Good News

Aoxomoxoa said:
I bought that same book from a UK second hand book seller called Abe books and it is listed as a former library book, don't listen to Prakosh/Dantes anymore than Darla/Dantes.

Item Status: Confirmed
Title: Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old Sou
Author: Bertram Wyatt-Brown
Quantity: 1
Book Description: Ships from the UK. Former Library book. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside.

Book Price: £ 0.63
Postage Price: £ 2.75
Click to expand...

You'll find it to be quite good. You'll recognize many similarities to Victorian England, which was largely behind Britain's tacit support of the Confederacy
 
Aoxomoxoa said:
I bought that same book from a UK second hand book seller called Abe books and it is listed as a former library book, don't listen to Prakosh/Dantes anymore than Darla/Dantes.

Item Status: Confirmed
Title: Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old Sou
Author: Bertram Wyatt-Brown
Quantity: 1
Book Description: Ships from the UK. Former Library book. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside.

Book Price: £ 0.63
Postage Price: £ 2.75
Click to expand...


OMG REALLY?!!! This book is in some libraries? Holy shit, now you have done it TOm.

If it's in a library...shit I don't know how Dantes is going to counter that stunning revelation. I mean, how many books do you actually find in a library? Once a book makes it to a library that ends the argument. It's not just any book that gets to be in a library, let me tell you...

Wow, well this was an SJ-level skewering alright.
 
Darla said:
Dantes if only you knew the subject you'd know what they teach in college history courses about it. WHy don't you try taking a course on it Dantes huh?
Click to expand...

Ohh alright, I will, I will! I promise I will! Stop pressuring me, please, stop it!
 
Dantès said:
I guess you can't think too well can you? I'll let you think about that for a while and then I'll get back to you if after 4-6 hours you haven't figured out what is wrong with your stupid question by then,

I think I've already shown that you may have read this one book but haven't read much else. And that was clear when you said that Cash's Mind of the South was about slavery; it isn't! Personally, I don't think you have much knowledge about much of anything.
Click to expand...

I didn't say Cash's book was about slavery. It was about the southern culture, of which the slave culture was a defining element. Which is why one has to consider the slave culture in the broader context of what was going on at the time, not in the context of how we live now.

As for the other thing.... obviously you spoke off the cuff and have nothing to back it up. Please be an adult and rephrase it, or be dismissed as a narrow-minded twit.
 
Darla said:
OMG REALLY?!!! This book is in some libraries? Holy shit, now you have done it TOm.

If it's in a library...shit I don't know how Dantes is going to counter that stunning revelation. I mean, how many books do you actually find in a library? Once a book makes it to a library that ends the argument. It's not just any book that gets to be in a library, let me tell you...

Wow, well this was an SJ-level skewering alright.
Click to expand...


All he lacked was the thumb picture..
 
Aoxomoxoa said:
Well I don't intend to get into a pissing contest as to who had the worst childhood, however living in the post war rat infested bombed out East End of London was no picnic either.
Click to expand...

Yes, it is an amazing human phenomenon isn't it? Most people like to think that they overcame extreme hardships to get where they are whether it be poverty, racism, sexism, agism or pick any other ism. I guess we don't want people to think that we had the skids greased for us and that it wasn't easy.

Everyone has unique experiences that shapes who they are and their outlook on life. It is a truism that everyones basis of historical fact starts on the day they were born. So it is natural that the millennials only see slavery through the lens of today. They have no other context and they weren't taught the true history. For some reason because slavery was a travesty, that also means we can't be honest about what really happened. You can't say that most slaves weren't beaten or starved because for some reason that means you are defending the act of slavery.

Yes, slavery was and is a horrible thing, but if it is a horrible thing, why embellish what happened? Does the act of slavery not speak for itself? Do we have to add other untruths to make the suffering sound even greater than it was? Are people worried that if there is a thought that slaves were not whipped on a daily basis that people would then say "See, no big deal, let's bring it back"? It is odd thinking to be sure.

It would be like talking about the Holocaust and saying that before marching the Jews into the gas chambers, Hitler personally cut out the livers of small children and ate them in front of their parents. That sure would have bee been awful. To my knowledge that wasn't true, but why can't we add it to history anyway since the Holocaust was in itself a horrible act. We should be able to ascribe any horror to the Nazis and for people to claim otherwise would be defending the Holocaust.

