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Samizdata quote of the day True, they were hypocrites. Jefferson himself was clearly aware of the ghastly contradictions. Pity they did not apply their own wise philosophies even-handedly, but they didn’t. That is was why Samuel Johnson hated them. And yet, their good ideas stand on their own merits.
– Perry de Havilland in response to “How do you respond to people who say that the Founding Fathers were hypocrites for owning slaves?”
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The Left hate Jefferson not for practicing slavery, but for preaching freedom, and for his part in achieving the freedom that the colonies that came under The United States achieved.
I heard one black historian referring to him as a paradox rather than a hypocrite.
It wasn’t hypocrisy, it was the desire to get the southern colonies onside against the British. They also knew that slavery was not sustainable but decided to kick the issue into the long grass. It all came to a head 90 years later. The founders knew this would likely happen.
Just because it was pragmatic does not mean it wasn’t hypocritical. If you wrap yourself in the flag of liberty but own slaves, that is just about the most perfect example of hypocrisy one could possibly contrive.
“The freedom of rob Indians and enslave Negroes” I believe was what Johnson wrote of them. But the ideas underpinning American liberty were the very pinnacle of the European enlightenment, and the hypocrisy of their implementation does not change that central truth.
There are practical limits–would the USA have benefitted from flying apart right at the start? I doubt the US would have had much of a role in the world if it had.
We can only all do what we can do. What the FF did for the USA was as much as they could for the time.
Probably true, Ecks, but that doesn’t change the answer to the question. To perhaps make it more palatable, the answer could be “Yes, they were hypocrites. So what?”
I am agnostic on the notion that the world would perforce be a worse place if the American War of Independence had gone the other way. Too many plausible scenarios.
At the outset of the Revolution Jefferson had 3 bounty notices for runaway slaves in the local press; 2 were white, indentured for life, different label same outcome.
Anti-slavery was only just becoming a topic in polite society but folks could express their wokeness by offering guests sugar in glassware etched with “this sugar was produced without the use of slaves”.
The left do not hate the Founders who did not own slaves any less – they are not rushing out to put up statues of John Adams or Ben Franklin.
The people who want to remove the statue of Jefferson from the New York Council building are not really fans of Governor John Jay (who ended slavery in New York) or G. Morris – who spoke against slavery at the Constitutional Convention.
Suppose you suggested statues of General George Thomas (a Virginian who served in the United States Army in the Civil War) instead of General Robert E. Lee in in the various cities in Virginia – the left might PRETEND to be pleased, but eventually they would come for George Thomas just has they have attacked statues of GEORGE WASHINGTON in various States.
This is not about slavery and race – it was never about slavery and race. This is and has always been MARXIST – a MARXIST effort to destroy the United States and Western civilisation generally.
And, tragically, Big Business supports the MARXISTS – 100%.
Eventually the “Woke” Corporate managers will have Marxist mobs at their own door – come to kill them and their families.
Screaming out “but I supported getting rid of statues of Thomas Jefferson” will not save the “Woke” rich.
What really gave the game away was the attack on the Monument to the Unknown Soldier in Washington D.C.
As well as the endless looting, burning and murdering (such as he murder of David Dorn by Social Justice Looters) in so many cities.
Anyone who claims that this is about “slavery” or “racism” is a LIAR.
Another example of the decline of Christian values. We are all sinners. All hypocrites. “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone”. Nobody’s perfect. The path of righteousness is straight and narrow, and we shouldn’t condemn those who stray: love the sinner, hate the sin.
Now, I know there are a lot of atheists here, but you don’t need to be a believer to understand the truth, and the importance, of these principles. If we’re all guilty to some extent, then good ideas can be accepted for what they are, rather than being condemned for coming from someone who didn’t practice what he preached.
But now that all that has been thrown under the bus, our new would-be masters consider themselves perfect, and hypocrisy to be not the universal sin, but the greatest one.
That too. “Black Lives Matter” is a false flag, just as the anti-nuclear movement was during the Cold War.
I think there was a clear conflict of values there. But I don’t think that, in ethical or psychological terms, it’s properly called “hypocrisy.”
When I describe someone as a hypocrite, I think of them as someone who asserts, or even embraces, a moral position, but who THEN makes exceptions to that moral position in their own favor when they can gain something by doing so. The moral position is the starting point.
