If you can take your slave into a non-slave Confederate state without losing your slave, it’s not a non-slave state. And here’s the relevant clause (bolding mine):
If a state in the CSA were to abolish slavery, that law would impair my right, as a citizen of the state, to own slaves, so it would be unconstitutional.
Would you argue, then, that because the Greeks owned slaves, that the first Greeks to be enslaved by the Romans were just fine with it?
Lincoln had a famous speech where he pointed out “Every man agrees that slavery is wrong for him…”
That’s such a good quote I had to look it up.It’s actually Frederick Douglas, in a Speech titled “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”
Well, there’s being “fine with it” and then there’s understanding why its done. But that’s neither here nor there. We’re looking at it from the perspective of the guy owning the slave, not the slave. He doesn’t see the slave as the same category of human as himself. It may be obvious to you that they are, but it isn’t to pre-modern peoples (per my definition above).
How long did we think that heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones? You and I know they don’t, and it makes perfect sense once someone explains it to you, but it took a long time for us to figure that out.
I would hope that had I lived 200 years ago I would see the same essential humanness in Blacks from Africa, but how would I know that from my own experience? Most, if not all, of the Blacks I’d see couldn’t even speak proper English and they were always looking for ways to avoid work! Surely they were a lesser breed than us educated, cultured souls. I don’t think the upper classes thought the lower classes of the same race were really the same as they were.
I am currently working my way through The Slave Narratives and it certainly is an eye opener to me. Not that so many wanted to be freed but quite the opposite. The number of people who thought they were better off during slavery came as a great surprise to me. I would imagine since those interviewed were very old, they possibly recalled their lives as children on a plantation and perhaps their role wasn’t a hard one. It may also be that the ex-slaves lives were so hard after emancipation, it may have seemed better to have a full belly and a place to live.
I don’t want to hijack this thread but does anyone else have thoughts on why some interviewed would feel that way after 60 plus years?
Please do not think that I advocate slavery or any kind of enslavement of any humans. I am simply pointing out what I have read and how shocked I was to find that some ex slaves actually embraced slavery.
Well, you are anyway, and you’re arguments could be seen as internally consistent from that viewpoint.
I personally challenge the notion that the viewpoint of the slave-owner should be regarded as being more valid that that of the slave, or even vaild at all, considering how readily roles can be changed, as in the case of the Greeks. Even if they regarded their own slaves as less human than themselves, I highly doubt that Greek slaves to the Romans automatically diminished their sense of their own humanity as a result.
The argument seems to be that every slave-owning society of the past should not be judged harshly, because they were simply functioning in the established social norm of their time. But we see in modern times that slavery is not something of the past, nor emblematic only of cultures less “advanced” than our own. the German society of the 1940s enslaved people, and so does our current society. There’s no amount of time or advancement that immunizes a people from such practices.
But by the logic of the argument proffered, that everyone who does such gets a free pass, we should not judge the Nazi enslavement of Jewish prisoners harshly, nor should we judge harshly those who import children for roles as abuse slaves, cuz, see, it’s just part of the norm of the time.
Makes no sense to me. The humanity of one group does not disappear because they are enslaved by another. And any era or society where that lie is seen as truth deserves harsh judgment, no matter what society they are a part of.
I’m not saying the slave owner’s viewpoint is more valid, but that’s what started this whole discussion (by Der Trihs, and which you agreed with), so it makes sense to look at his viewpoint. If it were as simple as being “converted” to the idea that slavery is bad as soon as your own people are enslaved, then slavery would have ended longer ago than it did.
Where did I say they shouldn’t be judged harshly? What I am doing is challenging the idea that any of us is morally superior than they people in the past such that had we been born then we would have our current, natural revulsion to the practice. That seems hopelessly naive, but that is what Der Trihs is saying and that is what you are agreeing with:
Ridiculous. You and I are better moral actors than our ancestors because we’ve been taught to be that way, not because we were born that way or somehow figured it all out ourselves. There were a few men and women who struggled to find a better moral way, and we all benefit from their actions.
I don’t want to get into the whole Nazi thing, because they are a modern people, not a pre-modern people (as the slave owners were).
