanted to count them as 5 out of every 5. The 3/5 was a compromise, and it had nothing to do with anyones view of the humanity of a slave.

You really need to improve your reading comprehension skills. I did not say that they were seen as 3/5 of a person. I said they counted 3 out of 5 of them for representation purposes. The whip-crackers wanted to count everyone of them because their power in the federal government would increase. This is useful in situations like electing presidents if it is thrown to the house, controlling the federal purse, enacting legislation like the fugitive slave laws, and spreading the cancer of slavery to newly acquired territory. (Unless you're so naive to believe that the Southerners intended to send people with the slaves' interest at heart to Washington.)

Northerners rightly did not want them to be counted in apportioning the seats in the House of Representation, because to do so made a complete mockery of the very notion that this was a representative body. They wanted the make-up of the House to reflect truth: since the non-slave population were the only ones actually being represented in the House, the count should only be of the that population.