Can you please explain to me how an inanimate entity like a “state” has rights? Individuals have rights. The huge advance of the concept of personal rights was that there were things the government could not do to you - and if the government did, it would be morally wrong. Rights are essentially a moral concept, and that gives them an important standing.
Cloaking the rules of the government game in the language of rights is damaging, because it implies some kind of moral justification for the idea that powers are split between the federal and state government. There isn’t. There are reasons why certain allocations are good and bad, and they might touch on morality, but they aren’t moral themselves in the way that “Curtis LeMay may not have is right to free speech infringed upon by the government” is a morality based statement.
Whether the state or the federal government determined whether a fugitive slave should be returned to his or her owner isn’t about morality in that sense. It’s the equivalent of whether the linesman or the referee should call offside decisions.
By even talking of states’ rights as if they exist you are pandering to the secessionists.
Because importation of slaves was illegal. Why compensated emancipation might have been a good idea was because, whether slavery is good or evil, slaves made up a large portion of a slaveholder’s assets. Simply declaring it illegal without compensation would (and did) ruin a lot of people, and they’re be resistance by the slaveholders involved, because nobody likes being financially ruined.
Shoot, forget about the past. People still say stuff like this. Variations on the theme have popped up on this very board in recent days, even if they’re shrouded behind politically correct disclaimers. There is always a “but” trailing behind. As in “Slavery was bad, but most slaveowners probably weren’t cruel to their slaves”.
Really? I always want to ask. How would you know that? Slavery without the constant threat of violence is not slavery, just as imprisonment without armed guards and highly secure fences, walls, and buildings isn’t imprisonment. This is especially true with plantations. A plantation that didn’t overwork it’s labor (and how are you going to overwork slaves without being violent…it’s not like you can threaten to withhold wages instead) probably wasn’t going to be able to compete against those that squeezed every ounce of work out of their slaves as they possibly could. So I’m struggling to imagine how any slaveowner really would have been able to manage more than a dozen slaves by being a nice guy, let alone most.
The OP is right in one way: Americans as a whole–not just the South–have a really hard time coming to grips with this part of its history.
Well, the majority of slaveowners owned less than a dozen slaves. If you look at the 1860 census, the ratio of slaves to slaveholders is about 10 to 1. If you look at slave ownership before the war, what you’ll find is a few slaveholders with large plantations and a whole bunch of slaves (the sort of stereotypical slaveowner), and a larger group who only owned one or two slaves, and an even larger group, of course, who didn’t own any slaves.
The total white population of the slaveholding states was about 8.1 million people, according to the 1860 census. Of that number, about 384,000 were slaveowners. Of that number, about 10,780 owned more than 20 slaves.
You’re right that most white people in the antebellum south did not own scores of slaves. It was more typical to own one or two or none. However, that does not alter the fact that the ownership of even a single slave still entailed a constant and omnipresent threat of violence (even death) if the person being enslaved ever tried to leave or become disobedient.
Majority is not most. Furthermore, even among that number that didn’t own tons of slaves, you can’t make any assumptions about how nice the slavemasters were just out of emotional impulses. A lot of people seem to do this because they don’t want to think that Americans could do evil things. Which is why the “states rights” song still gets airplay.
It’s actually plausible to me that someone who owned 10 or less slaves, depending on the business he was in, could have been more physically coercive than one who owned a lot more. This is because if one ran away, he’d stand to lose proportionately more of his “investment” than one that had slaves coming out of the ying yang. But that’s not really my point. I’m saying the system itself, when taken as a whole, relied on force in order to exist. So our tendency to paint the slaveowners in the gentlest way possible serves little purpose except to gloss over the reality of what slavery required, and it’s this, I think, that sticks in my craw the most.
Maybe if people focused on the system instead of individuals, they wouldn’t be so inclined to revise history in a way that makes the South’s case look better than it actually was.
I’m not making any assumptions. I’m just providing data. Undoubtedly, some people treated their slaves well and some people treated their slaves badly. I mean, you make the statement that a lot of people don’t want to think that Americans can do evil things, and that’s probably true, but there’s the other assumption that everyone who owned slaves was evil and abused their slaves.
Did the South ever put for a serious effort for compensation of said slave labor? And what would they say if the slaves wanted a share of that compensation too?
The whole institution of slavery was forced servitude with threats if you don’t cooperate. How many people are willing slaves? When talking about something like slavery, evil is the default, not the outlier.
That’s only if you assume that owning a slave makes you evil yourself. I’m not saying slavery isn’t evil, but if you live in a society where it’s accepted and practiced, are you evil for participating in an institution you and your society accept as good, but outsiders think is evil?
I would say that you are committing an evil act (and an ongoing one), the harm of which is subject to varying degrees of cognitive appreciation, depending on the individual, but I don’t buy that many, except for children and those who were literally intellectually handicapped, had no cognitive awareness of all that it was innately wrong.
Whether a person, per se can be called evil or not is (for the most people, anyway) too binary to answer.
I will say that using violence to defend the continued practice of what they all knew was wrong goes wll into the evil side of the spectrum.
I’m not going to dispute that there are people who think slavery proponents were evil incarnate. I’m not one of them, though. They are just people to me, and I’m not emotionally invested in seeing them as bad or good, quite frankly. It really doesn’t matter. Good people are capable of doing bad things, and vice versa. So there’s no rational reason to give someone–or even a group of someones–the benefit of the doubt about what happened during slavery just because they might be a good person.
If we accept that chattel slavery as it was practiced in the Americans was an intrinsically abusive system because it demoralized human beings to the status of animal property, then every slaveowner was participating in abuse. So pointing to the individual owner who never beat anyone as if to say not everyone was cruel is missing the point. Maybe the non-abusive ones just had docile, down-trodden slaves who never tried to run away because they were too frightened of the consequences. Or maybe they were Santa Claus. None of us really are to able to say. It doesn’t matter.
I also say that any “nice person” who supported the slavery cause, while being fully cognizant that the system allowed all kinds of abuses to go on, is really not all that much better than the “cruel person”.
What do you call a woman who knowingly marries a man who beats and sexually molest their children, and then stands by and does nothing of any significant consequence? I call her culpable. It doesn’t matter if she didn’t participate in the abuse herself. She assisted. Maybe she didn’t know it’s wrong to let all that happen to her kids. It doesn’t matter.
It does matter. If there’s a culture where everybody’s allowed and encouraged to beat and sexually molest their children, how can somebody be culpable for doing it, and how can somebody be culpable for standing by and watching it be done?
We learn what’s right and wrong from our societies, by being taught by our family and friends, and seeing the world around us. If you’re growing up in the antebellum South, if you see slaves all the time, if all the leaders and respected people of your community have slaves, if the church you go to praises slavery as a moral good; in other words, if everything in your society tells you that slavery is right and natural, can you really be blamed for thinking it is? Do you really expect people to reject their societies like that?
What a remarkable individual you are, then, to develop a completely independent moral system. And how coincidental that it’s similar enough to general societal morality that you can successfully function in the society.
