Funny you should ask… I’m actually a direct descendant, so maybe I’m biased.
As a damn Yankee and New Englander (though residing in CA for most of my adult life), I would say that we see him as just another General fighting in a horrible war. Maybe he was harsher than some, but he was fighting against an evil enemy. He’s certainly not considered a villain where I come from.
That’ll settle it once and for all.
Did I make that claim? No, I didn’t. You were the one who cited the fecundity of slaves as if to say they were happily fucking each other and making babies and enjoying life. What you overlooked was that women had to have babies, or they’d risk getting sold off or beaten. So whatever devastating point you thought you were making when you brought up their birthrate was ill-thought.
If you think suicide stopped after the trans-Atlantic slave trade was abolished, you are naive. Not in a society where running away was a suicidal act in of itself.
Okay, so you are naive. To find what has been documented on the subject and conclude that because there only two written accounts that you’ve seen, that means it rarely occured…that’s not even ridiculous, Sampiro. It’s point at you and laugh, Nelson style. “My logic” is that where there is smoke there is fire. These are slaves we’re talking about, and there is not going to be whole lot of statistics on infanticide (or homocide, for that matter). I feel confident in saying infanticide, abortion, and suicide were common in these days because they are common enough now. In an extreme situation like slavery, when life is treated with very little value, it would be unreasonable to believe infancticide wasn’t common.
Remember, you are the one who introduced suicide and infanticide into this discussion. Your point is that the Jews were in such a dire situation that “OMG, they often killed themselves!” Consider that the reason they did this was because they weren’t completely dehumanized; they still remembered what human dignity felt like. Second, third, and fourth generation slaves never had that privilege. So even if you are right, that the Holocaust victims more frequently offed themselves because they had it so bad, it doesn’t prove the Holocaust was worse than slavery.
It’s an argument that really shouldn’t be made. Just give it up, please.
Really? Do you have any of his artifacts or photos? How long ago did your ancestors get so far east?
I just read a fairly long essay on his marriage (“General and Mrs. William T. Sherman: A Contentious Union” by John F. Marszalek if you’re interested and haven’t read it). I’m increasingly convinced that Ulysses and Julia Grant were the only happily married couple during the whole Civil War.
If you could be arsed to read the works of the great J. Whedon, you would realize that nothing stays buried.
Did you implyt hat rape was a significant factor in the reproduction of slaves? Yes, you did.
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Aren’t straw men wonderful when you’re too stupid to make real arguments? (Gonna take a wild guess not many of your research papers ever got read aloud or accepted for publication did they?)
Of course it didn’t. There was suicide in every single stratum of American society including the rich- still is. Can you show me where suicide among slaves in the Civil War era was significantly higher?
THIS is the one intelligent part of your argument and what you should have based your entire response around. That’s as much help as I’ll give you though.
Why do I just know you’re pronouncing that to rhyme with navy.
I never said that. I said that you jumping and up and down and saying “Land ho!” as if you’ve discovered a continent of corroborative information is ridiculous because you found one article on one incident and you can find one or two examples of anything. (Any idea how frequently cannibalism has been practiced in American history from Jamestown to the present? Lots, but it’s not exactly indicative of a major social trend is it?)
Take this as victory or as an analgesic or antihystamine if you wish, but you’re honestly not worth arguing with. You’re less interested in debating like a master than masturbating like a howler monkey and I’m running out of Kleenex.
My father said that to me just this morning while I was extinguishing my morning smoke in his skull.
The Lees were pretty happy. I mean, the arthritis made her pretty miserable, but they got along well, and Stonewall Jackson doted on his wife.
To answer your Sherman question, I grew up in Upstate NY, and I don’t think I ever heard of Sherman as a villian at all. He’s seen as one of the generals who helped win the war
It’s not a qualitative difference worth taking any notice of.
No, nothing. I’m 5-generations removed. Not sure about the last question. Sherman, himself, was all over the place, btw. He died in New York.
I know he’s generally hated in the South, but I don’t think that sentiment carries over into what was the Union.
I was being hyperbolic of course, but yeah- Stonewall was happily married to the extent anybody could be happily married to that nutball, and the Lee’s except for her invalidism and his- I won’t say womanizing as he isn’t known to have consummated any unions, but she was bothered by his flirtations. One of the most gentlemanly acts of the war I think was when Ulysses set guards at her house upon learning that it was physically impossible for her to be evacuated without enormous pain.
When Jefferson and Varina Davis’s son Billy died of diptheria in 1873 (he was 12) Mary Custis Lee, herself within a few weeks of her death, wrote one of the sweetest letters of condolence I’ve ever read. I can only find a fragment of it online but I’ll reproduce the whole thing if anybody’s interested. She’s also the typical passive aggressive manipulative southern mother who tells Varina “Of course all of the girls and Bunny* never leave my side and are a source of great comfort to me, which is good since none of them seem inclined to marry or get jobs” (made me laugh out loud when I read it 135 years later).
There is an APPALLLLLLLINGLY bad opera by Philip Glass called Appomattox that I’m sure worked brilliantly on paper but doesn’t transcend into the waking very well, in which Mrs. Lee is a major character(small pics) (ginormous pic) and hearing that powerful soprano come from a wheelchair was admirable on the part of the singer but didn’t do a lot for my ears or the sense of history.
*The unmarried oldest son.
If you don’t see a chance to live as a qualitative difference you’ve led a very tragic or a very charmed life.
That was my grandfather’s skull, asshole. I’ve got your dad’s and have been using it as a flyswatter, and I am unutterably offended that you would abuse my family’s memory by using Grandpa H as an ashtray. The usual threats.
Let me help you, since the amnesia seems to be creeping on ya.
Now help us out. What point are you making with these line of inquiry? You seem really mystified about why slaves were a-popping out babies and you seemed to think there weren’t many suicides and infanticides among them, at least when compared to the Holocaust victims. All I did was answer your questions.
Slaves were raped and/or actively bred, that’s why they were fecund.
Suicides and such were an issue as well. They were poorly documently, but they occured regularly enough. As you now acknowledge.
You’re absolutely right and I don’t know why I didn’t see it before. The fact that the Caribbean had negative growth rates for centuries was because the slaves weren’t getting raped enough. It can’t be that there was remotely anything to make like worth living here. You are absolutely right and couldn’t be more right if you had hypothermia and got down to 90 degrees.
Ask any parent if thy’d rather die or have their children taken away and given to strangers.
This whole digression is off point anyway. As I keep saying, I brought up the Nazis to make a point about moral relativism. Arguing about which was worse is missing the point. If you agree that the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews was objectively evil, then you agree that moral relativism is bullshit and can’t be used as a defense of the Confederacy.
It’s weird that you extrapolate a high birthrate to having a “life worth living”. The poorest, most miserable places on the planet have some of the highest birthrates. Fecundity doesn’t have anything to do with quality of life. If anything, its inversely proportional to that.
But keep grasping at straws, man. I hate when you paint yourself into a corner by defending shit that you don’t even want to defend, but you seem to do it very often.
Thanks for spitting it out pretty clearly, DtC.
Which would imply that the people there find life worth living, neh?
No, it would imply that they are too poor or too religious to use birth control and have no other means of occupying their leisure time besides sex.
You are literally making an argument that “slavery wasn’t that bad” in this thread. There’s nothing to say to that besides pointing it out…what insult could I possibly come up with that’s worse?
