Posted on 09/22/2012 6:47:35 AM PDT by Renfield
...“One cannot question the genuineness of Jefferson’s liberal dreams,” writes historian David Brion Davis. “He was one of the first statesmen in any part of the world to advocate concrete measures for restricting and eradicating Negro slavery.”
But in the 1790s, Davis continues, “the most remarkable thing about Jefferson’s stand on slavery is his immense silence.” And later, Davis finds, Jefferson’s emancipation efforts “virtually ceased.”
Somewhere in a short span of years during the 1780s and into the early 1790s, a transformation came over Jefferson.
The very existence of slavery in the era of the American Revolution presents a paradox, and we have largely been content to leave it at that, since a paradox can offer a comforting state of moral suspended animation. Jefferson animates the paradox. And by looking closely at Monticello, we can see the process by which he rationalized an abomination to the point where an absolute moral reversal was reached and he made slavery fit into America’s national enterprise....
(Excerpt) Read more at smithsonianmag.com ...
Very true and more exact, I was just keeping it simple. IF we wanted to take this further, where did the British Colonies get those slaves? Black slave catchers in Africa. So, blacks started slavery and then became the hunters of other blacks and sold them into slavery. Great continent that Africa; not any better today, either.
So, in a state like Mississippi in 1860, the enslaved population numbered 436,631, or 55 percent of the state's total of 791,305
It is numbskull IDIOTS like you that believe that the South had any relevance or validity. How can you freaking secede when 55% of your population does not even get a vote?
The South then had ZERO moral rights to complain about anyone invading them. After all, they could not even truthfully say they represented the majority of their population.
If the blacks had been allowed to vote in any of the Southern states, not ONE of them would have seceded.
The only one influenced by propaganda (and possibly moonshine and inbreeding and a faulty education) is you.
ALL mankind was created equal. ALL of mankind has been freed from sin by Jesus and NO ONE can own another man.
And for the record, before you even ask the idiotic question, I am not Black nor am married or related to one. I do however have a brain and believe in our Lord.
Whatever one thinks of Lincoln (and there are cogent arguments to be made both ways), to justify the South and Slavery is so out of the bounds that I am surprised you are not walking around with cape on your head
In fact I could care less and who owned them and who didn't
Who owned slaves is 99.9% of the time not a reflection of their views but rather whether they needed them or not...all the way until our little war here.
Slavery became a political issue with which to gain votes and inflame the base on both sides until the issue (expansion of to be precise) broke up the parties into 4 oddly enough and one fella managed to pull together around 39.8% of the vote and we know the rest
The thing to learn about slavery besides learning to resist that irresistible urge to preen self righteously over ones position over it today is that we are once again embarked on an eerily similar path with much the same ingredients tossed in the soup
and I for one think we will go to war once again to divide this country because the issues are too strongly felt to compromise or because that compromise would kill us.
Slavery to me is just a footnote of the human condition.
Applying fancy self aggrandizing moral posturing on it now far removed from when it mattered is a silly indulgence and makes about as much sense as Arab Springs and Peace with Honour.
Folks here who smear Jefferson are fools playing the enemy's game for them.
Am I the only freeper on this forum who feels like White Christian America is under a full throttle attack from our culture today and this administration in particular?
if so...then why in the hell would I care about an institution practiced forever and in which those brought here actually lived longer than where they came from and had more food and shelter and at least temporarily adopted some semblance of family structure both during and after said institution and other Christian and civilizing mores..why on earth do we fret over who brought them here or owned them 200 years ago...to make excuses for how too many of them behave today I suppose.
the issue has always been how to get so many of them up to speed with the rest of us?
you tell me...how has that turned out.. those here who have experience like I do in tropical African culture know this has not worked but declined markedly..whitelandia freepers have fantasies they formed from the Cosby show
why on earth worry about all that crap instead of focusing on the utter dissolution of their culture they once had here is simply an incredible indulgence of misplaced guilt
Thomas Jefferson was a complex man, and like Washington played an indispensible role in creating the US as it is today. I think he both helped and hurt himself when he had all his personal papers burned.
