Literary Giant of American Fiction, Dead at 87

Both Howard Zinn and JD Salinger died yesterday. As Steve Schippert quipped:

"Yesterday, America saw two giants of American literary fiction pass: JD Salinger and Howard Zinn."

Boston Globe:

Howard Zinn, the Boston University historian and political activist who was an early opponent of US involvement in Vietnam and whose books, such as "A People's History of the United States," inspired young and old to rethink the way textbooks present the American experience, died today in Santa Monica, Calif, where he was traveling. He was 87.

His daughter, Myla Kabat-Zinn of Lexington, said he suffered a heart attack.

"He's made an amazing contribution to American intellectual and moral culture," Noam Chomsky, the left-wing activist and MIT professor, said tonight. "He's changed the conscience of America in a highly constructive way. I really can't think of anyone I can compare him to in this respect."

Chomsky added that Dr. Zinn's writings "simply changed perspective and understanding for a whole generation. He opened up approaches to history that were novel and highly significant. Both by his actions, and his writings for 50 years, he played a powerful role in helping and in many ways inspiring the Civil rights movement and the anti-war movement."

For Dr. Zinn, activism was a natural extension of the revisionist brand of history he taught. "A People's History of the United States" (1980), his best-known book, had for its heroes not the Founding Fathers -- many of them slaveholders and deeply attached to the status quo, as Dr. Zinn was quick to point out -- but rather the farmers of Shays' Rebellion and union organizers of the 1930s.

As he wrote in his autobiography, "You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train" (1994), "From the start, my teaching was infused with my own history. I would try to be fair to other points of view, but I wanted more than 'objectivity'; I wanted students to leave my classes not just better informed, but more prepared to relinquish the safety of silence, more prepared to speak up, to act against injustice wherever they saw it. This, of course, was a recipe for trouble."

~~~

Carroll called Dr. Zinn "simply one of the greatest Americans of our time. He will not be replaced -- or soon forgotten. How we loved him back."

I believe it was on The Dennis Prager Show that I heard him interviewed a few years ago. Prager asked him if the world would have been better off had the U.S. never come into existence. His answer? "Yes."

Qué han hecho con mi país?

Ward Churchill (remember him?) references the book, Smallpox and the American Indian, during his testimony in his civil suit against the University of Colorado at the City and County Building in Denver, Colorado March 23, 2009. Churchill is suing the University of Colorado for wrongful termination.
AP photo.

Today, I picked up 2 kids I carpool to the gymnastics club from their magnet school, as I do every Monday. Apparently, there was no mention about Columbus Day. Nada. Zippo. Nothing negative or positive. But they did watch a performance by dancers dressed like Mayan/Aztec Indians; and the older one said it was "Latino Heritage month".

This school was closed for Yom Kippur. But they were open today, with no mention of Columbus, but did celebrate "Latino heritage". Oooookaaay.....

I'm recognizing my country, less and less, as time moves on....

While Federal government offices in Washington, D.C. are closed for Columbus Day, students in Maryland, just a few miles away, have a full school day. What was once a guaranteed day off from work is now a gamble, with many schools and workplaces open on Columbus Day.

Columbus Day is not commemorated universally. Federal and state offices are closed, the United States Postal Service will not deliver mail, and many banks are shuttered.

But public schools in large cities like Los Angeles, Miami and Dallas are open, while in Washington, DC, New York City and Chicago they are closed

It has been a growing trend for more than 20 years.

Cross-posted at Flopping Aces

The President Acted Stupidly

Obama conceded his words had been ill-chosen, but he stopped short of a public apology.

Obama should live up to his image as a post-racial president and different kind of politician and apologize. He said he didn't have all the facts in, yet stupidly offered his presidential opinion, anyway.

Obama said of the racial controversy. "I want to make clear that in my choice of words, I think I unfortunately gave an impression that I was maligning the Cambridge Police Department and Sgt. Crowley specifically. And I could've calibrated those words differently."The president did not back down from his contention that police had overreacted by arresting the Harvard professor for disorderly conduct after coming to his home to investigate a possible break-in.

This is what happens when you hang out and bring your family to a racist church for 20 years.

Instead of doubling down with calibration, he really should just flatout apologize and admit he was wrong to weigh in. Yet, he is what he is, and can't help being who he is.

"The fact that this has garnered so much attention, I think, is testimony to the fact that these are issues that are still very sensitive here in America," Obama said.

Thanks, in part, to those carrying chips on their shoulders and reading racism into everything.

I've been engaged in a debate on my earlier post that you might be curious to check out.

I'm Offended by the Intolerance of Feigned Indignation

Happy 200th Birthday, President Lincoln!

A couple shares a moment during their visit to the Abraham Lincoln Memorial after midnight in Washington February 12, 2009.

REUTERS/Jason Reed

The Lie That America Bears Unique Guilt for Slavery

When Michael Medved wrote his column, Six inconvenient truths about the U.S. and slavery a year ago, lefties went nuts, mischaracterizing him as defending slavery, and Keith Olbermann distinguished him with the much coveted "Worst Person in the World" award.

Love his challenge to the caller Jamal, in this radio interview from November 30th, regarding if Jamal takes offense to having a "slave" last name (Phillips), why on earth would he adopt a "slave" first name (Jamal), given that if any group should bear unique guilt and responsibility for perpetuating the institution of slavery in its history, it's the Islamic world (they don't bear unique guilt, as slavery was institutionalized in so many cultures all over the globe). Not only was the slave trade alive and thriving long before America was ever a country, but it existed in the Islamic world a century after it was ended in the West, and was responsible for as many as twenty times the number of African slaves that were ever brought over to Britain and North America.

Pg 55-6 from the book:

Saudi Arabia outlawed slave owning only in 1962. The Islamic Republic of Mauritania finally moved toward abolition in 1981, but the practice continued unabated, even after a 2003 law that made slave ownership punishable with jail or a fine. As recently as December 2004, the BBC cited Boubakar Messaoud of Mauritania's SOS Slaves Organization: "A Mauritanian slave, whose parents and grandparents before him were slaves, doesn't need chains. He has been brought up as a domesticated animal."

The organization Christian Solidarity International continues to purchase Sudanese slaves in order to free them, recently paying $100 (or two cows) for an adult captive. A press release revealed that in March 2007 alone the group bought ninety-six male slaves, who had been seized as part of the Muslim northern government's "jihad" on the nation's Christian and animist south. Six of the young men had been raped by their Islamic masters, and 99 percent had received frequent and sadistic beatings.