Or, what if we looked at the current regimes love of drones and we said that not only are innocents being killed with drones but Obama has the dead bodies covered over with heavy equipment and then drills for oil. If you say I am wrong you must support drone strikes on innocent civilians. See how that works?

It is important that we have a proper historical record, to do otherwise does a disservice to us all.
 
Dantès said:
I promised Darla I would post this essay by Nell Irvin Painter and whatever Darla wants Darla gets so after a lot of typing and re-reading here it is, Darla.


Slavery and Soul Murder
by Nell Irvin Painter

In this remarkable if short piece from a collection of essays by edited by David R. Roediger, entitled Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White (1998), Nell Irvin Painter, who has also authored books on the first black migration from the South to Kansas and a book about Sojourner Truth as well as a relatively new book called The History of White People (2011) among others, ties the ideals that existed in slavery, evangelicalism, and the family together to show that the system of submission and obedience enforced by violence against slaves also permeated the other institutions in the antebellum south and that violence against slaves could also turn into violence against white women. In addition, according to Painter, white women had little recourse when their marriages to slave holders turned violent. It’s a dramatic and difficult if short piece, refuting much of the plantation tradition rewriting of slavery and the antebellum period, especially difficult I think for those here who have been claiming that slavery wasn’t all that violent and that the slaves really had it good and so on. This rather unlikely view of slavery with it’s typical Sundays on the plantation porch, picking the banjo and whistling Dixie and carrying on, is not a new idea by the way, there is a whole genre of literature created at the turn of the nineteenth-century and stressing this romantic rewriting of slavery called plantation literature--Thomas Nelson Page was it's most popular author--which stresses this plantation tradition and attempts to turn a nostalgic if jaundiced eye toward dixie and the joys of slavery--free health care and cradle to grave employment, indeed—don’t forget the singing, all the chicken you could steal, and the watermelon, lots and lots of watermelon. It really wasn’t all that bad, just like being a black person today isn’t all that bad. And just like Bill Cosby, and his tired ideological commitment to the joys of a capitalism that has made him a multimillionaire, many of the purveyors of this crap also find a willing audience. But there is another version of events. I dare those who claim here to "crack" books on slavery to READ ON!


The values and practices of slavery, in particular the use of violence to secure obedience and deference, prevailed within white families as well. The ideals of slavery—obedience and submission—were concurrently and not accidentally the prototype of white womanhood and of evangelical piety, which intensified the prestige and reinforced the attraction of these ideals. Nineteenth-century evangelical religion meant various things to its many believers, and it could compel them to startlingly different ideological conclusions, as exemplified in the North in the Jacksonian era. After the abolition of slavery in the North, evangelicalism fostered a profusion of convictions, including abolitionism and feminism; in the region still committed to slavery, evangelicalism produced no reforming offshoots that were allowed to flourish. Instead, unquestioning evangelical piety was more valued, and piety was another word for submission and obedience, terms that also figured prominently in the language of the family.

The imageries of religion and family have much in common, rhetorically and structurally, and scholars have repeatedly stressed the crucial role of human families as structural models both in religion and in slavery. Christians speak of God the Father, the Son , and the Holy Ghost, and Christians, Jews and Muslims trace the origin of humankind to the family of Adam and Eve. Religions routinely evoke the language of kinship when sketching out holy relationships between gods and people.

Slavery and the family are just as inextricably intertwined, for the etymology of the word family reaches back to the Latin words familia, meaning a household, and famulus/famula meaning servant or slave, deeply embedding the notion of servitude within the our concept of family. As the ideals and practices of servitude, family, and religion are so firmly linked in this cultural system, a search for cause and effect is bound to prove frustrating. Even without recourse to relations of causality, however, the confluence of values is noteworthy.

Slavery accentuated the hierarchical rather than the egalitarian and democratic strains in American culture, thereby shaping relations within and without families and politics. Patriarchal families, slavery and evangelical religion further reinforced one another’s emphasis on submission and obedience in civil society, particularly concerning people in subaltern positions.

