re: #440 ArmyWife

Please don’t think I view it as “simplistic”. This is something that has fascinated me since high school, from the perspective of “how can one human be able to do this to another human”. It was, and is, mind boggling. I always wondered if the “different species” argument (or variations of it) invoked was more to justify horrible actions to themselves rather than honestly held beliefs.

Okay, simplistic is probably the wrong word. It just strikes me that a lot of people tend to take a Readers Digest view of the slave era and not necessarily understand that things weren’t as cut and dried as we’d like to think they were, here in our safe, academic, armchair-history view of the era.

Wasn’t trying to imply you were one of those, but there are a lot like that.

In any event, some people seem to think they’re making a profound point when they mention how the North benefited indirectly from the slavery of the South, and imply that it was purely a symbolic move when Abe outlawed slavery only in the South. The truth is, the main center of slavery usage WAS in the South, so it made sense to outlaw it mainly there, since it doing so it effectively ended it EVERYwhere in the USA: After all, if it is stopped in the South, where slavery was absolutely an integral part of the economy, what usefulness then does slavery have in places where it’s NOT all that commonly used and is NOT an integral part of the local economy?

I’m sorry, but I don’t think they’re making a profound point with that distinction. It is, so far as I’m concerned, a red herring. It is a difference that makes NO difference, since the point behind Abe’s actions (to outlaw slavery in the South) ultimately WAS designed to HAVE the end result of ending slavery in the whole of the USA. It just did so by abolishing it where it was most strongly concentrated.