Will Travel, Have Gun

@An American Voter: Thanks. I actually used a piece of that interview in a different post.

@SoCal Chris: Thanks. I’ve seen that and think it’s been linked before; but can’t remember where I’ve seen it.

Like what, Gaffa?

Oh I don’t know – howabout the Slave trade

How about America not being uniquely guilty?

How about the institution of slavery being around in most every culture in the world long before the United States ever became a twinkle in the Founders’ eyes?

How about how what is remarkable, is not that America had slave-owners, but how quickly slavery was ended in the United States?

(and yes – no thanks to the Brits & those Africans who sold other Africans),

And yes, no thanks to the Islamic world of 1300 years of ceaseless slave-trading that went on openly for another 100 years after it was brought to an end in the West.

Civil War,

Uh….yes? Thanks for making my case: Our country had a war that resulted in the ending of slavery in the U.S., at the expense of 620,000 lives. Does it matter to you that the skin-color of many abolitionists was…white?

lack of voting rights,

Today?

Dred Scott v. Sandford,

The “three-fifths” clause had nothing to say about the intrinsic worth of blacks.

The origins of the clause is over political representation between the northern and southern states:

The origins fo the clause are to be found in the debate between the northern states and the southern states over the issue of political representation. The South wanted to count blacks as whole persons, in order to increase its political power. The North wanted blacks to count for nothing- not for the purpose of rejecting their humanity, but in order to preserve and strengthen the antislavery majority in Congress. It was not a proslavery southerner but an antislavery northerner, James Wilson of Pennsylvania, who proposed the three-fifths compromise. The effect was to limit the South’s political representation and its ability to protect the institution of slavery. Frederick Douglass understood this: he called the three-fifths clause “a downright disability laid upon the slaveholding states” which deprived them of “two-fifths of their natural basis of representation.” So a provision of the Constitution that was antislavery and pro-black in intent as well as in effect is today cited to prove that the American founders championed the cause of racist oppression.
-pg 110, What’s So Great About America?, Dinesh D’Souza

Gaffa:

Jim Crow laws, KKK, lynching, Montgomery Bus Boycott, Martin Luther King assassination, beating of Rodney King and the continued difference in opportunities today.

How can you lump Rodney King in there? Oh, yeah….probably bought into the media hype, like “Bush hates black people” over Hurricane Katrina.

Please let me know if you know of any Americans who celebrate MLK’s assassination, lynchings, etc. in 2009. I personally know of nada one.

Whilst compensation is ridiculous – the history of blacks in the US over the last 300 years is bad

Because they would have been far better off if their ancestors- about 3% of the transatlantic slaves (at least 94% went to Central and South America)– had stayed in the paradise that is today the continent of Africa. Ever read Keith Richburg’s “Out of America“?

and no wonder they feel put upon. Blatant discrimination from the sixties is still in living memory and things aren’t exactly perfect today.

Yeah, we just elected an uber-liberal president….not exactly perfect, today. And those who elected him to the highest office in the land did so either in spite of or because of the color of his skin. So tell your “America is a racist nation” notions to “go figure”.

That doesn’t excuse criminality or ‘positive’ discrimination (or whatever the PC crowd choose to dress it). However if white people were treated like they were -and in some case still are – then we would be pretty pissed.

My experience is that there are those- not all- but those carrying chips on their shoulders who perpetuate racism and see it where none exists. They look for it, and create the problem; fabricate it in their own heads.

America has racism, sure. But it is not uniquely racist.

And whilst there is racial tension in many countries – like the UK – the US has a bigger weight to carry in terms of it’s relatively recent history which does go back to the involuntary movement and slavery of human beings.

Absolute BS. America and Britain deserve credit- not blame- for its role in bringing about the end of slavery, not just in their own countries, but around the world. THAT is what is the remarkable story. The anti-slavery movement began nowhere else except in the West.

Obviously things have got a lot better over the last 50 years. So race should be a sensitive issue.

No….the sentence should read “so race SHOULDN’T be a sensitive issue.”

The only thing that is really holding “the black man” down today is “the black man” and preoccupied obsessiveness over race. Morgan Freeman when asked, “How do we get beyond race?” [paraphrased], responded, “Stop talking about it.” And what that translates to, is “stop obsessing over it, if you want racism to go away.”

How many blacks in America, living today, actually had American slave ancestors?

Dismiss it as white liberal guilt if you want – but they got plenty of reasons to gripe and comparing it to Africa is like comparing apples & oranges.

You let me know when there is a mass migration out of America because the country is so race repressive.

Sorry for the short response, but I’m off to work.

I’ll have you know I skipped my shower for this comment….

Gaffa #22:

Although I’m English – I’m not saying England is better than US in this regard. I even included Britain twice when refering to slave trade & the situation of Apartheid in South Africa. The UK has had plenty of race flare ups – although I would say because of history and that UK has less ethnic percentage that race relations aren’t so tense – not because the Brits (generally) are somehow less racist than the US.

Do you think America is all about racial division in the current clime? I’d say America as a whole is extremely tolerant and diverse.

