Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> Chris Doss lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com, Wed Dec 22 09:28:59 PST 2004:
>
> >>Think of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson -- they were slave
> >>owners (worse people than the worst Islamists and Ba'athists in
> >>Iraq) who had more self respect than Tory slave owners.
> >
> >FWIW I don't think it makes much sense to talk about slave owners as
> >being "bad people" in an era in which slavery was taken for granted.
>
> Chattel slaves of the New World slavery didn't take slavery for
> granted, and they thought of slave owners as "bad people" or worse.
And in any case, slavery was very definitely NOT "taken for granted," at least from the early 18th century. That old Tory Mossback, Samuel Johnson, opposed U.S. independence on the grounds that slaveowners had no right to be free themselves, and he even raised a toast to the next slave insurrection in the Indies!
One can offer historical rationale for ancient (Greek/Roman) slavery, but not for New World slavery in the 17th/18th/19th centuries. They hae no excuse whatever.
Chris should read Aphra Behn's _Oroonoko_.
Carrol