But I don’t think that the Founders started out with a moral position of liberal individualism. I think that, for example, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson grew up in a society where slavery already existed, and in families that owned slaves, and against a history where slavery had been practiced for millennia. The very scriptures of the religion they were raised in included legal rules for slavery, and exhortations to slaves about their duties to their masters. That was their starting point. And from there, many of them were finding their way to liberal individualism, and to its relevance to slavery, and to their own personal positions as slaveowners. In fact, they struggled over it; if you read Madison’s notes on the Constitutional Convention, you’ll see warnings against the consequences of letting slavery continue, and proposals for limiting it, and even a confrontation with South Carolina and Georgia, whose delegates threatened to walk out if slavery were prohibited by the new constitution. They didn’t have an established position of individual rights for everyone to betray; rather, they were trying to find their way to such a position.
Not having thought things through, or not being ready to act on such thoughts, isn’t hypocrisy as usually understood. It’s not a betrayal of an existing position but a struggle to advance to a new one. And it’s easy for us to say, now, “but it should have been obvious”—but I think we should be aware that our own future, if it’s a better one, will think the same about us.
What about the hypocrisy of the woke types? Their attacks on free speech claim to be centred around racism and ‘hate speech’ but are themselves a hundred times more racist and full of hate than those that they would like to silence.
I stand by my long-held opinion: to cry “racist” you must BE racist.
Seems nowadays racism is the only sin that exists – or the cardinal one, and is found everywhere.
In everything, including sin, fashion changes.
For example: being racist is worse than being a mass murderer – hence the Che T shirts.
Being a homophobe is also very bad unless you are a Castro.
Hypocrisy for me but not for thee.
All people are equal except the whites.
@William H. Stoddard
So, using your definition, would you agree that someone who writes in an important document:
Before heading home to his enslaved concubine and his farm full of slave labors working under the threat of his lash, might well fall under the definition of “hypocrite”? What one learns at one’s mother’s knee may cover the ignorance of some, but one can hardly argue Jefferson was unaware of his hypocrisy.
This seems to be a touchy and embarrassing subject among libertarians and conservatives in the USA, and I applaud PdH for boldly, unequivocally stating that which should be obvious.
@Sam Duncan
But at its foundation this is what I find most objectionable about the Christian religion. The idea that we are born into the sin of Adam, as if we are broken and irredeemable at birth. What we do doesn’t matter as a measure of our value as humans, all that matters is the sacrifice of one supposedly righteous for everyone else. This is not, as Paul claims “just and the jusftifier”, it is exactly the opposite of justice — punishing one for the sins of another, or holding a child guilty for the sins of its parents. It is in fact what the more extreme people in our society are doing right now — holding white people guilty simply because they are white, simply because of the sins of their putative ancestors.
“holding white people guilty simply because they are white, simply because of the sins of their putative ancestors.”
And conveniently ignoring the fact that, in other parts of the world, black people enslaved white people and that slavery is still happening today. If they want to get angry about slavery, modern slavery is a worthy target of their anger. Non of the people who are kicking off about stuff that happened centuries ago have suffered due to slavery themselves and I suspect that every single person who lived in the developed world has benefited from it.
I take it the whites had been convicted of some crime? Either I am misinformed about some aspect of 1776 Virginia Law (perfectly possible) or a white could not be indentured for life except as a court sentence, imposed for some crime.
At first, no-one could, which is why those blacks whom Portuguese traders offered for sale in 1619 were freed after 10 years, forming the earliest members of the free black community of Virginia. This continued for some time. The first legal case to rule otherwise was brought in the 1650s by just such a free(d) black man against his black indentured servant, whom he had at first been persuaded (by his white neighbour) to free (the servant having served 14 years, longer than he should have under the rules) but whom he later sued to recover. He lost his first case but won on appeal in 1655. In the later 1600s it remained the case that many owners expected to free blacks after 10 years and give them some farm tools, because that was what was required by the explicit indentures under which whites were sold. And if an owner tried not to, then, even late on in the 1600s, the courts would typically still free petitioning blacks who could show they’d served more than 10 years. But the times they were a-changing and the certainty of freedom was declining. Early in the 1700s, it became lawful to buy as lifetime indentures blacks offered as slaves by traders. Only whites (and any lucky blacks) who were offered for sale under an explicit indenture had to be freed at its end.
