You may or may not be aware of this, but many active slavers, among them John Taylor of Caroline, described slavery as an “evil” while simultaneously opposing, both in their words and their deeds, all immediate efforts to end it. “Evil” is a word which has many shades of meaning, and in the 18th and 19th centuries it was far more commonly used than it is today to refer not only to deliberate acts of wickedness, but also to more generally bad conditions such as hurricanes, earthquakes, or general ignorance and folly. Many anti-abolitionists and slavers viewed slavery as an “evil” in the latter sense (in that they would rather be rid of it, but did not believe that white slavers had any immediate moral obligation to stop enslaving the black people that they held captive). Robert E. Lee, for example, was of this school of thought (the letter in which he famously described slavery as a “moral and political evil” was actually a letter primarily devoted to denouncing abolitionism as a doctrine and Northern abolitionists as a group). So was John Taylor of Caroline. So was Jefferson, at times, although at other times he made hypocritical gestures towards a more anti-slavery position. It is either pure ignorance, pure folly, or pure chicanery to try to represent this position (which recognizes no moral obligation to stop enslaving actually existing slaves, and which explicitly prefers the indefinite continuation of slavery unless and until all black people could be ethnically cleansed from their life-long homes in the American South and forced to foreign colonies in Africa) as an anti-slavery position. Real abolitionists in the 19th century were quite familiar with this position (since it was the official position of the American Colonization Society, an organization of which John Taylor of Caroline was an early supporter and officer), and they denounced it furiously. (See, for example, William Lloyd Garrison’s Thoughts on African Colonization.) As well they should have, since the position is, first, racist rubbish, and, second, quite clearly calculated to ease the consciences of squeamish slavers rather than to free those held in bondage. Those who sentimentally wished for slavery to end, somehow or another, in some far-off day which they perpetually deferred in the name of some other goal that justified their keeping slaves in the meantime — as, for example, with John Taylor of Caroline and his dreams of a Negerrein Virginia — no more count as anti-slavery for those idle remarks than George W. Bush counts as anti-war for having said (in his speech announcing the Iraq war) that war is terrible and he longs to live in peace.

This is the necessary context — that is, the context of John Taylor of Caroline’s actual thoughts about the nature of the “evil” in question and what if anything ought to be done to “alleviate it” (short of “wholly cur[ing]” it), and what all that actually meant in practice for the many black people whose slave-labor he himself was living off of while he wrote those lines — that your isolated use of that single quotation, and your frankly outrageous attempt to paint this active slaver as being anti-slavery, omits.

As for your accusations of plagiarism, I thank you for quoting the passages that you claim to have “caught” me plagiarizing. I’ll be happy to let the reader judge whether what I wrote could fairly be described as “plagiarizing” either of the other passages that you mention here.

Consider RadGeek:

he was rather more explicit and consistent about his belief that the “evils” he condemned were to be remedied by ethnic cleansing, not by emancipation, and, if that wasn’t available, the lesser-evil alternative in his view was for “well managed” slaves who were “docile, useful, and happy,” and a slave-lord “restrained by his property in the slave, and
susceptible of humanity.” Taylor is widely considered to have been an important step in the ideological transition from the older Jeffersonian “necessary evil” defenses of slavery to the later Calhounian “positive good” arguments.

The juxtaposition of these two excerpted phrases and its accompanying paraphrase is illustrative in its prior familiarity…

“In Taylor’s opinion ‘slaves are docile, useful and happy, if they are well managed’ and that ‘the individual is restrained by his property in
the slave, and susceptible of humanity’. The blandishments as well as the terrors of religion indissolubly bind together the happiness and misery of
both master and slave. In this he anticipated the later arguments that slavery was a positive good.” — RW Fenn and JD Ellis. (2007) “The History of Hayfield in Caroline County in the Commonwealth of Virginia.” Copyright, Bardon Hall Publishers

Of course there is also the Wikipedia rendition of this same piece of copyrighted material, itself plagiarized with a couple of words rearranged to make it look original:

Taylor agreed with Jefferson that the institution was an evil, but argued that it was “incapable of removal, and only within reach of palliation,” and took issue with Jefferson’s repeated references to the specific cruelties of slavery, arguing that “slaves are docile, useful and happy, if they are well managed,” and that “the individual is restrained by his property in the slave, and susceptible of humanity . . . . Religion assails him both with her blandishments and terrours. It indissolubly binds his, and his slaves happiness or misery together.” His approach, defending the preservation of slavery as it was and claiming that proper management could benefit the slave as well as the master, anticipated the more emphatic defenses of slavery as a “positive good” by later writers such as John C. Calhoun, Edmund Ruffin, and George Fitzhugh.

