Coming to grips with the American Civil War | Hacker News Reader

Coming to grips with the American Civil War

nate.org

42 pointsbinarynate151 comments

cities like Indianapolis and the ability for all Hoosiers to live freely without the fear of what lies on the other side of the Ohio River.

Whoo, boy, someone needs to go read about Indianapolis and its relation to the Ku Klux Klan. What a black person needed to fear up until at least the 1980s was firmly north of the Ohio river (the Indiana side). Need gas? Stop somewhere other than Martinsville (to the south) or Elwood (to the north).

I grew up in Indiana, and it was no bastion of civil rights. In fact, one of the motivating factors to moving the hell out of there was when the county prosecutor for Indianapolis' county said that a car full of black young men was probable cause for a traffic stop (Stephen Goldsmith, circa 1990 or so). The day after our wedding in the early 90s, it took a little longer to get out of Indianapolis for our honeymoon because there was a KKK rally downtown clogging up the works. (Granted, it was probably half dozen pathetic old men in Halloween costumes, but still...)

So let's not glamorize Indiana as this safe haven for black folks. Maybe it is now, 25 years after we moved (EDIT: ya know, my classmates still live there, so no, it probably isn't), but within my lifetime it has been anything but.

Born in Indiana, and at one point something like 40% of adult men belonged to the Klan (in the 20s-30s). The state government was controlled by the Klan. In rural areas, the Klan is still very active. Indianapolis has a large Black population, but suffers oppression via systematic racist to this day.

Thanks for your perspective on this. I sometimes see mentions of the KKK's presence in Indianapolis (what comes to mind is the city government in the 1920's), but I haven't yet pulled on that thread to learn more like I should. I especially didn't know about the continuing issues into the 80s and 90s. It sounds like there's much more to the picture that I should learn about.

Many residents of northern states despised the black population that they absorbed after the Civil War ended. It was essentially an economic refugee crisis for the working class there. The Cincinnati area was full of what amounted to German-Catholic draft-dodgers (from the 1848 wars) who helped slaves across the Ohio River because they were just as marginalized and figured they had nothing to lose by doing what their religion demanded.

A question: in Britain slave-owners were compensated by the state when slavery was abolished. Many think slavery would not have ended without this, as egregious as it seems. Whilst it was expensive - the tax payer has only in the last 10 years paid down the debt - it arguably averted violence through the transition.

May I ask anyone more knowledgeable than myself why this approach - ie payment of compensation - was not considered in the US at the time?

There are several letters from Lincoln on the subject, calculating the cost of compensated emancipation v. the cost of one day or one month of the war. My recollection is that he couldn't get the border-state legislatures to go for it.

https://history.house.gov/Historical-Highlights/1800-1850/Th...

For some number of years, even the discussion of slavery bans was prohibited in US Congress.

Because ending slavery was only really on the table once the civil war was won. The war didn’t start over whether or not the US would end slavery, only over whether or not we’d end its expansion into new territories.

That seems like a distinction without a difference. The fear of not expanding it was firmly rooted in the fact that once there were more free states than slave states, the abolitionists would do something as unthinkable (to the disgusting insurrectionist southerners anyway): acknowledge that melanin does not make someone subhuman property.

The sad part is not much has changed. Those states are still full of people who fear melanin.

How do you get to the point of debating compensation for slaveholders without first seriously debating the abolishment of slavery? It’s a necessary first step.

There is a difference, obviously the slave states saw the direction things were going, but to the question at hand it’s a material distinction.

> May I ask anyone more knowledgeable than myself why this approach - ie payment of compensation - was not considered in the US at the time?

Because abolition (with or without compensation) didn't have sufficient backing in the US to be a serious policy option until after the Confederacy made it viable by pulling most of the slave states into rebellion.

While the new Republican Party was largely ideologically abolitionist, they could only compete effectively by running on a platform of explicitly deferring abolition in the interest of preserving the Union. The current policy debate was over things like whether and under what conditions to allow expansion of slavery into new territories and states, not abolishing it where it already existed. The South expected that falling short of their preferences on this would eventually lead to abolition on some terms, of course, which led to the rebellion to prevent that from ever being an issue.

Battle Cry of Freedom mentioned that prior to the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln offered to compensate the rebelling states 15% of the total value of their slaves (also hinting that this was better than not getting anything should they wait longer). The South rebuffed this offer. I don't think the book discussed how he landed on the 15% figure. My guess is that the number of slaves was so great that 100% compensation would be more expensive than the cost of seeing the war to its end.