Possibly “…they did not apply their own wise philosophies even-handedly…” because it was a no-win situation. Had the Founding Fathers tried to abolish slavery from the outset, it’s likely the southern states would not have joined the United States. Instead the Confederate States of America, or something very like it, would have come into existence in the late 1780s, rather than 1861, and would have carried on practicing slavery anyway.
First of all i must agree with Perry on this:
Next, i’d like to second Paul Marks’ note that not all Founding Fathers were slave-owners.
Whether slave-owners or not, all of the Founding Fathers had a concrete problem on their hands, and were only human, and on the whole they did a pretty good job.
—- Taking a broader view now, i have a quibble about this (also from Perry):
Leaving aside the Founding Fathers for a moment, i submit that we must distinguish between 2 different conceptions of liberty:
* The “pagan” concept that liberty is something that everyone has to earn for oneself, and therefore you have no obligation to free your slaves: an idea morally disturbing as stated, but not hypocritical or logically inconsistent.
* The “Judeo-Christian” concept that liberty is something granted from God, and therefore you cannot morally take away somebody’s liberty. (Of course you don’t actually have to be Jewish or Christian to believe this.)
The Founding Fathers were raised as Christians, but also steeped in the Greek and Roman classics. As Christians, they can be accused of hypocrisy; but not as classicists.
Possibly true.
Also quite possibly true. But does “because it was a no-win situation” means only an outcome that ends up with the historical unitary USA as per 1783 is a win? Ending up with two states from (say) 1784 (USA/CSA) does not really changes the moral calculus. It means a south as bad as it was but a better north.
Schrodinger’s Dog
Possibly “…they did not apply their own wise philosophies even-handedly…” because it was a no-win situation. Had the Founding Fathers tried to abolish slavery from the outset, it’s likely the southern states would not have joined the United States. Instead the Confederate States of America, or something very like it, would have come into existence in the late 1780s, rather than 1861, and would have carried on practicing slavery anyway.
But that ignores their own personal responsibility. You can argue whether the constitution should have banned slavery, and, in a sense federalism would have allowed them to ignore the issue. However, that does not absolve them of their personal guilt for participating in this vile practice. Jefferson and Washington could quite simply have freed their “own” slaves, irrespective of what laws they might have imposed on others. Perhaps they could not have sustained their own farms had they done so, perhaps it would have made it impossible to remain in the good graces of the gentry of Virginia. But neither of these is a particularly compelling reason to engage in slavery.
Snorri Godhi
* The “Judeo-Christian” concept that liberty is something granted from God, and therefore you cannot morally take away somebody’s liberty. (Of course you don’t actually have to be Jewish or Christian to believe this.)
Are you asking whether Jefferson though that liberty was endowed by the creator? I think he wrote a pretty important document that clearly states his views on this matter.
They were pragmatic hypocrites who understood that perfect can be the enemy of good. So they settled for good and relied on the system they established to make it better. Which it did – and still does.
@Perry de Havilland (London)
It means a south as bad as it was but a better north.
Moreover a south with a northern neighbor far less conflicted on the issue of slavery, without the need to “compromise” on the issue, without slave fugitive laws, and without much in the way of immigration control. The North could quite simply have drained the south of all its slave labor. And where would that have left them?
Think, if you will, of the Louisiana purchase (by the North, since they were the only ones with the money) in such a circumstance. No need for compromise on slavery in that massive territory. And so this putative CSA would also have been comparatively tiny. (One wonders though, since the man writing the check for Louisiana had a farm full of slaves, what he would do.)
Some reflections on the history and philosophy.
As Burke says, this was a policy: not an actual denial of the idea of abstract human rights as such but an assertion of the “pragmatic soundness” (Hannah Arendt’s description of it) of how rights beyond “the right of the naked savage” (Burke) could be robustly achieved and kept.
Both at the time of the American Revolution and two decades later (in his An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs), Burke defended the American revolutionaries against the charge
and, quoting Benjamin Franklin in support, insisted that the American colonists began on the defensive, seeking to retain the liberties they had as Englishmen, not become independent. The colonists started by demanding their
– rights they had (like their possessions) because their ancestors created them and they maintained and built upon them.