It’s a seditiously simplistic art really. Take somebody else’s paragraph and excerpted phrases, re-arrange a couple words, substitute a couple harsher-sounding synonyms like “slave-lord” for the dispassionate neutrality of the plagiarized original, truncate a couple of unnecessary names here and there, then post it as your own work and credit yourself endlessly for providing important “context” to the argument of others.

The only problem is when you get caught.

As for your comments on John Taylor of Caroline, again, you are taking the passage out of its context and directly ignoring the many other things that Taylor said about slavery. I quoted several of these.

What a curious claim. For comparative purposes it is sufficient to note that I provided a lengthy multi-sentence excerpt of Taylor’s writings on slavery with the belief that an intelligent non-zealot could reasonably ascertain their context from the simple fact that such context is implicit to the length and completeness of the quote itself.

By contrast, Mr. “RadGeek” claims to have supplied the “context” of additional quotations from Taylor yet not one of them amounts to anything more than a brief mid-sentence phrase, allegedly excerpted from Taylor and described within the sentences of others.

Even more curious is the apparent supply of RadGeek’s quotations, revealed by a moment’s activity on any simple search engine: more mid-sentence phrase excerpts of Taylor described in the words of others from two sources: a 1995 essay compendium by David Thomas Konig (http://books.google.com/books?id=6p9IOsu3xXIC) and that ever-reputable repository of trivialized idiocy for stupid people who wish to pretend they are smart: Wikipedia. If you desired to add substantive “context” to Taylor and discuss it through the lens of measured historical analysis, RadGeek, it would be welcome. But don’t post a litany of second-hand cherrypicked mid-sentence phrases in its place while simultaneously accusing another of the same for posting something far more extensive and substantive.

If nothing else has emerged from this exchange it is the validation of my earlier point about the tendency of zealotry to render any further rational discussion impossible. I’m content to leave it at that, as all honest attempts to reign in displays of zealotry, be they the effort of myself or others, have only elicited responses that illustrate the severity of the impediment it imposes upon conversation.

Far more difficult is to consider the status of slavery in its own time …

The “status of slavery” where and for whom?

For black people in Virginia, or for that matter for white slavers in Virginia, it was a pretty important issue.

William:

… and ask the question that all persons of moral character asked at the time: what can we do to get rid of this wretched institutional inheritance? If American history shows nothing else, it is that there was no easy answer to that question.

What do you mean by the question “What can we do?”

If it’s intended to be a moral question about what those who were in positions of legal power, or who perpetrated slavery as individuals should have done to get rid of it, the answer is easy: immediate, complete, and unconditional emancipation. This is something that Garrison, Spooner, and Gerrit Smith all believed in, advocated, and acted (in different ways) to bring about. It’s something that Jefferson and Taylor explicitly rejected in favor of continuing slavery, and gradual emancipation conditional on forced exile from America.

If it’s intended to be a strategic question about what abolitionists ought to have done in order to get around the efforts of obdurate or unrepentant slavers to prevent or halt emancipation, then that’s a more difficult question, but it’s a question that is only difficult because of the difficulties inserted by slavers like Jefferson and Taylor. It’s certainly not a “difficulty” that offers any reason to mitigate the judgment on Jefferson’s character, or his libertarian credentials.

William:

The same may be said with equal relevance to Jefferson’s concept of decentralized republicanism. And I’ll leave it at that.

I’m going to repeat this one last time, to make sure that we are clear. Nothing that I have said concerning Jefferson’s political views is a denunciation of “decentralized republicanism.” I’m an anarchist, so I don’t believe in any form of government, no matter how decentralized or how republican. But as it happens, I think that political decentralization is better than political centralization, and republican and democratic governments are better than monarchical governments.

