To be fair, I’m saying that I’m willing to judge people by (modified, see above) modern standards–but that even if I were limiting the judgement to 18th century standards, Washington was still a dick.
But what about the sad fact that southern Abolitionists were very rare. 
I’ve been able to find very little data on that.
The lack of data would support the “product of your environment” argument, wouldn’t it?
Speaking out your ass, are you? Quick question, two part:
- In your survey of the data, what percentage of southerners were Abolitionists?
- Hah, trick question, did you include southern slaves in that count?
Back to the main point: it’s extraordinarily unlikely that by the late seventeenth century a Southern slaver was unfamiliar with the abolitionist arguments. I make no claims about whether a person is insulated from judgement by some sort of numerical appeal; I only say that someone who is unexposed to an ethical argument cannot reasonably be held to that argument.
Why wouldn’t they?
Most people are honest and want to do an honest job of whatever their occupation is (regardless of whether they had any choice about their occupation) and most people want to avoid being punished. And so regardless of whether we’re talking about slaves, workers in Soviet Russia, or a modern day desk jockey are going to respond to any notice from their boss that they’re performing poorly.
Similarly, most people don’t want to hurt other people. Few people are sadists, few people are psychopaths, and the cross-section of both of those traits is even smaller. Most slave owners were just regular people brought up with wrong ideas. They bought slaves in order to expand their business and to secure more wealth for their children, not because they enjoyed the prospect of having human boxing bags floating around their property.
So if the slaves are mostly going to respond to negative feedback and you mostly don’t want to hurt people, let alone for arbitrary reasons, you’re going to give them a talking to before considering anything more than that. I’d venture to guess that even after a talking to, a lot of slaves were made to stand in a corner, given a task that was distasteful, etc. before ever getting to the prospect of physical punishment. While creepy, most slave owners saw slaves as being like “children”, not as being like mules. They believed that they could never really grow up to be anything more than a child, but they were still some form of human and could be talked to and deserved religion, food, housing, love, and care.
Certainly, there were slave owners who didn’t care one jot for any of that and was just as likely to slap a horse, a slave, or anything else with a whip if it misbehaved. And those slave owners are the ones who end up in the records and in the history books.
I don’t think that most slaves considered the state of their daily life to be abusive.
My brother was a bully, and when caught, he would be spanked. Good, painful spankings, not just a warning spank, the real thing. But my father didn’t spank him because he liked to do it or because he was abusive, he just wanted to make my brother not bully other kids. Otherwise, our household was completely peaceful and no one was “abused”. But, by the standards of today, I could see some calling it “an abusive household”. And, personally, seeing that spankings didn’t really work to correct my brother, I’m disinclined to use such a strategy if I ever have kids.
But as another kid in the house, I didn’t feel like I was in an abusive household and I felt that my brother had brought it on himself.
Now if I had lived in a house where I was in constant fear of my dad, and there was no way to predict when my dad was going to flip out and start wailing on one of us, there I’d not feel like any one spanking had been earned. If my brother messed up and had done something almost certain to anger our father, I’d help him escape before dad got home. And that I would certainly consider to be an abusive household.
But this would certainly be the sort of case where I would expect to see reports written about what had happened, where you would have both kids decrying their treatment to all and sundry. You could find information about the incidents years later.
Some slaves were punished because the owner was an evil asshole. But others probably brought it on themselves. I’m sure that there was a slave, somewhere in the US, who regularly beat his slave wife. I wouldn’t feel bad if that guy got whipped and then sent to the West Indies. The fact that slavery is bad doesn’t mean that someone is suddenly a good guy who can do no wrong.
