See, it’s this kind of post that makes me uncomfortable participating in this discussion.
Owning another person for their lifetime, and their children’s lifetime, and their children’s lifetimes, is not comparable to eating meat or not recycling.Owning another person requires a specific belief system and a certain way of life. It’s not just a “single issue”.
Thomas Jefferson was able to read the poems of Phyllis Whitley and witness the inventions of Benjiman Banneker and yet still write about the suitability of the negro as livestock. He might have been taught that they were animals, but he had direct, first-hand empirical evidence that they were not. We are told to remember his Declaration of Independence, but his Notes on Virginia should be just as memorable.
To me, a person of the future could judge us harshly for eating meat if we were presented with good evidence that our prey are just as intelligent as we are. If pigs started building cuckoo clocks and chickens started writing patriotic prose and we still continued to chomp on them, then yeah, we’re no-good jerks.
Just as he was a great rationalist politically and theologically, Jefferson was one of history’s greatest rationalizers when it suited him. Even in Notes on the state of Virginia- in fact even within the same chapter- he’ll note how inhuman an institution it is, no qualifications almost, and then defend it. While he favors a gradual emancipation, far from feeling blacks should feel indebted to whites, he acknowledges that one reason he favors removing them from Virginia when freed is that blacks have too many legitimate grudges against their former masters:
This was written in 1781, years before Saint Domingue/Haiti ran with blood. Jefferson acknowledges the injustices blacks have endured, he acknowledges the “geniuses” of some blacks, and even acknowledges that the difference in skin color (for whatever unknown reason causes it [it was unknown at the time]) may or may not have physical and intellectual differences and it’s subjective which is more beautiful, but then-
(It was a believed myth at the time that orangutans preferred human females to their own.)
I think as early as 1781 when he was 38 he was already deliberately blinding his logic on the subject, and he would only get worse over the years as the trap he was in sprang tighter and the springing was inevitable. (This was largely his own fault, for while he couldn’t help many of his agricultural reversals and fires he is completely unsympathetic when, knowing that a fiscal Doomsday is coming in his future, he spends lavishly- $50 bottles of wine, hundreds of dollars per year on books, the finest of clothes and furnishings, that damned CONSTANT rebuilding and renovating of Monticello and of Poplar Grove, all knowing that his financial situation is dire).
I don’t have a lot of sympathy for Jefferson dying in near penury- his slaves suffered far more by it than he did- but it is a case of an undeniably brilliant man being willfully blind to what he does not wish to see. I’ve always believed that his “invisible slave” features at Monticello- the dumbwaiters and the revolving doors that allowed him to eat alone, may have had much to do with the notion of not having to see his slaves.
Jefferson also kept on Monticello an overseer who was known to overuse the whip. He justified it by the fact the man was an excellent overseer who ultimately would do more good than harm for Monticello and thus by extension its slaves. You sometimes know that even Jefferson knows he’s shovelling enough bullshit to fertilize half of Arizona.
Two philosophers, separated by two centuries. Jefferson theorizes that blacks are inferior. Russell taking that same theory and makes a hypothesis - if and only if blacks and whites are put in the same social conditions then will the theory of inferiority be proven true or false. The Earl Russell, writing in 1952, basically predicted affirmative action!
In ancient Rome, there doesn’t seem to have been any real opposition to slavery until Christianity came along, or at least, no records of such an opinion survived. There were numerous slave revolts, but none of them seemed to be in opposition to the institution of slavery themselves, and, in a lot of cases, the revolting slaves took slaves themselves.
By some accounts, Joseph Cinque of the Amistad became a slave trader, though this is not confirmed. (The last 30 years of his life is largely conjecture.)
It is known that some of the Black Seminoles- black slaves who escaped to the regions of the Seminoles and joined/intermarried with the tribes- practiced slavery of other Indians.
Well, your values are in line with mine. We both had the luxury of spending our whole lives a century after the whole of Western civilization came to this consensus about the inherent immorality of slavery. A white American of the mid-19th Century formed his opinions without the benefit of this kind of hindsight. As repellent as “owning another person” rightly strikes you, remember that prior to Lincoln and the war, people practiced it with little inkling that it was something their descendants would ever judge them for doing. The Bible, the bellwether of Western morality at the time, didn’t forbid it and seemed to even endorse it. Every nation on Earth had practiced it and profited from it at some point. These all factor into an antebellum justification for doing it and feeling like a “good person” at the same time.
Think of the things you do or believe–about abortion (pro or con), immigration, the environment, intellectual property–and realize that one of them will inevitably put you on the wrong side of history, and someone in the future will wonder how you could ever think of yourself as a good person for holding those beliefs. You don’t think it’s comparable to owning slaves? You won’t be the one making that decision.
