The question is not whether slaveholders as a group were good, but whether any slaveholder can be good.
And yes, there were some slaves who regarded some masters as “good;” I read a number slave narratives while in grad school, and some of them made a point of referencing good masters. I specifically remember one runaway account whose author said that he never would have run if he had not been sold from his “good master” to a bad one.
Of course, slaves could think this way because they had been habituated to accept racialized slavery as normal; just as their masters had.
Yeah–and plenty of others led a revolution. I wasn’t claiming that all slaves thought the system sucked. I was claiming that there was not “near-universal” approval for the system. Pointing out that some freed slaves went on to become slaveowners in no way indicates that no slaves objected to the system.
Martini, I think this addresses your point, with one addendum: the Romans didn’t practice chattel slavery, to the best of my knowledge. I restricted my discussion to chattel slavery specifically to avoid such side issues.
Was slavery considered immoral at the time of the revolution? Here’s some Wikipedia, plus a primary source:
And that’s just the white dudes. I’m having trouble finding commentary published by slaves on the issue, for some reason.
Once again you are conflating “slavery” with “slavery as practiced in the Americas around the time of the American Revolution”. You’ll note that in my very first post in this thread I said in response to whether Madison could be judged by modern standards:
So, I never claimed there was near-universal approval at the time of the American Revolution, although there might have been in earlier times.
That’s exactly right. I agree with you that it’s not a matter of moral relativism…it’s more a reflection that cultures and situations are much more complicated than “right” or “wrong.”
I agree with the points raised by LHoD and monstro.
Can a slaveholder ever be considered a good person? You could just as easily ask the same question about an SS officer in Nazi Germany. Or a Jackson supporter during the Trail of Tears. Or a sacrifice-practicing Aztec. Or a member of the Taliban. Or a person who is cruel to animals because they were raised to treat animals like dirt. Why does it seem like this particular question of goodness is frequently raised with slaveholders moreso than other kinds of historical personages? Just because the forefathers of our proud, great country partook in slavery doesn’t make them exempt from the judgements few of us spare when talking about the people I mentioned above.
Moving on, though, I believe that its appropriate to focus on the contributions made by historical figures, and leave the moralizing out of it. What does it matter if Madison was a “good person”? He’s not famous for being a good person. He’s famous for his role in birthing a nation. We can hold him in high esteem for that, while acknowledging that like many during his day, he profited from a horrible practice that actually undermined the same principles he espoused.
I suppose it all hinges on whether someone can be blamed for causing or perpetuating a bad situation when they don’t see any other choices, or think that situation is reasonable. If slavery itself is bad, we can say that slaveowners certainly continued a bad situation, but can we say that bad can be attributed to the slaveowner, or the culture?
I do think some of the blame can be lied at the feet of the general culture and social situation. But I also don’t think that we can let slaveowners completely off the hook; even though it was normal and acceptable i’m not comfortable saying that they were totally victims of fate. I think that they should have thought about it, and while i’m prepared to say that in some cases freeing slaves would have been a bad idea for all concerned, they should have worked to do something to help.
In reference to the original question, though, yep, I think slaveowners can be good people. But they’d have to do some pretty spectacular stuff to make up for it.
Not to get to culturally relativist, but whenever I see arguements like these that try to judge the past by the standards of today, it makes me want to bang my head against a wall. You can’t have this discussion without realizing that our fundamental outlook is built on a diffent set of principles than people in the past. Modern Western society’s worldview is largely built on the ideals articulated in the Declaration of Independence: life, liberty, and the pursuit of hapiness. We base our ideas of good and bad on these principles. Things that infringe upon an individuals’ rights to these things are considered bad to us. Thus it is a crime and is evil to steal; or to deprive a person of thier liberty and pursuit of hapiness by enslaving them.
This outlook is fundamentaly differnt than that of the pre-modern world, and was only in its infancy in the 18th century. Just as today we hold it as plain, undeniable fact that all people are born equal, people of the past felt in the exact same way that all people were NOT created equal. All they had to do is look at the world around them to see that this was the case. To people of this time the main principle that thier worldview was built upon was the idea of duty. To them, the world was a hierarchy with God on the top followed by kings, priests, and all the rest of the social classes. Each group had a duty to those above and below them. Their ethic wasn’t built upon life, liberty, and hapiness. In fact pursuing those things in lieu of doing one’s duty was considered to be bad. One was expected to put their duty to society above thier wants as an idividual.
In an unequal world with the concept of duty as the basis thier morality system, the ideas of liberty and freedom as we know them ceases to exist, because no one can ever be free of his or her duties.
Does this change the fact that reducing a human being to little more than a draft animal is plainly abhorent to the innate morals that we as a species have develped in response to living in groups/societies for 1000’s of years? No, of course not. But it does show how a particular belief system allows otherwise good people to justify bad things.
Also, what I wanted to add is basically what you are seeing in the American Revolution and with the founding fathers is one worldview being replaced by the other as the changing times invalidate the old one. But it should come as no suprise that a change like that wouldn’t happen overnight. Which is why we see incongruities like chatel slavery persisting even while people are otherwise fighting for the rigths they now percieve as thiers as part of the new worldview. Add in the fact that completely changing would pretty much cause a collapse in the economic system that thier wealth was derived from, and again, it is easy to see where the apparent inconsistencies come from.