Despite the existence of a wide spectrum of opinion on slavery and feminism. agreement exists on the close relationship between the concepts of the white woman and slavery. Proslavery apologists often insisted that the maintenance of slavery depended on the preservation of patriarchy within white families, arguing that white women, especially rich women, must remain in their places and be submissive to their fathers and husbands so that slaves would not conceive notions of equality. Similar motives prohibited white men from acknowledging publicly that white women commonly labored in southern fields at tasks that the culture reserved rhetorically for women who were enslaved. The reasoning of proslavery apologia ran from women’s honor to gender roles to black men—white women sex, skipping over the reality of white men’s sexual use and abuse of black women in a manner that twentieth–century readers find remarkable: for its silences, its intertextuality, and its unabashed patriarchy. Of course, there is nothing at all contradictory between family feeling and hierarchy, between attachment and the conviction that some people absolutely must obey others.

Hierarchy by no means precludes attachments. Just as young slaves attached to the adults closet to them, white as well as black, so the white children and adults in slave-owning households became psychologically entangled with the slaves they came to know well. When Sojourner Truth’s son, Peter, was beaten by his owner in Alabama, his mistress (who was Sojourner’s mistress’s cousin) salved his wounds and cried over his injuries. That story concluded with Peter’s mistress’s murder by the very same man, her husband, who had previously abused Peter. Like Peter’s murdered mistress, other slave owners, especially women, grieved at the sight of slaves who had been beaten.

Abolitionist Angelina Grimké recalled scenes from her life as a privileged young woman in Charleston, South Carolina. When Grimké was about thirteen and attending a seminary for wealthy girls, a slave boy who had been severely battered was called into his classroom to open a window. The sight of his wounds was so painful to Grimké that she fainted. Her school was located near the workhouse where slaves were sent to be reprimanded. One of her friends who lived near it complained to Grimké that the screams of the slaves being whipped often reached her house. These awful cries from the workhouse terrified Grimké whenever she had to walk nearby.



As slave-owning children grew into adults, their identification with victims or victimizers often accorded to gender. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese shows that mistresses could be cruel tormentors of their slaves. But in comparison with masters, white women were more likely to take the side of the slaves, while white men nearly unanimously identified with the aggressor as a requisite of manhood. Becoming such a man did not happen automatically or painlessly. Playing on the patriarchy inherent in Western cultural institutions, which are also rooted in Christian religion, Jacques Lacan terms this socialization, “the name-of-the-father.”

Fathers ordinarily did the work of inculcating manhood, which included snuffing out white children’s identification with slaves. In 1839 a Virginian named John M. Nelson described his shift from painful childhood sympathy to manly callousness. As a child, he would try to stop the beating of slave children and, he said, “mingle my cries with theirs, and feel almost willing to take a part of the punishment.” After his father severely rebuked him several times for this kind of compassion, he became “so blunted that I could not only witness their stripes with composure, but myself inflict them, and that without remorse.” The comments of Thomas Jefferson on this whole subject are revealingly oblique.

Thomas Jefferson, Founding Father, slave owner, author of the Declaration of Independence, and acknowledges expert on his own state of Virginia and the United States generally, wrote Notes on the State of Virginia in response to a questionnaire from François Marbois, the secretary of the French legation at Philadelphia. Between 1780 and 1785 Jefferson codified his social, political, scientific, and ethical convictions. Jefferson did not have a very high opinion of Africans, though American Indians, he thought, would display their real and substantial worth when afforded decent opportunities. Jefferson found African Americans stupid and ugly, a people more or less well suited to the low estate they occupied in eighteen-century [sic] Virginia. Contrary to facile assumption, Jefferson’s appraisal of the capacities of Africans did not make him an unequivocal supporter of slavery. Nonetheless, as a gentlemen, whose entire material existence depended on the produce of his slaves, he was never an abolitionist. In fact, his reluctance to interfere with slavery hardened as he aged. By 1819, as the Missouri Compromise was being forged, Jefferson was warning American politicians not, under any circumstances, to tamper with slavery, even though he realized that by preserving slavery, the United States was holding “a wolf by the ears.”