Even if it is comparable, I’m left thinking so the fuck what? Say a bunch of people from the 35th century are going to consider omnivores and petowners as moral offenders.
“Shame on them”, they will say.
What is so wrong and unreasonable with this position? I mean, we judge people on the basis of their actions everyday. If it’s wrong to judge a slaveowner in this way, then how it is okay to judge a Taliban zealot or the homophobic tribesman who has been taught that gays should be beaten to death? These kind of judgements are inherently relative to whomever is making the judgement in the first place. It really has nothing to do with time and modern values. Afterall, an Islamist suicide bomber doesn’t consider himself a monster. In his eyes, he’s a hero. And yet he has plenty of contemporaries who disagree.
If it’s wrong to consider slaveowning forefathers “bad people” for owning slaves, then I’m wondering if you think it’s okay to consider them “good people” based on what they accomplished. If so, then your position is fraught with inconsistency, since the same time-dependent relativistic difficulties you say are associated with judging someone as immoral also come into effect when judging someone as virtuous. In the 35th century, when scholars look back at this era, the consensus might be that democracy and freedom were fundamentally evil concepts. Madison et al could be seen as catalysts for an ill-conceived, morally bankrupt revolution that set Western civilization back a thousand years. They won’t be considered good people then.
In my OP, I acknowledged that the “good person” label was not exactly remarkable for its cogent and precise definition.
Still, this is a very compelling point. I guess the only answer I’d offer is my own subjective belief that calling a person “bad” bears a burden of proof, and calling a person “good” does not – that is, all people start out at “good” and it’s for the person claiming they’re not to offer proof.
I can’t believe I subscribed again mainly because of this one post. Specifically, the part about remembering the Declaration while also remembering Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia. <sigh> I’m such a tool. This topic is near and dear to my heart though.
Paul Finkelman writes, “The historian who questions Jefferson, it would seem, implicitly questions America.” Jefferson as a political icon is claimed by many and both Clinton and Bush Senior invoked his name during their inagural adresses. Judge him not by the standards of today? Fine, let’s judge him by the standards of his day and his own actions.
Jefferson railed against miscegenation yet he also proposed a law banishing the children of white mothers and black or mulatto fathers from Virginia. Did he hate slavery? Sure, but only because contact with blacks would adversly affect white morality, he was afraid of a slave revolt similar to Haiti, and he didn’t want an inferior group of people to be in his newly formed republic. He was a hypocrit who railed against miscegenation, proposing a law to banish the children of black or mulatto fathers and white women, but had no problem dipping his wick in his own stock when he felt the urge.
I don’t know why Jefferson gets such a pass. He wasn’t even a particularly good President. He was no John Adams. So yes, Monstro, I think it is vitally important to remember the Declaration of Independence along with the Notes on Virginia. Anything less gives us a shallow understanding of Jeffrson and U.S. history.
Guys, again, you may be pushing me into a position that I’m not advocating. If you’re suggesting that some enslaved people didn’t object to slavery as an institution, of course I agree with you. But that’s not at all what I’ve objected to. I’ve objected to the idea that at any time in colonial or post-colonial America (I originally said “chattel slavery,” which I’ve admitted was an incorrect framing of my position), slavery received nearly universal acceptance.
Pointing out pro-slavery Indians, or the lack of writings of ancient Roman abolitionist slaves, does not have anything to do with what I’ve asserted.
I was responding to your earlier, apparently incorrect framing, that chattel slavery never received nearly universal acceptance, by pointing out that it did so in Rome. If you’re restricting your discussion to America, that’s a harder question, but I believe that in the 17th century, slavery was legal in all of the English colonies in North America, which suggests a high level of acceptance. As to how the slaves felt about it, I don’t know. As far as I know, they weren’t consulted…they were only slaves, and nobody at the time really much cared what they thought.
Jefferson gets a pass because even though he’s less enlightened than you are, he moved western culture further along on his own steam than you ever will. If he doesn’t qualify as “good,” then nobody does.
He agreed with your assessment of his presidency, though. His tombstone lists his greatest achievements and makes no mention of that.
I’m guessing this was meant to be aimed at another poster? I haven’t actually posted anything in this thread (besides this post)- it’s not a subject I can claim to be especially knowledgeable on.
Reduce the population of interest to strictly those who aren’t being oppressed and subjugated, and yeah, it won’t be hard to find “universal” acceptance of something like slavery. What value does this observation have to the discussion, is what I’m wondering.
It’s embarrasing that I have keep Godwinizing this thread, but I guess it’s necessary to get my point across. If a swath of pro-Nazi Germans were polled about their views toward the Final Solution and we found out that almost all of them accepted it, does this make them any less exempt from judgement? What about if we polled all the folks in the ghetto and most of them believed there is nothing wrong with looting. Can we judge them?