The issue here is not that I’m using slavery in order to stop discussions of decentralized republicanism. This is either a careless or a deliberate distortion of what I’ve explicitly and repeatedly said. What I’m doing is denying that the political system actually advocated by Thomas Jefferson counts as a form of decentralized republicanism, any more than the Roman Catholic Church counts as a “democracy” on account of the cardinals voting for the Pope.

You may want to talk about decentralized republicanism more than you want to talk about Thomas Jefferson and slavery. That’s fine; it’s an interesting subject. But this post is, again, about Thomas Jefferson and slavery. You are the one changing the subject in order to try to redirect conversation to something other than the original topic. Not me.

As for your comments on John Taylor of Caroline, again, you are taking the passage out of its context and directly ignoring the many other things that Taylor said about slavery. I quoted several of these. Taylor was a colonizationist, not an abolitionist, and he explicitly stated that while slavery was an “evil” that continuing to enslave black people was preferable to freeing them without the condition of forced deportation to Africa. He specifically criticized Jefferson’s own writing on slavery because he felt that Jefferson was too negative about it, and that “well managed” slaves were better off than free blacks in America. I gave you several direct quotations in order to contextualize your own quotation and to explain the ways in which his views were a point of transition between the older anti-abolition views of Jefferson and the later positively pro-slavery views of Calhoun, Ruffin, Fitzhugh, et al. You have simply ignored these quotations rather than engaging with them and repeated the original quotation, apparently unaffected by direct evidence to the contrary of your interpretation of it. I don’t know whether or not you have any actual knowledge of John Taylor of Caroline’s political writings on slavery other than the quotation you’ve misused here, but I do know that so far you haven’t engaged with his full views in anything resembling a comprehensive or accurate way, even when the full content of those views has been directly pointed out to you.

Gil:

And I agree that it’s easy to imagine that we would have applied our modern sensibilities …

Abolitionism is not a “modern sensibility.” It already existed in the 18th and 19th centuries. Jefferson in particular was familiar with the abolitionist arguments; at times he even made some of them himself, while consistently refusing to act on the conclusions that he drew.

Zealotry in defense of liberty and against slavery is no vice, moderation no virtue…

You’ve mistaken zealotry for extremism, Micha. Extremism is a conclusion that may be reached by rational means and qualifies itself only by distance between that conclusion and the status quo. Zealotry, by contrast, is no more than stubborn irrational advocacy. It is not reached by rational mechanisms and it qualifies itself not by relation to an existing condition but rather by the intensity with it is voiced.

It’s “slavery, was evil, period“, full stop, no qualification with times-were-different-back-then bullshit.

Except that would be an untruthful removal of necessary context from the discussion or, as I termed it previously, a conversation stopper.

Since we have characterized slavery in terms of good and evil, it necessarily follows that this determination is a moral one. Therefore the logic of morality applies. And what does that logic tell us? It tells us that a moral wrong is determined by the act itself, but the culpability of the individual for that wrong is determined by the circumstances of its occurrence.

To put it another way, this is why the act of “killing” (a wrong in the strictest sense) renders a wide range of accompanying levels of guilt - that from a justified use of deadly force to preserve one’s own person to manslaughter to premeditated homicide.

To end at the period and exclude the “but” of slavery’s circumstance thus necessarily deprives you of the logical means of extending culpability from an abstract moral wrong to the particulars of the individual actor. So if you want to cut out any qualifications and state your platitudes, that’s fine by me and we’ll leave it at that. Just don’t pretend to apply it to those you condemn, to wit: Jefferson, as you have just deprived yourself of the means to rationally do so.

However, I can see William’s point that it isn’t helpful to react to its mention so strongly as to make further discussion impossible.

And I agree that it’s easy to imagine that we would have applied our modern sensibilities to major institutions if we had been alive hundreds of years ago, but I think that most people would be mistaken about that.

Sometimes “But” isn’t so much a qualification as a segue into a suggestion that there might be more to say. Usually there is.

I’d much rather hear bad theories than have people too intimidated to suggest anything taboo.

