Posted on 11/12/2021 7:42:48 AM PST by ProgressingAmerica
As a citizen historian, I find it both "funny" and annoying how skewed history is and how few treat leftist historians compared to their leftist journalist counterparts. Its a huge problem for us.
Pimping a new book that he will hope you will buy, Andrew Roberts (the Book's author) writes this glowing piece for The Smithsonian about you know, George III, he wasn't all that bad of a guy!
Hey I have an idea. Maybe we should've stayed under monarchism. That whole "liberty thing"? Perhaps that's overrated. Sarcasm aside, take a look at paragraph number 2:
We can now see, for example, George’s fervent denunciation of slavery in an essay he wrote as Prince of Wales in the late 1750s, after reading Charles de Montesquieu’s classic enlightenment text, The Spirit of the Laws (1748).
This is historical malpractice. So George wrote some paper some time for some people to read, so what. When the pedal was down against the metal, what did King George actually do? Actions speak louder than words. When King George III had the opportunity, he sided with slave traders over abolitionists. Here's the actual text of the King's veto:
it hath been represented to us that so considerable an increase upon the duties of slaves imported into our colony of Virginia will have the effect to prejudice and obstruct as well the commerce of this kingdom as the cultivation and improvement of the said colony; whereupon we have thought fit to disallow the first mentioned of the laws, leaving the other, which is of short duration, to expire by its own limitation. It is therefore our will and pleasure that you do not upon pain of our highest displeasure give your assent for the future, without our royal permission first obtained, to any law or laws by which the additional duty of five per cent upon slaves imported, imposed by the last mentioned law, shall be further continued or to any laws whatever by which the duties of ten per cent upon slaves imported into our said colony, payable by laws passed antecedent to the seventh day of November, 1769, shall upon any pretense be increased or by which the importation of slaves shall be in any respect prohibited or obstructed.
The text of this is quite clear. Increasing the duties are going to reduce slave imports, and that's going to hurt the empire. Oh woe is me, we can't have that!
How different would this Smithsonian article look if it had included the fact that the King actively stood against abolitionism? Laws such as the one which was vetoed, referenced above, this was happening all over the colonies in the 1770s. This wasn't a one time thing.
I can see I'm going to have to record this veto into audio that everybody can listen to and throw it up on YouTube, since so many historians can't find the time to write the truth. What a bunch of flagrant liars. It isn't just this one guy, the Smithsonian is in on it. What a disgrace. What a historical disgrace this whole thing is. But that's where we are with the state of the "historical profession" in America these days. The article concludes this way:
The time has therefore come for objective Americans to take a fresh look at their last king. It was right for the colonies to break away from the British Empire in 1776 because they were ready by then to found their own nation-state, but despite the rhetoric of their founding document, they were not escaping tyranny, so much as bravely grasping their sovereign independence from a good-natured, cultured, enlightened and benevolent monarch.
Historians will always side against the American Revolution and cling to any whataboutism they can in order to make America look bad, meanwhile anything else must be preferred. "Rhetoric", "rhetoric"??? That's all the declaration is? It's no big deal? Reading the Declaration makes it quite clear that it is just as applicable today as it was back then.
We need new historians just as badly as we need new journalists. None of them are interested in being honest. None of them.
Juxtaposing George’s writings reminded me of Henry VIII releasing a work under his name defending the Seven Sacraments against Martin Luther. That contrasts with his later actions a wee bit.
Seems like an overreaction. Many leaders and politicians put in place policies they personally opposed for pragmatic reasons. Plus most of the original colonies were run like mini theocracies or monarchies where heretics were sent into exile. Before declaring independence many of the early colonies were falling over themselves to get the official imprimature of the King in order for their trade to be protected from piracy and rival nations.
Marxists Lie, that is what they do.
The author is more right than the Smithsonian, but he is overstating the case by calling the Virginia laws “abolitionist”. They were laws aimed at suppressing or (later) banning the international slave trade into Virginia. They did not propose to abolish (or even limit the practice of) slavery itself.
A more nuanced view is found here:
The Smithsonian has an agenda.
They also went throughout the country late 1800’s and early 1900’s
hoovering up
every giant ( nephiliam) skeleton
they could con locals out of
and stuck them somewhere out of sight somewhere within its bowels never to be seen or acknowledged again.
Can’t have evidence that confirms the bible and make their god darwin look bad.
This is what I have often said about Thomas Jefferson. He could wax eloquently about how bad it was to keep people as slaves, but he kept his own slaves.
