Louis
]]>Priceless.
As opposed to postbellum American slavery, which is the status quo for every working American via income taxation, and taxation in general.
As has been written, the 13th Amendment did not outlaw slavery, it nationalized it.
Bravo!
On a separate note:
“It’s also worth noting that Icelandic slavery, though certainly evil as all slavery is, did not represent anything like the degree of oppresison and brutalisation that antebellum American slavery did. (For example, in Iceland slaves could own private property, which slaveowners could not use without the slave’s permission.)”
Then these were not slaves. Property equals political power, which slaves by definition are dispossessed of. Slaves cannot own property without first owning themselves.
]]>There’s no easy way to test this, but one clue is in the attitude they take toward widely accepted injustices today. If they passively accept present-day injustice, the likelihood that they would have rebelled against equally widely accepted injustices 200 years ago is slight.
And even that is, as you say, no real way of telling. Which is why I strongly dislike self-righteousness about people in the past–it smacks of that smug assumption that we would all be Huck Finn, that we would all be the Good White Guy who disapproves of lynching or the Good Man who never beats or rapes his wife. And let’s face it, most of us wouldn’t be.
Was Washington’s slave-owning evil? Fuck, yes. But it was also affected by his culture and the dominant beliefs of his time. Culture affects actions. We don’t live in a vacuum, and while this doesn’t absolve the slaveowners, it mitigates their circumstances. We, at any rate, hve no right to get complacent about ourselves in relation to them.
]]>The interesting question is: how many (white) people today who are anti-slavery would still have been anti-slavery if they’d been born in antebellum Virginia? There’s no easy way to test this, but one clue is in the attitude they take toward widely accepted injustices today. If they passively accept present-day injustice, the likelihood that they would have rebelled against equally widely accepted injustices 200 years ago is slight. (Of course the — perhaps suspiciously? but nonetheless reassuringly — self-congratulatory moral is that we today who are anarchists, feminists, antimilitarists, etc., can plausibly claim that we would have been abolitionists back in the day!)
]]>It’s also worth noting that Icelandic slavery, though certainly evil as all slavery is, did not represent anything like the degree of oppresison and brutalisation that antebellum American slavery did. (For example, in Iceland slaves could own private property, which slaveowners could not use without the slave’s permission.)
]]>It seems that “liberty” is a concept which people have found easy — or, at least, feasible — to compartmentalise, enthusing over it for the in-group, but steadfastly denying it to others.
]]>He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of INFIDEL powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce.
Well, thank goodness the American Revolution put an end to that unpleasantness.
]]>Now, on to Washington:
That doesnt change the fact that the Fathers appreciated liberty much more than a lot of people living at that time.
Virtue is a matter of what kind of person you are, not a matter of how you stack up in a competition with your neighbors. And demanding the power of imperium over several hundreds of your fellow people is a very serious vice. In particular, it’s a vice that’s inconsistent with any claim to abhor tyranny or kingship, because it involves claiming all the powers and prerogatives of life-long absolute monarchy over your unwilling subjects. In the mouths of slaveholders, panegyrics to liberty and to republican virtue, or polemics against kings and tyrants, are empty lies.
That doesn’t mean that we can’t put their words in our mouths and make them mean something real (Garrison, Douglass, and many other abolitionists did just that). But it does mean that we have to rethink what we are going to say about the men who penned the words.
If you’re going to criticize someone at least do it with a modicum of proportion.
Proportion
means treating things according to the size and significance that they in fact had. But personally holding hundreds of your fellow people as chattel slaves is not a minor failing or a foible of fallen creatures. It is an atrocity of the first order, and the specific nature of the crime is exactly the same as that committed by every power-lusting Hapsburg or Bourbon or Bonaparte in history. Except that the crimes of slave-holders were worse; they routinely involved powers and prerogatives to confine, hurt, and feed off of people in ways more systematic, invasive, and intense than any crowned head of Europe ever dreamed of claiming over ordinary subjects.
The upshot is that I would like to suggest that a sense of proportion
requires taking the tyranny exerted by the slave-lords of the South every bit as seriously as crimes inflicted against, y’know, white people. A sense of proportion also demands that we pay attention to how much of his life Washington spent destroying and feeding off of the lives of his unwilling subjects at Mount Vernon; that is every bit as political and every bit as serious a matter as his 8 years as a general and his 8 years in the Presidency; and in point of fact, he spent much longer on the former than on the latter.
He did abhor tyranny. Like most men of the time period, however, he was inconsistent in applying his abhorrence of tyranny.
This is the same thing as saying that he abhorred tyranny only in some cases and not in others; and in particular, that while he may have disliked tyranny over white people, he had no real problem with tyranny over black people. In point of fact, pointing — as Boaz does — to his devotion to his plantation and his enthusiasm for scientific farming
(which required much more systematic and invasive slave-driving as an essential part of the program) illustrates how much emphasis he put on tyrannizing and robbing from black people — which is all that his farming
amounts to — in his own life.
It’s not as if Washington were so busy abhorring tyranny over white people that he just forgot somehow to apply
his hatred to tyranny over black people. He and most of the other Founders were acutely aware of the fact that they were suggesting different standards for black people than they were for white people, and even if they had been too stupid to see it, contemporary critics such as Samuel Johnson pointed it out clearly to them (If slavery be thus fatally contagious, how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?
). Different yelping slavers acted on it in different ways; Jefferson and Patrick Henry by wringing their hands and doing nothing about it; Washington by doing nothing about it for most of his life, trading in slaves to increase his manor, quietly endorsing racist colonization schemes while publicly opposing Quaker abolitionists later in his life, and providing in his will for the gradual manumission of the slaves held under his name after both his death and Martha’s. (A plan that not only ensured his own life-long tyranny over the enslaved, but also put Martha’s life at considerable risk after he died.) In other words, he was well aware of the problem, and he just did not care enough about black people’s lives or freedoms to do something effectual, public, or immediate about it.
I’m not suggesting that there is nothing to learn from Washington’s example or that he never did anything admirable. What I am suggesting is that there’s nothing to learn from sentimental lies, and that a proper sense of proportion demands that we take Washington’s slaveholding into account. Which neither Boaz nor most other white people indulging in this kind of sentimental Old Republic nationalism happen to do.
]]>But sentimental lies have nothing to teach us at all, and the ridiculous notion that Washington, the slave-driver of hundreds, abhorred tyranny or arbitrary power is nothing more or less than a sentimental lie. He may very well have abhorred the idea of ruling over fellow white people;
He did abhor tyranny. Like most men of the time period, however, he was inconsistent in applying his abhorrence of tyranny. You, however, portray him primarily as dedicated to enslavement, and this sounds like wishful thinking on your part. When analyzing historical figures try to be cognizant of “blacks” AND “whites” (ha!), since most people are a shade of gray.
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