This reminds me of my cousins in Japan fearing to visit Los Angeles because they’ve heard all the news sensationalist headlines about drive-by shootings.

Please don’t believe the hype. There is more racial harmony in the Colonies today than there is divisiveness. And the ones who are mostly race agitators are the ones who see America in terms of race- the Al Sharptons, Jesse Jacksons, NAACP, Reverend Wrights, etc.

Gaffa #15

@Wordsmith

How about America not being uniquely guilty?

Who said anything about uniquely?

It’s rather assumed, given that people for the most part only speak about American slavery, ignoring that slavery existed for thousands of years all over the damn globe.

How about the institution of slavery being around in most every culture in the world long before the United States ever became a twinkle in the Founders’ eyes?

So that makes it okay then?

Of course not! But have you ever in your life talked about slave history of other countries? It isn’t an “everybody did it so it’s ok” dodge to simply point out that America participation in the history of slavery is not unique and is less than the contributions to it by others in its 10,000 year history. Why should America harbor a special burden of guilt, while all others are guilt-free regarding their respective nation’s past crimes? Is there any other nation that so obsesses over their country’s crimes of the past more than the U.S.? And gets bludgeoned over the head with it by foreigners, to boot?

How about how what is remarkable, is not that America had slave-owners, but how quickly slavery was ended in the United States?

Well slaves had been used in colonial and when the US was formed for approx 200 years until the end of the Civil War. So that makes up over 50% of the time slavery was in existence in what is now the US. Seems the Declaration of Indepedence didn’t cover the freedoms and pursuit of happiness if you had a black face.

Did you know Thomas Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration of Independence specifically condemned slavery? Calling African slavery “cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty” and also wrote that “a market where men should be bought and sold” was “piratical warfare.”

Did the colonial U.S. have attitudes toward blacks that were any different than that of mainstream attitudes throughout the world? Certainly racist attitudes developed over the course of time; but I don’t think in the beginning, the enslavement of blacks had to do with racial prejudice as much as it had to do with economic opportunity. In the early days, black slaves brought to America in the 1600’s weren’t treated much differently than indentured white servants, and most eventually worked their way to buying their freedom. White indentured servants and black slaves toiled side by side in tobacco fields in Virginia; and Irish imiigrants were hired by some to do work considered too dangerous for expensive slaves to do. So did the plantation owners hold racist attitudes because they owned black slaves and hired Irish workers to do dangerous work? Or were they driven by simple economic interests?

Our country had a war that resulted in the ending of slavery in the U.S., at the expense of 620,000 lives. Does it matter to you that the skin-color of many abolitionists was…white?

There would of been no such war if there had been no such oppression. And I’m not saying all whites are racist and we are all guilty for the sins of our fathers.

Yet your attitude suggests a singling out of America as the only nation guilty of slavery and of doing so out of racism. At the time, was America the only nation who had slave-owners? What did other nations do on behalf of ending slavery? It was Britain and the U.S. who brought an end to the slave trade and the institution of slavery itself, beginning in the 19th century. No where else on planet earth was there an anti-slavery movement that developed. Slavery was a norm in the ancient world.

Keep in mind too, that not all of America owned slaves or approved of the institution, pre-Civil War. America’s prosperity was not built upon slaves. Those states who did partake of the institution did not fare as well, economically, as those states who were not slave-based economies. Pennsylvania passed emancipation in 1780; Connecticut and Rhode Island in 1784; New York in 1799.

Today?

I was talking about various points along history. Although I suppose you can argue there is some voting irregulaties e.g. Maimi-Dade county in Florida in 2000.

Good grief. There was no voter disenfranchisement based on race:

“African voter disenfranchisement”? Not a single black voter ever came forward with a credible claim, and voter turnout for black Floridians was higher than in previous elections.

The “three-fifths” clause had nothing to say about the intrinsic worth of blacks.

So if I said you are three-fifths of a person as you are a white person but don’t worry it’s nothing to do with your ‘intrinsic’ worth – you wouldn’t find that a tad offensive and racist? lol c’mon. Clearly it’s indefensible.

lol c’mon…clearly you’re not making the mistake of applying 21st century standards to the 19th century without also trying to understand the constraints of the times? This is like criticizing Lincoln for not freeing all of the slaves all at once or criticizing the Emancipation Proclamation for not going far enough.