In addition to the things you named, another explanation is that the former slaves did not feel comfortable being honest in front of the interviewers, many of whom were white. They may have been worried about the repercussions if their true feelings were expressed.
But I have no doubt that many slaves preferred their enslavement, not only because of the security but because they sincerely believed in their inferiority.
I think the slaves would have uprisen (uprose?) at the end of hostilities. Once they tried to “return home” and found nobody home they would have been volatile. The whole south was volatile as it was.
A better bet would be to read his entire saga of a divided America. GOTS was an OK book, but the sci-fi premise that it’s based upon skews it IMO. In case you’re wondering, the books to read would be:
How Few Remain
The Great War: American Front
The Great War: Walk in Hell
The Great War: Breakthroughs
American Empire: Blood and Iron
American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold
American Empire: Victorious Opposition
Settling Accounts: Return Engagement
Settling Accounts: Drive to the East
Settling Accounts: The Grapple
Settling Accounts: In At the Death
That’s the entire saga, although In At the Death isn’t out until July. How Few Remain tells the story of the second Mexican War between the CSA and the USA , 20 years after a Confederate victory in the Civil War, and the other volumes follow the time line through WWI, the interwar years and WWII. It’s a fascinating and horrifying read.
How do you define “modernity”? The Civil War wasn’t that long ago. Only 70 years seperated the beginning of the Civil War from Hitler’s rise to power. If you’re calling modern “post Darwin”, remember, The Origin of Species was published in 1859. The Civil War is post Darwin.
I don’t think it matters anyway…most of the slave holders thought they were right, just as most of the Nazis thought they were right, just as we think we’re right regarding whatever we believe, because we’ve all been conditioned to believe that. We can talk about why and how different groups of people came to believe what they did, and we can talk about the consequences of those beliefs, both good and bad, but there’s nothing to be gained by making moral judgements, because they don’t help us understand the events.
If you say, “Southern slaveholders (or Nazis, or Stalinists, or whoever) were just evil and they did what they did because they were evil” thats useless. Actually, it’s worse than useless. It’s actully harmful, because it cuts off the conversation. It says that no explanation is neccesary, or even possible.
Recognizing all this isn’t moral relativism. We’re free to judge their actions and beliefs as wrong. What we can’t do, though, is end it there.
I am wondering if those narratives are really of much use, and whteher they shed much light on slavery. According to the site you cite, “From 1936 to 1938, over 2,300 former slaves from across the American South were interviewed by writers and journalists under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration. These former slaves, most born in the last years of the slave regime or during the Civil War. . . …”
Now remember, 1936 to 1938 was 71 to 73 years after the abolition of slavery!
So they were asking people in their late 70s to early 80s what they remembered from their early childhood?
Add to this the fact that before the age of 5 or 6, very few people remember anything but brief images and impressions. If they remember very specific events, it is usually out of any helpful context.
Early childhood memories are largely absurd distortions of reality because we do not possess the base knowledge needed to analyze what we see in a larger social, political, economic or other context.
To a five-year-old, Mommy and Daddy are gods and omnipotent (even if Massa did buy them just last year).
You need to be at least 10 before you start to look around your society and analyze it and ask questions such as “Why do coloured folks have to work for free for white folks?”
To give a modern example, I know a family of (white) rural poor near my country home. They have kids from 4 to 14 years of age. The teens are obviously aware that their family is poor and looked down upon, and are somewhat ashamed of their home. As they get older, they feel it more and more. But the 4-year-old runs and plays around the wrecked cars all around the property, shows me the litter of kittens that one of their cats had in the back seat of a stinky old wreck, enjoys his Kraft dinner and hot dogs, and probably thinks he is in a nice place. His parents are loving people who do the best they can.
To get a REAL first-hand narrative on slavery, you would have had to interview a group of people who had been at least 10 to 30 years of age when slavery ended. In 1936, these people would have been 81 to 101 years of age. Most would have been dead or senile.
Or else, they should have run the interviews much earlier, such as 1905, say.
By their own admission, these narratives were mainly asking what it was like to be a very small child under slavery. And we have a natural tendency to see the past as happy, unless it was truly horrible (like, say, being in Dachau).