The long, savage history of Muslim slavers and their depredations in every corner of Africa makes a mockery of the trendy sentimental attachment of many African Americans to an alien Islamic culture that not only abused their ancestors but still afflicts their cousins. The fascination with Arab names (Jamal or Ayesha, not to mention Muhammad Ali or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), even among non-Muslims in the black community, and the glamorization of Arab civilization as somehow authentically African grow in spite of incontrovertible evidence of more than a millennium of brutal Islamic enslavement.

I picked up my copy of his new book, yesterday.

Big Lies That Poison Thanksgiving And Subvert Our Sense Of Honor

By MICHAEL MEDVED | Posted Tuesday, November 18, 2008 4:20 PM PT

For some of Barack Obama's most ardent supporters, his resounding victory represented the first sign of redemption for a wretched, guilty nation with a 400-year history of oppression.

Filmmaker Michael Moore, for instance, considered election night "a stunning, whopping landslide of hope in a time of deep despair. In a nation that was founded on genocide and then built on the backs of slaves, it was an unexpected moment, shocking in its simplicity."

Actually, Mr. Moore's summary of America's origins is a wholly expected distortion, shocking in its mendacity.

Like so many other revered figures in the worlds of entertainment and academia, the portly provocateur thoughtlessly recycles the darkest assumptions about the generous nation that provides his privileged, prosperous life.

My new book, "The 10 Big Lies About America," represents an aggressive effort to correct the ugly smears that play an increasingly prominent (and often unchallenged) role in our public discourse.

Big Lie No. 1, for instance, concerns the ubiquitous notion that the nation's founders and builders followed a policy of "genocide" toward Native Americans.

In truth, disease caused 95% of the deaths that ravaged native populations of North America following European contact. Despite lurid (but historically baseless) claims of massive infection brought about by "smallpox blankets," even the deadliest germs displayed no consciously hostile agenda.

In fact, intermarriage (including frequent intermarriage with African-Americans, slaves and free) and assimilation caused more Indian "losses" than all occasional massacres by governmental and irregular forces — incidents invariably condemned by federal authorities, never sponsored by them.

My book's Lie No. 2 precisely anticipates Moore's claim that America was "built on the backs of slaves," suggesting that our wealth and prosperity came chiefly through the stolen labor of kidnapped Africans.

While slavery represented an undeniable horror in our nation's early history, the slave population never exceeded 20% of the national total (amounting to 12% at the time of the Civil War). This means that at least 80% of the work force remained free laborers.

The claim that our forefathers built America "on the backs of slaves" rests on the idiotic idea that involuntary servitude proved vastly more productive than free labor. In fact, the states dominated by the slave economy counted as the poorest, least developed in the union — providing the North with crushing economic superiority that brought victory in the War Between the States.

Of more than 20 million Africans taken from their homes in chains, at most 3% ever made their way to the territory of the United States (or the British colonies preceding our nation). Americans played no part in establishing the once-universal institution of slavery but played a leading, outsize role in bringing about its abolition.

Other lies about America's past badly distort current debates over public policy. It's not true, for instance, that governmental activism provides a necessary remedy for periodic economic downturns (Big Lie No. 6).

In fact, leaders who courageously resisted the temptation of major federal initiatives at times of crisis presided over shorter, less painful recessions, while the ambitious innovations of Hoover and FDR worsened and prolonged the Great Depression. (Even liberal historians admit that the New Deal never worked as "a recovery program.")

Meanwhile, the popular assumption that our founders determined to create a secular, not a Christian, nation (Big Lie No. 3) has produced widespread hysteria over the program of "the Christian right."

In fact, the constitutional framers insisted on a combination of a secular government and a deeply Christian society. Even Jefferson, an unconventional religious thinker, believed that fervent faith represented a necessary element in the security and growth of the republic; he personally attended and authorized weekly Christian services in the Capitol building itself.

Secular militants, not Christian conservatives, currently strive to transform America in a way our founders would neither recognize nor approve.

Unfortunately, some of the same religious conservatives who get it right about the place of organized faith in the American fabric get it terribly wrong by signing on to Big Lie No. 10: that the United States has entered into a steep — and irreversible — moral decline.

In fact, a wealth of statistics concerning marriage, teenage sexuality, drug addiction, crime, alcohol abuse and other signs of social breakdown show a recent, decisive turnaround that may represent one of the nation's periodic "awakenings." Moralists have proclaimed permanent ethical collapse ever since 1645, yet no one could claim that our path has been straight downhill for 350 years.

The big lies about America all work to undermine the sense of honor and gratitude that ought to inspire every citizen, particularly in this Thanksgiving season. They also destroy the essential sense of perspective required in significant debates as a new government comes to power in Washington, D.C.

While Sen. Obama's supporters rightly rejoice at his election to the nation's highest office, they will disorient his presidency and damage society if they embrace destructive distortions about our past, and view his elevation as a rare (or exclusive) basis for pride.

Cross-posted at Flopping Aces

When will the House of Representatives Craft an Apology to the American People for Legislating Bad History?

Michael Medved points out this bit of bad history in Tuesday's House resolution apology for slavery:

“Whereas slavery in America resembled no other form of involuntary servitude known in history, as Africans were captured and sold at auction like inanimate objects or animals...”

The resolution apologizes to African Americans on behalf of the people of the United States "for the wrongs committed against them and their ancestors who suffered under slavery and Jim Crow" and expresses a commitment "to rectify the lingering consequences of the misdeeds committed against African Americans under slavery and Jim Crow and to stop the occurrence of human rights violations in the future."

We haven't rectified slavery and Jim Crow yet?!?! We live in a country where a man who is heralded as "black", stands a good chance of being America's next president. Where a rapper who supports him can make millions of dollars by spouting off racist, hateful remarks. I suppose his hate-spew is white America's fault and part of the "lingering consequences of the misdeeds committed against African Americans under slavery and Jim Crow"? Good grief! How ludicrous ludacris!

Medved:

slavery in the United States strongly resembled all the most common forms of involuntary servitude that have constituted a universal human institution since the beginnings of recorded history. Yale professor David Brion Davis (author of the magisterial and definitive book Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World) suggests that in its very essence, slavery treats its victims like animals. In fact, the practice of enslaving humans began in the mists of pre-history at the same time as the domestication of beasts and pointedly used some of the same cruel techniques to secure unquestioning obedience from man as well as animal.

Davis writes of the hideous abuse of slaves by the Brazilian tribe, the Tupinamba, long before first contact with the Europeans: “It is crucial to realize that such slaves were being treated essentially as animals, a fact symbolized by their ritualistic slaughter and the final cannibal feast. This behavior dramatizes the point that, wholly apart from later economic functions, slaves from the very beginning were perceived as dehumanized humans – humans deprived of precisely those traits and faculties that are prerequisites for human dignity, respect and honor.”

