I think maybe I have found the flaw in your logic: it doesn’t fucking matter if he meted out punishments based on merit. He didn’t have the right to mete out punishment to anyone. Legally, he did, of course. But morally, no.
It doesn’t matter how evenhandedly he treated his slaves. The point is that it’s not okay to own people.
It’s far more likely that he was in the middle – sometimes punishing slaves for disobedience, sometimes for misbehavior, sometimes for running away, etc. And this “in the middle” is incredibly brutal, even by the standards of the time. Many folks like Benjamin Franklin recognized this brutality, and stood against it. That Washington supported the brutality, and took part in it, is a big mark against him.
I wonder if we can start a petition to have the Mods rename his account “Slavery Smapti”.
Involuntary custom title?
What a load of exculpatory bollocks. As if slaves didn’t know they were slaves. Here’s a letter(original here) from an actual former slave (not a made up person in Sage Rat’s head) to his old master who has recently offered him a position. Jourdon Anderson seems to have a pretty clear idea of what being a slave meant for him and his family and how much better he is out of it. He also has a fine line in stiletto-sharp sarcasm:
No, but sure - if you’d asked Mr Anderson on a random day how his day was, he would have said “Good”. Of course he would. If it was a day he wasn’t watching Matilda and Catherine being raped, for instance. Or being shot at by his “master”. Or had forgotten that he was being treated like cattle or cheated out of a lifetime’s earnings. “Oh sure,” he’d say. “Today was a good day”.
Thanks for posting that letter, Stanislaus. I’d heard of it before but never read it. It’s a thing of beauty.
Wowzers! That certainly is a vile heap of effluence right there, to be sure.
I couldn’t say just from reading what the OP quoted, though, that our wise rodent friend is necessarily a racist at heart.
It may well be an unfortunate case of someone being needlessly cerebral while completely missing the point that they are talking about actual people being treated as property.
It’s evil. Ain’t no reason to justify it.
Whaaaaaa…???
George Washington doesn’t have to have been a monster for his ownership and treatment of slaves to have been evil in and of itself.
Stop playing Devil’s advocate.
The devil is not a stand up kind of guy.
Likewise, thanks for posting this, Stanislaus.
I’d read it some time ago, but forgotten it.
A valuable perspective that should bring some much needed clarity to any discussion about slavery.
It’s wonderful, isn’t it? Imagine going through that and still having the restraint to lay out such a massive “Go fuck yourself, pal” in such ostensibly polite language. I actually left out my favourite bit, which I think packs the greatest amount of triumphant vindication into the smallest number of words:
Fascinating letter, Stanislaus, thanks!
There’s some dispute over how much of the letter is Jordan’s “own work” and how much is interpolation by the transcriber.
puff Was it good for you too?
Where’s that damn like button?
Harriet Jacobs’ narrative is also very interesting. Among other things, she lived in town and fought very hard to stay in town, because life was relatively better and slaves more protected, than in the country:
The myth that slavery was not that bad, or that slaves were generally content, was widespread in the 1850s as well, and much of the work is aimed at specifically showing how that was not the case.
I hesitate to even dip my toe in this thread, but . . .
This is kind of the dilemma of systemic or institutionalized problems, right? Every slaver might not be brutal, but as long as he retains and exercises his power by operating in a system where other slavers are brutal, and where he has the option to become brutal at a moment’s notice, at the heart of it how different is he from those who are brutal?
I’d say that there are fundamental and important differences . . . but also that in other fundamental ways they are exactly the same.
To add to this, there are two conceivable ways in which a master could avoid brutality.
The first way is to let the threat of it hang in the air–never to use the lash because slaves are so convinced it will be used. I’m unaware of any records of any slaver who used this method; as I understand it, there were whippers-for-hire who would torture your slave for you if you were unwilling to do it yourself (I’m having trouble finding citation for this, so I may be misremembering). However, if there were a slaver who used this method–essentially terrifying slaves with the threat of torture so severely that they continued to work under the conditions of enslavement–that’s not exactly a sign of good slavery. And even then, the supposedly kind slaver doesn’t offer freedom to their slaves, which means that the slaves know if they decide to travel elsewhere or engage in other work, they’ll be captured and beaten and severely punished for attempting to leave. The cruelty remains outsourced.
The second way it could work is to tell slaves, as others have outrageously implied in this thread, “Look, if you want to leave I won’t stop you, but everywhere else is so worse for you than here that you probably don’t want to leave. You’d rather stay here and work for me in exchange for what I provide.” There are three problems with this idea. First, if someone tells their slave that they won’t pursue, that’s an offer of freedom, and it’s highly questionable whether it’s even a slavery relationship any more. Second, it’s still exploiting a system of brutality in an unconscionable manner. Third, I’m unaware of any slaver who made such an arrangement with anyone they’d enslaved.
The idea of the non-brutal slaver is, as far as I can tell, a myth.
Yes. This (the bit I put in red) is precisely the point that the Slavery Wasn’t So Bad folks are desperate to bury under reams of irrelevancies, such as the fine examples we’ve seen Rat post—knuckleheaded stuff about whether it’s possible to discuss Marie Curie as a Woman Scientist if we’ve failed to discuss her as a Scientist (?) and comparisons of 30th century living to life in our own times (!) and just-plain-dopey assertions about how when life in a period contains a lot of brutality, then what’s so bad about slavery, in comparison to all those public-hangings and such???
“Obfuscation through the posting of masses of murky unconnected and inapt claims” seems to be the watchword of these types. (There is a good article at Slate that collects some of the fallacious reasoning put about by the Wasn’t So Bad folks: Slavery myths: Seven lies, half-truths, and irrelevancies people trot out about slavery—debunked.
The basic formulation employed by these sophists:
A: American slavery can be classified as ‘bad’ only if the majority of slaveholders were brutal sadists;
B: Manifestly, not all slaveholders were brutal sadists;
C: Therefore, American slavery cannot be classified as ‘bad.’
It’s errant nonsense, of course.
Plus the tendency to speculate about what might have happened in the slave days like there is no historical data, no primary sources, no first-hand accounts to look to. These aren’t Cro-Magnons, we’re not poring over ancient artifacts wondering what this culture MIGHT have been liked if we imagine the slave-owners as genteel and logical creatures.
I’m going to say it again: brutality (or rape, or separating families, or hunger, or any other bad or good treatment) is not the point.
Not the point.
The point is that human beings had the status of things, roughly on a par with livestock. Yes, some owners were relatively less evil, and some were relatively more evil, but the institution itself was ineluctably evil and therefore the character of anyone who participated in it (except as a slave) is stained with that evil.
All of this talk about how some slave owners might be less brutal strikes me as dancing around the basic, unavoidable evil of slavery.
I think both are important to acknowledge.
Sometimes when I see those “Lost Pet” signs, I wonder if Fido or Fluffy aren’t as much lost as escapees. Maybe if Fido or Fluffy could have left behind a little note, it would say “Please don’t come looking for me. I’m perfectly happy where I am–which is not with you! Smooches!”
But the thing about American slaves is that–despite the conventional wisdom–they were actually intelligent human beings. Successfully running away required intention and presence of mind. No one leaves food and shelter for “inane” reasons unless they are obviously mentally impaired. Mentally impaired people don’t get very far. Every one who successfully escaped their enslavement lived to tell exactly why they escaped. I don’t think historians have turned up many reasons other than perfectly valid ones.
It is possible to convince one’s self that an animal didn’t really mean to run away. But not a human.