Jefferson’s reservations about slavery pertained to the owners of slaves, not to the slaves themselves. Being the property of other people was not noxious to blacks, he thought, but owning slaves entailed great drawbacks for whites. Jefferson recognized that the requirements of slave ownership “nursed, educated, and daily exercised“ habits of tyranny, and he observed that “[t]he man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.” In this part of his discussion, Jefferson’s customary verbal talent and intellectual suppleness turned into obfuscation. He veiled his explanation of the bad things that slavery did to slaveholders and was only able to write intriguingly of slavery’s breeding “odious peculiarities.”

Jefferson’s phrasing does not appeal to today’s family systems theories and psychoanalysts, who use instead the language of triangles to explain family relationships, including those that are violent. Children who are observers of abuse are likely to assume the position of the other members of the triangle: either by becoming victims themselves or by abusing others, especially younger siblings or children in positions of relative weakness. This is the kind of repercussion that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century observers like Thomas Jefferson were deploring through euphemism.



So far in this discussion, only slaves have figured as the victims of physical and psychological abuse. But the ideals of slavery affected families quite apart from the toll they exacted from the bodies and psyches of blacks. Thanks to the abundance of historical scholarship that concentrates on antebellum southern society, it is possible to reach some generalizations regarding whites. But even in the slave South, historians have been much less aware of the abuse of white women than of the oppression of black slaves. Abuse there was, as the diary of Baltimorean Madge Preston indicates.

Petitions for divorce and church records show that wife beating was a common motive for the attempted dissolution of marriages and the expulsion of men and women from church membership. Doubtless this was true in nonslave-holding regions as well. What is noteworthy in this context, as Stephanie McCurry shows for the South Carolina low country, is that legislators and church leaders routinely urged women to remain in abusive unions and to bear abuse in a spirit of submission. In the hard-drinking antebellum South, which was well-known for rampant violence against slaves and between white men, white women had little recourse when their husbands beat them, for, in general, the southern states were slow to grant women the legal right to divorce or to custody of their children in cases of separation. Until the 1830s, southern states lacked divorce laws, and state legislators heard divorce petitions on a case-by-case basis. The result was a small number of divorces granted inconsistently and according to the social and economic status of the petitioner in her community.


By the way, I am still waiting for that list of books that you have cracked on slavery, mister Taft2016. Where is this illustrious list, braggart. Put up or shut up, you old fool!
Click to expand...

Thanks, that was as great as you said.
 
Taft2016 said:
I didn't say Cash's book was about slavery. It was about the southern culture, of which the slave culture was a defining element. Which is why one has to consider the slave culture in the broader context of what was going on at the time, not in the context of how we live now.

As for the other thing.... obviously you spoke off the cuff and have nothing to back it up. Please be an adult and rephrase it, or be dismissed as a narrow-minded twit.
Click to expand...


Well of course a very, very, very small percentage of the South owned slaves. Also, blacks also owned other slaves. The indians owned slaves. But, we shan't speak of a factual historical record for to do so means you DEFEND SLAVERY.

No, the left wants this image of a slave owning South and nothing should get in the way of that least of all factual history. Think about this. Opposition to the Confederate Flag is only a recent phenomenon. Some leftie decided that it would be a proxy for its war on American values and conservatism so they set out to make people realize that all along they should have been offended by the Confederate Flag. That is how the left works and since they have a dominant hold on our pop culture, education and the media they have an upper hand in pushing a false narrative to prop up their sick, deluded ideology predicated on limited freedoms and a hatred of private property rights.
 
I Love America said:
For some reason because slavery was a travesty, that also means we can't be honest about what really happened. You can't say that most slaves weren't beaten or starved because for some reason that means you are defending the act of slavery..
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In many quarters, history has devolved from being an academic study to being a tool to stoke contemporary political fires. Much as journalism has devolved from being an objective search for the "truth."

While we are trying to have an academic discussion on the subject of slavery, we are also trying to discuss it with those who learned it only as a subject to advance contemporary political agendas. That's where this complete disconnect arrives from.
 
