Yes, he’s agreeing with both. He’s saying that it was a necessary evil and that the Union was put together in a way that led to its ultimate extinction.
That’s an explanation of the founder’s viewpoint not an endorsement of it. If I’m talking about the rise of Antisemitism in Germany before WWII talking about the political climate in Germany and I say "As Hitler said Jews were the reason Germany lost WWI I’m not endorsing Hitler’s views, I’m explaining his viewpoint not endorsing what he said. If that were the standard then pretty much every historian would be endorsing atrocities whenever they quoted or attributed a belief to historical figures.
I’ll defend pool: the way pool sees it, Cotton isn’t saying that slavery itself was necessary but maybe that it was more like a historical growing pain - something that all new countries and societies like America could conceivably go through in order to make more meaningful progress.
Now my point of departure from pool is that I personally don’t want to defend Sen. Cotton because of all the other indefensible shit he’s said in the past. I take what he says almost literally at face value.
Can anyone point me to what Founding Father used the phrase “necessary evil” to talk about slavery? None of the contemporary stories about Sen Cotton seem to include that fact.
I understand that the southern states wanted to defend slavery since their entire economic existence (at least the landed class) depended on it. And I understand that enough northerners went along to get along, since independence and a functioning Constitution were deemed as more important than outlawing the “peculiar institution”. But “necessary evil”? I’ve never heard it put that way.
The really odd thing about Sen. Cotton’s statement is that he is using it to attack the 1619 Project as overly negative with respect to American history, when his statement that the very founding of the nation required the allowance of enslavement (at a time when most of the leading founders knew it was morally wrong) seems to point in the other direction.
?? The quote was “…it was the necessary evil…” The word “necessary” is right there.
Well, anyway, good luck with the ESL final!
People sometimes misspeak or don’t use the words in exactly the same way that they were intended.
As I said (irony not lost), I personally won’t defend Sen. Cotton because of all the other heinous shit he’s said in the past. But if I understand him correctly, I think pool’s offering a “What he really meant was” defense rather than defending the denotative meaning.
Nope again. You’re endorsing it.
The only construction where that wouldn’t be the case is when “as” is being used as a synonym of “because” in a dependent clause, such as:
“As Hitler said Jews were the reason Germany lost WWI, he was not invited to Seder at his neighbor’s house.”
As RitterSport says, you’re failing miserably at language comprehension.
pool was arguing that the founding fathers thought it was a necessary evil, but Cotton did not. He wasn’t arguing that necessary didn’t really mean necessary.
Now that this argument has been shown to be false, pool is welcome to try his luck with your argument, or any others he wants. Keep throwing shit against the wall and see what sticks.
Fair enough. But I don’t think an appropriate defense of misspoken or misunderstood words is “Hey, these words actually mean what I intended and not what I said.”
“I meant to say X” or “What I was trying to say is X” is fine. But “I never said Y because I meant X” is not.
The Republicans have to stop invoking Lincoln’s name. They’ve long since handed off the principles of Lincoln.
If this was 1860, Joe Biden would be standing alongside Lincoln as a moderate progressive trying to end slavery with as little disruption as possible. And Tom Cotton and Donald Trump would be the conservatives trying to defend and preserve slavery.
If he wasn’t endorsing slavery as a necessary evil, all he had to say was “The founding fathers saw slavery as a necessary evil…”. Pretty simple, especially if you’re a politician whose livelihood is based on giving speeches. This isn’t a gaffe, it’s a dog-whistle.
Isn’t he saying it just because he’s not arguing in good faith? He’s not trying to establish a point at all, merely trying to throw his opponents into disarray by saying the most preposterous thing he can think of. He may believe it, he may not, he doesn’t care. While his opponents waste a lot of time arguing about what he said and marshaling all their efforts to refute it, he’s sitting back and enjoying watching them waste their time. That or working on the next piece of offensive bluster.
This seems to be a strategy widely applied at present and it encourages a world in which things are not settled by attempts to establish some sort of truth in a rigorous framework but one where you get your way by distracting your opponents while you move on with implementing whatever it is you want. It’s not about winning the argument to get your way. The middleman has been excised, all that’s left is getting your way.
The unfortunate thing is it relies on the fact that decent people are outraged by preposterous outpourings. Cotton and his ilk know there is a highly exploitable asymmetry at play here. For those in opposition to to the things the decent people think, there’s nothing that will upset them very much. They’ve already thought of all the most distressing outcomes possible, they call them policy. They can also rely on a sort of semantic lumpenproletariat who will jump through linguistic hoops to minimise the impact of what is said, presumably to somehow support it or clear the way for more of the same.
Every southern apologist who acknowledges this argument about the founding of the union is admitting that the southern states would have had NO economic viability without slavery. Which means that everything the south has or is today, was built on the backs of those slaves.
When I can hear or read a southern apologist acknowledge that fact and actually realize what it means, then I will believe there is some hope of redemption for those states.
Yeah, but that at least took 100 years to happen. It didn’t take 100 days for them to change from the party that was saving us from the Obamacare death panels to the party of “Mom and Dad have had a full rich life, but isn’t it time to think about letting go?”
The Founding White Guys intended the union to tear itself apart?
Seriously: take an English class. You’re wrong.
When you transcribe spoken language you’ll often find that it’s not grammatically perfect.
Cotton also specifically clarified later on that he did not endorse the view of slavery as a necessary evil and that he was talking about the views of the founding fathers. If you take him at his own words, no I am not wrong.
If you just think he is straight up lying about his true beliefs then that is a different topic.
No, but a lot of them, at the time the Constitution was written, thought they’d have to come back and deal with the slavery issue one way or another within 20-30 years and/or it might lead to fighting. It ended up taking quite a bit longer than that, which speaks to how much they wanted to keep the Union together.
They all recognized it was a convenient evil but there were plenty of them who did not find it “necessary” at all and were staunch abolitionists.
It’s just spin and euphemism to project some chosen “motives” of slave owners to burnish a traitorous cause. All we have is their acts, not their intent to work with.
The slaves are now and forever the heroes of southern history and the whites are not going to be that anymore. It’s a tough pill. Expect many more awkward contructions.