Posted on 09/17/2007 2:35:27 PM PDT by Delacon
I remember studing about the American Revolution and the Revolutionary War when I was in school. I don't remember anything about the Secessionary War being fought between 1776 and 1783.
BWahahahaha! The DoI asserted that men were equal (no divine right of Kings), free to decide which form of government they preferred. John Brown was a mass murderer, a lunatic. The framers were neither. HUGE difference.
Which was exactly the position eventually taken by Chief Justice Taney in the Dred Scott decision.
Bravos Sierra. The federal Congress limited military service to whites, and limited naturalization to whites. Even Lincoln believed that he was superior to blacks.
The DoI asserted that men were equal,... free to decide which form of government they preferred.
So if I can get enough people to go along with me, I have the moral right to enslave you and your family?
John Brown was a mass murderer, a lunatic.
True enough. I never said he was a nice guy. I said his attempts to lead a slave rebellion were and are morally defensible.
I'm not sure why you think my characterization of Dred Scott is BS. Taney stated that blacks were not and could not be US citizens, in plain defiance of historical facts. That his opinion was widely popular at the time had absolutely nothing to do with whether it war correct. BTW, at the time war broke out he had been working for several years on decision which would make it unconstitutional for states to outlaw slaver.
People confuse the Declaration and the Constitution. The Declaration was a statement of moral principles which did nothing to establish a form of government.
The Constitution does not, except implicitly, proclaim moral principles. It is rather an attempt to establish a government based on the principles outlined in the Declaration.
Perhaps I can take this to another level. If you and your family were enslaved, would you have a moral right to fight and kill for your freedom? If you have such a right, on what moral grounds do you deny the same right to anyone else? And if a human has the moral right to fight for freedom, don't other humans have the moral right to help them do so?
“Sheesh, you obviously don’t know jack - Jefferson DID condemn slavery in HIS draft of the DoI:”
You can’t be that obtuse. My whole point was that HIS draft is not the Declaration, and as an aside that if HIS draft had been the Declaration, slavery would have been condemned in it. It was reworked massively before it went to press. Trying to connect the Kentucky Resolutions which he authored and the Declaration which was authored by every member of the continental congress, is a weak argument. I wouldn’t say he was a ghost writer. He was a great man and he made great contributions to the final draft but it wasn’t even near his own. It wasn’t his own thoughts. The Kentucky Resolutions were and most of the country at that time condemned the resolutions that were his singular effort. Interesting that both Jefferson’s identity in authorship of the Kentucky Resolutions and Madison’s identity in the Virginia Resolutions weren’t revealed until years after the resolutions had passed into historical ignominity. On these they appeared to both be ghost writers.
“Just read some history. The South was being disproportionately taxed for the benefit of the industrial North. You don’t really think the Southerners decided to leave on a whim, do you?”
Well no. The taxes and tariffs that the South groused so much about were applied uniformly across all of the states. There is no act that said “Georgia shall pay this tax...). Yes, the impact of these laws was not uniformly felt. The South as a region took a heavier hit. But those same laws hurt the farmers in PA and NY as they did SC and GA. A countrywide civil war between agrarians and industrialists may have been justifiable. But that little bothersome difference between northern agrarians(who paid their laborers) and southern agrarians(who didn’t) over slavery didn’t make that possible.
Do you really think supporting someone full-time, including before and after they stop working, was cheaper than hiring labor? I seem to recall that de Tocqueville talked about this when he made a comparison of the opposite banks of the Ohio River.
ML/NJ
And everyone in the South was doing the bidding of these "slave owning aristocrats"? Please! Most Southerners did not own slaves and my guess is that they didn't care much about the "slave owning aristocrats." I'm not sure what was a Ponzi scheme about slavery. To be sure, ordinary Southerners would have cared about admitting only "free" States because it would have caused their interests to slide further in Washington. I'm not sure how Lincoln was going to block expansion of slavery into the territories. Wasn't that one of the things that the Dred Scott decision said the Federal government did not have the power to do? The non-slave-owning Southerners might have been worried about all those emancipated slaves in their midst but one of the things "Honest Abe" promised was that the existing Slave States could keep their slavery and that he would support enforcement of the fugitive slave laws. So there was not supposed to be any forced emancipation under Lincoln and such fears would have been unfounded.
ML/NJ
“Do you really think supporting someone full-time, including before and after they stop working, was cheaper than hiring labor? I seem to recall that de Tocqueville talked about this when he made a comparison of the opposite banks of the Ohio River.”
Actually I’ve read articles that support the argument that slave labor is not cheaper than non slave labor. Nothing conclusive. I like the idea and think it has merit. So let me stupulate that slave labor was more expensive than paid labor. Would your point then be that the slave owners were not only immoral but stupid businessmen as well? No wonder the northern farmers didn’t join with them.
