Brown actually planned to model his uprising on the American Revolution, and he and his fellow supporters wrote out and signed “A Declaration of Liberty by the Representatives of the Slave Population of the United States of America”.
And I’d say the argument for a slave uprising creating their own free-state separate from Virginia is alot stronger then Jeffersons argument that the US should be its own state because of taxes on tea.
You don’t think the French Resistance or native Congolese had an argument about the breakdown of democratic governance?
No, that wasn’t my point. My point was that the law has legitimacy because of principles of democracy. When you decide to exercise violence that is illegal under a democracy’s laws, it makes a difference whether that violence can be justified by democratic theory.
Maybe so. But I think that’s the avenue by which you have to argue that Brown wasn’t a terrorist or vigilante. It isn’t sufficient to merely argue that his cause was just.
I strongly doubt that most of them did; I further deny that it was necessary.
When part of your population is terrorized into slavery, it’s not a democracy. And John Brown was fighting against precisely that aspect of the society that was a democracy. A government that enslaves its population has no legitimacy.
So, Abe Lincoln, not democratically elected? Doesn’t count?
They are hostis humani generis, the enemies of mankind. So, yes.
Interesting question. I’d have to say no, not in any meaningful sense. When it’s a small minority of people who get to vote, and they’ve been choosing to vote to keep a significant part of the population in the worst sort of bondage, then no, that’s not a meaningful democracy.
I’m glad Lincoln got voted into office, but given the country’s undemocratic system, it wasn’t a free and fair election.
Anybody qualify in this day and age… just wondering?
Slavers still exist, so yes. If there really are (or ever are) “organleggers” who kill people to steal their organs I’d put them in the same category; as predators upon humanity. Like real life counterparts of Dracula style vampires; they regard people as nothing but prey to be exploited, as tools or raw material and are therefore the “enemy of mankind in general.”
The difference being that slavers are acting outside of the law now. Therefore there isn’t the same justification for going after them Charles Bronson style. When Mr. Brown faced slavery, it was defended by the government. The only way left to deal with slavers was with fire & the sword. Fortunately that isn’t the case now, but I also wouldn’t shed many tears if slaves murder their owners today.
Oh bullshit. Plenty of countries managed to eliminate slavery without bathing themselves in blood. (The most common method, and one discussed in the US, was to declare anyone born after X date to be free.)
If anything, Brown’s actions went a long way toward making a peaceful solution to slavery impossible.
The slaver owners had refused compromise at every single step. So bullshit to yourself. Had the Federal government declared anyone born after X date to be free, I wonder what would have happened? Secession, maybe? Civil war? Why would I possibly think that?
Of course, the rest of the country could have bankrupted itself paying compensation to the slave owning scum. They still wouldn’t have been happy, though, because all of their money wouldn’t have bought them people to have the power of life or death over, and the social structure would have crumbled.
Slave owners had the chance to give it up. They didn’t, and they weren’t going to without being forced to.
Which leaves the people born before “X date” still slaves, which is unacceptable. Slavery is not something that should be compromised on, not by a millimeter.
Which was exactly the sort of thinking that yielded over 600,000 dead Americans 1861-65.
No, it was comprising on the matter in the first place that led to that. The Founders compromised on the issue of slavery, and the Civil War was the long term result of them being unwilling to deal with the issue themselves.
Oh; and if the ending slavery inevitably meant “600,000 dead Americans 1861-65.”, well that was the price that had to be paid to end an evil that America inflicted on itself. The Confederacy and slavery in general was an evil that if anything was worse than Nazi Germany.
Slavery could have been ended without mass slaughter if cooler heads on both sides had prevailed. John Brown did his part to make that nigh impossible.
Ludicrous.
While true in theory, in practice, slaves being able to vote would have made no difference in the election, except possibly to increase Lincoln’s margin of victory. He won not one single electoral vote from south of the Mason-Dixon Line/Ohio River.
Sure–but the whole Lincoln thing is a red herring. The point is that you cannot defend slavery by saying it’s the law of a democratic institution: slavery is the very antithesis of democracy, except for highly technical definitions of “democracy” that abjure all positive connotations of the word.
So the U.S. was not a democracy until women could vote? Or possibly even as late as the civil rights actions of the 1960s which did away with poll taxes, literacy tests, and so on?
What’s your point? It’s not a binary on-off switch: obviously a democracy is a continuum, and obviously we’re more democratic now than we were fifty years ago, and fifty years ago was more democratic than 100 years ago. This isn’t anything new.
My point is that you cannot meaningfully claim to be a government of the people when many of your people are enslaved; and when you’re voting to enslave people, you surrender the right to call yourself an advocate of democracy. It’s like claiming that General Motors is a democracy since the Board of Directors votes on policy. A vote does not a democracy make.