You and Beth probably both feel that you “in no way defend slavery” but you both spend so much time defending it, or defending the people who fought to save the culture wic endorsed it. Is the point that most southerners were fools to defend the institution of slavery because most of them did not own slaves, or what?

Oops, no, it the fault of the damned abolitionists. It’s true that they were pesky, self righteous folks who wanted to intrude into other people’s business. But when what they were interfering with was the right and liberty to buy and sell a human being and his and her family etc….well, then I guess you hate them even more, because they were right on that one.

Essentially, you are both making my point that if the south had been more “reasonable,” or just pragmatic, we wouldn’t have to kowtow so much to the modern abolitionists. But pragmatism got trumped by pride, and, of course, honor. Lee’s honor complelled him to fight for his state, and hence the South and its lost cause.

Damn, we human beings are funny folk, and sometimes the funniest when we think we are being the most serious.

My reaction against Mr. Cramer’s article is in large part based on the knowledge that he overtly puts those abolitionists on the right and moral side, yet those same people are the very largest reason we are where we are in terms of the slow slide into statism. The progressive movement in America can very easily be called Secular Calvinism. In my opinion those “green polluters” are the intellectual heirs of abolitionists, who still see themselves as the epitome of morality and who therefore have the right to tell the rest of us how to behave.

It is not all that difficult to trace those Progressive Lincoln Republicans after the Civil War, in large part they developed and supported the Social Gospel, enthusiastically supported Teddy Roosevelt, marched against alcohol bringing us prohibition and by and large enthusiastically supported WWI and various of Woodrow Wilson’s foreign excursions. In large part the connections come through liberal Protestantism, led by the very Progressive Calvinist Congregational church. In time they became THE ESTABLISHMENT. As the Progressive power moved from the Republican party into the Democratic party, the religious aspects of the Progressive movement began to be watered down. By the late 1950′s secular Progressives had more power than the religious Progressives, but they most certainly never lost their zeal in telling the rest of us how to live our lives. And have no doubt that today the religious Progressives and the Secular Progressives find a great deal of common ground, including saving the earth from “climate change”.

Progressive politics were not particularly friendly towards people of color, black and otherwise. They might not have wanted others to own slaves, but they sure didn’t want blacks in their drawing rooms except as servants either. Not to mention the whole eugenics movement was primarily one with the Progressive movement.

While Mr. Cramer wishes to gloss over the difficulties the issue of slavery caused in American churches, it most certainly DID exist and the issue did cause splitting within some denominations. Great Book-Religion and the Antebellum debate over Slavery. I may not have written any history books RKV, but I can certainly read, and I don’t give a tinkers damn about the Bancroft as I see it as little more than a bunch of liberals giving other liberals prizes to reinforce each others opinions. The incident in which Mr. Cramer was involved certainly speaks to that belief I would wager.

I care deeply about intellectual and history integrity, and willingly give kudos to Mr. Cramer regarding his debunking of Bellesiles, that does not preclude me from being critical the subject of this article. The history of Progressives have by and large been whitewashed, including the very religious nature of it. Old newspaper writings described the political meetings involving Teddy Roosevelt when he ran under the Progressive Party as having the atmosphere of a Tent revival and there was a good reason it was described thus.

Consider this-Of the total southern white population of 8,099,760 in 1860, only 384,000 owned slaves. Of these, 10,780 owned fifty or more. It was calculated that about 88 per cent of America’s slave-owners owned twenty slaves or less. To stop those 384,000 from owning slaves, the religious radical John Brown sparked the war that killed some 620,000 as well as economically devastating the south for generations. In their moral superiority those non slave holding Christians managed to bring about the deaths of a great many people. I in no way defend slavery, but since this is an article about morality, I think it is fair to ask those hard moral questions, and that includes the actions of those who started a war, as well as examining their role in this nation post Civil War. John Brown has a great deal in common with Bill Ayers not withstanding their religious differences.

The green polluter is not to be compared to the slave owner but instead to be compared to their intellectual ancestors the abolitionists who saw themselves as morally superior despite all the death and destruction they had wrought. But that, me thinks, brings a bit of discomfort to Mr. Cramer given his ancestral Calvinist history.

“But I will grant you … God, or common sense, in the unlikely guise of the Federal Government, certainly PUNISHED them for their excessive pride, a pride which melded into their concept of slave-holding, courageous, liberty.

“I belabor the obvious to say that the Civil War changed our culture permanently in many ways, just one of which was the relationship between the Federal Government, the states, and the individual. If only those damned southerners had been more reasonable and not given Lincoln the reason to become super-daddy, we might have more of what many of you call liberty and freedom today…but we don’t.”