Dantès said:
LMAO!
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No I'm serious. Chandos...sigh. Still one of the hottest male leads in fiction. I found this in a library like 25 years ago, when I was young and not as naive as I am today...or, whatever. So anyway, he's like a tough guy, and Courtney needs to find her father and she has to cross Indian country, and Chandos doesn't want to take her, but he ends up doing it against his better judgement, and all kinds of hijinks ensue. Some of them quite erotic, but it was in a library so you know it's all very high-brow, and much of it actually happened. All true!
 
Taft2016 said:
I didn't say Cash's book was about slavery. It was about the southern culture, of which the slave culture was a defining element. Which is why one has to consider the slave culture in the broader context of what was going on at the time, not in the context of how we live now.

As for the other thing.... obviously you spoke off the cuff and have nothing to back it up. Please be an adult and rephrase it, or be dismissed as a narrow-minded twit.
Click to expand...

I did not and you cannot prove that I am wrong! Or you would have already done so. It wasn't until the late 40s that a white man was even charged with rape in the South and it wasn't until the 50s that they were convicted of rape and when they were it was always with the caveat they be given mercy/leniency because rape was a charge that had traditionally only been brought against black men and was punishable by the death penalty. Show me one white man who was killed for rape in the South even today. I bet there still hasn't been one. But there were none even convicted for the crime until the 50s and most of those walked right out of the court house with no jail time even after being convicted. White men could basically not commit rape in the South!
 
Dantès said:
I promised Darla I would post this essay by Nell Irvin Painter and whatever Darla wants Darla gets so after a lot of typing and re-reading here it is, Darla.


Slavery and Soul Murder
by Nell Irvin Painter

In this remarkable if short piece from a collection of essays by edited by David R. Roediger, entitled Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White (1998), Nell Irvin Painter, who has also authored books on the first black migration from the South to Kansas and a book about Sojourner Truth as well as a relatively new book called The History of White People (2011) among others, ties the ideals that existed in slavery, evangelicalism, and the family together to show that the system of submission and obedience enforced by violence against slaves also permeated the other institutions in the antebellum south and that violence against slaves could also turn into violence against white women. In addition, according to Painter, white women had little recourse when their marriages to slave holders turned violent. It’s a dramatic and difficult if short piece, refuting much of the plantation tradition rewriting of slavery and the antebellum period, especially difficult I think for those here who have been claiming that slavery wasn’t all that violent and that the slaves really had it good and so on. This rather unlikely view of slavery with it’s typical Sundays on the plantation porch, picking the banjo and whistling Dixie and carrying on, is not a new idea by the way, there is a whole genre of literature created at the turn of the nineteenth-century and stressing this romantic rewriting of slavery called plantation literature--Thomas Nelson Page was it's most popular author--which stresses this plantation tradition and attempts to turn a nostalgic if jaundiced eye toward dixie and the joys of slavery--free health care and cradle to grave employment, indeed—don’t forget the singing, all the chicken you could steal, and the watermelon, lots and lots of watermelon. It really wasn’t all that bad, just like being a black person today isn’t all that bad. And just like Bill Cosby, and his tired ideological commitment to the joys of a capitalism that has made him a multimillionaire, many of the purveyors of this crap also find a willing audience. But there is another version of events. I dare those who claim here to "crack" books on slavery to READ ON!


The values and practices of slavery, in particular the use of violence to secure obedience and deference, prevailed within white families as well. The ideals of slavery—obedience and submission—were concurrently and not accidentally the prototype of white womanhood and of evangelical piety, which intensified the prestige and reinforced the attraction of these ideals. Nineteenth-century evangelical religion meant various things to its many believers, and it could compel them to startlingly different ideological conclusions, as exemplified in the North in the Jacksonian era. After the abolition of slavery in the North, evangelicalism fostered a profusion of convictions, including abolitionism and feminism; in the region still committed to slavery, evangelicalism produced no reforming offshoots that were allowed to flourish. Instead, unquestioning evangelical piety was more valued, and piety was another word for submission and obedience, terms that also figured prominently in the language of the family.