One of his henchmen was James Madison, who was involved in Jefferson’s nasty “anonymous” propaganda campaigns against political opponents. Madison also later served as POTUS, and wound up embracing important things that he had earlier rejected (so-called states’ rights, national bank), but it would have been better for the US had he been more qualified for the job in the first place.
Of Adams, I’ll reprise — his one indispensible contribution to US history was to be the stooge who had to follow George Washington into the Presidency. It’s good that someone who was widely disliked in his own time wound up in that role, which was an impossible one. Big shoes to fill.
“I see many parallels today with Abortion. 50% of our populace supports abortion, mostly for selfish reasons (career, not the “right time” etc). When abortion is finally banned (as it will be) some historians will wonder if people back in the “savage 20th century” knew that abortion was wrong.”
Unfortunately I suspect euthanasia will become common in the United States long before abortion is outlawed. The appetite of government will have to be curtailed some way. No doubt the progressives will rationalize euthanasia for the elderly as “compassionate” and conserving society’s resources for future generation. Euthanasia gives the government a financial windfall by eliminating social security and medicare costs as well as harvesting the assets of the deceased through high inheritance taxes.
The plan seems to be pushing the retirement age to 70 and then setting an age cutoff of 75 for most life extending medical procedures. No more heart valve replacements, hip replacements, much less transplants for those over age 75. Quality of life will be miserable for those over age 75 and government councilors will strongly encourage the elderly to end their suffering quickly with a simple pill.
To the government, a citizen only has value if he/she is producing. Once productivity is gone, the individual has no value. Not unlike the relationship between the slaveholder and the slave.
It happened in 2008, and in 2004... weird coincidence. :’)
Thanks!
Since you like to throw insults around let me say you are a prime example of the brain washing that has been going on for the last some 160 years. Lincoln was a murdering pychopathic, two-bit railroad lawyer that was doing the bidding of the industrial Northern bosses he worked for.
“Americans celebrate Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, but H.L. Mencken correctly evaluated the speech, “It is poetry not logic; beauty, not sense.” Lincoln said that the soldiers sacrificed their lives “to the cause of self-determination — government of the people, by the people, for the people should not perish from the earth.” Mencken says: “It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of people to govern themselves.”
http://www.americancivilwarforum.com/the-gettysburg-address-2021514.html
What Lincoln REALLY thought about blacks.
“I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in anyway the social and political equality of the white and black races – that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. I say upon this occasion I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the negro should be denied everything.”
Abraham Lincoln
(1809-1865) 16th US President
Source:
Fourth Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Charleston, Illinois, September 18, 1858
(The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln edited by Roy P. Basler, Volume III, pp. 145-146.)
Good question huh?
then what about all those Yankee women then pray tell..51% of northern population...did they vote??
You are aware that as late as 1840s that all white males did not vote anyhow and that initially only those who had property deeds registered locally could vote?
feel free to bash owning people as property, from our lofty but decayed perch we can preen with impunity but the who got to vote in 1860 argument is irrelevant
btw...just look at yourself...shouting how noble you are over tropical africans here but resorting to basically every personal invective specifically designed to slur that person's ethinicity and origin and class known... to hurl at your opponent here...do you even notice that?
Isn't that what you think you are fighting against yet you do it yourself with little or no provocation
it's ok to call one an inbred hick who sleeps with sisters as long as ONE LOVES BLACK PEOPLE...where did you learn such logic?
at engineering school?
which one...I want to be sure to have my boys avoid it
With the gin, the short fiber or 'upland' variety could be profitably grown spreading cotton production all the way from Georgia to Texas and as far north as Missouri and Tennessee. It infinitely increased the demand for slaves to plow, plant, how and pick cotton and the price of slaves sky rocked to the point that in 1860, slaves were the most valuable property in the nation -- more valuable than all the railroads and factories in the notion combined.
Excellent post. Without the cotton gin history would have been very different. Slavery wouldn't have been as firmly rooted. Slaveowners wouldn't have been quite so well-off and confident about their institution. Slavery might not have appeared so essential and beneficial to so many people.