It was proposed but never got any serious traction because the slavery situation in the US was radically different than in Britain.

British slaves almost all lived in the colonies not in Britain itself. Freeing all the British slaves caused huge changes in the colonies but it didn't change things at home that much. Freeing all the slaves in the US is a much different ballgame because those former slaves are now citizens living right next door to you. The Southern States feared what would happen if the slaves they had been abusing for generations were freed and were given political power. In some southern states like Mississippi (if memory serves) the number of slaves was greater than the non slave population.

That's just one of many big practical reasons, there are many more, but it also can't go unmentioned that the US had built up a racist cult around slavery by this time. It wasn't just that the economic system of the south was intrinsically linked with Slavery, it was that the culture was built around the degradation of an entire race of people. They didn't keep slaves just because of money, but because they honestly believed that subjugating them was "for their own good". You can't buy someone out of a belief like that.

This is rigorously documented by the way. They believed they were morally right and didn't shy away from writing it down. All the declarations of Secession by the Confederate states contain similar language but the Texas one is particularly direct on this point:

"We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable." https://www.tsl.texas.gov/ref/abouttx/secession/2feb1861.htm...

I echo oramit's message above or below me, and will add Haiti as another datapoint to highlight the European and American difference.

France agreed to sever ties with its colonial possession but at an extraordinary cost to the Haitians who would remit payments for the next 125 years. This was only possible because Haiti was a country with its own resources.

Contrast that with the American South; the slaves had nothing to offer to reimburse their owners.

Sometimes I feel the removal of TR's statue was an overreaction, and then you recall this shit, and it gives pause.

Slavery was legally abolished in the US only after secession and in the midst of a total war between the Confederacy and the US. Since it was total war, the US had no enforcement capability in the South short of military conquest. At that point the South were in a very poor negotiating position.

Feels like a story half-told without looking past the war to the failure of reconstruction policy post-Lincoln.

That's a good point. I look forward to learning more about reconstruction, which will be the next stop on my reading journey. Like the civil war, I remember very little of the details of reconstruction that were covered in school.

One could easily argue that true reconstruction was not really tried in the Democrat-dominated South until well after the 20th-c. Civil Rights Era. It was only with radical Republicans' reform efforts culminating in the 1980s that the formerly backward, socially archaic "South" was turned into the free-wheeling and economically successful 'Sunbelt' of the present day.

This is often overlooked by many political commentators who look at the otherwise unexplained, sudden popularity of Republicanism in the Sunbelt, and make up weird theories such as "the parties must have switched", or something. The reality is of course far subtler and more interesting than that!

I highly recommend Eric Foners book The Second Founding on the Reconstruction period.

Well, for what it's worth, "Battle Cry of Freedom" is only the sixth volume in the Oxford History of the United States. The following volume, "The Republic for Which It Stands" by Richard White, covers the 30-year period following the war.

It's not like it was different from pretty much any modern post-war fuckups. Exit strategies never make it past any paper they were ever written. It's not like after hostilities the feelings, beliefs, etc of people on either side have suddenly changed. In fact, I would venture a guess that they feel even stronger.

This is why I feel like the people were told to wipe out every man, woman, and child in stories from biblical times. If you're going to do it, do it. Otherwise, people are left with sentiments that will fester and eventually boil over again. However, even in the biblical stories, that doesn't happen, and the two sides are bitter ever since.

Regardless, the only winning move (to any war) is not to play.

Otherwise, people are left with sentiments that will fester and eventually boil over again.

This does seem to very often be the pattern, which makes it pretty surprising to me in retrospect how smoothly Germany and Japan have adapted to the post-World-War-2 international order. They aren't completely nonexistent, but German Nazi groups and Japanese imperialist groups certainly have not dominated the post-war political scene, and democracy seems pretty firmly entrenched in both those countries.

So, perhaps you don't need to wipe out every man, woman, and child a la Deuteronomy, and there is some sort of post-war intervention that can be successful in creating a lasting peace. I don't have a much stronger conclusion than "sometimes it is possible", though.

Don't forget about time. Those small groups become larger groups with time. WWII hasn't been that long ago relatively speaking. Since the Civil War, it seems, there has been enough time for certain ideas to have grown to a large enough numbers of people that we are where we are today. This is sounding dangerously close to me supporting wiping out entire swaths of people, which I'm absolutely not. It's understanding the reasonings for those that do isn't so illogical. It just doesn't sit well with anyone that feels differently.