If slaves are rotating in and out of Washington’s land by the dozen, every year, and running away every few months, then yeah I’m liable to believe that he was an awful man. But if he had a fairly constant batch of the same 120 something people, over the course of several decades, and there seem to have been a 2-3 instances of slaves being sent away, and all other indications are that Washington was a decent guy who had no great animosity towards his slaves, then I’m liable to believe that those 2-3 slaves may well have brought their conditions on themselves. That doesn’t absolve Washington, just as it’s not alright for a police man to shoot a guy who’s black, even if that black guy proves to have been a wife beater after all. Saying that one guy is bad doesn’t mean the other guy is good. Both parties can be bad. But it’s a bit extreme to say that we’re talking about a monster, rather than that we’re talking about someone who lived in an era where “wrong” was the norm.
No, it isn’t. That might apply to judging people – we can cut Thomas Jefferson some slack because, in owning slaves, he was just doing what everybody of his class did in his time and place, and only a few exceptional whites (including Jefferson himself, of whom it has been said that his life was a constant war between his principles and his appetites) were even beginning to have any doubts about its morality. But that is no reason why we cannot now look back on the institution of slavery itself and fairly morally condemn it.
Well, that’s because of the hypocrisy. We might expect better of a man who wears a skirt.
Why are you being rude to me?
I googled Southern Abolitionists and really found almost no data at all.
I’m sure people could look back at us 200 years form now and see how we are destroying the planet/environment and be quite critical. We do know better. But, we would probably be a lot more likely to be more concerned if it was a fundamental part of society to be concerned about that, ie, to the point that people walked 3 mile instead of driving. I don’t know anyone who walks to the 7/11 for a soda when they can drive instead.
I’m not excusing slavery and the treatment of slaves. But maybe it is not as easy to condemn as we thought. Before I looked up Southern Abolitionists and found no data… I would of agreed with you 100%.
And, again, why are you being rude to me? It’s kind of a habit you have every time we disagree. As far as I know, I’ve never been rude to you. I know debates can get heated and people are invested in what they are talking about… but… maybe you need to learn to separate bad people (not me) from people you simply disagree with (me).
Well, then neither bears comparison to Confucius, do they? Nothing inhuman about his ideals – he simply laid out and systematized the traditional norms of Chinese society and exhorted people to at least try to live up to them, perfectly or imperfectly.
Your opinions on how slaves felt about their slavery, and their masters, are refuted by almost every single surviving document written (or dictated) by slaves and former slaves in which they discuss their enslavement. They were very aware of the ‘wrongness’ of slavery, and the desire for freedom.
“Wrong” was the norm for slave-owners, but it wasn’t the norm for everyone. Many of Washington and Jefferson’s fellows opposed slavery and recognized it for what it was. That Washington and Jefferson didn’t join folks like Ben Franklin and John Adams reflects very poorly on them.
I never said that Washington’s treatment of slaves was admirable. Based on the information given, it sounds like he was probably slightly worse than your exact middle of the road slave owner.
My point was, as said, that the information provided does not conclusively show that Washington was a monster. It is plausible, from the information given, that the instances of people running away or being punished, can be explained as reasonable within the framework of the time, for a fairly average slave owner.
I’ll do some research. Perhaps you are right and every slave owner was arbitrary and sadistic, but that just doesn’t ping my reasonableness meter.
A “fairly average slave owner”, for the standards of the time, were pretty damn close to monstrous.
I’m not shitting on you for saying that Washington’s ownership of slaves was admirable – you didn’t say it. You just don’t seem to think it was a big deal, or a mark against him, and it was. It was a huge mark against him. That he was an intelligent man, and very close to intelligent abolitionists like Ben Franklin, and still was fine with owning slaves reflects extremely poorly on him. It’s the difference between a German citizen turning in his Jewish neighbor or saying nothing about their hiding place.
As Samuel Johnson had it, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”. Or, if you prefer, “Slavery is now no where more patiently endured, than in countries once inhabited by the zealots of liberty.” And Johnson knew what he was talking about: his valet was Francis Barber, a former Jamaican slave whom Johnson made his heir. The inhabitants of the 18th century knew perfectly well that slavery was wrong.