Even among the famously civilized Greeks (more than two-thousand years before the emergence of the United States) Aristotle said the ox was the poor man’s slave and Xenophon “compared the teaching of slaves, unlike that of free workers, with the training of wild animals.”

None of this absolves from guilt the United States (or the British colonies that preceded independence): the institution of slavery wrecked the lives of millions. But the out-of context consideration of that guilt amounts to an irresponsible distortion of its essential nature and its extent. Of the estimated eleven to thirteen million human beings kidnapped from Africa and brought to the New World in the 400 years of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, less than 5% of them went to the British colonies in mainland North America. In other words, some nineteen out of twenty slaves were shipped to the West Indies and Latin America, not to the future United States.

What is obscenely, pathetically humorous, is that Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), who introduced the House resolution, is running against Nikki Tinker, a black American, in a mostly black district of Memphis.

Also blogging: Further Adventures of Indigo Red

George W's War

From Investor's Business Daily, sent to me by a friend:

George W.'s War

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Friday, June 20, 2008 4:20 PM PT

No one likes war. War is a horrific affair, bloody and expensive. Sending our men and women into battle to perhaps die or be maimed is an unconscionable thought.

Yet some wars need to be waged, and someone needs to lead. The citizenry and Congress are often ambivalent or largely opposed to any given war. It's up to our leader to convince them. That's why we call the leader "Commander in Chief."

George W.'s war was no different. There was lots of resistance to it. Many in Congress were vehemently against the idea. The Commander in Chief had to lobby for legislative approval.

Along with supporters, George W. used the force of his convictions, the power of his title and every ounce of moral suasion he could muster to rally support. He had to assure Congress and the public that the war was morally justified, winnable and affordable. Congress eventually came around and voted overwhelmingly to wage war.

George W. then lobbied foreign governments for support. But in the end, only one European nation helped us. The rest of the world sat on its hands and watched.

After a few quick victories, things started to go bad. There were many dark days when all the news was discouraging. Casualties began to mount. It became obvious that our forces were too small. Congress began to drag its feet about funding the effort.

Many who had voted to support the war just a few years earlier were beginning to speak against it and accuse the Commander in Chief of misleading them. Many critics began to call him incompetent, an idiot and even a liar. Journalists joined the negative chorus with a vengeance.

As the war entered its fourth year, the public began to grow weary of the conflict and the casualties. George W.'s popularity plummeted. Yet through it all, he stood firm, supporting the troops and endorsing the struggle.

Without his unwavering support, the war would have surely ended, then and there, in overwhelming and total defeat.

At this darkest of times, he began to make some changes. More troops were added and trained. Some advisers were shuffled, and new generals installed.

Then, unexpectedly and gradually, things began to improve. Now it was the enemy that appeared to be growing weary of the lengthy conflict and losing support. Victories began to come, and hope returned.

Many critics in Congress and the press said the improvements were just George W.'s good luck. The progress, they said, would be temporary. He knew, however, that in warfare good fortune counts.

Then, in the unlikeliest of circumstances and perhaps the most historic example of military luck, the enemy blundered and was resoundingly defeated. After six long years of war, the Commander in Chief basked in a most hard-fought victory.

So on that historic day, Oct. 19, 1781, in a place called Yorktown, a satisfied George Washington sat upon his beautiful white horse and accepted the surrender of Lord Cornwallis, effectively ending the Revolutionary War.

Also of related interest, in the same spirit as the above, is this piece by Medved:

The handsome young Democratic nominee is the most spellbinding orator of his generation, promising dramatic change to correct economic injustice and bring an end to a bloody, unpopular war. Republicans deride him as a showboating demagogue with scant governmental experience and place their faith in a gruff, battle-tested veteran who asks for public patience to fight the war till victory. Meanwhile, halfway around the world, anti-American insurgents have recently lost thousands of fighters to desertion and improved U.S. tactics, but they believe they can exploit their enemy's war weariness. The guerrilla fighters, therefore, intensify their gruesome attacks as part of a conscious effort to influence the November election on behalf of the Democratic "peace" candidate.

Though contemporary Americans will assume the above description applies to Iraq and the 2008 campaign, it's also an accurate summary of the situation leading up to the fateful election of 1900 and the darkest days of our four-year war against insurrectionists in the Philippines. This nearly forgotten conflict deserves renewed attention today since the parallels with our present predicament count as both eerie and illuminating.

Saturday Morning Cartoons- Patriotic Schoolhouse Rock

I always read this video as more about assimilation than of multiculturalism:

Don't Know Much About History....

Hah! Check this out:

History News Network’s poll of 109 historians found that 61 percent of them rank Bush as “worst ever” among U.S. presidents. Bush’s key competition comes from Buchanan, apparently, and a further 2 percent of the sample puts Bush right behind Buchanan as runner-up for “worst ever.” 96 percent of the respondents place the Bush presidency in the bottom tier of American presidencies. And was his presidency (it’s a bit wishful to speak of his presidency in the past tense–after all there are several more months left to go) a success or failure? On that score the numbers are still more resounding: 98 percent label it a “failure.”

More here.

Hat tip the following Investor's Business Daily to Michael Medved:

So 98% of history professors adjudge George Bush's presidency a failure and 61% say he's the worst president ever. And we thought historians studied history, not events too recent to be properly assessed.

It should be no surprise that the 109 history professors surveyed by the History News Network would be critical of Bush. History professors tend to be a Democratic lot. A study conducted by Daniel Klein and Charlotta Stern in 2003 found that the Democrat-to-Republican ratio among them is roughly 9.5-1.

The professors' political bias has blinded them to reality. They formed their opinions around an axis of nonsense: Bush's invasion of Iraq, his "tax breaks for the rich," and the alienation of many nations around the world. Let's take their arguments one at a time.

• It's far too early to deem the Iraq invasion a failure. In terms of military achievement, it ranks as one of the greatest in modern history. In a matter of weeks a dangerous dictator was toppled, his regime ousted, his military routed and an oppressed people freed.

Since then, thousands of terrorists have been denied their chance to strike America because the U.S. military has eliminated them.

The cleanup has been messy. But unless the U.S. loses its resolve, a stable, U.S.-friendly representative government is likely to emerge in a strongly anti-American region dominated by despotic regimes.

• "Tax breaks for the rich" is the big lie come alive. Under the Bush tax cuts, 25 million Americans at the bottom half of the income scale have been wiped off the federal income tax rolls.