>Germany and Japan have adapted to the post-World-War-2 international order. They aren't completely nonexistent, but German Nazi groups and Japanese imperialist groups certainly have not dominated the post-war political scene, and democracy seems pretty firmly entrenched in both those countries.

Germany and Japan no longer romanticize and idolize revolutionary violence and nationalism, whereas the US very much still does in the mythology that its built around gun culture and the Founding Fathers - in no small part because the US suffered relatively little for its part in World War 2, and never actually learned the lessons the rest of the world did.

> Germany and Japan no longer romanticize and idolize revolutionary violence and nationalism

There's plenty of idolization of it in Germany still, with the prevalent myth of a "clean" Wermacht. Often the proponents of the myth end up unwittingly parroting transparent Nazi-era propaganda about the supposed heroic deeds of whatever random, obscure German military figure.

Totally agree.

I'm convinced that the failure of reconstruction explains the current state of US politics, perhaps better than an analysis of the civil war itself.

The author mentions that: "Southerners adopted beliefs that justified slavery as a moral good, such as the view that slavery benefited slaves because it offered them a better life than they would otherwise have as freed people."

The law was changed, but this belief was still held by the defeated southerner ruling class, who began using weasel tactics as a method of enforcement (example: Jim Crowe). These tactics were initially fought by federal power, but the political will to carry on this fight faded over time. I fret to think of the US that could have been, had this fight been given the attention it deserved.

I’ve wondered recently if the US civil war really needed to happen and if the states and world would be better off if it hadn’t. We are taught it was necessary as kids but after learning more I’m not so sure.

First, slavery was abolished by the late 1800s across the Americas and elsewhere. It was going to happen regardless. Brasil was by far the largest slave state, a fact few US folks realize. Other countries didn’t need a war to end it. Then there’s the death toll. Next, too much concentration of power after WWII leading to today’s war machine looking around for things to do. The US was founded on a Union, but a Union you can’t leave is really a prison.

Today’s polarization is also supported by having a larger country with different views pulling in different directions. Smaller countries seem to get in less trouble.

>I’ve wondered recently if the US civil war really needed to happen and if the states and world would be better off if it hadn’t. We are taught so as kids but learning more I’m not so sure.

It certainly would have been better if it didn't happen, 720K lives and countless fortunes and the decimation of 1/2 the land mass. Reconstruction was pretty horrible for ex-slaves as well. Of course slaves suffer being slaves for longer if there was no war. No one would ever know how long it would have taken to end slavery without the war, but I doubt it would exist today if things had continued without it.

>Today’s polarization is also supported by having a larger country with different views pulling in different directions.

I'm convinced today's polarization is a lot of theatre intended to divide. I analog it to crowds cheering different WWE wrestlers during the match, only to have the wrestlers have a beer together after the show.

> I'm convinced today's polarization is a lot of theatre intended to divide

Media definitely contributes, however this was an argument noted during the writing of the Declaration of Independence. It is real.

That's a decent summary of the role of slavery in the war and I would only nitpick a few things. That said, it sounds like the author might have come to those (correct) conclusions by reading a single book. This can be dangerous and I would caution everyone to read a couple of books on contentious topics just to make sure they're getting a rounded view. (And that introduces the danger of both-sides-ism, which is its own problem. It ain't always easy.)

Nice summary! Next read ‘Forever Free’ by Eric Foner to learn about Reconstruction. Those two books should be required reading in American high school history classes.

Thank you! I'll take you up on that recommendation. "Battle Cry of Freedom" ends abruptly at the close of the war, and I was just thinking last night that the next book I read should be on reconstruction.

In addition to that, "Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality" by Richard Kluger is a really good read.

Adding this to my list as well, interested to read some of Foner’s work.

I already had Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 by W.E.B. Du Bois on my to-read list, if anyone has read either/both I’d be interested to hear a comparison.

Follow it up with "The Color of Law" by Richard Rothstein to understand how the decisions made during Reconstruction impacted the 20th and 21st centuries.

Great analysis, and also, contrary to popular belief, reflects what I learned in history class in school in my red state in the 1990s.

Thank you!

My reading of McPherson suggested Lee's victories during the Seven Days Battles led to Lincoln's resolve to free the slaves. Up until that point, the North was hoping to quickly force the South into submission with their institutions largely intact. But Lee's unexpected success raised the stakes into an all-or-nothing ragnarok in which the South, along with slavery, had to be annihilated.