Yes, slavery existed, and yes, slavery was evil. But it’s always easy to sit here from your modern perch and condemn its long-dead practitioners in paragraph upon paragraph of haughty self-righteous Jacobin indignation.

See, it’s statements like these that are highly problematic. There should be no “but” following the first sentence. It’s “slavery, was evil, period“, full stop, no qualification with times-were-different-back-then bullshit.

Owning slaves is _in and of itself_ an inherently anti-libertarian thing. Nobody with the tiniest shred of decency or humanity could possibly think otherwise.

All this long, long thread has demonstrated is that John V and William are exactly the sort of people Rad Geek was addressing in his original post.

Taylor is widely considered to have been an important step in the ideological transition from the older Jeffersonian “necessary evil” defenses of slavery
to the later Calhounian “positive good” arguments.

If anything, that is a testament to widespread ignorance about both Taylor and Calhoun. For all the faults of his response to slavery, Taylor was unequivocal in his identification of its moral evil:

The fact is, that negro slavery is an evil which the United States must look in the face. To whine over it, is cowardly; to agravate it, criminal; ant to forbear to alleviate it, because it cannot be wholly cured, foolish…such a state of things is the most unfavourable imaginable to the happiness of both the master and the slave. It tends to diminish the humanity of one class and increase the malignity of the other, and in contemplating its utter destitution of good, our admiration is equally excited by the error of those who produce, and the folly of those who suffer it.

It’s a hard road to follow to get from that to “slavery is a positive good.”

That you reduce a conceded evil and fault - even among its practitioners - to the “ghoulish essence” of American government prior to circa 1865 shows plainly that you cannot even discuss slavery itself in its historical context and condition without descending into polemical fanaticism.

Yes, slavery existed, and yes, slavery was evil. But it’s always easy to sit here from your modern perch and condemn its long-dead practitioners in paragraph upon paragraph of haughty self-righteous Jacobin indignation.

Far more difficult is to consider the status of slavery in its own time and ask the question that all persons of moral character asked at the time: what can we do to get rid of this wretched institutional inheritance? If American history shows nothing else, it is that there was no easy answer to that question. It was a question that took a million butchered lives to imperfectly resolve!

Men like Garrison, Spooner, Smith - and yes - even Taylor and Jefferson each tried to answer it before that resolution. And for that alone they deserve credit. There answers - and they were a multitude ranging from a Somersett-style judicial ruling to emancipated colonization in Liberia - were indeed imperfect for no less obvious a reason than that they all failed. But such is the nature of a wicked and complex problem, and when you respond to any honest discussion of that problem in its context by spouting nothing more than outraged zealotry at its participants you only cheapen and trivialize its place in history.

The signs of such zealotry abound in your response. Seriously, who else but a zealot composes an jeremiad of overweened morality to state that he *agrees* with a point of condemnation of Alexander Hamilton, to say nothing of the conceited bloviations that flow from you in all points of disagreement. Who else but a zealot would flippantly deny making comparative qualifications to Hamilton’s fault, only to revert to an entire paragraph of the same on the very next line?

It is literally as if the s-word, slavery, is mentioned and all rational discussion, including of slavery itself, ceases and succumbs to your fanatical exercises of the high-and-mighty. From there forward all is assessed through the rose-colored lens of slavery and your accompanying moral indignation (which, for inexplicable reasons, you seem to believe to be superior to the moral indignation that all other sane people rightfully feel toward slavery). Thus nothing else can be said of pre-1865 America, or Jefferson, or Taylor, or even Calhoun without that lens’ awkward and constant imposition. It is a fundamental confusion of a particular for essence; a supplanting of the substance with its attributes.

Beyond that point it is not possible to have a conversation as any subsequent point becomes drowned in the fanatic’s shrill banshee cries. When substance ceases to be and all is reduced to attribute nothing can be said which does not take on the same misapplied attribute.

Some days ago I deferred to Dr. Niskanen’s assessment of this tendency in American political dialog:

“The doctrines of nullification and interposition have been criticized or dismissed by later political theorists, primarily because they were used to defend slavery and the continued denial of civil rights to blacks. Americans have an unfortunate habit, however, of evaluating a legal concept by the motivations of its advocates. Most contemporary Americans probably regard the Alien and Sedition laws, discriminatory tariffs, and slavery as repugnant.
The doctrine of nullification, however, should not be evaluated by the fact that it was first used to attack bad law and later used to defend other bad law, but rather whether it would, in general, promote law that reflects the broad consensus of the population.