judging the 18th century by 20th and 21st century moral standards? Easy to do, today, armchaired by the distance of history.

~~~

Try putting yourself in the context of the times, and the social constraints of what was possible. Your casting moral judgment is anachronistic. Moral choices can be made only from options that are actually available to be made. More excerpts from Sowell’s Black Rednecks and White Liberals:

We cannot assume twenty-first century options, or even present-day knowledge, when judging decisions made in the 19th century. Nor can we assume that we have superior knowledge of the social realities of an earlier era that we never lived through, compared to the first-hand knowledge of those who confronted those realities daily and inescapably.

This isn’t to say we can’t “judge” the past and shouldn’t learn from it; but in being careful how we proceed to judge and analyze without understanding not only from our perspective but also from within the perspective of those who lived within the times.

Do you not understand why some who were profoundly against slavery were also against abolitionists? If you cannot understand these things then it’s no wonder why my Dredd Scott point flew right over your head.

How can you lump Rodney King in there? Oh, yeah….probably bought into the media hype, like “Bush hates black people” over Hurricane Katrina.

A savage beating by the people who are supposed to uphold the law?

Was it racially motivated? You lumped it in there to buttress your point, but now you’re shifting goal posts.

Please let me know if you know of any Americans who celebrate MLK’s assassination, lynchings, etc. in 2009. I personally know of nada one.

Not sure how that is relevant. I didn’t say anyone did celebrate such events.

The point is, you’re dredging up every racial transgression that comes to mind to point out how blacks are justified in holding a chip on their shoulder to this day; nevermind that half of them occurred 150 years ago, and the decades since the ’60’s has seen lots of changes- yet somehow, America’s still racist, America’s still holding the black man down, etc. Bullshit. It’s stereotypical liberal race-baiting bs that perpetuates discord rather than promotes racial harmony. It makes a lot of people angry- black and white- who haven’t lived the lives they read about, regarding oppression, prejudice, disenfranchisement, etc. Some of that still occurs, but it’s greatly magnified and amplified into distorted proportions by those on your side of the political spectrum.

Because they would have been far better off if their ancestors- about 3% of the transatlantic slaves (at least 94% went to Central and South America)– had stayed in the paradise that is today the continent of Africa. Ever read Keith Richburg’s “Out of America“?

Probably not. But if they are born and bred in the US then they should be treated equally as a US citizen.

Today, how are they not treated equally and wholly as U.S. citizens? This isn’t America of a generation ago.

Yeah, we just elected an uber-liberal president….not exactly perfect, today. And those who elected him to the highest office in the land did so either in spite of or because of the color of his skin. So tell your “America is a racist nation” notions to “go figure”.

Bravo – after 42 white presidents you got there.

That’s such a canard. In the 18th and 19th century, was the population makeup of equal proportion between whites, blacks, asians, etc.? That’s like accusing Japan of not having elected a caucasian Japanese to be prime minister or Britain of not yet having a citizen with Hindu ancestry as British prime minister. Maybe I should accuse the NBA of racism for having a disproportionate number of black athletes over asians?

Population of blacks in the U.S. today is still about 13-14% of the population. Yet people think that if 9 out of 10 of your office employees are white with one black, somehow you’re discriminating against blacks, and the one you have is a token?

You know what racism is? It’s racism if I begin choosing blacks to fulfill government positions not on the merits of their ability but because of the color of their skin to fulfill a bogus racial quota. It’s racism if because you perceive an imbalance of 42 white presidents, the next 42 presidents should consist of nothing but non-whites.

I’m sorry to be insulting, but what a stupid asinine point you made. Gee, 43 presidents have been all men. 43 presidents as far as we know were all heterosexual. Any other points I missed covering here?

America was founded by those primarily from European countries, such as Great Britain. It is only natural that in these early years of our founding and subsequent years after, we didn’t have Chinese mayors, Muslim doctors, black presidents, Indian governor, Japanese senators, etc. Social evolution takes time.

Today, it’s ridiculous to accuse the U.S. of not giving equal opportunity to any of its citizens based upon race. People of all ethnic backgrounds occupy positions in all aspects of society.

The US as a country isn’t racist. However like a lot of countries it clearly has a racist history and continues to have issues today.

Kind of another “well duh”….

The issues are driven and kept alive primarily by those who seek it out. If you’re looking for racism, you will probably find it, even when it’s a fabrication of your own mind. I’ve seen this happen firsthand, time and time again.

Absolute BS. America and Britain deserve credit- not blame- for its role in bringing about the end of slavery, not just in their own countries, but around the world. THAT is what is the remarkable story. The anti-slavery movement began nowhere else except in the West.

lol – that reminds me of the Family Guy episode where I think it’s Stewie who tells a black guy there is no need to thank him at Gettysburg because they had written a ‘pretty big cheque for them.’

Great. Liberal humor gets you laughs. Bravo. Makes me laugh, too. I hope that behind that snarky comment, this one didn’t fly over your head as well.