I certainly hope this was meant to be ironic rather than just plain vicious, which is how it comes across. I don’t know where you get your stereotypes of antebellum Southern attitudes, but they are unrecognizable to this descendant of Tidewater Virginians. “Pride” at being better than slaves (or black people in general) was a Northern phenomenon as well, which got combined with pride at being better than “backwards” Southerners.

Folks in my “down home” didn’t equate liberty with the right to own slaves. Well before the Revolution, Virginians petitioned the Crown to stop subsidizing the slave trade, and the Colonial legislature to find a way to phase out slavery. Yes, the holders of vast numbers of slaves wielded their clout against the local movement. But, even wealthy plantation owners like Washington and Jefferson agonzied over the contradition between their beliefs and their actions (and fudged this by providing for post-mortem emancipation). One of my family’s neighbors, Robert Carter III, went ahead and emancipated the people he held while he was still alive.

Churches and other institutions in our parts went back and forth between integration and segregation from Colonial times well into the 20th century. Arrogant people don’t engage in that type of dialog.

Granted, large slaveholders and the politicians dependent upon their support ratcheted up the pro-slavery rhetoric like crazy. None of their rhetoric, however, matched that of the abolitionists (a radical anti-slavery faction): they spoke, throughout the War (and some of them before the War) of killing Southern whites, slaveholder and non-slaveholder alike. John Brown massacred a family in Kansas, then raided a Federal arms depot with further massacres in mind. Southerners never spoke of killing Yankees till it was a matter of self-defense against armed invasion.

I pity you for your belief that being too proud to lie down and take death threats meekly, and to submit to outrageous taxation instead, is some kind of fault that must be “punished.” Lincoln was already out to be “super-daddy,” as were Henry Clay and a number of Congresses before his administration, as is Barack Obama today. Blaming Southerners for Lincoln’s actions is like blaming the Tea Party activists for Obama’s statist legislation.

What is with all this knee-jerk Southern-bashing? When the chips were down, we said NO to Lincoln, the statist “American Program” of the Whigs before him, and the punitive taxation both demanded. Can’t you appreciate that?

Wasn’t it enough to kill hundreds of thousands of us and lay waste to our region? What is this inexplicable need to get us to say you were right to do that? How can you be left unsatisfied unless we do, yet still claim to oppose large statist government?

Do good conservatives conserve?

And this, by the way, was the basis on which Christian abolitionism argued: that regardless of whether slavery as an institution was right or wrong, no Christian should mistreat or abuse another person, because it violates how we would want to be treated ourselves. We would not want to be whipped for failing to harvest “enough” cotton during the day; we would not want to have our family torn away from us where we could not see them; we would not want our wives or daughters to be sexual slaves; therefore there was an obligation to not do these things.

Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave recognized that some of his masters, without abandoning the system of slavery, were prepared to treat their slaves by the high standard that Christianity requires–and made a point of expressing his admiration for that. One can make the case that an employer should treat his employees as he would want to be treated. Inevitably, some of our laws in practice require employers to treat employees worse than the CEO would want to be treated; but there are employers who do their best to do the best that they can for their employees within the framework we have. I have had employers who clearly did the best that they could do (for example, many of the startups that I worked for in California); and I have had the other type of employers, such as Hewlett-Packard.

However, the particular slave system that existed in America was specifically forbidden by the Old Testament. However, the Old Testament laws were never for Christians in any sense whatsoever other than to teach them about Jesus Christ (despite those who would assert otherwise). Still, it can be definitely stated that a great many Christian leaders failed to heed the command of Paul in Philemon concerning the ethical treatment of slaves (which incidentally the Jewish legal code concerning slavery, while not theologically binding, should have acted as a guide). Of course, this failure was clearly sin on the part of people who should have – and to be quite honest did – know better. However, let it be said that we are all sinners, and therefore all in need of Jesus Christ for salvation, whether black or white, slave or free, Jew or Gentile.

As a side note, environmentalism is a rejection of doctrines of God’s providence and sovereignty over creation. Man cannot destroy the earth and its environment, only God can. So, the idea that any Christian – especially any evangelical or fundamentalist Christian – would align himself with an environmentalist movement speaks precisely of how few Christians take the Bible seriously. They merely hear things like “God gave man dominion over creation so we should become creation care evangelicals” without even bothering to do study of the Bible themselves, or even to study what good theologians have written on the topic.

