Mika dear, may I suggest you insert the words “serial rapist” in place of “slave holder” in this post and see how you feel about it?
But a slave owner isn’t neccesarily equivalent to a serial rapist. Sure, lots of slave owners really were serial rapists, literal rapists.
The whole question requires certain things to be true. All slaves are enslaved by the threat of violence, but that violence need not be an explicit threat. Even a master who never threatens violence to his slaves nevertheless has an entire governmental slaveholding apparatus behind him.
Except we can imagine cases where the slaveowner does not intend to call the pattyrollers if one of his slaves decided to leave. The trouble is that no black person could just leave, even if the slavemaster was content to let them leave, because freelance slave catchers would get them. Escaping from slavery wasn’t just regarded as an offence against the slaveowner, it was regarded as an offence against the entire slaveowning society.
So a slaveowner is not neccesarily morally equivalent to a rapist, because there were many ways that a person could find themselves the owner of a slave, but lack the ability to legally free the slave, or there could be circumstances where freeing the slave would cause more problems. The example of free blacks who owned slaves that were actually family members is on point. If you buy your sister out of slavery, but were unable for practical reasons to legally manumit her, does that make you morally equivalent to her rapist?
I would agree that cases where slavery was simply a legal fiction were very rare, and that in most cases, even where a master never had his slaves beaten, the threat of violence was always present.
You raise an excellent point and one that makes me feel even better about the point I was trying to make. 
I mentioned cultural relativity only to head off the eventual, “so by that logic if a society’s values condones eating infants than its not evil?” line of thought.
I knew I should be more clear with that snark. I’m not contending that all or even most slave owners were serial rapists. My point is that slavery as practiced in the American South was such a vile instititution that (in my view) it blighted the moral record of any slave owner as surely as being a serial rapist who is otherwise faithful to his wife would.
[Nitpick] “Helot” is an incorrect term if you meant “greek slave”. Most greek states had slaves, helots were unique to Sparta, and can be described as something between a serf and a slave [/nitpick]
And no, I don’t think being a slaveowner automatically prevents one from being a good person. As others have mentioned, in most cultures that practised slavery it was relatively rare to mistreat them (after all, they cost money). In Roman times a slave represented about the same value as a car does today - meaning that most families would own one, maybe two. These slaves were usually treated well, because you needed them. Mistreating a slave was looked upon as a sort of madness. How would you react if you saw your neighbour hitting his car with a baseball bat?
Of course, things could be different if the slave belonged to a some rich person who owned hundreds of them, or if the slave worked on some huge farm or mine. However, no sane person worked his slaves to death - they were valuable.
So, owning a slave, without a more spesific context is not neccesarily a moral wrong. However, mistreating another person is.
Can you explain how a slaveowner would be unable to legally free his own property? I’m not saying that there wouldn’t be difficulties associated with freeing large numbers of slaves at once, but I can’t imagine that they’d be legal difficulties.
Not that you are advocating this position, but I hope we’re not going down the road of making slaveowners out to be pitiful victims of circumstances out of their control. As is frequently pointed out whenever the topic of slavery is discussed in other threads, not everyone had slaves. Those that did tended to be quite rich. For many if not most, the rich had slavery to thank for their riches. No one was pointing a gun to their head, forcing them to own all of those people. They had options; they just chose the most profitable and convenient ones. So let’s not portray this as something that just landed in their laps and they had to make the best of a bad situation.
A good example is the case of George Washington Parke Custis, who promised his adoptive father, George Washington, that he would when able free all of his slaves. That time came 5 years after his death- it was the first time his estate was able to provide freedom because it was always in debt (to northern banks, incidentally) and it was financially and legally impossible to free them before. When Custis died he bequeathed the burden of continuing the emancipation of his slaves to his son-in-law Robert E. Lee, who had to take an extended leave of absence from the army and devote full-time to making the estate solvent enough to do this, finally accomplishing it in 1862 after the Civil War had begun. Plantation economics were extremely complicated and very few plantations were free of debt, plus remember that not all planters had lavish lifestyles that led them further into debt like Thomas Jefferson. A planter could be thrifty and a financial wizard and yet a drought (like the one Alabama’s in now) or a hurricane or a warehouse fire or any number of things could undo a year’s hard work and force more debt. (Lee’s mother owned 30 slaves and the money she received for leasing them to planters was the only thing that came between her family and destitution; Lee inherited 8 slaves and is believed to have freed 5 and given 3 to his sister who was in need.)
There was also the issue of what slaves would do once freed. In many states it was illegal for them to remain more than 1 year once freed; after that time they could be reenslaved by their former master or by the state. They usually could not read, had no skills and no money and no land- what were they to do? In one of the darker sides of history many slaves who successfully escaped slavery died in abject poverty. Harriet Tubman’s final years were managing a home for some of these.
Plus, a slave could be worth in today’s currency, $20,000 or more. It’s easy for you to say that if you inherited $400,000 in slaves and that was the majority of your inheritance that you’d say “Slavery’s immoral, I’m setting them all free!”, but unless you’ve turned down that type of inheritance then you cannot say what you would have done with any believability or accuracy. (Easy to say “I’d have hidden Jews and joined the resistance in WW2 Germany” and it brings comfort to say I would have, but there’s no way of knowing because I can’t transport myself back there.)
The fact it was a horrible system doesn’t mean it had a simple solution. It did not, and in many ways life was worse (by the admissions of some former slaves themselves- I’ll give cites if requested) after they were emancipated. The only thing that would have worked peacefully would have been a gradual emancipation as was practiced in New York state or Canada, but it’s doubtful it ever would have been implemented.