Fact is, some of us have ancestors who number among the 364,000 dead, on the side of the Union. I think Chris, one of the authors here, mentioned in one thread that he had an ancestor involved in smuggling escaped slaves to safety.

Nor were all the States involved in promoting slavery, or had slave-based economies.

Once again: America and Britain deserve unique credit for bringing about the end of slavery as an open institution after 10,000 years of it.

Had you lived in the 1800’s, can you be smugly secure in the knowledge that your moral compass would recognize slavery as an evil institution when it was an accepted part of life for so many cultures for so many generations?

A student asked his history professor: “Where did slavery come from?”

“You’re asking the wrong question,” the professor replied. “The real question is: Where did freedom come from?”
-Chapter 2, Free and Unfree Labor, Applied Economics by Thomas Sowell

Gaffa:

No….the sentence should read “so race SHOULDN’T be a sensitive issue.”

The only thing that is really holding “the black man” down today is “the black man” and preoccupied obsessiveness over race. Morgan Freeman when asked, “How do we get beyond race?” [paraphrased], responded, “Stop talking about it.” And what that translates to, is “stop obsessing over it, if you want racism to go away.”

And yet you seem to be talking about it too…

Uh…..big duh, maybe? Given I’m doing you the courtesy of a response to your earlier comment? Should I talk about the weather instead? Or the deodorant I used in place of a missed morning shower after my morning run?

How many blacks in America, living today, actually had American slave ancestors?

It would be interesting to see the stats if any exist – but I would imagine most – as people intermingle. What’s your point? Do you doubt that many do???

The point is, your comment #10 @ monique:

Good to see Africans see themselves as people and not a color.

Hmm – I wonder if there is anything US history might make them a little bit antsy?

Those blacks who are calling for their 30 acres and a mule, claiming the source of their current situation in life is due to events that happened 150-200 years ago are only holding themselves down in mental and emotional chains.

And as far as stats on the number of blacks who are descended from slaves, I think they do exist, as I’ve heard/read them cited. Most blacks in this country, like Colin Powell and Barack Obama, have no ties to African slave ancestors in America.

You let me know when there is a mass migration out of America because the country is so race repressive.

So does that mean any conservatives in the US today either have to shut up or emmigrate from their country if they don’t like the way things are run?

Is it just my inability to communicate, or are my points just flying right by you?

Jesus frakkin’ Christ…..

Sorry for the short response, but I’m off to work.
I’ll have you know I skipped my shower for this comment….

lol – that was your call. btw – thanks for the civil exchange.

Eff you, you bloody Brit….. 😀

Well as I said – it can be argued…

I don’t see it as very arguable. But then, I’m partisan. You?

Thernstrom/Redenbaugh’s dissent in the highly partisan U.S. Civil Rights Commission report:

“The Commission did not hear from a single witness who was actually prevented from voting as a result of being erroneously identified as a felon. Furthermore, whites were twice as likely as blacks to be placed on the list erroneously, not the other way around.”

More than 6,500 ineligible Florida felons btw, did vote in 2000.

@ WordSmith

– but also in Brazil there are a lot more mixing of the races

Really? I think there are parts of the U.S. that are absolutely integrated racially, with a diversity pool found nowhere else in the world. I suppose it depends on where you go.

but that kind of goes with the role doesn’t it?

Yes, it’s a tough burden being the greatest country on God’s green earth, and have to act humble about it. 😉

I disagree, with reference to my link to Thomas Sowell’s point regarding judging the past through the lens of 21st century morality

I don’t think you can keep running to this to stiffle debate on how we view historical events.

“Stiffle debate”?! I’m trying to win this one! And sorry Charlie, but no one lays it out more clearly and logically than Thomas Sowell, so I will keep “running to him” until you’re bleeding through your nose in Thomas Sowell thinking.

What baffles me is that you still don’t seem to get it. Or maybe you do, and simply disagree. I just think it is plain logic to point out that it is sanctimonious hindsight preaching to the past, drawing assumptive criticism without understanding the context of the times and the constraints. You have the benefit of seeing through the lens of today. But if you had lived in the times of our ancestors, your “smug moral superiority” might not be so clear-cut and obvious. You might have even been on the “wrong side” of the issue (I wouldn’t be surprised, since I find you on the wrong side of so many issues today 😉 ).

I’m not saying that in 18th and 19th century that the US (or anyone else) should have had an Equal Opportunities law for all. But that slavery was a notable sore and was debated in those times. We can use Jefferson’s own words and compare them to his own actions – and there is a big discrepancy for all to see.

It’s arguments like the above that makes me believe that you’re still “not getting it”. That you’re missing the important point and not seeing what is being laid out for you.

Your argument below is another example that you’re failing to understand Sowell, and not simply disagreeing with him and with me:

Clearly Washington was ahead of his time and didn’t like the whole notion of slavery and tried to a degree to rid himself of it. But even so the picture isn’t so simple.

Note…

“At the age of eleven, he inherited ten slaves;by the time of his death there were 316 slaves at Mount Vernon, ”

“The major reason Washington did not emancipate his slaves after the 1782 law and prior to his death was because of the financial costs involved.”

