WORDSMITH,,this is a post that has to be preserve thank you bye

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@Wordsmith

The quote I used from Jefferson isn’t to do with the concern over the slaves but concern for themselves as the enslavers if they released their slaves. No doubt in terms of not just financial but also fear of retribution.

“but none chose to return to slavery.”

See there’s the real heart of the issue. Whatever concerns those enslavers have for their slaves welfare, genuine or not, it is truimphed by the slaves own will for freedom. No one should enslave another human being. You can talk about 40,000 years of history of slavery if you like but that was not a constant situation where slavery was happening throughout year on year, to that degree and at every part of the globe. In England – although there was a limited amount of slavery in Roman, Viking & Saxon times etc – it had pretty much died out within the country by the 17th century for many centuries. But by all means compare the US to the Empire Rome or the Arabs – if that’s the appropriate standards you think 18th Century US can only achieve. However Romans and Arabs didn’t declared the following…

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

It would have been more honest if Jefferson had inserted white between all and men. So in the same way that Michelle Malkin can hold up Obama for his admin’s corruption judging him by his own standards – it is fair game to judge the founding fathers by their own standards. This doesn’t take any credit away from them in regards to their progressive steps BUT neither should we pretend there isn’t a significant gap between their rhetoric and actions.

The litmus test for a slave’s welfare is simply to ask them whether they want to stay or go. It’s for them to choose. Now of course that doesn’t mean a mass release of all slaves overnight – so it could happen gradually over a decade or so. The thing is to put your feet in their shoes – if you were enslaved – would you like the opportunity to leave – even if it could mean even more hardship – or would you want to be patronised by those who believe it is in your best interest to stay put? Americans are rightly independent – wanting to live free or die. It is shame those sentiments weren’t given over to those with black faces at the time.

Consider the below…

“During the War of 1812, British Royal Navy commanders of the blockading fleet, based at the Bermuda dockyard, were given instructions to encourage the defection of American slaves by offering freedom, as they did during the Revolutionary War. Thousands of black slaves went over to the Crown with their families, and were recruited into the (3rd Colonial Battalion) Royal Marines on occupied Tangier Island, in the Chesapeake. A further company of colonial marines was raised at the Bermuda dockyard, where many freed slaves, men women and children, had been given refuge and employment. It was kept as a defensive force in case of an attack.

These former slaves fought for Britain throughout the Atlantic campaign, including the attack on Washington D.C.and the Louisiana Campaign, and most were later re-enlisted into British West India regiments, or settled in Trinidad in August, 1816, where seven hundred of these ex-marines were granted land (they reportedly organised themselves in villages along the lines of military companies). Many other freed American slaves were recruited directly into existing West Indian regiments, or newly created British Army units. A few thousand freed slaves were later settled at Nova Scotia by the British.

Slaveholders primarily in the South experienced considerable “loss of property” as tens of thousands of slaves escaped to British lines or ships for freedom, despite the difficulties. The planters’ complacency about slave “contentment” was shocked by seeing slaves would risk so much to be free.[63] Afterward, when some freed slaves had been settled at Bermuda, slaveholders such as Major Pierce Butler of South Carolina tried to persuade them to return to the United States, to no avail.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_United_States#cite_note-62

Clearly given a choice – slaves were willing to risk everything for freedom. Again the US was built on freedom – it shouldn’t of taken over 80 years after the Declaration of Independence to get to the point where slavery was stopped. That time period wasn’t primarily due to the concerns of the enslavers for their slaves – but because the unwillingness by many to stop the misery and exploitation of slavery.

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I say they dealt with complexities you are trying to ignore, in criticizing them for not supposedly “following through their rhetoric with action”.

No wonder you’re called “Wordsmith” ..well said………..you could take ALL that all of you have said here in this thread and that’s exactly the right summation, Sparky.

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Using Robert Carter III only further proves my point that releasing slaves was possible.

Small slaveholders around this time (and before) had freed thousands of slaves.

between 1782 and 1861, white men and women in the state of Virginia freed more than one hundred thousand slaves without compensation
-pg 182-3, The First Emancipator, by Andrew Levy

The freeing was still a gradual process, and to Carter’s credit. But it took him another decade to act upon his “conscience”, even though the House of Delegates in Viriginia passed the Act to Authorize the Manumission of Slaves in 1782.

Carter did not have the responsibilities of president and I still say you’re judging the leaders of this country too harshly. He did not face Washington nor Lincoln’s challenges (I am in the middle of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation by Professor Allen C. Guelzo). Both the abolitionists and the anti-slavery proponents (who opposed the abolitionist movement) deserve credit for moving this nation in the direction of emancipation and the realization of our country’s ideals for all. It was an evolutionary process. States with significant slave populations eventually followed, figuring out ways to finance emancipation on a large, public scale. Sorry if we did not move fast enough for you.

And as for Jefferson’s concern over the welfare of slaves if they were released – here’s quote from him which probably goes closer to the bone…

We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.

Yes, and……? How does this make Jefferson a hypocrite when he had legitimate concerns regarding whether simply freeing slaves would not just as well amount to “abandonment”? The concerns Jefferson had were real concerns.