And the rich? The federal tax burden of the top 1% of earners has gone from 19% under Jimmy Carter (in 1980) to 39.4%. Meanwhile, the bottom 50% paid 3.1% of taxes in 2005. In 1995, they paid 4.6%.

• Since Bush has been in office, pro-Americans have been elected to lead Germany (Angela Merkel), France (Nicolas Sarkozy), Italy (Silvio Berlusconi) and Canada (Stephen Harper). Both Britain and Australia remain close to the U.S. though both are under governments less pro-American than their predecessors. Who's been alienated? Iran, which has been at war with the U.S. for nearly 20 years?

History professors need to stick to teaching history. They seem to be seeing the unfolding of events through a cloudy lens

George W. Bush will go down as one of our best presidents in U.S. history.

Meanwhile....the worst former president and one of the worst presidents wants some attention:

A History of Political Mud-Slinging and Character Assassination

"If you vote for Nixon, you ought to go to hell."
-Harry S Truman, campaigning for John F. Kennedy, in 1960

The line from "Give 'em Hell Harry" just cracks me up. Could you just imagine a politician today saying these lines? Especially with a Huckabee background?

We often hear people bemoan the level of discourse, the "nasty" attack ads, the height of new lows, etc. In truth, we're carrying on a 208 year-old tradition (In 1789, George Washington ran unapposed; 1792, first political parties formed....4 years later- let the mud fly!) - and I'd say that today we are more civilized, not less....or perhaps, about the same.

Here are other examples:

• 1800: Jefferson hired a writer named James Callender to attack President Adams. He wrote that John Adams is "a repulsive pedant," a "gross hypocrite," and "a hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensiblity of a woman."

• 1876 the opponents of Rutherford B. Hayes spread around a rumor that he had shot his own mother in a fit of rage.

• A Democratic newspaper told voters that Lincoln should not be elected president because he only changed his socks once every 10 days.

• 1912: Theodore Roosevelt is shot in the chest while preparing to give a campaign speech, then proceeds to deliver it anyway: “I don t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot, but it takes more than that to kill a bull moose!”

• 1828: a Republican pamphlet said Democrat Andrew Jackson was "a gambler, a cock fighter, a slave trader and the husband of a really fat wife," an insult for which he never forgave his opponents.

• 1844: Democrats call Whig candidate Henry Clay on his "supposed baggage train of gambling, dueling, womanizing and "By the Eternal!" swearing." Clay lost.

• 1836: Congressman Davy Crockett accuses candidate Martin Van Buren of secretly wearing women’s clothing: “He is laced up in corsets!”

Hmm.....I guess Giuliani won't be the first.

Hugh Hewitt: Watching Hillary’s campaign go after Senator Obama, does it tell you what you’re in for if she’s the nominee and you’re the nominee?

Rudy Giuliani: (laughing) I have a pretty good idea. I had a pretty good idea before.

There's a new book out, called "Anything for a Vote: Dirty Tricks, Cheap Shots, and October Surprises" by Joseph Cummins. Sounds very entertaining for us political junkies.

You can see a book preview, here.

RT Rider has more, including the famous "Daisy" video ad from Johnson-Goldwater. I bet Democrats would have loved to run it in 2004, replacing "Goldwater" with "Bush". Oh, waitaminute....Remember the Moveon.org "Bush-Hitler" ad? If you haven't seen THAT video, you really should. See it here. Some disgusting things should be viewed, to be believed.

And also reprints this from the book: On the Bill Clinton of the 1920's, Warren G. Harding:

When Republican operatives decided to nominate the fifty-five-year-old Ohio senator, they asked if he had anything hidden in his personal life that would "disqualify" him from winning the presidency. Harding asked for some time to reflect on the question, and he may have pondered that he chewed tobacco, played poker, loved to drink (Prohibition had just been voted in), and was having affairs with not only the wife of one of his friends but also a young woman thirty years his junior, with whom he had an illegitimate daughter. Then he said, nope, nothing to hide, guys -- it's all good.

Ain't politics fun?

This site has an archive of political cartoons and ads.

“Bright Goings On”
Cartoonist: Unknown
Source: Fun
Date: November 4, 1864, p. 84

In this cartoon from Fun, a British humor magazine, John Bright shakes hands with President Abraham Lincoln, who appears as a militaristic half-wit stepping on the U.S. Constitution. Bright was a Liberal member of parliament and leading reformer whose Quaker religious beliefs (note his Quaker hat) provoked his intense aversion to slavery. During the American Civil War, he was an outspoken supporter of the Lincoln administration and the Union cause, although his pacifism prevented him from calling for British military intervention on the side of the Union. The fallen man in the cartoon’s background may be Confederate President Jefferson Davis or Uncle Sam.

“A Warning”
Cartoonist: Unknown
Source: Fun
Date: December 3, 1864, p. 115

This ominous cartoon appeared in Fun, the British humor magazine, after Abraham Lincoln’s reelection. The president is depicted as a vengeful warmonger whose prosecution of the Civil War has resulted in extensive loss of life for no apparent gain to the nation.

Killed in a Duel, Then Lost in the Earth

In Monday's New York Times.

Keith Olbermann: One of the World's Worst

So Keith Olbermann thinks Michael Medved is one of the worst:




Here's the column Michael Medved wrote:

Six inconvenient truths about the U.S. and slavery
By Michael Medved
Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Those who want to discredit the United States and to deny our role as history’s most powerful and pre-eminent force for freedom, goodness and human dignity invariably focus on America’s bloody past as a slave-holding nation. Along with the displacement and mistreatment of Native Americans, the enslavement of literally millions of Africans counts as one of our two founding crimes—and an obvious rebuttal to any claims that this Republic truly represents “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” According to America-bashers at home and abroad, open-minded students of our history ought to feel more guilt than pride, and strive for “reparations” or other restitution to overcome the nation’s uniquely cruel, racist and rapacious legacy.

Unfortunately, the current mania for exaggerating America’s culpability for the horrors of slavery bears no more connection to reality than the old, discredited tendency to deny that the U.S. bore any blame at all. No, it’s not true that the “peculiar institution” featured kind-hearted, paternalistic masters and happy, dancing field-hands, any more than it’s true that America displayed unparalleled barbarity or enjoyed disproportionate benefit from kidnapping and exploiting innocent Africans.

An honest and balanced understanding of the position of slavery in the American experience requires a serious attempt to place the institution in historical context and to clear-away some of the common myths and distortions.