One important aspect about the war was the sheer disparity in both manpower and industry between the two sides: 21 million in the union vs 9 million in the confederate, 3.5 million (!) of which are slaves. It really is a wonder that the CSA held out for so long. Christopher Caldwell mentioned that the war somewhat resembles the British Empire crushing a colonial subject in this regard.

It takes quite a while to mobilize an army across a continent on horse and wagon. Not to mention several of the Union generals were incompetent and had to be removed after they failed to deliver.

The CSA had the military advantage of operating almost always on its own territory. This had considerable benefits in intelligence-gathering. It also had advantages in shorter supply lines, until the Federal troops got over inhibitions about taking whatever was lying around.

One nuance this summary misses is that there was a serious hesitancy among Northern politicians to seriously address the slavery issue. While many believed it was abominable, they didn't step up to stop it because it would shake up the status quo which by and large benefited them.

True, the status quo benefited them. But also, when the status quo did get shaken up, it resulted in half a million dead. A leader with any foresight would hesitate to open that particular Pandora's Box.

That's true, and there may have been fewer casualties if such a leader had stepped up sooner

Correct, and don't discount the generations of men and women born into bondage because of the inability of northern leaders to step up sooner. It's a little insulting to suggest the half million soldiers dead are the cost of the Civil War, when it's also the millions who suffered from the existence of the institution of slavery.

Or the USA would cease to exist.

The fact that this issue needed to be settled by a brutal war puts into perspective just how difficult of a problem this was to solve.

If this issue was tackled earlier, it's very possible that the country would have split into two factions, which would then compete with one another during westward expansion, triggering a conflict that would turn out to be much more devastating.

The most interesting case to compare with in this regard is Britain, which freed its slaves with essentially zero cost in lives--by paying off the slave owners. I'm not sure that could ever have been on the table in the US given the position abolitionists took, but it's interesting to wonder how things might have gone if it had been.

Brazil freed its slaves with no compensation at all (in either direction).

I disagree here. What could the North have done differently (post 1792) to seriously address the slavery issue? The Southern states had enough political power to put off any major reform; e.g. they had enough clout to engineer the dreadful Dred Scott decision.

Highly recommend reading “Confederates in the Attic” by Tony Horwitz. It gave a better view of the South’s psyche around the Civil War

A materialist take on this is also that advances in technology made slavery a useless institution towards maximizing the interests of capitalists and that permitted its withering away.

Slavery was a market for people in themselves, but the proletariat is a market for their labor power. Labor power is superfluous in form. This change in institutions brought about by the possibilities of technological advancements kept the rates of profit up and made slavery null in advanced countries. Similar to serfdom.

I've seen people make the argument that the Constitution is inherently corrupted because it was written by white slave owners, and that it doesn't represent all people because there was a time when it didn't represent all people (slaves).

It's obviously horrible that slavery happened, but what would add insult to injury would be to throw out a brilliant set of ideas because the flawed human founders didn't follow them in totality.

Attacking the Framers for their hypocrisy this is really backwards when you think about it. Slavery is one of the oldest institutions in human society. The Bible and Quran also describe slavery without condemning it as fundamentally evil. Opposition to being an enslaved group was, of course, universal, but that didn't necessarily give rise to an opposition to slavery as a practice. The Old Testament describes God punishing Egypt for enslaving the Jews, but doesn't condemn the practice subsequently.

What's notable about European Christians, including the Founders, isn't that they practiced slavery, but that they recognized that it was categorically evil (not just evil in particular applications). The Founders laid the intellectual and legal framework for eliminating slavery in America, and ultimately world-wide, through American influence. For example, I'm not sure the Muslim world would have eliminate slavery even by today without Western pressure: https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/international/w.... Criticizing the "hypocrites" who only took the first steps towards dismantling an institution that they inherited from antiquity is odd.

Do you have evidence that all of the founders thought slavery was categorically evil? I doubt this very much but could be wrong. Apparently they thought forming a more cohesive federal system was more important than abolishing slavery. As to what you wrote about the Quran and the Bible. From my perspective that provides convincing evidence that the supreme entity described in those books does not provide a reasonable example of “good”.

"... He has waged cruel War against human Nature itself, violating its most sacred Rights of Life & 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 to 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 upon whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former Crimes committed against the LIBERTIES of one People, with Crimes which he urges them to commit against the Lives of another. ..."