How did Carter’s 450-485 freed slaves fare?

“Their lives were difficult, dominated by menial labor and repressive laws, but none chose to return to slavery. Some ended up in jail, or destitute. Others found themselves and their children working in conditions little different from slavery. Others simply disappeared.” Moreover, because Carter’s schedule freed slaves according to age, not family ties, “There were husbands who were freed but whose wives remained slaves, and there were free parents with slave children.”
All of which would seem to indicate that large-scale manumission was a very complicated issue and perhaps that the Founding Fathers, whom the author constantly compares unfavorably to his biographic subject, understood some of the complexities better than Robert Carter III did. Carter himself moved to Baltimore before freeing his slaves in Virginia, in recognition, the author says, that “public acts” such as his Deed of Gift and “the departure of the author of such public acts from the slaveholding community were inextricably linked.”

Not all slaves fared as badly; however, the concerns men like Washington and Jefferson had were real concerns in how to proceed responsibly in bringing about an end to an institution that had strong inroads in human cultures throughout the world.

I say they dealt with complexities you are trying to ignore, in criticizing them for not supposedly “following through their rhetoric with action”.

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@Wordsmith

Using Robert Carter III only further proves my point that releasing slaves was possible. And as for Jefferson’s concern over the welfare of slaves if they were released – here’s quote from him which probably goes closer to the bone…

We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.

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@Wordsmith

lol well I’m not pious (or even remotely religious) and as I don’t own slaves myself – I’m not a hyprocrite on such issues – so hardly sanctimonious. Also with the bs – what I have said that is factually incorrect? I’m happy to debate but I think we are both above such baseless remarks.

No, no….that’s bulls**t. You might be above it, but I’m not.

(See? I told you, you were sanctimonious. )

If I’ve raised the temperature, I apologize. It’s due to my own loss of patience and exasperation at traveling in circles, here. I get a bit moody from smashing my head repeatedly on the desk (hardwood) after reading comments going nowhere.

To believe that Washington and Jefferson were actually incapable of freeing their slaves beggars belief. You have given the proposition that they didn’t do this due to their concern for their slaves whereas I suspect it is more likely this was due to their own personal finances. Unfortunately they didn’t put their money where their mouths were.

Personal finances and other selfish reasons are fair. Your last sentence is the attitude I take issue with. It goes back to the lack of empathizing with putting yourself in their shoes and walking 30 acres. Constraints of the time…an evolving mindset in how men of their times began thinking of slavery as an issue….

I’m not sure what banning Mark Twain has got to do with it. I certainly don’t support such things.

Frankly, I’m not at all surprised, given how I’ve been arguing that you’ve been failing to see my point. If you figure it out, maybe all of the Sowell citation will begin to click and fall into place for you. Hint: How we regard the past….how people thought of things at the time…language and attitudes….always racist? Words we’re sensitive to now, today, as offensive…why weren’t they back then?

Let’s look at other Founding Fathers – John Dickinson, William Livingston & George Wythe who managed in their lifetimes to free all their slaves. So the minority of Americans who owned slaves clearly weren’t incapable of such an act. As for 18th century laws passed in the south – I don’t see how this prevented Washington from releasing all his slaves in the 17th century. It was people like Dickinson, Livingston & Wythe who set a better example by their personal actions than either Washington or Jefferson.

You left out Robert Carter III, who freed 500 slaves.

Let’s not forget that a number of the Founders, such as John Adams, didn’t even own a single slave; let’s not forget that the majority of Americans, in fact, didn’t own slaves. 80% of Southerners were not slaveholders.

Again, Washington as president was under political constraints, holding a nation together that had not yet evolved to the point of emancipation of slaves. Yet the country, in only a short space of time, moved in that direction. It didn’t take 10,000 years; yet for you, things apparently did not move quick enough.

John Dickinson- Quakers were among those who spearheaded the anti-slavery movement, and Dickinson was one. So it’s not surprising he came to a point of freeing his slaves. That’s to his credit. Financially, it wasn’t that big of a sacrifice. But that should not diminish the praise.

William Livingston- Yes, he should be applauded. By why set him up as more “holier” than Washington and Jefferson? He expressed anti-slavery sentiments as early as 1776, yet didn’t free his TWO slaves until 1787. So where’s your equal-opportunity criticism at Livingston for not having freed his slaves in 1776?

George Wythe- A mentor to Jefferson, who greatly admired him for his character. An abolitionist. So not surprising he’d free his own slaves. But again, not everyone who was anti-slavery became part of the abolitionist movement for reasons already expressed. Wythe pushed for blacks to be included in Virginia’s Declaration of Rights, but failed, just as Jefferson had tried to include anti-slavery statements in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence.

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

As for this – a rather silly comparison when one of them happens to be the President of the United States and has the power to push somthing like that through whilst the other isn’t. I guess that makes any criticism of Obama where people believe he hasn’t gone far enough -null and void unless any of his critics on here can show material proof that that have had a bigger impact? And of course how do you measure the impact of someone like Garrison – who dedicated his life in freeing slaves? I’m sure he added a tremendous amount to persuade people that slavery was wrong.