“Also, Washington did not want to risk splitting the new nation apart over the slavery issue. “He did not speak out publicly against slavery”, argues historian Dorothy Twohig, “because he did not wish to risk splitting apart the young republic over what was already a sensitive and divisive issue”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington_and_slavery

Washington could of freed his slaves – or at least given them the opportunity to go if they wished – and paid those who remain and hired help. Imagine what an example that would of set as the first President. But again a person’s pocket comes first over such principles.

I seriously don’t understand how Twohig’s point trumps my point regarding any of the Founders who were anti-slavery. Did you honestly read, study, and digest what I cited from Sowell? Especially since part of your citation is already in my own quotation:

Beginning in the early 1770’s, he rarely bought a slave and he would not sell one, unless the slave consented, which never happened. not selling slaves was an economic loss. Slave labor on a plantation with soil as poor as Mount Veronon brought in little or nothing…The only profit a man in his position would make was by selling slaves to states where agriculture was more flourishing. Washington would not. “I am principled against selling negroes as you would do cattle at a market…” From 1775 until his death, the slave population at Mount Vernon more than doubled.

You’re essentially accusing Jefferson and Washington of hypocrisy, because they supposedly “said one thing, and did another”; or weren’t “pure enough” nor went far enough in their denouncement of slavery. You still don’t seem to get how one could be anti-slavery, yet oppose the abolitionists.

Excuse me while I “run” to more Sowell:

Repeat:

During his public life, Washington was known to leave behind slaves he brought with him on his travels to the north, in effect, freeing them. His behavior as a slaveowner is also noted in Richard Brookhiser’s Founding Father:

Abstract moral decisions are much easier to make on paper or in a classroom in later centuries than in the midst of the dilemmas actually faced by those living in very different circumstances, including serious dangers.

One way to understand the constraints of the times and their effects on public attitudes is to examine the difference between the way that many in nineteenth-century America saw the slave trade, as distinguished from the way that they saw slavery itself. If the institution of slavery and the presence of millions of slaves were facts of life, within which many decision-makers felt trapped by having inherited the consequences of decisions made by others in generations before them, the continuing trade in slaves, whether from Africa or within the United States, was a contemporary problem that was within their control. Thus, decades before slavery was abolished, the United States joined in the outlawing of the international slave trade. Even many Americans not yet ready to support the abolition of slavery as an institution nevertheless made the bringing of more slaves from Africa a capital offense in the United States.

The moral distinction between slave trading and the continuation of slavery as an institution might be hard for some in later centuries to understand because, in the abstract, there is no moral difference. Only in the concrete circumstances faced by the people of the times was there a practical social difference.

On Washington:

However, even those slaveholders with aversions to slavery in principle were constrained by a strong tradition of stewardship, in which the family inheritance was not theirs to dispose of in their own lifetime, but to pass on to others as it had been passed on to them. George Washington was one of those who had inherited slaves and, dying childless, freed his slaves in his will, effective on the death of his wife. His will also provided that slaves too old or too beset with “bodily infirmities” to take care of themselves should be taken care of by his estate, and that the children were to be “taught to read and write” and trained for “some useful occupation.” His estate in fact continued to pay for the support of some freed slaves for decades after his death, in accordance to his will.

The part of Washington’s will dealing with slaves filled almost three pages, and the tone as well as the length of it showed his concerns:

The emancipation clause stands out from the rest of Washington’s will in the unique forcefulness of its language. Elsewhere in it Washington used the standard legal expressions- “I give and bequeath,” “it is my will and direction.” In one instance he politely wrote, “by way of advice, I recommend to my Executors…” But the emancipation clause rings with the voice of command; it has the iron firmness of a field order: “I do hereby expressly forbid the sale….of any Slave I may die possessed of, under an pretext whatsoever.”

Long before reaching this point in his personal life, George Washington had said of slavery as a national issue: “There is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for the abolition of it.” But, like Burke, he saw a need for a plan of some sort, rather than simply freeing millions of slaves in a newly emerging nation surrounded by threatening powers, just as the freed slaves themselves would be surrounded by a hostile population. In short, the moral principle was easy but figuring out how to apply it in practice was not. Moreover, in a country with an elected government, how the white population at large felt could not be ignored. When Washington congratulated Lafayette for the latter’s purchase of a plantation where former slaves could live, he added: “Would to God a like spirit would diffuse itself generally into the minds of the people of this country; but I despair of seeing it.” He saw legislation as the only way to end slavery and said that a legislator who did that would get his vote.”