1. SLAVERY WAS AN ANCIENT AND UNIVERSAL INSTITUTION, NOT A DISTINCTIVELY AMERICAN INNOVATION. At the time of the founding of the Republic in 1776, slavery existed literally everywhere on earth and had been an accepted aspect of human history from the very beginning of organized societies. Current thinking suggests that human beings took a crucial leap toward civilization about 10,000 years ago with the submission, training and domestication of important animal species (cows, sheep, swine, goats, chickens, horses and so forth) and, at the same time, began the “domestication,” bestialization and ownership of fellow human beings captured as prisoners in primitive wars. In ancient Greece, the great philosopher Aristotle described the ox as “the poor man’s slave” while Xenophon likened the teaching of slaves “to the training of wild animals.” Aristotle further opined that “it is clear that there are certain people who are free and certain who are slaves by nature, and it is both to their advantage, and just, for them to be slaves.” The Romans seized so many captives from Eastern Europe that the terms “Slav” and “slave” bore the same origins. All the great cultures of the ancient world, from Egypt to Babylonia, Athens to Rome, Persia to India to China, depended upon the brutal enslavement of the masses – often representing heavy majorities of the population. Contrary to the glamorization of aboriginal New World cultures, the Mayas, Aztecs and Incas counted among the most brutal slave-masters of them all --- not only turning the members of other tribes into harshly abused beasts of burden but also using these conquered enemies to feed a limitless lust for human sacrifice. The Tupinamba, a powerful tribe on the coast of Brazil south of the Amazon, took huge numbers of captives, then humiliated them for months or years, before engaging in mass slaughter of their victims in ritualized cannibalistic feasts. In Africa, slavery also represented a timeless norm long before any intrusion by Europeans. Moreover, the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch or British slave traders rarely penetrated far beyond the coasts: the actual capture and kidnapping of the millions of victims always occurred at the hands of neighboring tribes. As the great African-American historian Nathan Huggins pointed out, “virtually all of the enslavement of Africans was carried out by other Africans” but the concept of an African “race” was the invention of Western colonists, and most African traders “saw themselves as selling people other than their own.” In the final analysis, Yale historian David Brion Davis in his definitive 2006 history “Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World” notes that “colonial North America…surprisingly received only 5 to 6 percent of the African slaves shipped across the Atlantic.” Meanwhile, the Arab slave trade (primarily from East Africa) lasted longer and enslaved more human beings than the European slavers working the other side of the continent. According to the best estimates, Islamic societies shipped between 12 and 17 million African slaves out of their homes in the course of a thousand years; the best estimate for the number of Africans enslaved by Europeans amounts to 11 million. In other words, when taking the prodigious and unspeakably cruel Islamic enslavements into the equation, at least 97% of all African men, women and children who were kidnapped, sold, and taken from their homes, were sent somewhere other than the British colonies of North America. In this context there is no historical basis to claim that the United States bears primary, or even prominent guilt for the depredations of centuries of African slavery.

2. SLAVERY EXISTED ONLY BRIEFLY, AND IN LIMITED LOCALES, IN THE HISTORY OF THE REPUBLIC – INVOLVING ONLY A TINY PERCENTAGE OF THE ANCESTORS OF TODAY’S AMERICANS. The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution put a formal end to the institution of slavery 89 years after the birth of the Republic; 142 years have passed since this welcome emancipation. Moreover, the importation of slaves came to an end in 1808 (as provided by the Constitution), a mere 32 years after independence, and slavery had been outlawed in most states decades before the Civil War. Even in the South, more than 80% of the white population never owned slaves. Given the fact that the majority of today’s non-black Americans descend from immigrants who arrived in this country after the War Between the States, only a tiny percentage of today’s white citizens – perhaps as few as 5% -- bear any authentic sort of generational guilt for the exploitation of slave labor. Of course, a hundred years of Jim Crow laws, economic oppression and indefensible discrimination followed the theoretical emancipation of the slaves, but those harsh realities raise different issues from those connected to the long-ago history of bondage.

3. THOUGH BRUTAL, SLAVERY WASN’T GENOCIDAL: LIVE SLAVES WERE VALUABLE BUT DEAD CAPTIVES BROUGHT NO PROFIT. Historians agree that hundreds of thousands, and probably millions of slaves perished over the course of 300 years during the rigors of the “Middle Passage” across the Atlantic Ocean. Estimates remain inevitably imprecise, but range as high as one third of the slave “cargo” who perished from disease or overcrowding during transport from Africa. Perhaps the most horrifying aspect of these voyages involves the fact that no slave traders wanted to see this level of deadly suffering: they benefited only from delivering (and selling) live slaves, not from tossing corpses into the ocean. By definition, the crime of genocide requires the deliberate slaughter of a specific group of people; slavers invariably preferred oppressing and exploiting live Africans rather than murdering them en masse. Here, the popular, facile comparisons between slavery and the Holocaust quickly break down: the Nazis occasionally benefited from the slave labor of their victims, but the ultimate purpose of facilities like Auschwitz involved mass death, not profit or productivity. For slave owners and slave dealers in the New World, however, death of your human property cost you money, just as the death of your domestic animals would cause financial damage. And as with their horses and cows, slave owners took pride and care in breeding as many new slaves as possible. Rather than eliminating the slave population, profit-oriented masters wanted to produce as many new, young slaves as they could. This hardly represents a compassionate or decent way to treat your fellow human beings, but it does amount to the very opposite of genocide. As David Brion Davis reports, slave holders in North America developed formidable expertise in keeping their “bondsmen” alive and healthy enough to produce abundant offspring. The British colonists took pride in slaves who “developed an almost unique and rapid rate of population growth, freeing the later United States from a need for further African imports.”

4. IT’S NOT TRUE THAT THE U.S. BECAME A WEALTHY NATION THROUGH THE ABUSE OF SLAVE LABOR: THE MOST PROSPEROUS STATES IN THE COUNTRY WERE THOSE THAT FIRST FREED THEIR SLAVES. Pennsylvania passed an emancipation law in 1780; Connecticut and Rhode Island followed four years later (all before the Constitution). New York approved emancipation in 1799. These states (with dynamic banking centers in Philadelphia and Manhattan) quickly emerged as robust centers of commerce and manufacturing, greatly enriching themselves while the slave-based economies in the South languished by comparison. At the time of the Constitution, Virginia constituted the most populous and wealthiest state in the Union, but by the time of the War Between the States the Old Dominion had fallen far behind a half-dozen northern states that had outlawed slavery two generations earlier. All analyses of Northern victory in the great sectional struggle highlights the vast advantages in terms of wealth and productivity in New England, the Mid-Atlantic States and the Midwest, compared to the relatively backward and impoverished states of the Confederacy. While a few elite families in the Old South undoubtedly based their formidable fortunes on the labor of slaves, the prevailing reality of the planter class involved chronic indebtedness and shaky finances long before the ultimate collapse of the evil system of bondage. The notion that America based its wealth and development on slave labor hardly comports with the obvious reality that for two hundred years since the founding of the Republic, by far the poorest and least developed section of the nation was precisely that region where slavery once prevailed.