Finally, the comparison of dumping slave babies into the ditch for economic reasons and abortion (due to people not wanting to be financially or personally responsible for babies) was an outstanding one.

You assert that it was no longer justifiable economically, but are we then left with the implication that they stayed with the system even though it was in their best interests economically NOT TO? That seems odd, to say the least, doesn’t it?

But I will grant you that their pride in their liberty, their “rights” to do what they wanted to and not be told by some yankee do-gooders to give up their slaves, certainly was capable of pushing them to irrational behavior.

Yes, pride plays a big part in this–especially for that majority of Southern whites who did not own slaves. No matter how poor they were, at least they weren’t slaves! There was someone below them.

In addition, while slavery did not make economic for the region as a whole, it could make enormous economic sense for the larger planters. There were substantial costs that slavery imposed on each state: maintenance of slave patrols and of state militias as useful military forces well past the point where they were anything but social clubs in the North; discouraging of free labor for the same reason that slavery did so in the classical world; encouraging immigrants to go to the North; retarding manufacturing. Yet the benefits of slavery were largely falling on the owners–especially the large owners.

The analogy to the current illegal immigration situation is quite strong: employers hire cheap, easily frightened illegal immigrants, while the rest of the society gets stuck with medical care costs at the emergency rooms.

Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations makes this point: that free men are more productive than slave labor, because everything you get out of a slave beyond his own subsistence must be beaten out of him. There is still considerable argument about exactly why American slavery developed when it did. One argument is that the shortage of whites willing to indenture themselves to the New World declined mid-17th century, and at that point, Africans made more economic sense. The Africans lacked any substantial political voice, because only free blacks were allowed to vote. (A free black man was actually elected to the Maryland legislature in 1642.) It was therefore easy to pass laws that permanently degraded their status.

Another argument that I find persuasive (at least partly because it fits into gun rights so beautifully) is that it was difficult to keep distributing the best lands to the people at the top without producing a huge population of discontented and armed poor whites. As Governor Berkeley explained, “How miserable that man is that Governes a People where six parts of seaven at least are Poore Endebted Discontented and Armed.” Slavery enabled poor whites to rise up one rung on the socioeconomic ladder. They had someone to look down up, and to exploit. The alternative would have been disarming poor whites–which would have put the colony at the mercy of Indian attack, and attack by European navies and pirates.

Except that permanent slavery developed decades after the first Africans arrive on slave ships–and appear to have been treated as indentured servants when they first arrived in Virginia and Maryland. There is a statute passed in Maryland in 1664 that clarifies that Africans are slaves for life, and that the children of slave mothers are also slaves for life. (White women who marry slave men become slaves as long as their husband lives, and their children become slaves as well.) Virginia is less clear, but the 1639 and 1640 militia statute exclusions suggest that African servants are changing status from the equivalent of white indentured servants to some lower status.

Raising the children of slaves was equally as expensive. It is many years of feeding to make a child a worthwhile worker. Attrition rates are high. Thus, continued permanent slavery.

This is an interesting claim, but I have not seen any strong evidence for this. At least in America, slave children start working (although at fairly trivial tasks) at about eight years of age. Unlike the sugar plantations of the West Indies, attrition rates were NOT high in America. At least part of why African slaves eventually end up in high demand is that they are far less likely to die of malaria, because of the sickle-cell anemia gene’s protective benefits. (Malaria kills whites at astonishing rates on the Chesapeake into the 19th century.)

Slavery was on the way out by the time of the Civil War, as someone posted earlier. Why? Economics. It was becoming too expensive, when there were just so many immigrants available to do the labor (at less expense), seeking escape from their even harsher lives back home, and dreaming of a better life here, at least for their progeny.

This was a fashionable claim in some circles. Time on the Cross, for all the criticism it received (and deserved), does suggest that slavery remained economically viable right into the 1850s. For the most part, immigrants bypassed the South–because they perceived that they would be competing with black labor. A recurring complaint in the 1850s from the relatively small class of skilled white workers in places like Charleston was the number of slaves that were working cheap, and making their own contracts, giving a portion of their pay to the master.

As others have pointed out, the galley slave is apparently not a classical civilization thing. While I wouldn’t count on Wikipedia as a terribly trustworthy source, it also confirms what I have read elsewhere: classical civilization generally preferred freemen to row.

[S]lavery was far from a sweet thing back then, even compared to the depths of American chattel slavery.

I don’t think that I ever called it a sweet thing–only that Roman slave law recognized certain rights that slaves had, and many of the continental legal systems based on Roman law were generally better than American slave law for that reason.