Under this policy, giving rights to others who did not inherit or build them (others that they had not enslaved) was like giving alms to people who did not inherit wealth and whose poverty you had not inflicted on them: it was charity and Christian virtue but not legal obligation. You could decide to do it – the British empire decided in time to free all whom its power could reach – but it was a choice, not a debt. Britain did not owe the world a century-long campaign to end slavery because the century before Britons abroad had bought people enslaved by others and offered for sale to them, any more than she owed Africans money payments because valuable gold and ivory had been traded for beads and bolts of cloth.
When the American revolution’s demand that London let them keep their “rights of Englishmen” went to the point of demanding the right no longer to be Englishmen, a new theory was called on. Jefferson’s “felicitous pen” produced the declaration of independence.
At this point, the promise was made to all who would be under the authority of the US. Obviously little could be done while the new nation fought to exist but the words of the promise were clear; when it was established then the new nation would establish freedom within its bounds. Later, Frederick Douglass put it thus:
At first, they hoped to honour it cheaply. The constitution abolished the slave trade in 20 years – and the Federalist papers reminded those who wanted it abolished right away that under the current arrangements it had no time limit, so that was no reason not to ratify the constitution. The hope (often the self-indulgent hope, proclaimed as much to rationalise away the embarrassment of ‘the land of the free’ having so many slaves as from firm determination to make it so) was that with no more slaves imported and owners freeing their slaves out of Christian duty (and embarrassment), a high price could be avoided, though Jefferson
In a world where whites could serve indentures, the idea that blacks must ‘serve their time’ could perhaps be rationalised, but the founding fathers all seemed to know that Frederick Douglass’ “cheque” would have to be honoured – and that their nation indeed was dangerously short of the moral funds to do so.
In Virginia, the start of the 1830s seems to mark a real break, influenced by the start of fiercer rhetoric from the north (‘The Liberator), by Nat Turner’s revolt and above all by the legislature’s proposal to abolish slavery coming so near passing. The so-near-winning debate forces Virginians to stop indulging a vague consequence-free idea of abolition soon and instead look straight at the reality of abolition now. The effect was that they did indeed discover they had not the moral funds for it – they liked it in theory but were caught between feasible plans they would not accept and the impracticality of plans they would accept. After that, abolition was never politically worth revisiting in Virginia.
You can see the effect clearly in the generational differences of the civil war. Lee, and several of his older senior generals, were very cautious about secession and wished slavery were gone. Lee wished it very emphatically in his private writings, and very tactfully in his repeated urgings of Confederate President Jefferson Davis to bring in
Lee’s younger junior officers, by contrast, though they remained loyal and obedient to him when, in the Confederacy’s death throes, he finally got the power to take the first very tentative step, were firm secessionists and anti-abolitionists before and during the civil war. I get the impression of a real generational divide – one going well beyond the customary greater wisdom of age.
Comparing the troubled consciences of some of the older men with the untroubled certainties of the younger leaves scope for debate over who were honest by their lights, who were weak, who were hypocrites and who were just plain wrong.
For myself, I respect Lee, though I’m glad his cause lost. My favourite founding father is John Adams.
Did we all really benefit ? There is an argument that as capitalism developed, slavery became a drag on the new industrial economy so the call for abolition was for both economic and moral reasons.
I think their definition of “men” differed from yours. It technically wasn’t hypocrisy if you thought of blacks as something less. Which, IIRC, they did.
I suggest some qualification of both Fraser Orr (June 20, 2020 at 4:24 pm) and bobby b (June 20, 2020 at 10:56 pm).
As regards Jefferson, Julie-near-Chicago’s provides some details.
As regards
they did not think that consciously intellectually though of course it accurately describes the emotions of many. What their intellect allowed is in Julie’s data:
This relates to my “serve their time” remark in my comment above. That was the kind of thing their intellects could believe.
(I note in passing that the quote’s usage of the noun ‘enslavement’ – “to continue an existing state of slavery” – indirectly clashes with my usage of the verb ‘enslave’ in my comment above – “to convert a non-slave into a slave”. Both meanings can be needed in discussion.)
Used to be Banned (June 20, 2020 at 10:33 pm), at the time when the triangular trade was abolished, it was still profitable to all three corners: above all to the African sellers, who hated abolition, but also to the US purchasers, and indirectly to the British traders, who loaded cheap industrial goods onto ships heading south to the African coast and received raw materials from the US in ships returning from America. It was classic arbitrage, moving trade goods from the UK where they were cheap to Africa where they were valuable, moving people from Africa where they were cheap to the US where their work could create much more wealth, and moving raw materials from the US, where they grew easily, to the UK, where they could be turned into manufactures.