5. WHILE AMERICA DESERVES NO UNIQUE BLAME FOR THE EXISTENCE OF SLAVERY, THE UNITED STATES MERITS SPECIAL CREDIT FOR ITS RAPID ABOLITION. In the course of scarcely more than a century following the emergence of the American Republic, men of conscience, principle and unflagging energy succeeded in abolishing slavery not just in the New World but in all nations of the West. During three eventful generations, one of the most ancient, ubiquitous and unquestioned of all human institutions (considered utterly indispensable by the “enlightened” philosophers of Greece and Rome) became universally discredited and finally illegal – with Brazil at last liberating all its slaves in 1888. This worldwide mass movement (spear-headed in Britain and elsewhere by fervent Evangelical Christians) brought about the most rapid and fundamental transformation in all human history. While the United States (and the British colonies that preceded our independence) played no prominent role in creating the institution of slavery, or even in establishing the long-standing African slave trade pioneered by Arab, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and other merchants long before the settlement of English North America, Americans did contribute mightily to the spectacularly successful anti-slavery agitation. As early as 1646, the Puritan founders of New England expressed their revulsion at the enslavement of their fellow children of God. When magistrates in Massachusetts discovered that some of their citizens had raided an African village and violently seized two natives to bring them across the Atlantic for sale in the New World, the General Court condemned “this haynos and crying sinn of man-stealing.” The officials promptly ordered the two blacks returned to their native land. Two years later, Rhode Island passed legislation denouncing the practice of enslaving Africans for life and ordered that any slaves “brought within the liberties of this Collonie” be set free after ten years “as the manner is with the English servants.” A hundred and thirty years later John Adams and Benjamin Franklin both spent most of their lives as committed activists in the abolitionist cause, and Thomas Jefferson included a bitter condemnation of slavery in his original draft of the Declaration of Independence. This remarkable passage saw African bondage as “cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty” and described “a market where MEN should be bought and sold” as constituting “piratical warfare” and “execrable commerce.” Unfortunately, the Continental Congress removed this prescient, powerful denunciation in order to win approval from Jefferson’s fellow slave-owners, but the impact of the Declaration and the American Revolution remained a powerful factor in energizing and inspiring the international anti-slavery cause. Nowhere did idealists pay a higher price for liberation than they did in the United States of America. Confederate forces (very few of whom ever owned slaves) may not have fought consciously to defend the Peculiar Institution, but Union soldiers and sailors (particularly at the end of the war) proudly risked their lives for the emancipation cause. Julia Ward Howe’s powerful and popular “Battle Hymn of the Republic” called on Federal troops to follow Christ’s example: “as he died to make men holy/let us die to make men free.” And many of them did die, some 364,000 in four years of combat—or the stunning equivalent of five million deaths as a percentage of today’s United States population. Moreover, the economic cost of liberation remained almost unimaginable. In nearly all other nations, the government paid some form of compensation to slave-owners at the time of emancipation, but Southern slave-owners received no reimbursement of any kind when they lost an estimated $3.5 billion in 1860 dollars (about $70 billion in today’s dollars) of what Davis describes as a “hitherto legally accepted form of property.” The most notable aspect of America’s history with slavery doesn’t involve its tortured and bloody existence, but the unprecedented speed and determination with which abolitionists roused the national conscience and put this age-old evil to an end.

6. THERE IS NO REASON TO BELIEVE THAT TODAY’S AFRICAN-AMERICANS WOULD BE BETTER OFF IF THEIR ANCESTORS HAD REMAINED BEHIND IN AFRICA. The idea of reparations rests on the notion of making up to the descendants of slaves for the incalculable damage done to their family status and welfare by the enslavement of generations of their ancestors. In theory, reparationists want society to repair the wrongs of the past by putting today’s African-Americans into the sort of situation they would have enjoyed if their forebears hadn’t been kidnapped, sold and transported across the ocean. Unfortunately, to bring American blacks in line with their cousins who the slave-traders left behind in Africa would require a drastic reduction in their wealth, living standards, and economic and political opportunities. No honest observer can deny or dismiss this nation’s long record of racism and injustice, but it’s also obvious that Americans of African descent enjoy vastly greater wealth and human rights of every variety than the citizens of any nation of the Mother Continent. If we sought to erase the impact of slavery on specific black families, we would need to obliterate the spectacular economic progress made by those families (and by US citizens in general) over the last 100 years. In view of the last century of history in Nigeria or Ivory Coast or Sierra Leone or Zimbabwe, could any African American say with confidence that he or she would have fared better had some distant ancestor not been enslaved? Of course, those who seek reparations would also cite the devastating impact of Western colonialism in stunting African progress, but the United States played virtually no role in the colonization of the continent. The British, French, Italians, Portuguese, Germans and others all established brutal colonial rule in Africa; tiny Belgium became a particularly oppressive and bloodthirsty colonial power in the Congo. The United States, on the other hand, sponsored only one long-term venture on the African continent: the colony of Liberia, an independent nation set up as a haven for liberated American slaves who wanted to go “home.” The fact that so few availed themselves of the opportunity, or heeded the back-to-African exhortations of turn- of-the-century Black Nationalist Marcus Garvey, reflects the reality that descendants of slaves understood they were better off remaining in the United States, for all its faults.

In short, politically correct assumptions about America’s entanglement with slavery lack any sense of depth, perspective or context. As with so many other persistent lies about this fortunate land, the unthinking indictment of the United States as uniquely blameworthy for an evil institution ignores the fact that the record of previous generations provides some basis for pride as well as guilt.

I doubt Keith Olbermann actually bothered to read the article. If I'm wrong, and he had read it when he aired his slander, then he's an even bigger fool than I have thus given him credit for.



Others blogging on another talk show host smeared and marked for character assassination:
A Soldier's Perspective
Conservatism with Heart
Flopping Aces
Freedom Eden
Marie's Two Cents
Mike's America
Now for Something Different
The Liberal Lie, the Conservative Truth
The Oxford Medievalist

Mike Gallagher writes An Open Letter to Keith Olbermann

Saturday Morning Cartoon: ABC Schoolhouse Rock "Elbow Room"

The way was opened up for folks with bravery.
There were plenty of fights
To win land rights,
But the West was meant to be;
It was our Manifest Destiny!