A passage which was removed from the Declaration of Independence in order to avoid unwanted controversy over the issue in Great Britain, which was yet to abolish slavery themselves. (It was finally abolished in 1833.)

I'm not sure about all of them, but here's a good summary. Take it for what you will; as always, real life is a lot more nuanced than a summary paper.

https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/teaching-res...

Pretty much every Founder thought that slavery was a huge political shit-sandwich that made Federalization difficult, and they all hoped that the Federal system would sow the seeds for its eventual abolition.

The infamous Cornerstone Speech was an interesting view into the Founders' perspective. It was the speech given by the Vice President of the unrecognized Confederate States of America, describing the Confederate view of the Founders' philosophy: https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/1861stephens.asp

> ...the new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions-African slavery as it exists among us-the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson, in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split." He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution were, that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with; but the general opinion of the men of that day was, that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the Constitution, was the prevailing idea at the time. The Constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly used against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the idea of a Government built upon it-when the "storm came and the wind blew, it fell."

This seems like tea-leaf-reading. Neither Jefferson nor Monroe freed a significant number of their slaves --- they owned many --- even from their death beds.

I mean, it's as straightforward a characterization of Jefferson's views as it gets, and from contemporaries.

I don't know about Monroe, but Jefferson was unable to free his slaves because he was deeply in debt (https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2015/07/the-debt-and-dea...). He was land (and slave) rich, but cash poor, and had he freed his slaves, his estate would have remained in debt. Jefferson also outlawed the international slave trade, which isn't really something one would be inclined to do if they didn't feel that slavery was an evil that needed to be abolished.

Jefferson could have freed his slaves and left his estate in an irrecoverable debt for the greater cause of abolishing slavery, and at best you could argue that his unwillingness to do that constitutes some form of hypocrisy. That said, it's not at all obvious that his unwillingness to do that suggests that he _wasn't_ opposed to the institution of slavery itself, any more than a socialist/communist today that uses an iPhone is inherently a hypocrite.

So for the financial stability of his estate he kept people in bondage and yet believed that this said bondage was evil. You don't consider that a massive hypocrisy? It is extremely hypocritical especially in light of his views on usufruct.

Yeah, I mean, say what you will about the moral character of the founding documents (I think they did a pretty good job for the time, minus the slavery clauses), the question of the founders integrity isn't much in doubt! They were rank hypocrites.

> minus the slavery clauses

Which slavery clauses? In fact, the only clauses in the US Constitution that addressed slavery in any form (the Three-Fifths Compromise) were actually incentives to abolish slavery.

> They were rank hypocrites

Sure, I think the crux of the debate is whether or not that hypocrisy is one that can be overlooked given the context of the time, and all other deeds/actions.

We're so far removed from the institution of slavery today that the tradeoff of riddling your descendants with debt by freeing slaves seems absurd (and it obviously is, in 2022), but back then it was likely a far more nuanced tradeoff. That's not to say that it's excusable — some of the Founders would have disagreed with where Jefferson ultimately came out on that trade-off — but just that it would have been far more debatable back then than it is today.

My analogy with the modern anti-capitalist that chooses to be a shareholder in corporations out of necessity to participate in today's society is an attempt to draw a comparison with an institution that is seen as less clear cut by _today's_ moral standards.

I don't think you can plausibly win your argument that the 3/5ths Compromise had the intent, let alone the effect, of abolishing slavery. But I don't have to have that argument with you, because you've forgotten about the other slavery clauses.

As for the hypocrisy of the founders, you have only to reconcile their own words about the morality of slavery with their actions.

> I don't think you can plausibly win your argument that the 3/5ths Compromise had the intent, let alone the effect, of abolishing slavery.

I can try!

The slave states hoped to have their slaves count has whole persons on the matter of counting the population for apportionment of seats in the House of Representatives. This would have greatly increased their power without any meaningful representation for the people in question. The Three-Fifths compromise diluted the power of the slave states by only counting them as 3/5 of a Person. If the slave states wanted more seats in the House (and by extension, more power), all they had to do was free their slaves. That's the incentive.

> But I don't have to have that argument with you, because you've forgotten about the other slavery clauses.

Again, which slavery clauses? I'm just asking you to be specific. If it's as straightforward as you think it is, this shouldn't be hard for you.

> you have only to reconcile their own words about the morality of slavery with their actions.

