Wednesday, October 3, 2007

"Slavery Was Good for the Slaves"

That seems to be the central thesis of Michael Medved's argument. We should be proud of slavery and of ending it?

What sort of yahoo is he? Slavery wasn't ended because good and decent people woke up one sunny Spring morning and said: "Let's free the slaves" and it was done. He seems to gloss over the fact that it took a war to end slavery, a war that devastated an entire region of this country and killed 500,000 Americans in the process. (If you want to compare that to modern population, think of having that war today and killing 4,700,000 Americans.)

Here's an inconvenient truth for Medved: Without slavery, the Civil War would not have been fought. Slavery almost tore apart the American Confederation and almost doomed the Constitutional convention. Slavery was a time bomb and the Founding Fathers knew they were just doing a "Dubya" and they kicked that can far down the road.

Here's another inconvenient truth: Smugglers were bringing slaves into the South right up to the start of the Civil War.

Here's a third one: Of the so-called "civilized nations" of the West, the US was about the last to abolish slavery and the only one that had to fight a war with the slaveowners to do so.

And here is a fourth and last one: The "noble cause" was always bullshit. Draft-dodging was rampant throughout the South, for the poor whites saw the war for what it truly was, a war to protect the privileges of the slave-owning aristocracy.
on or about

1 comment:

  1. BadTux10/04/2007 3:25 AM

    Oh geeze wiz. I haven't heard nonsense like that since I was a kid and a doyenne of the Daughters of the Confederacy (who happened to be my 4th grade teacher) started off on a rant about how the negros were happier under slavery and that mean Abraham Lincoln stole their slaves without compensation as required by the Constitution yada yada yada.

    One thing I will say about the Southern cause during the American Civil War. While a huge percentage of the poor whites dodged the draft, pretty much the entire aristocracy signed up. The Confederate versions of Jenna and Not-Jenna Bush were actually out there fighting and dying. I am most familiar with the situation in Louisiana, since that's where I'm from. Pretty much every Confederate politician in Louisiana at the end of the war was missing an arm or a leg, everybody else was in the military fighting. Not like today, where the modern American aristocracy has people for that. (My own folks were dodging the draft in the swamps, BTW -- very few Cajuns actually showed up to fight).

    - Badtux the Southern Penguin

    ReplyDelete

House Rules #1, #2 and #6 apply to all comments. Rule #3 also applies to political comments.

In short, don't be a jackass. THIS MEANS YOU!
If you never see your comments posted, see Rule #7.

All comments must be on point and address either the points raised in the blog post or points raised by commenters in response.
Any comments that drift off onto other topics are subject to deletion.

(Please don't feed the trolls.)

中國詞不評論，冒抹除的風險。僅英語。

COMMENT MODERATION IS IN EFFECT UFN. This means that if you are an insulting dick, nobody will ever see it.