Good point. My favorite examples is when people try to make the Declaration of Independence about slavery. This is a very bad case of historical malpractice.
The Declaration of Independence is about the right of a collective people to declare independence from a government they see as no longer representing their interests.
Subsequent generations have reinterpreted it to be a condemnation of slavery, which is absolutely misrepresenting it's purpose and intent.
American slavery was not exclusively from Africa; the very concept of “black” and “white” was invented by slaveholders to divide slaves by an artificial interest, to keep them down. This complicates our evaluation of the moral superiority slaves of African origin, irrelevant to the actual conditions of the time. And after the colonial/revolutionary period, when William Wilberforce took what seems to us to be the moral high road, there was a hidden, perhaps less than moralistic factor, that the economic principal had been discovered by American slaveholders that there was a substantial profit drain in having to provide for the care of slaves too old to work. Whereas in the British occupation of Ireland, in same period leading up to the Civil War in America, the 1840s and 1850s, the history of the potato famine is complicated by the fact that there were bumper harvests exported to England and protected by British soldiers so the starving Irish couldn’t get the food. In the international labor market including American slaves and Irish peasants, this put them at odds. Wilberforce isn’t on record as opposing systematic British government policies permitting the ethnic cleansing of the Irish. There’s sufficient hypocrisy to go around, in the time of King George, of William Wilberforce, and now.
Suppose he freed them, what would have happened to them?
Just askin’
Laws such as the one which was vetoed, referenced above, this was happening all over the colonies in the 1770s. This wasn't a one time thing.
My intended focus was "This isn't a one time thing." Pennsylvania passed laws very similar to this Virginia law raising taxes to put a stop to slave trading, following a campaign(I forget some of the details at the moment) by prominent abolitionist Anthony Benezet and Benjamin Rush. Benezet, as you may know, was promoted by Ben Franklin. Of course, the law was vetoed by the Royalist governor.
As an aside, putting a stop to the slave trade instead of slavery is actually where the abolitionists were at in those days.
Massachusetts did pass an outright abolition of the slave trade around the same time period, in the 1770s, and it was vetoed by the Royal governor. Rhode Island also passed an abolitionist law in the 1770s, written by one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.
And yes, I did intend "This isn't a one time thing" both in the context of laws passed as well as vetoes received. Most of the laws that I am aware of passed the colonial legislatures - this is what the people wanted. It was the King and the King's men who didn't want it in the pre-revolutionary era. The crown wanted slavery to stay in place.
Any number of things could have happened to them depending on how Jefferson did it.
My guess is that they would have remained with him and continued taking care of his property, but that they would get some small amount of pay for doing it.
This is what happened with many slaves freed in the past.
There really aren’t any clean hands in the situation, even probably up to and including the abolitionists themselves. For one, let’s start out with the fact that many of the abolitionists themselves were either current at the time or recent former slave owners. I mean, let’s be real. The guy who wrote the song “Amazing Grace” was a former slave trader too.(as an aside) All 13 of the colonies were slave colonies. All of them. The only way you get abolitionism in any form is with the aid and support of at least some slave owners. Benjamin Rush was a slave owner. So too was Benjamin Franklin. I don’t say that to be provocative, it’s simple historical fact. The colonies were a society in transition being held back from transition by the pen of the king.
The earliest abolitionists themselves knew they couldn’t stop slavery, which is why if you read their writings they all had a laser focus on only the slave trade separated from slavery. It’s not that they didn’t oppose slavery, but they were trying to strategically focus on what they thought they could accomplish. That’s both to their credit as well as (let’s be real) their detriment in realistically ignoring the larger issue of the enslavement of persons brought across the sea against their will.
King George’s veto is King George’s veto. It denounces itself. Moving on.
Jefferson and other(perhaps moreso) Founders had an extremely hard line to carry. 13 colonies were required to win against the King. Not 12, not 11, not 8. All 13. There was no other way than to accept it in the short term and achieve Liberty for some first. This is after all the exact same thing that the Jamaican Maroons did in their fight against the Brits. They didn’t free all the slaves either. That’s the reality of fighting against a super power. You win where you can.
Yes, that’s to the Founders and the Maroons’ detriment. The fact is, they didn’t free everybody all at once. But at the end of the day, who was trending where?
The Founders were trending abolitionist, and the Maroons were trending abolitionist as well. This is absolute. We have the king’s vetoes of colonial laws, we have the Founders writings, we have some of the laws the passed pre-indepedence, we have the colonies/states themselves (starting in 1780 with Penn.) who started actually passing abolitionist laws post-independence when there was no more veto that could be a threat. They followed through after the fact. This was (at least in some places) important to them.