Which society's morality? That of the 18th Century, or that of today? I think the entire point is that the morality of slavery has changed over time. Public opinion about homosexuality has dramatically changed just in the last 20 years. The morality of homophobia in the 18th century is very different from its morality today. That's the whole point. While the Founders definitely saw slavery as evil back then, it was still the status quo. The perceived wickedness of the institution even back then was very different from the perceived wickedness of the institution today. Put another way, failing to ratify the 13th Amendment in 1865 would have been really bad. Repealing the 13th Amendment today would be decidedly worse.

It's obviously not hard for me, since I've already cited an academic paper on this thread that spells this out in detail, enumerating the pro-slavery clauses. You can go read it now and we can put aside the discussion of who knew what when. Obviously, your claim that the 3/5ths Compromise is "the only clauses(sic) in the US Constitution that addressed slavery in any form" is trivially refuted --- even removing the words "in any form" from your claim, it's still false.

> If the slave states wanted more seats in the House (and by extension, more power), all they had to do was free their slaves. That's the incentive.

You arguably get greater returns by keeping your slaves, but practicing forced breeding programs (which very much existed on plantations). If you can get slaves to produce 40% more children than they would without being raped, you end up ahead in representation without giving up your slaves.

> In fact, the only clauses in the US Constitution that addressed slavery in any form (the Three-Fifths Compromise) were actually incentives to abolish slavery.

U.S. Const., article I, section 9: "The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a Tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person."

Thanks, that's another one; but again, the intention of it was to grease the wheels for the slave states to join the Union so that the institution itself may eventually be outlawed. Indeed, Jefferson's outlawing of the international slave trade went into effect on January 1, 1808, not a single day after the limit laid out in Article 1, Section 9.

I don't know anything about the history of that law but it passed the house almost unanimously and the Senate wasn't split along slave/free lines. It didn't have the effect of hurting slavery and it's conceivable the slave-state legislators thought it would boost local production (of slaves)

Read Jefferson's views on usufruct and compare with his desire to maintain his estate's wealth and not free slaves for said wealth. It's hard to not think lowly of a man with such views that are backed up with such actions. Your refusal to condemn Jefferson for his actions is odd. It's not like the man was devoid of praiseworthy actions but he was no saint.

> Your refusal to condemn Jefferson for his actions is odd. It's not like the man was devoid of praiseworthy actions but he was no saint.

You're right, just to take a step back and make it absolutely clear, I definitely condemn Jefferson for his ownership of slaves. That said, I view his praiseworthy actions as sufficiently admirable as to outweigh his misdeeds, and on net I have a great deal of respect for Jefferson, warts and all. The commentary around maintaining wealth / avoiding bankruptcy is not mean to excuse the trade-off he ultimately had to make, but to make it clear that he wasn't some cartoon villain, even if I disagree with the ultimate trade-off he personally did make.

Nobody's telling you not to respect Jefferson. Where you'll get pushback is in your attempt to say he wasn't a rank hypocrite. He obviously was.

I see, then we're not really disagreeing on much.

On net, one can deeply agree with Jefferson while overlooking (or perhaps even excusing) his alleged hypocrisy, especially considering that his written word carried a lot of weight in helping to legitimize the abolitionist cause (indeed, to the chagrin of the Confederates, per the Cornerstone Speech).

All I'll say in addition is that the modern day cultural effort to eradicate our Founding Fathers from our institutions (i.e. "telling [us] not to respect Jefferson") is anathema to that.

I don't agree with that last assertion, and would counter that our reverence for the founders and their documents has papered over a lot of fucked up shit baked into our governance (the fact that a Wyoming vote is 50x more valuable than a California vote is hard to get past). But reasonable people can and do disagree about it.

I don't think reasonable people can disagree about Jefferson being a hypocrite.

> would counter that our reverence for the founders and their documents has papered over a lot of fucked up shit baked into our governance (the fact that a Wyoming vote is 50x more valuable than a California vote is hard to get past).

I'm glad you brought this up, because it, to me, exposes the core of the problem.

The fact that Wyoming's vote is 50x more valuable than California's isn’t unique to the US, and is the case in many Federations that grant co-sovereignty. In Switzerland, the upper house is set up in exactly the same way; the number of people represented by a single seat in their upper house varies by a factor of 45.8, due to the equal representation as opposed to proportional representation. The same is true of the European Union, whose upper house also grants equal representation to Malta and Germany, with a veto power. Ditto Australia. That's exactly what you want if you're trying to balance the needs of a decentralized and heterogenous federation, and that's how the US was set up. This doesn't allow the minority to rule against the majority, but it does allow the minority to protect itself from the majority with a veto power on Federal legislation (but absolutely not for State legislation).

