America’s Brush With Slavery

As for the non-brown underclass, there was socialism in the USA five years before Marx even published his Capital:

Eventually 1.6 million homesteads were granted and 270,000,000 acres (420,000 sq mi) were privatized between 1862 and 1986, a total of 10% of all lands in the United States.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_Act

That would be hilarious if it weren’t so Wrong.

This sort of thinking explains nearly everything in the most congenial fashion imaginable.

dfree, You’re too kind. The someone in question would have to have never read a book by a black person and never even glimpsed a pbs show about black culture and history.

As Farah points out, there’s been other institutions creating “inherited” underclasses as well; but I’d argue that slavery is the hardest to stay ignorant of.

I’m intrigued by their reference to ‘our (admittedly somewhat hyperbolic) claim that America is the freest and most democratic nation on Earth’. As a matter of construction, I don’t see how a comparative statement can by ‘hyperbolic’. ‘Completely free’ or ‘amazingly free’ or ‘unprecedentedly free’ yes, they could legitimately be called hyperbole. But the statement in the original post that the USA ‘ is freer, more individualistic, more democratic, and more open and dynamic than any other nation on earth’ is either true or it isn’t. Describing it as ‘hyperbole’ in the context of an argument trying to justify American exceptionalism reveals it as meaningless chest-beating. If it’s just hyperbole, and other countries are equally free and democratic, where is the alleged exceptionalism?

Weird people, but I guess that describes most of the NRO writers.

In the original article, I love:

“Asked whether he believed in American exceptionalism during a European trip last spring, Obama said, “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” (Is it just a coincidence that he reached for examples of former hegemons?)”

Let’s see, former hegemons: France, check. Germany, check. Austria, check. Spain, check. Italy, check.

What was he supposed to pick? Belgium and Montenegro?

What was he supposed to pick? Belgium and Montenegro?
I choose you, Pikachu

Rich Lowry.

”I’m sure I’m not the only male in America who, when (Sarah) Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, ‘Hey, I think she just winked at me.’ And her smile. By the end, when she clearly knew she was doing well, it was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing. It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America.’

Well Rich you were possibly not the only American male, but you were almost certainly the only American male not on heavy medication.

I preferred it when America’s loons just wrote about the moon landings and the Kennedy assassination: at least that had a certain ‘underground’ Don Delillo like vibe to it.

Nutter.

This man is a professional historian and, from this, he appears to think that there were still serfs in England in 1776.

“Professional historian” is probably being a little too generous to Hanson.

“Quasi-free underclass” seems to describe people bound to their jobs because they can’t afford to lose the employer health insurance pretty well.

I’ve grown very intolerant of such thing; IMHO not only is ‘Tertiary Syphillis’ Hanson a traitor to scholarship, but so is anybody who consorts with him.

How can anyone dance around that elephant without seeing it?

@22–

but the complete misreading of thucydides is not inadvertent: misreading thucydides was always a central tenet of the straussian project, and the neo-cons just took it over along with lots of other bits.

you see, the *real* message of thucydides–which he hid from the masses–is the green lantern theory of international politics: if only the athenians had *willed* it hard enough, they would have beaten the syracusans, and the spartans, and had a thousand-year…! um…a thousand year…golden age of athens!

A good rule of thumb, which I recommend to all my European acquaintances, is: “If there’s something you don’t understand about American history, government, or society, the explanation is usually slavery.”

England….serfs?

Sadly, a worse institution took root here, but never became part of the national psyche.

Which clause is “sadly” intended to modify?

“once upon a time did some good work on the ancient Greeks”

my sense from talking to classicists is that this is true if “good” means “bog-standard, unexceptional”, i.e. good enough for publication and tenure.
i’ve never heard anyone argue that his scholarly work was brilliant, pathbreaking, or much above standard academic fodder.

which is just to say: he did not give up a brilliant career in order to serve his country. he gave up a life of obscure mediocrity in exchange for high-priced whoredom.

That is far from the most ridiculous statement in that article

he should probably note that serfdom had been extinct in England far longer by the time colonization began than slavery has been abolished in the US today.

I still remember my shock on hearing someone (Jesse Jackson) referring to the victims of Katrina as “the children of slaves” and working out that it was possibly true literally as well as metaphorically; i.e. not only were many of them descendants of slaves, but it’s possible that some of them might have had parents who were born shortly before 1865; born, in fact, into slavery.
Which really makes it feel not very long ago at all.

bdbd @27: England….serfs?

We all know Charlie don’t surf but Camilla’s been known to hang ten now and then.