The imageries of religion and family have much in common, rhetorically and structurally, and scholars have repeatedly stressed the crucial role of human families as structural models both in religion and in slavery. Christians speak of God the Father, the Son , and the Holy Ghost, and Christians, Jews and Muslims trace the origin of humankind to the family of Adam and Eve. Religions routinely evoke the language of kinship when sketching out holy relationships between gods and people.

Slavery and the family are just as inextricably intertwined, for the etymology of the word family reaches back to the Latin words familia, meaning a household, and famulus/famula meaning servant or slave, deeply embedding the notion of servitude within the our concept of family. As the ideals and practices of servitude, family, and religion are so firmly linked in this cultural system, a search for cause and effect is bound to prove frustrating. Even without recourse to relations of causality, however, the confluence of values is noteworthy.

Slavery accentuated the hierarchical rather than the egalitarian and democratic strains in American culture, thereby shaping relations within and without families and politics. Patriarchal families, slavery and evangelical religion further reinforced one another’s emphasis on submission and obedience in civil society, particularly concerning people in subaltern positions.

Despite the existence of a wide spectrum of opinion on slavery and feminism. agreement exists on the close relationship between the concepts of the white woman and slavery. Proslavery apologists often insisted that the maintenance of slavery depended on the preservation of patriarchy within white families, arguing that white women, especially rich women, must remain in their places and be submissive to their fathers and husbands so that slaves would not conceive notions of equality. Similar motives prohibited white men from acknowledging publicly that white women commonly labored in southern fields at tasks that the culture reserved rhetorically for women who were enslaved. The reasoning of proslavery apologia ran from women’s honor to gender roles to black men—white women sex, skipping over the reality of white men’s sexual use and abuse of black women in a manner that twentieth–century readers find remarkable: for its silences, its intertextuality, and its unabashed patriarchy. Of course, there is nothing at all contradictory between family feeling and hierarchy, between attachment and the conviction that some people absolutely must obey others.

Hierarchy by no means precludes attachments. Just as young slaves attached to the adults closet to them, white as well as black, so the white children and adults in slave-owning households became psychologically entangled with the slaves they came to know well. When Sojourner Truth’s son, Peter, was beaten by his owner in Alabama, his mistress (who was Sojourner’s mistress’s cousin) salved his wounds and cried over his injuries. That story concluded with Peter’s mistress’s murder by the very same man, her husband, who had previously abused Peter. Like Peter’s murdered mistress, other slave owners, especially women, grieved at the sight of slaves who had been beaten.

Abolitionist Angelina Grimké recalled scenes from her life as a privileged young woman in Charleston, South Carolina. When Grimké was about thirteen and attending a seminary for wealthy girls, a slave boy who had been severely battered was called into his classroom to open a window. The sight of his wounds was so painful to Grimké that she fainted. Her school was located near the workhouse where slaves were sent to be reprimanded. One of her friends who lived near it complained to Grimké that the screams of the slaves being whipped often reached her house. These awful cries from the workhouse terrified Grimké whenever she had to walk nearby.



As slave-owning children grew into adults, their identification with victims or victimizers often accorded to gender. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese shows that mistresses could be cruel tormentors of their slaves. But in comparison with masters, white women were more likely to take the side of the slaves, while white men nearly unanimously identified with the aggressor as a requisite of manhood. Becoming such a man did not happen automatically or painlessly. Playing on the patriarchy inherent in Western cultural institutions, which are also rooted in Christian religion, Jacques Lacan terms this socialization, “the name-of-the-father.”

Fathers ordinarily did the work of inculcating manhood, which included snuffing out white children’s identification with slaves. In 1839 a Virginian named John M. Nelson described his shift from painful childhood sympathy to manly callousness. As a child, he would try to stop the beating of slave children and, he said, “mingle my cries with theirs, and feel almost willing to take a part of the punishment.” After his father severely rebuked him several times for this kind of compassion, he became “so blunted that I could not only witness their stripes with composure, but myself inflict them, and that without remorse.” The comments of Thomas Jefferson on this whole subject are revealingly oblique.