The same may be said with equal relevance to Jefferson’s concept of decentralized republicanism. And I’ll leave it at that.

What is being argued, though, is that the late 18th century system of
Jeffersonian republicanism in the U.S. (though indeed marred by the imperfection of
slavery) …

Chattel slavery was not some minor “imperfection” marring a fundamentally humane system.
It was the central organizing principle of the law and daily life in Jefferson’s Virginia.
It was a crime against humanity that sustained a thoroughly hideous cannibal-empire filled
with self-satisfied thugs and posturing hypocrites, who lived on the blood and labor of
their fellow creatures, and who passed law after law to protect their neo-feudal economic
system and fortify their prison camp plantations at government expense. In Jefferson’s
Virginia, this legal cannibalism devoured the lives, property, and labor of three hundred
thousand souls, about 40% of the entire population of the state. A conversation about early
American politics that ignores such plain facts or marginalizes them as “imperfections” in
a basically worthwhile system (rather than what they were — the ghoulish essence of the
system itself) is bullshit. And bullshit conversations like that ought to be stopped.

Me:

You forgot to add an important qualifier. What you no doubt meant to say
was “the decentralized republicanism advocated for white people by
Jefferson.”

William:

Of course such a qualifier was hardly “forgotten” as I had acknowledged
Jefferson’s fault on slavery from the outset and readily contextualized that grievous
fault aside his better characteristics long before you got here. So you return to the
slavery canard not to inform the discussion, that discussion already being informed of
it, but rather for its conversation-stopping shock value.

No, the reason that I return to chattel slavery is that to describe Jefferson’s slavocracy
as “decentralized republicanism” is to carelessly spread an absurd lie. What Jefferson
actually believed in, and actually practiced, was decentralized republicanism for white
men, patriarchal tyranny for white women and children, and a hereditary, invasive,
absolute tyranny accountable to none save God alone for all black people regardless of
age or gender. You may as well describe the Roman Catholic Church as a democracy, because,
after all, the Cardinals all get to vote on the Pope.

William:

First, by means of comparison between Hamilton’s “views” and Jefferson’s
“practice” it appears that you intend to cast the latter as comparatively more offensive.

No, I don’t intend anything of the sort. As I’ve repeatedly said, I consider Hamilton
to have been perfectly loathsome, and to be directly responsible for all kinds of
political rot. I can’t speak for anyone other than myself, but I’ve never claimed that
Jefferson is “worse,” from a libertarian perspective, than Hamilton. I don’t even know
how that kind of global comparison would be made — each one was clearly much worse than
the other in some respects, and much better than the other in others, and I neither know,
nor much care, how you’d make those different respects commensurable with one another to
make the comparison.

The reason for linguistically leaning on Jefferson’s practice is that, in addition to
being a slaver, he was also a posturing hypocrite, especially on this issue, so the
preferences manifest in hisd eeds sometimes need to be stressed over his idle words,
when it comes to assessing his character or his legacy.

William:

Second, why the need to constantly qualify Hamilton’s faults …

I don’t.

William:

Why is it not sufficient to fault Hamilton as Hamilton for things he did in and of themselves?

It is.

