Yale's David Blight Blames Slavery on Burkean Conservatism

Yale Online ^ | Spring 2008 | David Blight

[Chode]

so the africans that sold their neighbors were conservatives??? wow...

[Chewbarkah]

And just as his own reference to Nat Turner reminds us, mayhem and violent death. The ready spectre of genocide made upsetting the social order a bit risky.

[1010RD]

The integrity issue is the key. Their worldview is a lie from the Master of Lies.

[Fraxinus]

I find it amusing that slavery was justified by economics and need to preserve the social order when slavery put a limit on the development of skilled labor, and all slave owning societies had a justified fear of revolt. Also one of the most jealously guarded privileges of slave owners was the ability to command sexual favors.

[RobbyS]

Indeed. The pro-slavery apologists were radicals, which is why Davis did not include them in his government.

[LS]

I notice he, like all libs, conveniently ignores the LEADING defender of slavery, Virginian George Fitzhugh, an ardent admirer of Marx and a man who wrote that slavery was the ultimate form of communism. Free men in the North were truly the slaves because of all those terrible choices, but the slaves in the South perfectly depicted the utopian communist model where slaves were unburdened of all decisions by their masters. Only a few poor people "had" to be masters, but they did it for the good of society.

The reason almost EVERY academic dealing with this period ignores Fitzhugh is obvious: his argument is exactly accurate. Slavery is communism, and communism, slavery.

[pallis]

Unlike earlier indentured servitude, where slaves were like part of an extended family, learning trades in return for debt and labor, the Slavery in early America was more like animal husbandry, and keeping the herd under control to perform its function. Plantation owners weren’t interested in developing skilled labor. Lucky was the slave who got domestic duty, or something requiring more than brute labor.

[Maceman]

Liberals are opposed to individual liberty as defined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The only real issue they have with chattel slavery in America two hundred years ago is that the slaves were privately owned.

They are all orgasmic over the idea of slavery to the state.

Democrats never pass up on opportunity to tell us why slavery by the state is for our own protection and our own safety, because life under the anarchy that conservatives want to impose is just too risky and dangerous. We can't have any of that inhumane "on-your-own economics" that conservatives advocate.

Thereby proving that you no longer have to be black to be an Uncle Tom.

[SuziQ]

Uh, how does this dim-bulb explain the slavery in Pharoah’s Egypt, or anywhere else, for that matter, before black tribal chiefs sold their prisoners, from other tribes, to Arab and Portuguese slave traders, so they could bring them to the US.

[driftless2]

Once again, a liberal (as usual) fails to do his homework. The writer, while trying to condemn conservatism ends up justifying anarchy. He really doesn’t know what Burke thinks. Like Reagan said, it’s not that liberals are ignorant, it’s that most of what they know isn’t true.

[Sherman Logan]

The southern revolution, or perhaps counter-revolution, was intensely conservative, in that they were trying to preserve and protect a way of life.

The problem is that the particular way of life they were trying to conserve was at its base anti-American, since it was based on rejection of the core principle of America, that all men are created equal.

So while it was conservative, it wasn’t American conservatism in any but a geographical sense.