Say what you want about slave owners, I doubt if many of them ever lashed a five-year-old black kid. They were far more likely to show they were not such bad masters by telling the little “pickininny” he was cute and giving him a nice apple. The fact that they expected the cute little guy to give them a lifetime of free labour under threat of violence and torture would not have been understood by the kid as he munched his apple from the nice Massa.
And at home in the slave quarters, no matter what the parents thought of Massa, they were not stupid enough to say it in front of kid of 4 or 6 who sould blurt it out in front of whites.
My guess is that these narratives were part of the desire of white America in the 1930s to “sanitize” slavery and forget the horrible chapter that it was. Look at “Gone with the Wind” (the novel and the movie are both products of the 1930s).There is not a mention of field hands, or the economics of working a slave to death young and replacing him, or any of the brutality used to keep slaves terrorized and in line. All we see is loving old Mammy who is practically a member of the family, or Butterfly McQueen as the hilarious, “half-witted darky”.
On the other hand, it is possible that house slaves formed an almost-family relationship with their masters in some cases, and that the people interviewed remembered living in a nice house where they ate well when they were 5 or 10 years old and their parents were maids and footmen.
But on the whole, this “Slave Narrative” sounds to me like a salve for white guilt from the 1930s.
Oh please. The civil war started one year after that publication, so it’s hardly fair to think that those ideas had permeated society. Besides, The Descent of Man wasn’t published until 1871. *Origin *only implied the evolution of humans from “lower” animals.
The argument that slaveowners were monsters is completely wrongheaded. How can we understand monsters? The thing to understand is that slaveowners weren’t monsters, Nazi’s weren’t monsters. They were human beings. And to imagine that if we lived in the antebellum south we’d be antislavery is nonsense.
scotandrsn: You say you agree with DT, but do you really understand his assertion? He’s claiming that CSA would still have legalized slavery today, if they had won the Civil War. IOW, every country on earth except the CSA would have abolished legalized slavery. Utter nonsense. **DT **wants to assert that American Southerners today, as a group, are evil, and to back that up he has to claim that they would still support legal slavery. Is that what you agree with???
[ hijack ]
Not quite. It was actually little more than one of many New Deal “make work” programs to permit the Feds to spend money to get into the economy. At the time, one branch of the government thought it would be a good idea to take the new technology of elctronic recording and capture as many dying voices as possible. Similar groups were sent out to interview veterans of the Civil War, Indian Wars, and War with Spain, immigrants, settlers, and a host of other people.
The rest of your criticisms of what was recorded are legitimate, but you have mistaken the motives.
[ /hijack ]
I sit corrected. I suspected the make-work projects of the New Deal were probably behind this. But if “sanitizing” slavery was not a motive for the project, I must insist that it could nonetheless have been a subconscious motivation among certain interviewers.
You have only to look at movies lik GWTW and Jezebel (or products like Aunt Jemimah and Uncle Ben) from the 30s and 40s to see that white America wanted to believe that slavery had actually been some kind of affectionate extended family full of funny but loveable Mammies and kindly old “uncles”.
An alien watching these movies would be astounded to learn that they are allegedly portraying SLAVERY, a system in which kidnapped human beings are forced to work without pay for their entire lives under threat of violence and torture.
Read After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection by James West Davidson and Mark H Lytle. I tell you this for two reasons.
1 - It is one of the greatest books I have ever read.
2 - The book is about examining evidence. The authors use genuine historical issues to examine various issues related to this subject. One of the examples they use are the interviews of former slaves - the very ones you’re talking about.
I don’t want to steal their thunder - you really really really should read this book - but they point out that you can’t judge slavery just be reading the surface of the interviews. For example, they compare cases in which the same person was interviewed by two different people - one white and one black - and show the stark contrasts between the two interviews. (And the authors make the point that there’s no reason to believe that the statements given to black interviewers were any more representative of the interviewee’s true opinions than the statements given to white interviewers.)
That’s true, but I don’t know if it’s all that relevant. Darwin’s theories certainly have been abused to support racism and racial inferiority. So even if the idea of evolution had permiated Southern society, there still would be plenty of southerners who were willing to justify slavery and racism. In fact, it might even help the slavery argument, just as it was used to support anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany…now the pro-slavery people would have “scientific support” for black inferiority.