Some places did have restrictive manumission laws. For instance in Virginia and North Carolina at the beginning of the 18th century, a slave could only be freed if he had performed some public service, and then only with the approval of the governor. In South Carolina around the same time, a slave could only be freed if he had killed or captured an enemy in time of war or alarm. In other places, the owner was required to put up a bond for the conduct of their former slaves and ensure that those unable or unwilling to work wouldn’t be a burden on the community.
Returning the thread to the OP, incidentally, John Payne was a North Carolinian planter who upon conversion to the Quakers freed his slaves and later relocated his family to Philadelphia. He died bankrupt and saved from poverty only because his wife and daughters, one of them Dolly, received employment (a stigma at the time). Dolly’s second husband was James Madison. Payne’s poverty probably made people say “idiot” to the freeing of his slaves.
I understand the financial difficulties, but not the legal ones. Can you explain how a slaveowner was legally required to own against their will? That implies that the slave was not really the owner’s property, but something that was foisted upon them through coercive forces. Slaves were given to people as gifts all the time. In theory, couldn’t an owner simply give a slave away…to the slave himself?
All of this is well and good, but it doesn’t really address the legal aspect that I’m inquiring about.
All of these are good questions, but none of them really justify ownership of another human being. The ugly truth was that the “but they’re illiterate!” card was actually used as a pretense to keep slavery in place, because the white folks with a conscience needed to believe slavery was the best solution for their ignorant, child-like darkies.
I’m not saying it was easy and I’m not calling anyone evil. I just object to characterizing nonconformity during those days as an impossibility. Since not everyone practiced slavery, some due to financial reasons and some due to moral convictions, focusing on the minority that got saddled with a white elephant from some dying, debt-carrying relative to the exclusion of the many who freely purchased and freely continued to own slaves because they freely wanted to reap the benefits of that practice strikes me as disingenuous.
And yes, some of the slaveowning forefathers expressed guilt over what they were doing. But let’s not pretend that the vast majority of them were truly caught between a rock and a hard place, is all I’m sayin.
I can only think of two ways of reading this:
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You’re still ignoring the views of slaves when considering whether there might have been near-universal approval of chattel slavery in earlier times; or
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You think that there may have been a time in which the slaves themselves almost universally agreed that chattel slavery was a good system.
Is there a third way of reading this post? Help me out.
Daniel
No, because the slave couldn’t legally own property.
Fair enough. My comments are specifically restricted to chattel slavery (which I am hereby corrected on–it’s not unique to the Americas as I thought), so the rest of your post isn’t really relevant to what I’m talking about.
Daniel
I think if you read the entirety of my posts in this thread the answers to your questions will be become clear. If not, I’ll be happy to clarify. But please do remember that this thread is not about whether slavery is good or bad, but whether a slaveholder can be considered good. And note that it isn’t even necessary for slaves to consider slavery good or bad-- my guess is that for much of history it was just taken for granted and thoughts about its goodness or badness did not occur to people.
Exactly. They could not even own themself.
Thomas Jefferson’s will manumitted 5 slaves- two brothers, 1 nephew and two sons of Sally Hemings (the latter of course probably Jefferson’s sons as well). Jefferson, already a godlike personage at the time of his death, nevertheless had to literally plead for their right to remain in his will:
Sally Hemings herself was not formally emancipated (or at least if she was no official papers remain), but her sons remained in Virginia where they rented a house with her. One left for Ohio before her death, the other (Madison) immediately afterwards, because they were not allowed to own property in the place of their birth. (Madison and his brother Eston were apprenticed to their carpenter uncle John [also freed] and thus had a trade that supported them; this distinguished them from most free blacks who would have had almost no way of supporting themselves.)
Point: Even TJ had to go hat-in-hand to get permission for free blacks to remain in Virginia more than a year, and the state did not have to do so. Liberating slaves was not altogether kindness unless you also had enough money to transport them out of slave states and give them a livelihood. (Jefferson also bequeathed $300 to his freed valet but it wasn’t paid because it didn’t exist; he freed another slave, Madison & Eston’s cousin Joe Fosset, but Fosset’s wife and 11 children were sold at the auction of his estate.)
No, nothing prevented somebody from legally freeing a slave who was not under mortgage (though the majority were), except for human nature. It’s hard to voluntarily get rid of property worth in today’s evaluation about as much as a middle range new car. And above all you cannot apply presentism to their mindsets: they’d have been familiar with abolitionists, but other than freed and ecaped slaves abolitionists were almost never from a family or even a culture where slavery was an omnipresent financial fact-of-life. Nobody here is defending slavery, but there’s a difference twixt apologetics for the institution and acting as if the practitioners should have been as horrified by it as we are. (And remember that many abolitionists took a still very paternalistic notion of blacks and did not consider them their equals.)
I know what a good father is, a good husband, a good citizen, ect. - I don’t know what a good person is.
The real question is: can there be such a thing as a good slaveholder?
And the answer is “First you must define what good is, and then you must see if a slaveholder fits”. Too subjective. “Can a slaveholder be a productive person” or “Can a slaveholder have three nipples” are things that can be answered more objectively.
Consider the future, and what kind of social consensus might be reached by our distant descendants: Can someone who ate meat ever be considered a “good person”? Or someone who didn’t recycle?
No one in history was so virtuous that some single-issue activist couldn’t find a way to disqualify him as a “good person.”
What if he didn’t eat recycled slaves? Now that would be a toughee.
Of course I have read the entirety of your posts, but maybe we’re talking past each other. Are you defending, or asserting, that there was any period at which it was almost universally believed that chattel slavery was a good thing? Because that’s the more specific point I thought you and I had been talking with one another about.
Daniel