How can FDR be considered a good person when he ordered the internment of hundreds of thousands of Americans of Japanese, German and Italian ethnicity during WWII. And not just adults-- children, too. Children! Surely he is a bad person, right? What the hell is his face doing on Mt Rushmore? I guess he fits right in with those other bad people there-- Washington and Jefferson.
Edit: Oops, that’s Teddy, not FDR on Mt Rushmore. Still, you get what I mean.
I guess I’ve never been one to talk about how a good person is when I don’t personally know them, so your particular argument is not resonating with me. But I don’t blame anyone for thinking FDR is a bad guy because of what he did, just as I don’t blame anyone for thinking he is good because what he did.
FDR (or Teddy) did great things. So did Jefferson. So did MLK. So did Benjamin Franklin. So did a boatload of others. Should we consider them “good people” because of their achievements and positive contributions, and overlook their flaws? If so, how is that any better than the converse?
Actually, I was being facetious. I agree with you that saying someone is a good or a bad person based on one aspect of that person’s life is silly, especially when we are talking about a historical figure and we can’t put ourselves in the mindset of that time in history.
Actually, you can. Admiral Canaris. Was he a good person? He was, as far as I can tell, noble, honorable, and when he realized the monster he was working for, took steps to assassinate him, and the failure cost him his own life. He saved hundreds of jews and other ‘undesirables.’
I submit to you, this is a good man, and yet a member of the Nazi elite.
The thing about cultural relativism is that there is a big difference between cultures that have been exposed to more enlightened ideas, and those that haven’t. There are even big differences between individual people within a culture who have been exposed to more enlightened ideas, and those that haven’t. In our time, we can (and should) have less tolerance for cruelty and unfairness, because there are very few societies who have not been exposed to these ideas. Our own culture was different before a few brilliant thinkers formed certain ideals, which eventually came to be accepted as truth. Certainly, none of us can claim that we would have come up with these ideals on our own, in direct opposition to the culture around us.
I was talking primarily about “most of human history” not “the last 300 years.” I think John Mace was talking about the same period (as he more or less said.)
Prior to around 1600, the only places that didn’t practice slavery didn’t practice slavery because it wasn’t economically beneficial. For example feudal European lords found serfdom to be more beneficial within their political/economic system than outright slavery. Although many European serfs lived lives so marginally different from slaves that on an individual basis the distinctions could be almost non-existent.
Your point about the victims of slavery really only holds water after around 1750 or so and in relation to black slaves in the New World. Prior to that, around the world slavery was a fairly common thing to subject conquered peoples to; and in fact many of the earliest African slaves brought to the Americas were from tribes that would be just as willing to sell members of other tribes into slavery if they had simply been fortunate enough to win their battles.
Your comments do have merit in regard to race-based slavery after the mid 18th or late 18th century. Because then is when you start to enter into a fairly unique system of slavery not widely seen in the rest of world history. Slavery in the New World became based on race and lineage. It was considered “appropriate” to enslave blacks and only blacks, and it was considered logical that any children born of a slave, were themselves slaves.
Persons born into slavery are very different than people who are actually enslaved. Mainly because their voices were often never heard, we’ll never know if a large percentage of them would have bought into the slave-owning system, we do know that a small percentage of free blacks did, in fact, end up owning slaves for profit. However the majority of free black slave owners owned slaves for other reasons (often family members who they could not free because of laws in their state, and it was seen as beneficial to keep them enslaved and keep the family together rather than let them be owned by someone else.)
The history of political thought within the United States in regard to slavery is an interesting one. Most of the slave owning Founding Fathers had open reservations about slavery, and many, very gradually, came to the decision that slavery was in fact wrong. They all acted on that feeling in different ways, Washington was one of the few prominent Founding Fathers to free all of his slaves (although he could not free his dower slaves as legally those were considered the property of his wife), the aforementioned George Wythe freed his slaves as well.
We were definitely moving in the direction of deciding, morally, that slavery was wrong. To be honest America was one of the first countries to really have that sort of movement, albeit it a very marginal one. People often point to the early dates other countries abolished slavery, but most of those cases I don’t see much historical support for a great moral revolution against slavery, but rather a recognition that it wasn’t economically beneficial.
The British Empire went on to do a lot of pretty nasty things after they abolished slavery, I’m not really sure morality had much to do with them abolishing slavery at all.
What happened in America is the generation after the Founding Fathers in the South became reactionary, and we moved backwards, not forward, in the South. Part of it was fueled by the economic importance of cotton, the entrenched position of the Southern plantation owners, and general distaste for Northern attempts to legislate their morality onto the South.
I think after 1800, American society overall felt that slavery was wrong, but not worth doing anything serious about (until the mid 19th century.) In the American South, I think there was a portion of the population who felt it was wrong, but worth keeping around anyway, and there was a portion of the population who genuinely believed that slavery was good for the blacks and that freedom was injurious to them.
Also, the Romans practiced what would certainly be defined as chattel slavery for many hundreds of years. Roman slave owners could kill a slave for any reason whatsoever with impunity. Roman slave owners could sell slaves and buy slaves, like well, chattel. Because that is what they were.
Eventually Roman slaves achieved more rights, but not until the time of Augustus and later, and even then their lot wasn’t all that great. Roman slavery was however, indeed distinct from American slavery in that it wasn’t racially based whatsoever, nor was it strictly lineage based.
I’m an atheist, and I’m somewhat skeptical that there was even a cult-leader/philosopher named Jesus. But just out of curiosity, what’s your gripe with the J-man personally?