Slaves that Washington took north with him when he entered public life he quietly left behind when he returned to Virginia after completing his terms as President- in effect freeing them on the sly,” as one biographer put it, at a time when to free them officially could have set off controversies that neither he nor the new nation needed. George Washington was, after all, trying to hold together a fragile coalition of states bearing little resemblance to the world power that the United States would become in later centuries.

As a slaveowner in Virginia, Washington thought of ways he might sublet much of his estate, in which his current slaves “might be hired by the year, as labourers” by tenant farmers. He was clearly casting about for some way, as he put it in a letter, “to liberate a certain species of property which I possess very repugnantly to my own feelings.” But there were no takers. Washington’s behavior as a slaveowner is also worth noting:

Beginning in the early 1770’s, he rarely bought a slave and he would not sell one, unless the slave consented, which never happened. not selling slaves was an economic loss. Slave labor on a plantation with soil as poor as Mount Veronon brought in little or nothing…The only profit a man in his position would make was by selling slaves to states where agriculture was more flourishing. Washington would not. “I am principled against selling negroes as you would do cattle at a market…” From 1775 until his death, the slave population at Mount Vernon more than doubled.

As Southern states in the nineteenth century began to tighten restrictions on the right of slaveowners to free their slaves, in order to forestall the social problems that were widely feared, the laws made manumission increasingly difficult, legally complicated, and a costly process. Those slaveowners who were prepared to grant manumission found it less onerous to let those who were legally their slaves simply live as de facto free persons.
-Pg 149-151, Black Rednecks and White Liberals by Thomas Sowell

I don’t know….Sowell doesn’t say. 😉

Actually, I think clues there are covered in what’s been cited already (absent a direct interview question posed to Washington on why on his deathbed and not prior):

even those slaveholders with aversions to slavery in principle were constrained by a strong tradition of stewardship,

His feelings and thoughts on what to do, an evolving process?

Long before reaching this point in his personal life,

But, like Burke, he saw a need for a plan of some sort, rather than simply freeing millions of slaves in a newly emerging nation surrounded by threatening powers, just as the freed slaves themselves would be surrounded by a hostile population. In short, the moral principle was easy but figuring out how to apply it in practice was not.

laws made manumission increasingly difficult, legally complicated, and a costly process. Those slaveowners who were prepared to grant manumission found it less onerous to let those who were legally their slaves simply live as de facto free persons.

For Jefferson, I believe he was financially strapped; but I don’t think that was the case with Washington. I think, so long as he was alive, he could look after those in his care; once he was gone, he had no such guarantee.

And again, it all goes back to judging men in a previous age without having lived in the context and constraints of their times. They don’t have the luxury to look outside of that context like you and I. In centuries later 20/20 hindsight, would they have acted more boldly with sweeping action and grandiose rhetoric to satisfy the Gaffas of the world?

Why don’t send a letter to Gore and ask him to set the personal example because a future Gaffa 200 years from now will criticize him for hypocrisy.

Only problem with that, of course, is that 200 years from now, we’ll know for certain that the extent of man-made gw was ever utter bs. 😀

So future Gaffas will be criticizing why we at FA didn’t do more to personally make the case against man-made climate change and prevent cap ‘n trade.

Washington’s will actually specified that any/all slaves be freed upon Martha’s death if she survived him.

True (and it’s noted in my citation of Sowell), but Martha also freed the rest of the slaves during her lifetime:

Martha Washington lived until May 22, 1802. George had freed half the slaves of Mount Vernon, and Martha freed the rest.

Also:

Washington ended up freeing all his own slaves, making careful arrangements in his will for their liberation. In December 1800, a year after his death, Abigail Adams visited Martha Washington at Mount Vernon. She wrote to her sister: “One hundred and fifty of [Mrs. Washington’s slaves] are now to be liberated, men with wives and young children who have never seen an acre beyond the farm are now about to quit it, and to go adrift into the world without horse, home or friend. Mrs. Washington is distressed for them. At her expense she has cloaked them all, and very many of them are already miserable at the thought of their lot. The aged she retains at their request; but she is distressed for the fate of others. She feels a parent and a wife.” Nevertheless, within a month she had set them all free.

It is a shame that much of this is lost in our school systems today; and what is taught to children in regards to our Founding Fathers is a reduction to “They owned slaves”. It leads teachers like Marguerite Talley-Hughes, a kindergarten teacher at Jefferson Elementary School in Berkeley, to be offended by the name of the school. Over 4 years ago, there was a push by teachers and parents to have the name changed from “Jefferson” to “Sequoia”. One parent said,

the debate over Jefferson’s slave-owning background convinced her 9-year-old son Eli Baum, who had intended to vote against the name change to ultimately put down “Sequoia” on his ballot.

“I said, Why did you vote for Sequoia over Jefferson?’ and he said, Because Jefferson owned slaves,'”

Fortunately, after much heated debate, the school board voted 3-2 to keep the Jefferson name intact, going against the wishes of the Jefferson Elementary School community, which did vote to change the name to “Sequoia”. Ironically,