Perhaps the least "politically correct" of the Schoolhouse Rock videos...unapologetically so...and one of my favorites.

Basically, covering "manifest destiny".



Al Gore would be horrified by listening to the part about "trampled down the wilderness"

Reject the Lie of White "Genocide" Against Native Americans
By Michael Medved
Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Few opinions I've expressed on air have produced a more indignant, outraged reaction than my repeated insistence that the word "genocide" in no way fits as a description of the treatment of Native Americans by British colonists or, later, American settlers.

I've never denied that the 400 year history of American contact with the Indians includes many examples of white cruelty and viciousness --- just as the Native Americans frequently (indeed, regularly) dealt with the European newcomers with monstrous brutality and, indeed, savagery. In fact, reading the history of the relationship between British settlers and Native Americans its obvious that the blood-thirsty excesses of one group provoked blood thirsty excesses from the other, in a cycle that listed with scant interruption for several hundred years.

But none of the warfare (including an Indian attack in 1675 that succeeded in butchering a full one-fourth of the white population of Connecticut, and claimed additional thousands of casualties throughout New England) on either side amounted to genocide. Colonial and, later, the American government, never endorsed or practiced a policy of Indian extermination; rather, the official leaders of white society tried to restrain some of their settlers and militias and paramilitary groups from unnecessary conflict and brutality.

Moreover, the real decimation of Indian populations had nothing to do with massacres or military actions, but rather stemmed from infectious diseases that white settlers brought with them at the time they first arrived in the New World.

UCLA professor Jared Diamond, author of the universally acclaimed bestseller "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies," writes:

"Throughout the Americas, diseases introduced with Europeans spread from tribe to tribe far in advance of the Europeans themselves, killing an estimated 95 percent of the pre-Columbian Native American population. The most populous and highly organized native societies of North America, the Mississippian chiefdoms, disappeared in that way between 1492 and the late 1600's, even before Europeans themselves made their first settlement on the Mississippi River (page 78)....

"The main killers were Old World germs to which Indians had never been exposed, and against which they therefore had neither immune nor genetic resistance. Smallpox, measles, influenza, and typhus rank top among the killers." (page 212).

"As for the most advanced native societies of North America, those of the U.S. Southeast and the Mississippi River system, their destruction was accomplished largely by germs alone, introduced by early European explorers and advancing ahead of them" (page 374)

Obviously, the decimation of native population by European germs represents an enormous tragedy, but in no sense does it represent a crime. Stories of deliberate infection by passing along "small-pox blankets" are based exclusively on two letters from British soldiers in 1763, at the end of the bitter and bloody French and Indian War. By that time, Indian populations (including those in the area) had already been terribly impacted by smallpox, and there's no evidence of a particularly devastating outbreak as a result of British policy.

For the most part, Indians were infected by devastating diseases even before they made direct contact with Europeans: other Indians who had already been exposed to the germs, carried them with them to virtually every corner of North America and many British explorers and settlers found empty, abandoned villages (as did the Pilgrims) and greatly reduced populations when they first arrived.

Sympathy for Native Americans and admiration for their cultures in no way requires a belief in European or American genocide. As Jared Diamond's book (and countless others) makes clear, the mass migration of Europeans to the New World and the rapid displacement and replacement of Native populations is hardly a unique interchange in human history. On six continents, such shifting populations – with countless cruel invasions and occupations and social destructions and replacements - have been the rule rather than the exception.

The notion that unique viciousness to Native Americans represents our "original sin" fails to put European contact with these struggling Stone Age societies in any context whatever, and only serves the purposes of those who want to foster inappropriate guilt, uncertainty and shame in young Americans.

A nation ashamed of its past will fear its future.

One of the most urgent needs in culture and education for the United States of America is discarding the stupid, groundless and anti-American lies that characterize contemporary political correctness.

The right place to begin is to confront, resist and reject the all-too-common line that our rightly admired forebears involved themselves in genocide.

The early colonists and settlers can hardly qualify as perfect but describing them in Hitlerian, mass-murdering terms represents an act of brain-dead defamation.

Saturday Morning Cartoons: All Fifty States and Their Capitols

Don't jeopardize your chance for sing-a-long fun!

Another way to have fun learning a little about all 50 States.

Saturday Morning Schoolhouse Rock- The Shot Heard 'Round the World

Saturday Morning ABC Schoolhouse Rock

Saturday Morning ABC Schoolhouse Rock

"No More Kings"

Men before Monuments

“Never be separated from the Americans.”
- Winston Churchill, on the eve of his retirement as prime minister in 1955

In their day, both Churchill and Roosevelt were frequently criticised, often savagely, by their countrymen, including legislators who had little knowledge of the behind-the-scenes reality of the war.

In his quarters at the White House over Christmas 1941, the visiting British Prime Minister was in the tub, dictating to an assistant. Coming out of the bathroom, Churchill dropped his towel, and there was the PM, in all his naked glory, pacing and talking. Suddenly there was a knock at the door. "Come in," Churchill said as he turned to face Franklin D. Roosevelt, who apologized and began to retreat. The Prime Minister stopped him. "You see, Mr. President," he quipped, "I have nothing to hide from you." FDR loved it, and later told his secretary Grace Tully with a chuckle, "You know, Grace, he's pink and white all over." After Churchill returned home from this trip, Roosevelt told him, "It is fun to be in the same decade with you."

The Roosevelt-Churchill connection set the tone for a series of relationships between ensuing American Presidents and British Prime Ministers -- Reagan and Thatcher, Bush and Blair -- who were brought together by common interests and shared values. As the wars of the 21st century take shape, George W. Bush and Tony Blair are working in the shadow and style of the Great Men of World War II.- Jon Meacham

Bush and Blair have one essential point completely in hand: sometimes leaders must project power when public opinion—both elite and mass—is against it. Lesser politicians and the press are prone, in Churchill’s phrase, to spin around with “the alacrity of squirrels.” Without Churchill’s defiance from May 1940 forward—defiance fueled by his prayers that FDR would eventually enter the war—Adolf Hitler might well have struck a deal legitimizing the Third Reich’s early and widespread conquests. And without FDR’s deft maneuvering to nudge Americans toward engaging the evil unfolding in Europe, we could be living in a different—and much more troubled and troubling—world.

“Our friendship is the rock on which I build for the future of the world so long as I am one of the builders.”- Winston Churchill in a letter to Franklin Roosevelt in 1945

The Little Known History of Slavery, Part Three

As was pointed out earlier, the moral question of slavery only came up amongst western powers; not in Asia, not in Arabia, not in Africa; but in the West... namely, among the British and American colonialists.

