On Sat, 20 Oct 2001, Lou Paulsen wrote:
> In any case, interestingly enough, the historical record is not quite
> what you say - there were a couple of books on this which I
> extensively annotated, but I always forget authors' names. But in any
> case, the idea of abolition was pretty respectable in the South until
> rather late, the 1830's anyway and maybe later. It was generally
> thought by many intellectuals to be a temporary evil. Usually the
> Southern white abolitionists favored abolition-by-attrition plans,
> whereby the children of slaves would be born free. (Those are the
> plans which were implemented in the Northern states.)
Actually I think this underlines my point. This is was not abolition. This was precisely the sort of pragmatism that abolition -- the movement to declare slavery illegal -- was opposed to. Abolitionists believed that the enslavement of men and women was wrong in the eyes of god. Theirs was an absolutism. The position you are discussing conceded a central compromising point to Southern thinking: that the property rights inherent in slavery had to be taken seriously and therefore could not simply be abolished -- in large part for the very reason that such property holders could never be expected to agree to it without force. I quite agree that that this was for a long time a respectable position in the South. It was arguably the position to some degree of all the Virginian founding fathers. It's also not incompatible with the pre-war positions of Abraham Lincoln. And an alternate universe in which it triumphed might not have been such a bad thing.
> How about Harriet Tubman? How about the Underground Railroad? They
> got 'resonance' among slaves, you bet they did. There's an active
> abolition movement for you.
Quite true. It was also a Northern one. Without northern sanctuary it was unthinkable. And it was one of the central causes of the civil war, precisely because resonance among Northern publics was matched by an equal and opposite reaction against it in the South. The conservative turn you note from 1830 on was in large part a direct consequence.
Michael __________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com