However, Wilkinson’s original post was about Thomas Jefferson. It was not about Alexander
Hamilton at all. My post was about Thomas Jefferson. It mentioned Alexander Hamilton only to explain
what a dangerous creep I think he was. Wilkinson’s kind notice of my post was, again, about
“Thomas Jefferson’s loathsomely anti-libertarian credentials.” It is only the people trying
to apologize for Jefferson who keep insisting on dragging Alexander Hamilton into the
discussion, apparently in order to try to change the subject from Jefferson’s
anti-libertarian positions to something else — e.g., Hamilton’s Caesarianism, or European
monarchy, or the United States Constitution, or just about any damn thing other than
the original topic. I responded to some of these comparisons, initiated by you and not
by me, by pointing out that American chattel slavery is actually a salient issue in the
comparison you’re trying to make, not something that can be waved or set aside, and now,
for my trouble, I am told that I ought to be faulting Hamilton as Hamilton rather than
comparing him to somebody else. This is really too much. If you want to know my views about Alexander
Hamilton or George Washington or the U.S. Constitution or the Whiskey Rebellion or slavery
in New York or slavery in the Caribbean or central banking or the Civil War or the Ludlow
Massacre or any number of other things, I’ve written about them all, on their own,
elsewhere, and I’d be happy to discuss them with you, on their own, in a forum other than
this one, but for here and now you should not be surprised that my focus is on Jefferson,
not Hamilton, in discussing an article on Jefferson; and you also should not be surprised
that if you insist on inserting a comparison with Hamilton into the discussion, I’ll urge
that you consider the crime of slavery if that’s one of the salient issues in the comparison.
I certainly will not waste my time “faulting Hamilton as Hamilton” in a discussion that’s
about something other than Hamilton’s many follies, vices, and crimes.

William:

And that is why I make the claim that decentralized republicanism is a
lesser evil than monarchy or other autocracies.

For what it’s worth, I agree with you about this. What I deny is that Jefferson advocated
decentralized republicanism, if either the term “decentralized” or the term “republican”
means anything at all. What he actually advocated, and practiced, was a form of brutal
autocracy for everyone other than his fellow white men.

William:

If you doubt that ask yourself this: is a child inherently marked with evil
character if, by pure chance of his birth, he happens to inherit the plantation of his
slave-owning father?

No. However, if, as an adult, he continues to spend the rest of his life enslaving those
people, even though he had decades in which to legally emancipate them, or simply to
treat them as free men and women (by letting them come and go as they pleased,
work or not work on what they chose, distributing his unearned lands to the people his
father had forced to till, and generally treating them as his equals rather than his
servants), and did nothing of the sort for his long life, and continued to live his
life of idleness on the backs of his victims and their forced labor–well, then,
that certainly does indicate very deep and grave vice in that man-stealer’s
character.

William:

But he also advanced in goodness, even on slavery, …

Well gosh, William, that was mighty white of him. But the only way that a slaveholder
can “advance in goodness” that matters more than a tinker’s cuss is to stop holding
innocent people as slaves. Jefferson didn’t do that. And that’s important.

William:

He called the agrarian trades morally superior to manufacturing based on
the fact that manufacturing interests at his time were using the government to subsidize
their own existence and tax their competitors abroad.

As opposed to Southern “farmers,” who never
sought favors or subsidies for their interests from the United States government.

I don’t know whether you actually intended to endorse this view of Jefferson’s, or merely
to explain it. But whether you do or not, it’s worth noting that this is just another
example of Jefferson’s posturing hypocrisy. And it’s certainly true that the Southern
slavocracy went on for the next three-quarters of a century demanding and getting more and
more privileges and protections from the state and federal governments (gag orders, fugitive
slave laws, etc. etc. etc.) through the same processes of political back-scratching and
log-rolling; something that Jefferson somehow failed to predict.

William:

I’m no expert on Jefferson’s correspondences, but I do know of his influence on the most prominent follower of his agrarian model, John Taylor of Caroline.

Another Virginia slaver and “colonizationist,” who wrote that the abolition of slavery
without forced exile for the freed black people, would bring “miseries on both their owners
[sic] and themselves, by the perpetual excitements to insurrection,” and that “the blacks
will be more enslaved than they are at present; and the whites in pursuit of an ideal of
freedom for them, will create some vortex for engulphing the liberty left in the world and
obtain real slavery for themselves,” and who had the shamelessness, after a life of
man-stealing and useless slave-driving parasitism, to dare to assert that free black
farmers, when not forced into exile from their homes, are “driven into every species of
crime for subsistence; and destined to a life of idleness, anxiety, and guilt.” Perhaps
less of a posturing hypocrite than Jefferson, in the sense that he was rather more explicit
and consistent about his belief that the “evils” he condemned were to be remedied by
ethnic cleansing, not by emancipation, and, if that wasn’t available, the lesser-evil
alternative in his view was for “well managed” slaves who were “docile, useful, and happy,” and a slave-lord “restrained by his property in the slave, and
susceptible of humanity.” Taylor is widely considered to have been an important step in
the ideological transition from the older Jeffersonian “necessary evil” defenses of slavery
to the later Calhounian “positive good” arguments.

