I know them mostly from Melville’s “Confidence Man”, but they’d be worth learning more about.

I think you misunderstood me. My point was that Medved and his critics here are talking past each other. Medved’s points are clearly meant as a collection of rebuttals to pro-reparations arguments—arguments he thought so prevalent among mainstream leftists that he needn’t even recapitulate them. In fact, these arguments turn out to be so far from the minds of Crooked Timberites that they can’t even figure out what on earth has motivated him to say what he’s saying. Just in case it’s not already clear, I view this as a knock on Medved, not on Crooked Timber. So we’re actually not as far apart as you seem to think we are.

Our main disagreement appears to be that you assume Medved’s misunderstanding of the mainstream academic left to be deliberate disingenuousness, whereas I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and attribute it to ignorance. Personally, I don’t think that distinction is worth making a big deal about, but feel free to rant about it, if you like.

Wilberforce was a Methodist, which at the time was not an independent denomination but was considered a relatively extreme group advocating personal piety and social reform within the COE. For much of his career being called a “Methodist” was not so far from being called “fundie” or “religious nutter” today. Through the persuasive efforts of the Wilberforce and the Clapham sect over many years Methodism and the social reform movements it championed became more mainstream, but for most of his life this wasn’t true.

You can check us out at http://www.reparationsthecure.org

If, by some magical logistical feat, one were to quantify the two and weigh one over the other, would it then be the “preferable” method, one we should embrace? If not, is the former somehow “forgivable” because the latter is worse?

Medved’s rant about how slavery wasn’t so bad after all, reminds me of the US occupation as compared to Saddam. The most ridiculous of claims – we didn’t torture people like he did, we’ve technically got a lower death count in aggregate across the entire country, when we exploit the country for its natural riches its ok because we’re capitalist.

Since Nazism is the defacto benchmark of bad behavior, whatever doesn’t meet that benchmark isn’t bad? My god, I pray that Medved never actually gains the political capital of a local dogcatcher, because I can only imagine what abuses he’d put his position through while still keeping under the line of National Socialist.

Notable omissions include the novelist Graham Greene:
http://amsaw.org/amsaw-ithappenedinhistory-100203-greene.html

Much of the location filming for the latest movie (1999) based on Greene’s novel: The End of the Affair (1951), was shot very near to the rebuilt church where Wilberfoce and the Clapham sect worshipped:
http://www.outlines.org.uk/claphamsociety/clapsocNL_295_March.pdf

Other notable omissions with literary connections: Harriet Shelley, when she eloped to become the first wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Noel Coward, Kingsley Amis and Angela Carter.

One reason why this is so extraordinary is that the phrase, “the man on the Clapham omnibus,” was referenced in a judicial decision by Sir Charles Bowen in the early 20th century as the stereotypical ordinary person who needed to be convinced beyond reasonable doubt for a person on trial to be convicted. Perhaps the explanation for the paradox is that with the advent of a rail connection to central London, by the early 20th century Clapham had transformed from a village in Surrey to a commuting surburb of London.

This is JMW Turner’s painting of an aspect of Clapham Common from c. 1800-05:
http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=999999996&workid=14730&searchid=9058&tabview=display

Exactly – and that became the increasingly prevalent urbane sentiment in Britain in the late 18th century, driven by an increasingly pervasive moral conviction that the institution of slavery was inherently evil. Wilberforce finally convinced Parliament to prohibit the slave trade by British flagged ships in 1807 when the Napoleonic Wars still had another 8 years to run before the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 finally vanquished Napoleon’s Grand Army.

Turner’s painting of the Slave Ship, exhibited in 1840 at the Royal Academy, gives us some insight into the extent of feelings about slavery. Why else would Turner choose to disturb the tranquility of an exhibition at the Royal Academy by exhibiting in 1840 such a powerful and evocative painting depicting horrifying events in the course of a voyage of the slave ship Zong in 1781?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zong

Turner was already an Academician and had already established a secure reputation for his art and slavery, not just slave trading, had already been abolished in the British empire years before in 1833.

We shall probably never know for sure about the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings but, by available accounts, she looked after his daughters and accompanied the family when Jefferson went to Paris as ambassador.

Jefferson may have thought he was genuinely fond of Hemmings; he may have regarded her as a farm animal; or he may have followed the poet Horace (in one of the Satires that I can’t be bothered to look up because it’s disgusting) that he preferred his sex easy and available. I neither know nor care.

What do you imagine Hemmings thought about the situation?

Incidentally, Francis Barber was a free man, although he was a servant, unsurprisingly, as it was the largest category of urban occupation in his time. And Johnson hated slavery.

A footnote: while England did work to abolish slavery, and while Gladstone fervently opposed slavery, under Gladstone Britain tacitly supported the Confederacy (allowing them to build ships in British shipyards). Henry Adams was a junior member of the American Embassy in Britain during the Civil War, and he spends the first half of his “Education” puzzling about Gladstone’s inexplicable behavior. IIRC, Adams drew cynical, Realpolitik conclusions from his experience. (Not sure; I didn’t finish the book, which is one of the most oddly-written books I’ve ever tried to read.)

Wiki:

The discontent of Baptists from the south eventually led to their withdrawal from the national Baptist organizations. At an Augusta, Georgia meeting in May 1845, they formed a new convention and named it the Southern Baptist Convention. They elected as its first president William Bullein Johnson (1782-1862), who had served as president of the Triennial Convention in 1841.

The consequences of the decision to separate from other Baptists in defense of the institution of slavery have been long lived. A survey by SBC’s Home Mission Board in 1968 showed that only eleven percent of Southern Baptist churches would admit Americans of African descent. During the SBC Conservative Resurgence/Fundamentalist Takeover the Southern Baptist Convention of 1995 voted to adopt a resolution renouncing its racist roots and apologizing for its past defense of slavery. The racism resolution marked the denomination’s first formal acknowledgment that racism played a role in its founding. Today there are many diverse and even self-consciously ethnic churches within the convention.

In short, the fundamentalists finally denounced slavery twelve years ago. For all I know, that was already part of the PR for their their family values / anti-abortion campaign, which had already been in full swing for some time.

http://crookedtimber.org/2006/06/21/values-and-violence/

I don’t know exactly why you think CTers are talking-past-each-other over this – Sadly, No! confronted it directly, and the issue was covered in the first comment here. Perhaps what you mean to say is “oo, these lefties at crooked timber think that collective guilt idea is so stupid that they won’t even pay lipservice to the right’s stupid straw man!” Or are you merely trying to hijack the thread to a discussion of guilt because honest discussion of this issue hurts your brain?