As a side note, In American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regie, Ulrich B. Phillips writes,

Manumissions were in fact so common in the deeds and wills of the men of '76 that the number of colored freemen in the South exceeded thirty-five thousand in 1790 and was nearly doubled in each of the next two decades.

While people like George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson openly expressed their belief that slavery was a profound evil, simply abolishing and freeing slaves was no simple task; in some places, it was legally impossible. These men did more than just talk the talk; and yet, because so many today judge them with 21st century ethics, they are condemned as hypocrites for owning slaves even as they had condemned slavery. Taking into consideration the context of the times that they lived in is vital to understanding why those who were against slavery were often at odds with the abolitionists, let alone with a world that "grew up" on the institution of slavery.

Such simpleminded, intellectual laziness and ignorance is what leads liberal do-gooders like Marguerite Talley-Hughes, a kindergarten teacher at Jefferson Elementary School in Berkeley, to be offended by the name of the school. Over 2 years ago, there was a push by teachers and parents to have the name changed from "Jefferson" to "Sequoia". One parent said,

the debate over Jefferson's slave-owning background convinced her 9-year-old son Eli Baum, who had intended to vote against the name change to ultimately put down "Sequoia" on his ballot.

"I said, Why did you vote for Sequoia over Jefferson?' and he said, Because Jefferson owned slaves,'"

Back when this issue was in the news, Dennis Prager ridiculed the fact that they saw fit to allow students to vote on the issue at all. Students who are children of elementary school age, being allowed to make adult decisions. How impoverished the student's education is, that all he knows of Thomas Jefferson is that he's a bad man to look up to as a role model and national hero, because he "owned slaves". You know...there is a reason why adults are adults and children are children; why the voting age is set at 18, and why there is a legalized drinking age, movie ratings, etc.

Fortunately, after much heated debate, the school board voted 3-2 to keep the Jefferson name intact, going against the wishes of the Jefferson Elementary School community, which did vote to change the name to "Sequoia". Ironically,

even with that name, the school district cannot quite dodge the slavery connotations. Some community members have pointed out that under Chief Sequoia's leadership in the early 19th century, the Cherokee nation owned more than 1,500 black slaves.

A spokesman for the Berkeley Unified School District, Mark Coplan, acknowledged that Chief Sequoia "presumably owned slaves and was rather barbaric," but he emphasized that the proposed new name would honor the sequoia tree, not the Cherokee leader.

Among other names that were considered:

Ohlone; Rose; Peace; Cesar Chavez, the farm worker organizer; Ralph Bunche, a United Nations diplomat; Sojourner Truth, a leader in the abolitionist movement; and Florence McDonald, a former Berkeley council member.

Among those names listed, does anyone think that any person so honored is morally pure and absent of flaw and defect?

Another school in the district, Columbus Elementary School, was renamed Rosa Parks Elementary School (with intense debates that almost had it renamed "Cesar Chavez"). James Garfield Middle School was changed in 1968 to Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School. had renamed "Abraham Lincoln Elementary" to "Malcolm X Elementary" in the 70's.

The name changes in and of themselves don't bother me; but the possible motives behind those changes does. It is feckless narcissism.

To go back to Jefferson and the slave-owning issue where 3 teachers and staffers wrote a letter to the Teacher-Parents Association stating that they were "increasingly uncomfortable to work at a site whose name honors a slaveholder", perhaps the following information might make them feel a bit softer toward our 3rd President of the United States:

One of the early battles that was lost [in the anti-slavery sentiments growing amongst colonialists] was Jefferson's first draft of the Declaration of Independence, which criticized King George III for having enslaved Africans and for over-riding colonial Virginia's attempt to ban slavery. The Continental Congress removed that phrase under pressure from representatives from the South.

When Jefferson drafted a state constitution for Virginia in 1776, his draft included a clause prohibiting any more importation of slaves an, in 1783, Jefferson included in a new draft of a Virginia constitution a proposal for gradual emancipation of slaves. He was defeated in both these efforts. on the national scene, Jefferson returned to the battle once again in 1784, proposing a law declaring slavery illegal in all western territories of the country as it existed at the that time. Such a ban would have kept slavery out of Alabama and Mississippi. The bill lost by one vote, that of a legislator too sick to come and vote. Afterwards, Jefferson said that the fate "of millions unborn" was "hanging on the tongue of one man, and heaven was silent in that awful moment."

Three years later, however, Congress compromised by passing the Northwest Ordinance, making slavery illegal in the upper western territories, while allowing it in the lower western territories. Congress was later authorized to ban the African slave trade and Jefferson, now President, urged that they use that authority to stop Americans "from all further participation in those violations of human rights which has been so long continued on the unoffending inhabitants of Africa. Congress followed his urging.

Abstract moral decisions are much easier to make on paper or in a classroom in later centuries than in the midst of the dilemmas actually faced by those living in very different circumstances, including serious dangers.

One way to understand the constraints of the times and their effects on public attitudes is to examine the difference between the way that many in nineteenth-century America saw the slave trade, as distinguished from the way that they saw slavery itself. If the institution of slavery and the presence of millions of slaves were facts of life, within which many decision-makers felt trapped by having inherited the consequences of decisions made by others in generations before them, the continuing trade in slaves, whether from Africa or within the United States, was a contemporary problem that was within their control. Thus, decades before slavery was abolished, the United States joined in the outlawing of the international slave trade. Even many Americans not yet ready to support the abolition of slavery as an institution nevertheless made the bringing of more slaves from Africa a capital offense in the United States.

The moral distinction between slave trading and the continuation of slavery as an institution might be hard for some in later centuries to understand because, in the abstract, there is no moral difference. Only in the concrete circumstances faced by the people of the times was there a practical social difference.

Thomas Sowell concludes,

Both the present and the future are at stake when we look at the past. What lessons we draw from that past depend on whether it is viewed narrowly or against the broader background of world history.

The teachers at Jefferson Elementary School would do well to enrich their children's education if they would read a bit of Thomas Sowell. Certainly, that other Thomas for which their school is named, deserves better than to simply be known to school children as "slaveholder". Thomas Jefferson, a multi-faceted, complex personality on the world stage, deserves better; and his nation's children deserve better. George Washington....Thomas Jefferson...Abraham Lincoln...these are all American heroes worthy of honor and national pride.

Thomas Sowell excerpts indentured into this post, from the chapter, "The Real History of Slavery", in Black Rednecks and White Liberals

Previous entries:
The Little Known History of Slavery, Part One
The Little Known History of Slavery, Part Two