They weren’t necessarily, personally, all “arbitrary and sadistic”, but they all took part in a system which required brutality and sadism to function. I doubt every single slave-owner raped their slaves, but enough did to permanently and significantly alter the DNA ancestry of black people in America – and the fear of terrible punishment, as well as the fear of being sold to someone even worse, was absolutely necessary to keep them from running away. Hell, Southern states even passed laws to ban educating slaves, or even allowing them to congregate in groups – they were that afraid that knowledge and communication could lead to revolt (and rightly so, from the point of view of slave-owners!).
Why do you think so many slaves tried to run away? Why do you think entire communities sprang up, in wildernesses and in free territories, made up of escaped slaves? Why do you think the average black person in America has a very significant portion of European ancestry? Why do you think slave revolts were put down with such incredible savagery and brutality? Why do you think Southern physicians (really!) suggested that slave owners whip “the devil out of them” if a slave started to show signs of dissatisfaction?
We might also cut slaveholders some slack – some little – for the “wolf by the ears” argument. They had been born into a slaveowning society, after a certain point they mostly inherited their land and their slaves, at any rate they inherited slavery as a condition of their social environment, and they sincerely believed their slaves were dangerous savages who would run wild if they let up on them one little bit . . . and there were so many slaves! What happened in Haiti in 1791 (the rebel slaves simply killed very white person they could catch) only reinforced their fear. That’s why abolitionists in the South were likely to get lynched – abolitionism was even scarier to slaveowners than Communism was to American conservatives in the 1950s. Abolitionism was a physical threat to them, that’s how they saw it. And the majority of whites, who were too poor to own slaves, saw it in exactly the same way.
As it happened, American slaves took no reprisals against whites when they were eventually freed. But, then, there were Union troops, mostly white, all over the South at the time. Who knows what might have happened in the event of a successful slave rebellion?
That’s why I’m rude to you. You googled Southern Abolitionists and didn’t find much. Instead of concluding that maybe you suck at Google, or that maybe something more than googling “Southern Abolitionists” would suffice to make an argument, you posted that it’s a “fact that southern Abolitionists were very rare.”
That’s bullshit. It’s a shitty argument. It’s a shitty argument based on shitty research. AND YOU DON’T SEEM TO REALIZE THAT.
You’re constantly making extremely poor arguments, without having any realization that you’re doing so. It’s fine to be ignorant about a topic; that’s a good time to shut up and listen, not a time to make claims. When you’re ignorant about a topic and you make claims about it anyway, that’s talking out your ass. And when you do it in the pit, I’ll be rude to you about it, because you shouldn’t do it, and I want the experience of doing it to be unpleasant for you, so maybe you’ll stop doing it.
Jesus Christ. You are trying to infer what you think slavery would have been like based on abstract reasoning? Based on putting yourself in the place of the slaveholder and imagining what he would have thought?
American Chattel Slavery is literally one of the best documented historical events we have. People in the 18th-19th centuries, white and black, were great keepers of journals and writers of letters and memoirs and fans of litigation that involved lots and lots of paperwork. Read the WPA interviews, read Harriet Jacobs or Frederick Douglass, read any number of secondary sources that have compiled the thousands and thousands of primary sources we have on this subject.
I don’t know what you are an expert on, but I imagine it’s something. Have you ever had to deal with someone who thinks they know your specialty and how it works because of what seems reasonable to their totally ignorant self? You’re being this guy.
Please. Go educate yourself or be quiet.
Read the fucking links that have been provided in this fucking thread. That’s your fucking research right there.
nm
You’d venture to guess? You’d venture to fucking guess?! Well, if that’s not a fine bit of cogent and well-researched argument, my name’s not Jiminy fucking Cricket!
You’d venture to guess.
You know how before I rated you at a 2 on the knowing what you’re talking about scale? Must’ve been Christmas or something, I give you a 2.