even with that name, the school district cannot quite dodge the slavery connotations. Some community members have pointed out that under Chief Sequoia’s leadership in the early 19th century, the Cherokee nation owned more than 1,500 black slaves.

A spokesman for the Berkeley Unified School District, Mark Coplan, acknowledged that Chief Sequoia “presumably owned slaves and was rather barbaric,” but he emphasized that the proposed new name would honor the sequoia tree, not the Cherokee leader.

Among other names that were considered:

Ohlone; Rose; Peace; Cesar Chavez, the farm worker organizer; Ralph Bunche, a United Nations diplomat; Sojourner Truth, a leader in the abolitionist movement; and Florence McDonald, a former Berkeley council member.

Among those names listed, does anyone think that any person so honored is morally pure and absent of flaw and defect?

Another school in the district, Columbus Elementary School, was renamed Rosa Parks Elementary School (with intense debates that almost had it renamed “Cesar Chavez”). James Garfield Middle School was changed in 1968 to Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School. had renamed “Abraham Lincoln Elementary” to “Malcolm X Elementary” in the 70’s.

@GaffaUK:

as I think I have shown – their own rhetoric (and indeed the words of the Declaration of Independence)

Recalling how Jefferson’s first draft specifically denounced slavery…

doesn’t match up to their own personal actions – where money and their own comforts come before principles and the freedoms of others. Of course they are politicians – so no change there.

And as I think I Sowell has shown, what you refuse to factor in, is the fact that these men lived in different times. That you apply anachronistic 21st century moral sight to what was a reality for much of the previous 10,000 years of human civilization…until the 1800’s, beginning with Britain and the U.S. If you had lived in their time period, I seriously doubt you would have known any better than they. Slavery was the norm. Thinking “outside the box” and imagining a world absent of slavery was a revolutionary idea, and was a process of thinking that evolved. Can you not fathom why some who were strongly anti-slavery were also opposed to the abolitionists? Can you not understand how

Garrison’s rhetoric may look better to a later generation but the cold fact is that William Lloyd Garrison did not free a single slave, while Abraham Lincoln freed millions.

Someone like you, in your arguments, essentially would praise a Garrison, while lamenting why Lincoln didn’t do more, right away.

These men lived in different times and it is wrong to dismiss them as hypocrites for not doing more to back up rhetoric with action. It’s sanctimonious bs.

@GaffaUK:

Again…sanctimonious bs and a refusal to put yourself in the restrictions and mindset of a previous age.

But I’m using their OWN words written in the 18th CENTURY or later. Muddy all the waters you like with interpretation, context, 21st century thinking etc but that doesn’t stop the fact that they believed that slavery was wrong.

And what they wanted and what they were capable of doing were not necessarily the same thing. Your interpretation is what muddies the waters of history by applying 21st century standards to the past without placing yourself in their shoes and the world they navigated in.

I guess you choose not to comment on anything before your birth as that would be naturally wrong as things were different generation or do ago.

I guess you forget wordsmith comment #26:

I think one of the keys to healing is to “let go of the past”. Not forget about it- certainly not! We learn from the past.

Our perspective and judgment of the past holds weight; has validity; but one should also make an honest attempt to understand the thinking of those in previous generations when leveling criticism. Try putting yourself in “their shoes” to see why they might have thought one way, yet were constrained in complete action.

Look at how there are those who wish to ban books like Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn because some of the language, attitudes, and characterization may appear to be racist to our 21st sensibilities and PC-induced sensitivities.

I would quite understand your point – IF they had slaves AND never saw anything morally wrong with owing them. But that isn’t the case.

I don’t think you do understand my point at all because of your inability to see why the hypocrisy charge doesn’t stick; you still “no sell” an acknowledgment of

1. Legal constraints

Such as

As Southern states in the nineteenth century began to tighten restrictions on the right of slaveowners to free their slaves, in order to forestall the social problems that were widely feared, the laws made manumission increasingly difficult, legally complicated, and a costly process. Those slaveowners who were prepared to grant manumission found it less onerous to let those who were legally their slaves simply live as de facto free persons.

2. That Freeing slaves in a hostile world might be more cruel than humane- a reason why some opposed absolute immediate abolition as a viable solution. keep in mind that blacks like Frederick Douglass refused to be shipped to Liberia. Others felt safer to be in the care of their slave “masters”:

Abigail Adams visited Martha Washington at Mount Vernon. She wrote to her sister: “One hundred and fifty of [Mrs. Washington’s slaves] are now to be liberated, men with wives and young children who have never seen an acre beyond the farm are now about to quit it, and to go adrift into the world without horse, home or friend. Mrs. Washington is distressed for them. At her expense she has cloaked them all, and very many of them are already miserable at the thought of their lot. The aged she retains at their request; but she is distressed for the fate of others. She feels a parent and a wife.” Nevertheless, within a month she had set them all free.

Sowell refresher:

Even to have made slavery a public issue at the time would have accomplished nothing except to jeopardize the survival of a fragile coalition of newly independent states.

