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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   28987 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023

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To say accurately what the US was founded on, we should look at what the system was like before independence was declared and why they declared independence and fought a war against the most powerful army of the time for it.

The founders wrote the Declaration of Independence to proclaim their reasons for claiming it. It's published, you can go read it here. You'll see that it says nothing at all about slavery or race - it's all about civil rights, taxes, and various details about how the government works. Those were their beefs with the British system, not anything about slavery or race.

Indeed, it would be pretty weird for anything like that to be in there, considering that slavery and racism were near-universally approved of in those days. The British certainly had no problem with it at the time, and neither did any of the other colonizing powers. A claim that America was "founded on white supremacy" would only be accurate if the primary reason for declaring independence was that the British demanded that they tolerate colored people and they were sufficiently opposed to that to make war based upon it.

The founders wrote the Declaration of Independence to proclaim their reasons for claiming it. It's published, you can go read it here. You'll see that it says nothing at all about slavery or race - it's all about civil rights, taxes, and various details about how the government works. Those were their beefs with the British system, not anything about slavery or race.

Indeed it does not. The original draft contained this passage:

He [King George] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

...Which was then excised, with the (perhaps reluctant) consent of its author, because it was getting in the way of the independence effort. Faced with a choice between the respective tyrannies of the British crown and chattel slavery, they chose to embrace the latter to better fight the former. The document says nothing about slavery because many of them found the compromise shameful, but it's still the compromise they chose to make.

Okay so that's saying that some of the founders did find slavery abhorrent. I don't see how that proves your point though. They all appear to have united behind their cause primarily because they found political tyranny abhorrent. The fact that disliking slavery was a minority viewpoint which they chose to compromise on in order to achieve their primary objective of classical liberalism shows that that was indeed their primary objective. I'd say it shows the opposite of what you claim - the British showed little objection to slavery and the slave trade at the time (they wouldn't start to seriously oppose it until decades later), but at least some of the founders did oppose it, so they were at least slightly less "racist" and "white supremacist" than was the norm at the time.

Okay so that's saying that some of the founders did find slavery abhorrent.

Just not abhorrent enough to do anything about.

They all appear to have united behind their cause primarily because they found political tyranny abhorrent.

They found the political tyranny of modest taxation and less-than-perfectly-favorable administrative status more abhorrent than unaccountable ownership of millions of human beings.

The fact that disliking slavery was a minority viewpoint which they chose to compromise on in order to achieve their primary objective of classical liberalism shows that that was indeed their primary objective.

What is the difference between your phrasing above, and "they founded the country on White Supremacy"? Figuring out a workable accommodation with White Supremacy was probably the largest and most significant issue involved in uniting the States.

The British showed little objection to slavery and the slave trade at the time (they wouldn't start to seriously oppose it until decades later), but at least some of the founders did oppose it, so they were at least slightly less "racist" and "white supremacist" than was the norm at the time.

That is not my understanding of the history. The British had their abolitionists as well at the time of the founding, so "some of the founders opposed it" gives no advantage; some of the British did too. Further, the founders who opposed it abandoned all substantive opposition to get independence done, and in so doing enshrined and armored the institution of slavery well beyond what it would have been while remaining part of the British empire. It may be presumed that if independence had not happened, slavery would have ended in Britain on roughly the same timetable, and the colonies would not have been exempted. Slavery would have ended something like two generations earlier, with no Civil War, no Jim Crow and so on.

Just not abhorrent enough to do anything about.

Well yeah, but it's a bit much to expect them to solve every problem in the world at once. They're only trying to fight a war against the most powerful empire in the world at the time with a pretty marginal amount of manpower, territory, and level of economic strength.

They found the political tyranny of modest taxation and less-than-perfectly-favorable administrative status more abhorrent than unaccountable ownership of millions of human beings.

Also having effectively no say about their own laws and governance. If the law you live under permits slavery and you have no right to change it, then maybe achieving the right to set laws at all is a bit higher priority.

What is the difference between your phrasing above, and "they founded the country on White Supremacy"? Figuring out a workable accommodation with White Supremacy was probably the largest and most significant issue involved in uniting the States.

Exactly what I said in my first post in this thread:

A claim that America was "founded on white supremacy" would only be accurate if the primary reason for declaring independence was that the British demanded that they tolerate colored people and they were sufficiently opposed to that to make war based upon it.

Instead, it was one of a number of issues that was compromised on in order to form a coalition strong enough to win the war for independence. Perhaps even the most significant one. Nevertheless, what they "founded the country on" was what they united in wanting to change about the current system, not what they were not politically and economically able to change yet.

In contrast, I would say it's reasonably accurate to describe the Confederate cause in the American Civil War as actually founded on white supremacy, because they did explicitly secede because of Slavery and directly related issues. There were some other issues there too, but they were pretty clearly secondary and likely some were compromised on in order fight a large-scale war.

That is not my understanding of the history. The British had their abolitionists as well at the time of the founding, so "some of the founders opposed it" gives no advantage; some of the British did too. Further, the founders who opposed it abandoned all substantive opposition to get independence done, and in so doing enshrined and armored the institution of slavery well beyond what it would have been while remaining part of the British empire. It may be presumed that if independence had not happened, slavery would have ended in Britain on roughly the same timetable, and the colonies would not have been exempted. Slavery would have ended something like two generations earlier, with no Civil War, no Jim Crow and so on.

Do you have a source for that? I'm not a huge expert on the history of abolitionism in the British political system or anything, but the most authoritative-seeming source that I found, at the British Library, specifically cites the success of the American Revolution and the ideals upon which it was fought as inspiring the first organized anti-slavery groups:

But these stirrings did not as yet represent a coherent movement. That was to come in the years immediately following the American Revolution (1776–1783). It is no coincidence, for instance, that the first organised anti-slavery society in Britain, the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade (SEAST), was founded in May 1787, taking its inspiration from events on the other side of the Atlantic, where the American Revolution had witnessed the first tentative steps to abolish slavery and the slave trade, mainly in Northern colonies (now states) such as Pennsylvania and New York.

Interestingly, the same source also cites both the USA and the British Empire ending the Atlantic Slave Trade at about the same time:

Capitalising on this shift in the geopolitical situation, abolitionists started to chip away at the legal provisions that protected the slave trade. This occurred first through the Foreign Slave Trade Act (1806), which prohibited British slave traders from operating in territories belonging to foreign powers, and then the Slave Trade Abolition Act of March 1807, which abolished Britain’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade once and for all. It was a momentous decision and one that was also a personal triumph for Wilberforce, as well as the members of the SEAST. But it is worth emphasising that this unfolding drama was set in motion by events in the Caribbean. The final push towards 1807 was also made easier by the knowledge that the USA was about to abolish its own international slave trade, as set out under the terms of the US Constitution.

Which had been set in the US Constitution by those same founders decades prior. Kind of seems like they're leading the way there.

It is the case that the British completely abolished slavery in their remaining colonies first. Though it's anyone's guess exactly whether or how that would have happened if the American colonies had remained under their control. They didn't seem to mind buying American cotton, largely grown by slaves, up to the Union blockade in the American Civil War.

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