Wage labor is a rather new invention. Also humane working hours and conditions. IN the eighteenth century, under apprenticeship people couldn’t leave their jobs and worked under slave-like conditions (could be physically beaten, etc.). Often they were minors. Army & Navy not much better — worse in some respects.

Apart from everything else that is idiotic about the excerpt, English serfs were attached to the land, not to the nobility.

Lowry was born in ’68, Lowry in ’72. Why do they write in a style that even Stanley Fish wouldn’t think was up-to-date?

I think it’s worse than not having talked to black people. The presence of significant numbers of blacks in the US is a consequence of slavery, so to buy this line you must never have noticed that there even are black people here.

Hey, maybe this guy is just some country club’s mascot poodle or something. Never gets off the premises but to see the Vet, and it’s a very, uh, exclusive Vet naturally.

One of my favorite moments in the history of the dearly missed eXile was the Gary Brecher-VDH feud:

http://exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=7843&IBLOCK_ID=35

After this article, Hanson accused Brecher of attempting to burn down Hanson’s estate.

Oh dear oh dear, where to start.

First, serfdom in England was abolished under Elizabeth I, in 1574, it is doubtful any member of the original colony had met an English serf.

Other forms of servitude, in particular, penal servitude and indentured labour were common. One of the reasons early settler relations with Indian tribes were bad was their habit of enslaving them.

The English became increasingly opposed to slavery in the wake of the Monmouth Rebellion against James II, the last Catholic monarch and the bloody assizes that followed. The 800 sentences of penal servitude were considered a popish affront to English liberties and became a principal complaint in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The English, in common with many other protestant countries developed a revulsion of torture at around the same time and for pretty much the same reason.

Serfdom was finally abolished in Scotland in 1699, which at the time was an entirely independent country under the same king. The act of Union did not come until later with the Darien fiasco.

It took another 70 or so years for the same principles to be extended to other races in the Mansfield decision, which as any non-exceptionalist knows was the real complaint driving the American Revolution and not the squabble over taxes that has been glassed over it in the history books.

What was he supposed to pick? Belgium and Montenegro?

As I understand the rhetoric of the anti-EU crowd, Belgium is currently a hegemon.

Apologies for the accidental incomplete post — I simply meant to add the author, Steve Willett, and the fact that he was very articulately opposed to the Iraq War from a quite conservative perspective.

ajay @ 37:
In the course of doing some family genealogy, I found quite a few ancestors who were slaveowners in the antebellum South. One of them, Robert Ball, owned a modest plantation in Kentucky. One of his former slaves (Robert Ball Anderson) went on to be a successful businessman in Nebraska and, when he was quite elderly, married a very young woman. His widow lived until 1998 (she was one of the last civil war widows). Had I started my research a decade earlier, it would have been possible for me to talk to the widow of a man enslaved by my great-great-great-great-grandfather.

It’s the National Review, for God’s sake. What the hell do you expect?

I just read the first two paragraphs of the original article and saw two straw men, the first dripping with typical conservative intellectually nihilistic denialism, and the second just plain stupid.

There really is no point in trying to debate with the conservative mind set. You’re better off drinking a pint of bad Scotch. That hangover goes away in a day or two.

Sad, but True,
JzB

Ponnuru seems to be a second generation Indian American. Correct? I see that both his parents were doctors in Kansas, and what little I know of American history, such a large social jump would not be possible if his parents were the second generation. The point being, if Ponnuru is in fact second generation, the ABCD factor has a large role to play in identifying oneself to the conservative narrative even at the cost of glorification.

Their creative definition of Jefferson’s “Empire of Liberty” was a particular favourite. It’s remarkable, the things that one can do with three little words.

Mind over Matter

Of course Ponnuru and Lowry are completely right about slavery not affecting the American psyche. White people didn’t mind, and no one else matters.

Further, they are clearly right that this example lies at the heart of American exceptionalism. All of those European countries are shackled to their long and bloody past of genocidal conflict with one another, whereby the nations that survived did so by displacing the orignal inhabitants of their present territories. Good thing we don’t carry that burden, through the simple expedient of never letting the fate of the Native Americans affect our psyches.

This healthy amnesia doesn’t just apply to the distant past. We starve two continents, and drop incendiaries and nuclear weapons on civilians with abandon, and pat the people who did this on the back as our greatest generation. Damn good thing we’re the exception, and don’t have a conscience.

Minor point. France still had about a million Serfs in 1789. Whilst some parts of Germany did abolish in the period of French ascendency, 1794-1806, others waited till 1848. Until the Hardenburg reforms in 1807-1812, Prussia did too. Serfdom remained in parts of Italy, the Hapsburg complex and Russian Poland till 1812-15. Russia and Romania waited till the 1860s

Whatever ‘serfdom’ remained in France in 1789 didn’t even remotely compare to slavery. Of course the French had plenty of slavery too, just elsewhere.