Garrison, because of the very fact that he isn’t president, can pontificate all he wanted to without suffering the consequences of his high-ringing rhetoric. Go back and read my passages regarding Lincoln, the Emancipation Proclamation, and working behind the scenes to achieve the ends, using “non-Garrison” means. Lincoln was president. Not emperor.

All too often those against change, complain about how difficult or complicated, or whine you don’t understand when sometimes underneath they lack the will (or even the belief) to enact such change. A lot of people just prefer the status quo and to conserve things as they are – no matter how injust it may be to others.

British Dude…

-13th Amendment abolished slavery just 89 years after the birth of the Republic

-Slave importation was ended in 1808, just 32 years after independence

-Decades before we even had a war between the states, slavery was outlawed in most of them.

After 10,000 years as an instutition globally….I’d say that’s a pretty short space of time to achieve “radical change” and America has more to be proud of than to be ashamed by.

Yet apparently not good enough for Gaffa…

@MataHarley:

So you doubt any plantation owners of that era’s ability to have compassion for humanity? Would it be more humane to “free” them, sans education, into a society that would never hire them and allow them to starve and fend for themselves against the elements?

For Gaffa:

My belief has ever been that until more can be done for [the slaves], we should endeavor, with those whom fortune has thrown on our hands, to feed and clothe them well, protect them from ill-usage, require such reasonable labor as is performed by free men and be led by no repugnancies to abdicate them, and our duties to them. The laws do not permit us to turn them loose, if that were for their good; and to commute them to other property is to commit them to those whose usage we cannot control.
-Thomas Jefferson

Yet Jefferson’s a hypocrite, ’cause he owned slaves.

Simplistic sanctimony….

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gaffa: To believe that Washington and Jefferson were actually incapable of freeing their slaves beggars belief. You have given the proposition that they didn’t do this due to their concern for their slaves whereas I suspect it is more likely this was due to their own personal finances. Unfortunately they didn’t put their money where their mouths were.

Never read up much on the southern slavery history, eh Gaff? So you doubt any plantation owners of that era’s ability to have compassion for humanity? Would it be more humane to “free” them, sans education, into a society that would never hire them and allow them to starve and fend for themselves against the elements? It’s not post 1960s we’re talking about here….

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@Wordsmith

lol well I’m not pious (or even remotely religious) and as I don’t own slaves myself – I’m not a hyprocrite on such issues – so hardly sanctimonious. Also with the bs – what I have said that is factually incorrect? I’m happy to debate but I think we are both above such baseless remarks.

To believe that Washington and Jefferson were actually incapable of freeing their slaves beggars belief. You have given the proposition that they didn’t do this due to their concern for their slaves whereas I suspect it is more likely this was due to their own personal finances. Unfortunately they didn’t put their money where their mouths were.

I’m not sure what banning Mark Twain has got to do with it. I certainly don’t support such things.

Let’s look at other Founding Fathers – John Dickinson, William Livingston & George Wythe who managed in their lifetimes to free all their slaves. So the minority of Americans who owned slaves clearly weren’t incapable of such an act. As for 18th century laws passed in the south – I don’t see how this prevented Washington from releasing all his slaves in the 17th century. It was people like Dickinson, Livingston & Wythe who set a better example by their personal actions than either Washington or Jefferson.

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

As for this – a rather silly comparison when one of them happens to be the President of the United States and has the power to push somthing like that through whilst the other isn’t. I guess that makes any criticism of Obama where people believe he hasn’t gone far enough -null and void unless any of his critics on here can show material proof that that have had a bigger impact? And of course how do you measure the impact of someone like Garrison – who dedicated his life in freeing slaves? I’m sure he added a tremendous amount to persuade people that slavery was wrong.

All too often those against change, complain about how difficult or complicated, or whine you don’t understand when sometimes underneath they lack the will (or even the belief) to enact such change. A lot of people just prefer the status quo and to conserve things as they are – no matter how injust it may be to others.

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@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

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It looks like all of us Americans should just give up, know we’re a terrible racist country whose forefathers hated Blacks and unlike ANY other country, treated them badly, and get on with it.

But, then, you can’t count on ME for moral clarity, I think it’s a sin to teach young children the ‘flaws’ of their country until they’re old enough to understand CONTEXT. Heck, I teach preschoolers the story about Geo Washington cutting down the cherry tree: I figure that using a story that helps children remember an important moral tenet is okay even if it’s not true. So, you can’t count on me. My four year olds are so happy that Jackie Robinson became such a great ball player! They know he was Black and they loved hearing about Lincoln and how his actions led to Robinson’s opportunities. Even if Lincoln didn’t fight the war to free the slaves, I figure I grew up loving America with those illusions in MY heart and mind and it didn’t hurt me…….let them learn to love America before people who can’t wait to tear her down get on with it……Hopefully, those teachers will at least wait till Middle School? (Aye Chihuahua is right: Read any honest book on slavery: there were times the slaves had to loan cash to their land owners, regularly…they were friends, but the context forced them to retain the slave/owner relationship…many were friends. But, if TEN were nasty to their slaves…….that’s what our teachers will teach and foreigners will capitalize on)

Great exchange, folks……..

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