You’re making things harder on yourself by bringing up John Taylor of Caroline, not easier.

The point is I really don’t know that you really do “get it,” based on the rest of your reply.

As for my hypothetical inheritance of female slaves:

“If, on the other hand, you could guarantee their protection from the coercive power of another upon attaining freedom, then that would be the more moral course.”

Yes, I would think that considering I recognize such a practice as being clearly wrong, it would be morally incumbent upon me to do what I could to provide those slaves safe passage to a place where slavery was not practiced or tolerated. Especially if I was someone of some considerable means and political influence, such as oh, I don’t know, a state legislator or president of the United States.

I just happen to recognize that you cannot separate someone’s actions from the “whole of a person,” as you put it. It is not up to me show you the connection, William, it simply IS. If I repeatedly beat my wife, I think it would be fair to make some judgments about me based on those actions. To have come right out and speak about the evils and injustices of wife-beating doesn’t in any way minimize the grave injustice I have committed against my wife. It would, in fact, be all the more damning of me considering that I understand wife-beating to be morally wrong.

And where did I say that the Barbary pirates were “aggrieved victims”??? Go back and check what I wrote, because I wrote no such thing.

Assuming that this is correct, I guess the salient question (at least so far as we are trying to judge Hamilton’s character) is “why?” I’m less interested in calling down moral condemnation on either Hamilton or Jefferson than I am in understanding what each of them were right and wrong about, and why. Chernow (who may be spinning in Hamilton’s favor on this) leads me to believe that Hamilton was essentially an exemplar of what Thomas Sowell would call the “constrained” view of human nature, while Jefferson was more the “unconstrained.” Hamilton was aristocratic in the sense that he thought popular passions were dangerous (and he was one of the few in America to accurately predict the course of the French revolution) and that the people who had the intelligence and wisdom to make good policy were a minority. But it should be noted that his aristocracy was meritocratic, not hereditary.

Jefferson may well have sincerely believed in the evil of slavery, strict constitutionalism, and decentralized power, on all of which I agree with him. But when it was convenient to him he cynically cultivated the votes of plantation owners, ignored the plain text of the constitution (as in arguing with Madison that the House could scrap the Jay Treaty), and wielded executive powers greater than Washington.

As I say, I’m not so much interested in the black hat v. white hat characterization of either man. To me they were both complex, brilliant, and flawed. I wish they could have learned more from each other.

Is it that you consider Jefferson himself evil for participating in an evil, rather than merely flawed? If so, then I await your answer to my earlier question about the extension of an evil particular to the whole of a person. The fault in your attempt to make that connection is that it completely removes Jefferson from the context of his society (and while context never absolves guilt for clear wrong, it does mitigate its severity).

As to your hypothetical inheritance, I would answer that if you inherited them in a society that had existing laws beyond you control that would result in them being recaptured and forcefully enslaved by another, more cruel person than yourself if you so desired to free them, then yes. Keeping them would be a lesser evil upon them than the alternative. If, on the other hand, you could guarantee their protection from the coercive power of another upon attaining freedom, then that would be the more moral course. As you can see, context matters immensely in determining the scope of moral judgments.

Then again, I’m not exactly inclined to put much faith in the moral compass of somebody who believes the Barbary Pirates were an aggrieved victim of American commercial interests so I’m not sure discussing this further even matters.

* A bicameral legislature
* The lower house, the Assembly, was elected by the people for three year terms
* The upper house, the Senate, elected by electors chosen by the people, and with a life-term of service
* An executive called the Governor, elected by electors and with a life-term of service
* The Governor had an absolute veto over bills
* A judiciary, with life-terms of service
* State governors appointed by the national legislature
* National veto power over any state legislation

Modelled after England, yes. Too much centralization of power, yes. But not monarchy.

http://www.usconstitution.net/consttop_ccon.html#hamilton