Even with Jefferson, to get specific here. The fact remains that even though he failed in his personal life(some of which was due to the restrictions of Virginian law) he was to my knowledge a life-long legislative abolitionist. At every instant that I am aware of, as a legislator from the earliest days of the Burgesses up to the presidency, the NW Ordinance is also worth mentioning - Jefferson was against either and/or slavery and the slave trade. I’m not aware of one single time where he promoted nor authored nor signed laws designed to strengthen slavery.
He was always against it. Can you show me the opposite? I’ve looked and never ever found anything in Jefferson’s works. I’d like to know the specifics of the opposite in the case it does exist.
But then wouldn’t he be required to house, cloth and feed them? Who would pay for that? Or would his plantation devolve to something like the company towns the coal industry became (in)famous for.
My point being, once slavery was accepted, it became like holding a tiger by the tail. I believe this was the reason slave holders would free their slaves upon death. It was now someone else’s problem.
Please stop re-litigating the Civil War with me. You know I don’t care at all about that.
I’m asking nicely. Please?
I have stated that the Democratic party was the slavery party. I expect some Democrat to reply that there was slavery before there was a Democratic party. If that excuse absolves Democrats, then it also absolves the United States.
That's the part I wasn't so sure of but a bit of research shows that you are right. The word "abolition" seems to have been originally used both for the abolition of slavery generally and also for the abolition of the slave trade specifically.
From the OED "Abolition":
[1773 Pennsylvania Gaz. 13 Jan. 4/1 Some Regulations that have taken Place in the Spanish Colonies, which..are certainly worthy our Imitation, in case we should not be so happy as to obtain an entire Abolition of Slavery.]
1785 G. Gregory Ess. Hist. & Moral 320 The general arguments concerning the good policy of slavery and the slave trade... If it can be proved that good policy..condemns the measure under our consideration,..we may reasonably hope for its final abolition.
1788 T. Clarkson (title) Essay on the comparative Efficiency of Regulation or Abolition as applied to the Slave-trade.
1790 G. Washington Diaries IV. 104 He used arguments to show the..impolicy of keeping these people in a state of Slavery; with declarations, however, that he did not wish for more than a gradual abolition.
From the OED "Abolitionist":
1791 Deb. Abolition Slave-trade 46 If some of the circumstances of cruelty were proved, which the Abolitionists have only asserted, [etc.].
1830 Clarkson's Abolition of Afr. Slave-trade by Brit. Parl. II. iii. 89 Many looked upon the abolitionists as monsters.
And here's links to the last two word cited above:
https://archive.org/details/a160ceb5-bca2-4eb2-8435-bc96f6518ae8/mode/2up
https://archive.org/details/ASPC0002373001/page/n7/mode/2up?q=abolition
You may also be interested in this (old) book that has a lot of detail on the subject: https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Wrong_of_Slavery_the_Right_of_Emanci/CSuWlNgwK4UC
Starting on p. 85 or 86
Yes, I think it would have turned out something very like a company town.
My point being, once slavery was accepted, it became like holding a tiger by the tail. I believe this was the reason slave holders would free their slaves upon death. It was now someone else’s problem.
I think most of the desire to hang on to the slaves was because of the money produced by their labor. I don't think the prime motivation for emancipation upon the owners death was to make it "someone else's problem", it was because they recognized that they would have no further need for money because they were dead.
Rest assured, had they been able to wring another scrap of value for themselves from the labor of slaves, they would have continued doing it till that point as well.
And yes, I have a very cynical nature about people giving up money from other people's work.
I don't split American history into different categories. It's all the same history. I actually don't think I said a thing about the civil war in this discussion. You mentioned the phenomena of "historical malpractice", and the example I provided is the most egregious form of it of which I am aware.
Do you know of a more significant example of "historical malpractice" than that of people trying to make the Declaration of Independence about slavery?
I think that is the worst of the worst, but I welcome anyone suggesting another example of historical malpractice which is worse in the degree of lying or worse in the level of significance caused by the lying.
To take a shot at that goal, I would suggest the lauding of John F. Kennedy as a hero for resolving the Cuban Missile Crises is a very serious example of historical malpractice. Nobody more deserves the blame for making a botch of the situation than John F. Kennedy, but all the historians treat him like the hero instead of the idiot that caused it.
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