~~~

Slaves that Washington took north with him when he entered public life he quietly left behind when he returned to Virginia after completing his terms as President- in effect freeing them on the sly,” as one biographer put it, at a time when to free them officially could have set off controversies that neither he nor the new nation needed. George Washington was, after all, trying to hold together a fragile coalition of states bearing little resemblance to the world power that the United States would become in later centuries.

As a slaveowner in Virginia, Washington thought of ways he might sublet much of his estate, in which his current slaves “might be hired by the year, as labourers” by tenant farmers. He was clearly casting about for some way, as he put it in a letter, “to liberate a certain species of property which I possess very repugnantly to my own feelings.” But there were no takers. Washington’s behavior as a slaveowner is also worth noting:

Beginning in the early 1770’s, he rarely bought a slave and he would not sell one, unless the slave consented, which never happened. not selling slaves was an economic loss. Slave labor on a plantation with soil as poor as Mount Veronon brought in little or nothing…The only profit a man in his position would make was by selling slaves to states where agriculture was more flourishing. Washington would not. “I am principled against selling negroes as you would do cattle at a market…” From 1775 until his death, the slave population at Mount Vernon more than doubled.

Part of the reason for the population increase was not in purchases but in marriages and offspring.

This held true for the broader reason for the population increase in the U.S., when it was Brazil and the other Americas that accounted for the majority (around 94%) of transatlantic slaves, where reproduction between slaves was more restrictive.

like Burke, he saw a need for a plan of some sort, rather than simply freeing millions of slaves in a newly emerging nation surrounded by threatening powers, just as the freed slaves themselves would be surrounded by a hostile population. In short, the moral principle was easy but figuring out how to apply it in practice was not. Moreover, in a country with an elected government, how the white population at large felt could not be ignored.

Also cut-and-typed from pg 151, Black Rednecks and White Liberals by Thomas Sowell:

In the case of John Randolph, the charge of hypocrisy is hard to sustain in view of the events surrounding his death. Never married, and so without heirs to his estate he made provisions in his will, years before his death, that his slaves were to be not only freed but provided with land in a free state, on which they might hope to live in peace and be self-supporting. In a will written a dozen ears before his death, Randolph wrote: “I give and bequeath all my slaves their freedom, heartily regretting that I have ever been the owner of one.” An earlier will said: “I give my slaves their freedom to which my conscience tells me they are justly entitled.” That this was said by a conservative white Southerner- a bitter political opponent of the abolitionists and a man who asserted the right of secession long before the Civil War- suggests something of the complexity of the issue confronting those who faced it directly as a human reality, rather than as an abstract question.

~~~

Whatever the merits or demerits of Randolph’s personal or public policy conclusions, “hypocrite” hardly seems the right word for him. Abstract moral decisions are much easier to make on paper or in a classroom in later centuries than in the midst of the dilemmas actually faced by those living in very difficult circumstances, including serious dangers.

3. Their ability to look outside their own world experience at the possibility of a world free of slavery was a gradual process of thinking. The Washington of 20 years before his death is a different man than the one of 20 years into his life.

George Washington’s attitude toward slavery changed as he grew older. During the Revolution, as he and fellow patriots strove for liberty, Washington became increasingly conscious of the contradiction between this struggle and the system of slavery. By the time of his presidency, he seems to have believed that slavery was wrong and against the principles of the new nation.

As President, Washington did not lead a public fight against slavery, however, because he believed it would tear the new nation apart. Abolition had many opponents, especially in the South. Washington seems to have feared that if he took such a public stand, the southern states would withdraw from the Union (something they would do seventy years later, leading to the Civil War). He had worked too hard to build the country to risk tearing it apart.

Privately, however, Washington could — and did — lead by example. In his will, he arranged for all of the slaves he owned to be freed after the death of his wife, Martha. He also left instructions for the continued care and education of some of his former slaves, support and training for all of the children until they came of age, and continuing support for the elderly.

As for Jefferson, I think he was hamstrung by his financial needs and just couldn’t follow through with his noble sentiments.

But in all, these are complicated men, as we all are, in a different era. One where the vision of abolishing slavery was initiated on their watch. Movements to ban slavery didn’t exist until men like them began seriously thinking about it in the 17-19th century; and that, thanks in no small part to the American Revolution and drafting of the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution, forcing men of good conscience to confront concepts of freedom and equality for all.

BUT they never released all their slaves during their lifetime. Washington’s slaves were only all released on his death and Jefferson’s were sold on after his death.

I’ll have to look it up again, but I believe by Washington’s death, half the slaves he had ever owned had already been released. About 150, with 150 remaining when he died.

I still think your passing moral judgment (“condemnation” of sorts) over these men is misplaced/misdiagnosed given the circumstances of the times they lived in, which you seem to regard as rather insignificant.

And continually refering to 10,000 years of slavery is bogus because things speed up when such ideas come to the fore. If that’s the case maybe we’ve all been a bit hasty over the last 200 years and maybe we should have gradually over the next 10,000 years and slowly at a glacial pace – have released people from the misery (sorry – I forget that my 21st cnetury view again – of course slaves were very content & happy at being slaves) of slavery.

That window into your mentality really tells me you “don’t get the argument”. All I feel like doing is rolling my eyes and give up typing out anything further, to clarify the point. (Maybe ditto’s correct?).

They could have found ways over a matter of years to reduce their slaves until they had none. And again they didn’t do this because they were primarily concerned about their slaves welfare. Aqua hit it on the head – it was primarily in their own personal interests to keep slaves. I don’t see the problem in admiring people in history for their achievements whilst acknowledging any flaws.

Ok, maybe you do “get it”, and we just have an honest disagreement. Which would be fine.

Washington did free slaves during his lifetime; and 150 (the rest) freed by Martha before her own passing.

I do see personal interest involved, as well as genuine compassion and attempts to figure a way out of the dilemma of living in a world that has ever known slavery.

A student asked his history professor: “Where did slavery come from?”

“You’re asking the wrong question,” the professor replied. “The real question is: Where did freedom come from?”
-Chapter 2, Free and Unfree Labor, Applied Economics by Thomas Sowell