Thomas Jefferson, Founding Father, slave owner, author of the Declaration of Independence, and acknowledges expert on his own state of Virginia and the United States generally, wrote Notes on the State of Virginia in response to a questionnaire from François Marbois, the secretary of the French legation at Philadelphia. Between 1780 and 1785 Jefferson codified his social, political, scientific, and ethical convictions. Jefferson did not have a very high opinion of Africans, though American Indians, he thought, would display their real and substantial worth when afforded decent opportunities. Jefferson found African Americans stupid and ugly, a people more or less well suited to the low estate they occupied in eighteen-century [sic] Virginia. Contrary to facile assumption, Jefferson’s appraisal of the capacities of Africans did not make him an unequivocal supporter of slavery. Nonetheless, as a gentlemen, whose entire material existence depended on the produce of his slaves, he was never an abolitionist. In fact, his reluctance to interfere with slavery hardened as he aged. By 1819, as the Missouri Compromise was being forged, Jefferson was warning American politicians not, under any circumstances, to tamper with slavery, even though he realized that by preserving slavery, the United States was holding “a wolf by the ears.”

Jefferson’s reservations about slavery pertained to the owners of slaves, not to the slaves themselves. Being the property of other people was not noxious to blacks, he thought, but owning slaves entailed great drawbacks for whites. Jefferson recognized that the requirements of slave ownership “nursed, educated, and daily exercised“ habits of tyranny, and he observed that “[t]he man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.” In this part of his discussion, Jefferson’s customary verbal talent and intellectual suppleness turned into obfuscation. He veiled his explanation of the bad things that slavery did to slaveholders and was only able to write intriguingly of slavery’s breeding “odious peculiarities.”

Jefferson’s phrasing does not appeal to today’s family systems theories and psychoanalysts, who use instead the language of triangles to explain family relationships, including those that are violent. Children who are observers of abuse are likely to assume the position of the other members of the triangle: either by becoming victims themselves or by abusing others, especially younger siblings or children in positions of relative weakness. This is the kind of repercussion that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century observers like Thomas Jefferson were deploring through euphemism.



So far in this discussion, only slaves have figured as the victims of physical and psychological abuse. But the ideals of slavery affected families quite apart from the toll they exacted from the bodies and psyches of blacks. Thanks to the abundance of historical scholarship that concentrates on antebellum southern society, it is possible to reach some generalizations regarding whites. But even in the slave South, historians have been much less aware of the abuse of white women than of the oppression of black slaves. Abuse there was, as the diary of Baltimorean Madge Preston indicates.

Petitions for divorce and church records show that wife beating was a common motive for the attempted dissolution of marriages and the expulsion of men and women from church membership. Doubtless this was true in nonslave-holding regions as well. What is noteworthy in this context, as Stephanie McCurry shows for the South Carolina low country, is that legislators and church leaders routinely urged women to remain in abusive unions and to bear abuse in a spirit of submission. In the hard-drinking antebellum South, which was well-known for rampant violence against slaves and between white men, white women had little recourse when their husbands beat them, for, in general, the southern states were slow to grant women the legal right to divorce or to custody of their children in cases of separation. Until the 1830s, southern states lacked divorce laws, and state legislators heard divorce petitions on a case-by-case basis. The result was a small number of divorces granted inconsistently and according to the social and economic status of the petitioner in her community.


By the way, I am still waiting for that list of books that you have cracked on slavery, mister Taft2016. Where is this illustrious list, braggart. Put up or shut up, you old fool!
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No wonder lefties like Dantes and Snarla like stuff like this. This has it all. Racism. Sexism. Male dominance and RELIGION. All wrapped up in a tiny bow. All of their hatred nice and neat.

This is the kind of stuff they sit around in their Sob Sister book club and compare to their present day abuses they experience on a daily basis
 
I Love America said:
Well of course a very, very, very small percentage of the South owned slaves. Also, blacks also owned other slaves. The indians owned slaves. But, we shan't speak of a factual historical record for to do so means you DEFEND SLAVERY.

No, the left wants this image of a slave owning South and nothing should get in the way of that least of all factual history. Think about this. Opposition to the Confederate Flag is only a recent phenomenon. Some leftie decided that it would be a proxy for its war on American values and conservatism so they set out to make people realize that all along they should have been offended by the Confederate Flag. That is how the left works and since they have a dominant hold on our pop culture, education and the media they have an upper hand in pushing a false narrative to prop up their sick, deluded ideology predicated on limited freedoms and a hatred of private property rights.
Click to expand...