You couldn't sell the hired labor at a moments notice. And what was there to supporting a slave anyway? Clothing was rudimentary. The food was raised on the plantation, by slave labor. Housing was not a continuing expense. Other than their original cost the continuing expense was nothing next to the labor they produced.
How?
Could be. I don't know. I do know that slavery was legal in the North for quite some time, and it died off probably because owning slaves was not economically efficient rather than because of any moral consideration. (Northerners did not, for the most part, free their slaves but sold them to Southerners.) Owning slaves may very well have been a luxury that wealthy Southerners could afford.
As for "immoral," who decides? Slavery is common in the Bible with rules about how slaves should be treated. Aristotle speaks of slavery's virtues. Some of what we think about slavery now has to do with its eventual association with the War Between the States. Slavery is hardly the worst of human conditions. Just consider my great-grandmother. She died at Auschwitz.
ML/NJ
They held an honest election?
:O)
Usually your arguments make more sense than this.
You also didn't have to pay to purchase a laborer. Food that was feed to a slave had economic value. It could have been sold. Housing was not an expense the same way that it costs an airline nothing to fly you on a less than full airplane because they were going anyway. And as for the production value of a slave, maybe you can explain why slavery died off on its own in the North. If you could have a slave for free, and the slave wanted to be your slave, would you take him? I wouldn't. It's not because there are no chores around here that need doing, but it's a lot cheaper to hire people when I need them than to put them up and feed them in exchange for their work.
ML/NJ
“As for “immoral,” who decides? Slavery is common in the Bible with rules about how slaves should be treated. Aristotle speaks of slavery’s virtues. Some of what we think about slavery now has to do with its eventual association with the War Between the States. Slavery is hardly the worst of human conditions. Just consider my great-grandmother. She died at Auschwitz.”
I decide. So has most of the world’s population going back to before the civil war. You say “Some of what we think about slavery now has to do with its eventual association with the War Between the States”. No, Britain outlawed even the trafficing in slaves before our civil war and beat the hell out of our slave ships. I can’t understand how you could minimize slavery in light of your great grandmother(hell I just can’t understand it). I just posted to someone else on this thread that the only people that have more of a right to revolution than slaves are those being subjected to genocide. Slavery and genocide. Neither should be used to minimize the other.
I'll also tell you, as I've said often here before, that I would rather have been Thomas Jefferson's slave than a coal miner. This doesn't cause slavery to be something I would choose over the life I do have, but my guess is that more than one percent of the world's population would prefer Southern slavery to their current lot.
ML/NJ
In the first place I would question just what machinery the farmers were buying, regardless of source. Farming was labor intensive, plantation agriculture even more than most. There wasn't any machinery for them to be importing that would help that. In the second place I would dispute your claim that there were more farmers down south than up North. There was three times the farm acreage up North than down South. Almost twice as many draft animals, 1.5 times as much livestock of all kinds. The North produced twice as much corn, four times as much wheat, all of which indicates a large rural population. And if we accept your claim as true for the sake of arguement, a much larger market for imported machinery.
As do yours. Sometimes.
You also didn't have to pay to purchase a laborer.
Nor could you sell him. A slave was an investment that could be liquidated and which appreciated in value for many years of their life. A laborer was an expense, nothing more.
Food that was feed to a slave had economic value. It could have been sold.
Without the slave it would not have been grown to begin with so your claim of opportunity cost makes no sense. The cost of the food was next to nothing. Grown on the plantation with slave labor it represented no real expense to the plantation owner.
Housing was not an expense the same way that it costs an airline nothing to fly you on a less than full airplane because they were going anyway.
Housing was not a continuing expense. Throw up a cabin, with slave labor, and it could be used for generations of slaves with little maintenance.
And as for the production value of a slave, maybe you can explain why slavery died off on its own in the North.
The North did not have the labor-intensive plantations that the South had, and more importantly society turned against it.
If you could have a slave for free, and the slave wanted to be your slave, would you take him? I wouldn't.
You're not a member of mid-19th century Southern society.
It's not because there are no chores around here that need doing, but it's a lot cheaper to hire people when I need them than to put them up and feed them in exchange for their work.
And if there aren't people around to hire? Or if your neighbor down the road offers a dollar or two more than you? And what if the person you want to hire is a real boob or a thief? Slaves was an investment. A cheap source of labor. And a reliable source that would be there when you needed them.
And what about when your children were sold? That's the factor everyone seems to be forgetting--slaves weren't just labor, they were livestock that bred and increased their numbers, creating wealth for their owners. The numbers of slaves in the US was rising fast in the mid-19th Century, despite the fact that the international slave trade had been all but shut down, and the price of slaves was going up.
Did Jefferson sell the children of his slaves?
ML/NJ
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