“It took another 70 or so years for the same principles to be extended to other races in the Mansfield decision, which as any non-exceptionalist knows was the real complaint driving the American Revolution and not the squabble over taxes that has been glassed over it in the history books.” Phillip Hallam-Baker

And so I believe.

How do you convince anybody else?

Books, articles, primary sources. . .?

I wish to thank Phillip Hallam-Baker for his provocative and informative post. As a start, as far as sources, Wikipedia has the following — quoted below. Note, that although the polemics in England about slavery began before the start of the War of Independence in 1776, the slave cases were resolved in Britain after it ended. (Another reason the colonists wanted to break away, I gather, was that the English crown wanted to limit European settlement west of the Alleghenies to protect the Indians and the colonists did not. It is one of those ironies of history, that the native Americans of Canada received much better treatment under the crown, than those of the States):

Domestic effect (excerpt):

Mansfield sought to limit the impact of the Somersett case, although by that time the political climate in England had become considerably more conservative because of the American and French Revolutions. In 1780 his house had been firebombed by a Protestant mob because of his judgments in support of rights for Catholics, which may well have caused him to be more cautious on politically sensitive issues. Far from being an ardent radical, it appears that Lord Mansfield was forced into making a judicial determination that he had tried to avoid but in the end made the decision as best he could.

Despite all his concerns and all the potential consequences, Lord Mansfield freed James Somersett. He did so in the face of the [previous] opinions of the Attorney-General and Solicitor-General in 1729, men whom Lord Mansfield in the Somersett case described as “two of the greatest men of their own or any times”. He could have followed those decisions as he would have been legally justified in doing or he could have tried to free Somersett on a technicality but because both the pro- and anti-slavery lobbies wanted a ruling, he did neither. As in the Slave Grace case, Lord Mansfield’s judgment went far further than it needed to go to free Somersett. He described the system of slavery as “odious” at a time when the slave trade was at its height and the abolition movement was in its infancy. The prominence given to the case brought the issue in to the public arena as never before and was interpreted as ending slavery in England, which is what Mansfield had believed it might do. The case remains Lord Mansfield’s legacy as a watershed in the abolition of slavery and one of the finest examples in English law of the maxim he quoted as a warning to the parties in the case before he began his months of deliberation — “let justice be done though the heavens fall”.

International effect

The Scottish case of Joseph Knight against his owner John Wedderburn (discussed in Slavery at common law) began in 1774, and at its conclusion in 1778, showed that slavery had as little support in Scottish common law as in English. In theory, it was suspected by many lawyers that the same would be true in British colonies, which had clauses in their Royal charters requiring their laws not to be contrary to the laws of England- they usually contained qualifications along the lines of “so far as conveniently may be” but it was anticipated that the principles behind Lord Mansfield’s decision would demand a rigorous definition of “conveniently” if a case was taken to its ultimate conclusion. The Somersett case was reported in detail by the American press and in Massachusetts there were several attempts by slaves to obtain freedom in 1773–74, which were supported by the General Court but vetoed by successive Governors. As a result, paradoxically, both pro- and anti-slavery colonies, for opposite reasons, hoped for a rapid break with English law in order to achieve their goals with regard to slavery.[11]

The way those ambitions were fulfilled in the Constitution of the United States without using the words “slave” or “slavery” is well known, as is the later period of tension which saw the pro-slavery states making increasingly cynical efforts to maintain a legal basis for slavery. The decision of the King’s Bench in Somersett’s Case may be contrasted with the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, some 85 years later, in Dred Scott v. Sandford 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857), where the U.S. Supreme court held that a black “whose ancestors were… sold as slaves” was not entitled to the rights of a federal citizen and therefore had no standing in court and that blacks were “beings of an inferior order” not included in the phrase “all men” in the U.S. Declaration of Independence nor afforded any rights by the United States Constitution. The case is also sometimes compared with North Carolina v. Mann, 13 N.C. 167 (N.C. 1830), in which the Supreme Court of North Carolina ruled that slaveowners could not be convicted for killing their slaves.

[11]^ Wiecek, William M. “Somerset: Lord Mansfield and the Legitimacy of Slavery in the Anglo-American World”, University of Chicago Law Review, Vol. 42, No. 1. (Autumn, 1974), pp. 86–146 (via JSTOR- subscription).