I was on an historical tour many years ago, so my memory is fuzzy.... I think it was Natchez MS, but it may have been Vicksburg. One of the most prominent slave holders in the town, with a large luxurious home, was himself a former slave holder.

Coming from the north, where we all live in de facto segregated neighborhoods, it struck me that this black neighbor lived comfortably among his wealthy white neighbors.
 
I Love America said:
Well of course a very, very, very small percentage of the South owned slaves. Also, blacks also owned other slaves. The indians owned slaves. But, we shan't speak of a factual historical record for to do so means you DEFEND SLAVERY.

No, the left wants this image of a slave owning South and nothing should get in the way of that least of all factual history. Think about this. Opposition to the Confederate Flag is only a recent phenomenon. Some leftie decided that it would be a proxy for its war on American values and conservatism so they set out to make people realize that all along they should have been offended by the Confederate Flag. That is how the left works and since they have a dominant hold on our pop culture, education and the media they have an upper hand in pushing a false narrative to prop up their sick, deluded ideology predicated on limited freedoms and a hatred of private property rights.
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The fool is back, I don't know how he keeps slipping in with this shit but he does. And now he is trying to insert another diversion the confederate flag! What was the original topic of this thread does anyone ever remember? I don't think so. and I bet you haven't had much to say about it have you?
 
Taft2016 said:
You'll find it to be quite good. You'll recognize many similarities to Victorian England, which was largely behind Britain's tacit support of the Confederacy
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A lot of that goes back to the type of immigrant in the North and South. The Northerners were mostly descended from Southern England and the South from Northern England, Scotland and Ireland. During the Civil War there was incredible hardship in Northern England due to supplies of cotton drying up. They also saw the war as the attempt by a larger oppressor to subdue a weaker one.

http://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofEngland/Lancashire-Cotton-Famine/
 
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Taft2016 said:
In many quarters, history has devolved from being an academic study to being a tool to stoke contemporary political fires. Much as journalism has devolved from being an objective search for the "truth."

While we are trying to have an academic discussion on the subject of slavery, we are also trying to discuss it with those who learned it only as a subject to advance contemporary political agendas. That's where this complete disconnect arrives from.
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Well, you are of course 100% correct. There is not one thing that will ever break through Darla's and Dante's image of themselves as "victims" of WHITE MEN. The poor dears. Life must be so hard for them. I do declare.

But, back to slavery. It was as much an economic practice as anything else. It was all about cheap labor. Yeah. I know. To me this is why Lincoln will go down as one of the worst Presidents ever. There was no need to start a war to end a practice that was on its way out. Not only would public opinion have soured the practice, but economics would have made it untenable to keep it going moving forward. Automation would have made the prospect of owning slaves too expensive. Now when a leftie reads what I just wrote, all they hear is "YOU ARE DEFENDING SLAVERY". I am not. I am merely stating facts. Slavery would have ended in this country without a war taking 500,000 lives.

Lincoln cared more about keeping the union together for economic purposes than he did about the slaves. It was the war that led to the democrat party forming the KKK and all those years of segregation and democrat party led Jim Crow laws. Without the Civil War, I contend that the practice of slavery would have ended peacefully and would have spared black people years of hardship at the hands of the democrat party.

But, thanks to Lincoln we have 400 years of guilt foisted on white folks who never had anything to do with the practice of slavery or whose families had anything to do with the practice of slavery. No sir. You have to be made to pay by proxy. Throughout the years it has been the democrat party that has caused hardship for blacks and yet they portray themselves as the defenders of blacks. Pardon me if I refuse to be lectured by a party that created the Ku Klux Klan.

But, did the democrat party stop with the Ku Klux Klan? No. They wouldn't be satisfied until they destroyed the black community completely. What the democrat party couldn't accomplish with lynchings and church burnings they accomplished with welfare and the destruction of the black family. I will never be lectured to by a democrat party that has decimated the black community. That the black community doesn't see that their supposed benefactors are in fact their present day slave masters is a travesty. But, it is the decision they have made. So be it.
 
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