>Dear List:
>
>Chris Doss wrote:
>
>>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.
>
>I must disagree. Slavery was a fact of life for many, but
>the existence of an abolition movement seems to suggest
>that slavery was not "taken for granted" and that slave
>owners were viewed in their own time as bad people.
Besides, Jefferson, one of the names under discussion here, had something of a guilty conscience about slavery ("I tremble for my country when I think that God is just") - but never, of course, enough to free his slaves.
Here's the conclusion of the Encyclopedia Britannica article on TJ, racism, & slavery:
>It also shaped his personal posture as a slave owner. Jefferson
>owned, on average, about 200 slaves at any point in time, and
>slightly over 600 over his lifetime. To protect himself from facing
>the reality of his problematic status as plantation master, he
>constructed a paternalistic self-image as a benevolent father caring
>for what he called "my family." Believing that he and his slaves
>were the victims of history's failure to proceed along the
>enlightened path, he saw himself as the steward for those entrusted
>to his care until a better future arrived for them all. In the
>meantime, his own lavish lifestyle and all the incessant and
>expensive renovations of his Monticello mansion were wholly
>dependent on slave labour. Whatever silent thoughts he might have
>harboured about freeing his slaves never found their way into the
>record. (He freed only five slaves, all members of the Hemings
>family.) His mounting indebtedness rendered all such thoughts
>superfluous toward the end, because his slaves, like all his
>possessions, were mortgaged to his creditors and therefore not
>really his to free.
>