You guys are having a really good discussion!
Slavery was an institution which existed pretty much everywhere in one form or another for centuries. It’s looked upon today as horrible and perhaps the greatest evil in history. That’s fair enough, I suppose, but people need to remember that modern ideas of freedom simply didn’t exist until the economic conditions arose which allowed them. People didn’t pontificate about libertarian ideals circa 267 BC or 834 AD.
Life was very hard until relatively recently in human history. Unless you were extremely wealthy, your daily life was something we would consider unthinkable today. You worked from dawn to dusk at backbreaking labor. You didn’t have the luxury of worrying about what to do with your free time, much less entertain higher questions such as, “Is it right for a man to own another man?” Many people would have been better off owned as a slave by a benevolent rich man than tending to a small plot of land that could be wiped out at any time by a flood, a drought, insects, or other natural occurrences. Slavery was really nothing more than a social services and public works type system where the rich or the taxpayers provided for the poor in return for their forced labor. Some owners and overseers were kind, others brutal, but the system itself was never really questioned. After all, life itself could be either kind or brutal, particularly brutal in those days. That’s why the Bible never outright condemns slavery. It doesn’t mandate it, either. We’re thus free to abolish it as a system.
As capitalism, mercantile economies, and concepts of political liberty grew, slavery was increasingly seen as bad and was phased out or banned in the Western nations. The establishment of colonies, however, brought it back for a time, largely because these new territories were vast, primitive in the beginning, and seen as needing forced labor to get started. This was unfortunate, of course, but it happened. Once something like that happens, you have to look at it in the context of its time, as well as in its overall effects.
The reason slavery became a racially based practice in America (yes, there were whites who traded their freedom for passage to the New World, etc., but ultimately it became racial) was because Africa was teeming with slavery. It had never once crossed the mind of black Africans that slavery was wrong, and they’d likely still be practicing slavery there today if the colonial powers hadn’t eventually put an end to it. So when slavery made its unfortunate revival in America, Africa was a logical source for slave purchases.
Was it a “bad thing”? Yes, but it’s also true that many a slave was well-treated, probably most. And it’s undeniably true that black Americans today are better off because slavery occurred. Should it have been banned? Absolutely, because a society that relishes liberty should not permit someone to be physically owned and enslaved by someone else. It simply doesn’t fit in a society where liberty is cherished, and the South held onto their archaic institution way beyond any point in which it could be justified by arguing that it fit into the social structures of the era.
Should we wallow in guilt over it today? Should we flay ourselves or flay southerners over it? Absolutely not. Someone mentioned the Holocaust earlier. I have a Jewish friend who literally can’t watch movies that deal with the Holocaust. Even though those films (such as Schindler’s List) are designed to remind us of a great evil so that we hopefully never repeat it, she can’t bear to see what happened to her people, and never brings it up unless the topic is somehow invoked by others. It’s interesting that blacks have been conditioned by liberalism to dwell incessantly on the bad things that happened to their ancestors. A few years ago, it was reported that the National Park Service wanted to highlight slavery more in order to attract blacks to Civil War sites. Someone recently e-mailed me an article about blacks and opera. It was argued that more blacks would go to opera, ballet, and classical music concerts if these arts focused on slavery and Jim Crow laws and lynchings.
That’s not the key to black success. The key is to follow the good advice of Herman Cain, Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell, Michael Steele, and others, and stop demanding benefits because of something bad that happened decades or even centuries ago.
I agree with everything you said.
It is notable that one American who never condemned southerners as a group for being saddled with slavery was A. Lincoln. He once said that he wouldn’t know how to end the practice himself if he were given all power, so he couldn’t really condemn others for not being able to end it.
But there is a major difference between recognizing that an evil institution is very difficult to get rid of, and proclaiming that it is a good, even being willing to start and continue one of the bloodiest wars in history to protect the institution against distant threats.
What you said...nice post.