[End quote from Wikipedia]

“I for one would love to see the GOP implode in a Palin-fueled flameout. What would replace it? ”

I don’t think that this would happen; the most extreme case would still retain the shell of the GOP (name, brand, legal organizations, etc.), because it’d be so useful.

The GOP is far too useful to the economic elites to allow it to sink any further; they’ll lean on people as needed. And IMHO the ranks of the right-wing religious authoritarians contain plenty of power-hungry and smart people who’ll trim their sails as needed, to retain as much power as they can. The elite MSM will serve their economic masters, and cover the two parties as needed, if you get my meaning.

We’ve seen that economic elitism + cultural populism is an incredibly strong combination.

Mr. Wiecek’s book is good. But I’m looking for something a bit more convincing.

The Blumrosens? Though they move on fairly quickly from the Mansfield decision to talk about other things.

There was the religious issue, also. The colonists were largely dissenters with few rights under English law.

Phillip wrote:

“It is hard to see that the North would have refused secession if there had been no slaves.”

I generally agree with what you said, but I don’t know about this statement. After all, there is no slavery now, and I don’t see the country letting the South secede (though I would. Shame to lose New Orleans, though.). The North did seem to try to bend over backwards to accommodate the “peculiar institution”, so I tend to think the reasons for war were to keep the country unified for the usual strength and glory reasons, and the economic interests you mentioned. That doesn’t change the fact that slavery is the reason the South seceded of course.

@Harold

The religious tolerance issue was very much overplayed. The Pilgrims did not emigrate in search of tolerance so much as for the right to visit intolerance on others. My church, the Quakers were subject to religious persecution in many states pretty much up to the adoption of the Bill of Rights.

Strictly speaking they were separatists. Church and state were deeply interconnected at the time. The reformation was closer to them than WWI is to us today. The reign of Bloody Mary was closer than WWII. Probably the strongest motivation for the emigration was the expectation that northern Europe was on the precipice of a major religious war. Which of course it was, the 30 years war began two years before the Pilgrims sailed.

Going into the detailed causes would of course require asking the type of question that are not acceptable in US schools.

Going back to the original wingnut piece, the real common thread between the emigration of the pilgrims and the revolution was the rejection of the notion of the divine right of Kings. England’s monarchy had been constrained by parliament since long before the Tudor dynasty. The Stuart kings brought with them a very different approach to government, one that led to the civil war and ultimately the line being deposed in favor of constitutional monarchy under the Hanovarians. The Separatists were really being persecuted for opposing the unchallenged rule of the sovereign. The revolutionaries were reacting against the absolutist prejudices of the Tory government of Lord North.

The unpopularity of the puritans in England came rather later than 1620 and extended largely from their Talebanesque rule during the civil war, massacring Catholics, closing theaters and the like. Calls for toleration of Catholicism were complicated by the activities of the Catholic church, in particular the gleeful support of persecution of the Hugenots in France and the ongoing hypocrisy of the Inquisition.

The chief restrictions on non-conformists were that they could not be awarded degrees at Oxford or Cambridge Universities, which were primarily devoted to training of Anglican clergy. Nor could they gain a military commission or work in government. In other words the restrictions were essentially the same as the ones that the US recently endorsed when they were imposed by the Iraqi government against ‘Baathists’ (i.e. Sunni candidates).

the real common thread between the emigration of the pilgrims and the revolution was the rejection of the notion of the divine right of Kings.

I’m not sure that it’s a common thread: from the perspective of the colonial separatists in the 1770s, divine right monarchy was something that remained in the Catholic states on the continent, but had been out of the equation in the Anglosphere since 1690. In that context, it’s ideologically a reassertion of Whiggish Lockean principles from the American side, and I think it’s a stretch to see Lord North’s paternalistic heavyhandedness towards the distant colonials as ‘absolutism’ in the Stuart sense.

I’m more comfortable seeing the religious migrations of the early 1600s in the context of Calvinist ambiguity towards living under a rule perceived tyrannical, and while it’s true that its rhetorical legacy was eagerly picked up by the colonial separatists of the 1770s, the force behind that rhetoric is very different.

@Nick

What I meant was that you could make a claim that what the revolutionaries were demanding was the same liberties that English citizens had traditionally enjoyed in England in the Time of Good Queen Bess and then join a parallel to the pilgrims reaction against the Stuart persecution of non-conformists and absolutist attitudes.

Claiming that a reaction against serfdom played any part in the foundation of the US is just plain stupid.

Forget the Libertarians of the Ron Paul era, though his supporters deny it, Paul got his start in politics playing the race card.

It has been my sad experience that _all_ Libertarians are at best “racially insensitive.”

People who think that the income tax is a greater horror than slavery, are just not nice folks.