You can see some of the same kind of wishful thinking in Jefferson's own assumptions. He came to believe that spreading slavery territorially would make it easier to abolish the institution. Or at least he said that. But of course it didn't work that way.
exactly...and sure not the first thing I think about when i wake up...even at 54 i still think about something else first thing...just like always ..since the late 1960s..lol
why freepers fall for this stuff...
Uh, no. Not unless you'd like to live under that kind of "paternalistic care" yourself and would be willing to give up whatever rights you have in exchange for security.
What we refer to, today, as "slavery," was a complex system, which in America, at least, was managed under Christian concepts, where those in charge assumed clear responsibilities for the welfare of those dependent upon them, whether free family members or those held in service. With emancipation, not only the duties were abolished for the "slaves." They were abolished for the "Masters." And, to this day, nothing as compassionate has ever really been substituted. (And the Welfare State, created by the Federal Bureaucracy, is really a terrible impediment, not a boon, to actual social progress.)
You recognize the similarities, but cover the old order with enough schmaltz to make it seem more benign and palatable than it actually was. What you think of as institutions that produce "actual social progress" are more intrusive, more brutal, and worse than anything we have today. I repeat, if that kind of antebellum paternalism was so good, give up your rights and live under it yourself.
All slaves were freed in the state of New York by 1827.
The biggest slave owner in the state of SC was a black man.
There were black slave owners in South Carolina, but the largest black slave owner, William Ellison, did not own more slaves the largest white slave owners.
The reason that I keep recommending the Booker T. Washington address, is that it humanizes the interaction. I suspect that there are very, very few, today, who ever went weeping to a cemetery to mourn the passing of the person in charge of a local Welfare Office.
On the broader subject, one can cite Biblical relationships; the celebration of British valor at Agincourt, or whatever illustrates the fact that Mankind has always had to struggle with the fact that everyone does not achieve at the same level, and leadership to address the resulting "problems" cannot be fairly judged without a better understanding of the "problems," than those trying to prove points are likely to have.
William Flax
Well said wardaddy. The whole race thing today is a bigger mess than it has ever been. Our nation and culture is being destroyed and ripped apart at the seams as a direct result of it. Whether through manipulation or this perpetual running around in circles about it. All this constant slavery rehashing is very counter productive and hypocritical as hell not to mention where it is all leading to. Just look around at Obama and what race crap has bubbled to the surface and that is just some mild examples of what is really underneath. We are heading down a very troubled road. I don’t care who had slaves, I don’t care that blacks as a race can’t seem to get their stuff together and I certainly don’t care to hold myself or family hostage to all this ‘social justice’ BS of today. That many so called conservatives seem to wallow in it is proof enough of just how far left the whole country has moved. From Affirmative action and quotas to African American studies and Black Liberation Theology all this anti-white rhetoric is not only BS but very dangerous.
Cheers, wardaddy!
Bill Flax
William Flax
Interesting comment about Adams.
“”ALL mankind was created equal. ALL of mankind has been freed from sin by Jesus and NO ONE can own another man.””
One only needs to read Jefferson’s letter to John Adams to understand that Jefferson was an anti Christian bigot. Jefferson was the worst kind of heretic there is -on the same level of someone like Bill Maher
Excerpt from Jefferson’s letter to Madison...
“And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter”-Thomas Jefferson
http://www.beliefnet.com/resourcelib/docs/53/Letter_from_Thomas_Jefferson_to_John_Adams_1.html
Now maybe some research is called for, but I'm betting if you were a single slave with no family or relatives, you might be bounced through the system from one owner to another. Maybe you wouldn't actually be turned out to starve, but the notion that your masters would be extremely benevolent when you got to old to work is something I'd question. Having children and other relatives on the plantation that you could do things for and who could do things for you would probably make a master much more likely not to sell you off.
In any case, when emancipation came, many slaves took to the road. The conditions they found when their journey ended may not have been very different from what they left, but they very definitely wanted to get out from under the personal tyranny of particular masters and live their own, more independent and self-reliant lives.
It's funny how some people who are most adamantly for liberty and against government have a soft spot when it comes to the tyranny of slavery and make the same kind of paternalistic arguments that they spurn when it comes to present-day society.
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