After the triangular trade was ended by the abolition of the slave trade, direct trade between southern cotton-growers and Manchester mill-owners was also profitable to all involved right up to abolition – including, of course, in a strictly physical sense, to negro cotton pickers, whose merely physical standard of living exceeded that of the poor in many areas of the world. (They of course, benefitted more even in this merely physical sense from being freed, able to negotiate their remuneration with their former owners, or seek other opportunities.)
[Both the negro cotton pickers and their former owners suffered a bit from the fact that the civil war’s embargo caused cotton-growing to diversify, for example to slave-filled Egypt (slavery and the slave-trade was huge and growing there till British invasions made an end in Egypt proper (1882) and in the former Egyptian empire to the south (1898).]
There was an opportunity-cost economic argument against southern US slavery. Both tobacco farmers and southern city dwellers discovered that giving negroes more freedom let them create greater wealth for both themselves and their increasingly-nominal owners (the only down side for the owners being that ‘increasingly-nominal’ bit). It can be strongly argued that deep-south cotton states could have increased their overall wealth by doing likewise. But arguing that slavery was abolished for economic reasons would be like arguing that we on this blog want free speech because a free-speech Britain would be more profitable Britain; true, but hardly the reason.
BTW, Julie-near-Chicago also posted this about claims that Jefferson had children by a slave woman he owned.
Thank you Niall,
I am well aware of the triangular trade and of the crucial part played in it by some Africans themselves (hypocrites indeed) to the extent that Britains first West African colony, Sierra Leone, was established to rehouse slaves freed by the Royal Navy who feared re-endlavement should they be returned to their homelands.
My point about economic arguments in favour of abolition refers to industrialising economies such as Britain and indeed the north east USA, not the agrarian economy of the south.
Some posters mention the close call on the issue of abolition, the UK Parliament passed the first abolition Bill by (1807) by something like 260 to 16 at a time when only The Gentry had the vote.
Incidentally the person who first outlawed slavery in England was William The Conqueror but that was probably to make it easier to define the new status of serfdom.
(My apologies if my first response was a bit OT to your point.)
My take, FWIW, remains the same. Although the potential opportunity cost argument remains, and the costs of transition were of course less for those in the British Isles and the northern US, I still think it obvious that economics was not the potent political motive at the time. Those who stood to lose financially could see they stood to lose, whether mill-owners or compensating tax-payers in the UK or men fighting and dying and paying for a very expensive war in the North. The abstract opportunity cost of the possibly increased wealth of a society twenty years later had virtually no interested advocates. I think it obviously incorrect to suggest that politically it was a major player in sustaining the abolition movement.
One might compare WWII. You can argue that the post-war world ended up wealthier from fighting and winning that war than it would have from dodging and appeasing in 1940 – that Churchill’s defiance was economically better for us than Halifax’s seeking terms would have been – but in late 1940 only the hard left in Britain claimed that we rejected Hitler’s peace offer and stayed in the war because “British capitalism is fighting for loot”, and they were, as always, being ridiculous.
Which would mean that the passing of the first UK Abolition bill (1807) by overwhelming majority was entirely due to the moral sensibilities of MPs and Lords.
I repeat – the Marxists (Frankfurt School) people behind this COULD NOT GIVE A TOSS about slavery, or “racism”.
They do not care if it is statues of Catholic Saints and crosses that they are destroying – they have done that to. In California – and only one Catholic Bishop in California had the courage to condemn them, the other Californian Bishops HAVING NO CHRISTIAN FAITH (yes I know what I just typed and I stand by it – if a Bishop will not oppose Marxists attacking Christian statues then that Bishop is NOT a believer, he is a FAKE there to spread the “Social Gospel” of thinly disguised Marxism). With the support for BLM the thin (indeed threadbare) disguise has come off – and the “Social Justice” clerics stand exposed as the Marxists they really are. Of course they do not condemn the smashing of saints and crosses – that is what they really want to do themselves.
Any advance on one Californian Bishop condemning it? Any advance om ONE?
And they want to destroy the reputation of ALL the “dead white males” – whether they were friends of slavery, or enemies of slavery.
It makes no difference (none at all) to the Marxist BLM. It is all part of destroying “capitalist” Western Civilisation.