Appealing to anti-slavery is a poor argument against this aspect of Switzerland's system, as is the case for America. Bringing up the Founders' alleged hypocrisy vis-a-vis slavery strikes me as a game of misdirection to poorly argue against the merits of building anti-majoritarian checks that allow minorities to protect themselves from majorities from passing new laws onto them. If you really think that the US should be structured as a weaker Federation (or perhaps even a unitary republic), as opposed to the more strong Federal republic of the status quo, you can argue that on the merits (and to be sure, it's certainly debatable!) without conflating it with slavery, or ad hominem attacks against the Founders. It would be tantamount to attacking the merits of having a strong central bank by appealing to Alexander Hamilton's philandering adultery.

I’d also add that appealing to slavery hypocrisy is a particularly poor line of attack on a strong Federal system with a Senate-like institution, because the U.S. Senate was proposed by the Free States (New Jersey Plan, Connecticut Compromise), not the more populous slave States, which wanted a purely proportionally apportioned legislature (Virginia Plan).

> I don't think reasonable people can disagree about Jefferson being a hypocrite.

Reasonable people can absolutely disagree about whether Jefferson's hypocrisy was justifiable, given the morals of the time. And further, reasonable people can support the "fucked up shit baked into our governance" as features and not bugs, and appeal to Jefferson (and Madison) in doing so.

> The fact that Wyoming's vote is 50x more valuable than California's is the case for any Federation that grants co-sovereignty

No, it's not.

Co-sovereignty is not incompatible with the different levels of co-sovereign entities all being democratic republics with equal suffrage.

Pretty much every Founder thought that slavery was a huge political shit-sandwich

Who knows what they thought? Chernow was lambasted by historians for embellishing Hamilton's story by making him out to be a hater of slavery.

Written history is no different than any other literary endeavor. To get readers, you need to tell a feel-good story. My cynicism about human nature notwithstanding (as someone who doesn't like confrontation, I'm pretty sure I'd be on the wrong side of history more often than not), the book-pushing reason alone is enough to doubt cherry-tree-chopping, log-cabin-building portrayals of our marquee statesmen.

But the big difference is that, unlike Chernow, many (if not all) Confederates were contemporaries of the Founders, including Jefferson. It would be like modern historians today trying to work out Reagan's political positions.

And the Cornerstone Speech is really just the most on-the-nose characterization of Jefferson's views, but our understanding of his views is the product of analysis of a variety of his own writings and actions (including, famously, the outlawing of the international slave trade): https://www.umbc.edu/che/tahlessons/pdf/historylabs/Where_Di...

And finally, _even if_ one were to concede that Jefferson was somehow a dishonest broker and was secretly an apologist for slavery, it has very little bearing as to the merits of the values enshrined in the US Constitution. That some of the Founders happened to own slaves doesn't render the principles of the freedom of speech invalid. That some of the Founders happened to own slaves doesn't render the principles of a restrained government with checks and balances invalid.

And I'll assume you also believe LBJ didn't harbor a racist thought when he passed landmark civil rights legislation as a senator and as president.

We don't believe our politicians' words match their thoughts even when televised live. Why should we then take them at their word from crumbling parchment dating back hundreds of years?

Well, at least we can agree that their innermost thoughts are largely besides the point of what the Constitution actually says.

> And I'll assume you also believe LBJ didn't harbor a racist thought when he passed landmark civil rights legislation as a senator and as president.

No, actually, in fact, my argument is that LBJ's passage of landmark civil rights legislation despite any other shortcomings is admirable, and on-net he is justifiably respected for it, to the extent that politicians today still appeal to LBJ and the desire to govern like LBJ.

> We don't believe our politicians' words match their thoughts even when televised live. Why should we then take them at their word from crumbling parchment dating back hundreds of years?

We judge politicians based on a variety of things; their words, the legislation they pass, etc. If the legislation they pass helps drive progress (in whichever dimension/axis) that weighs heavily on how society views them. The "crumbling parchment dating back hundreds of years" contains a variety of ideals/provisions/rights/protections that one could conceivably support today without also supporting slavery. The country takes them at their word from that piece of parchment because the country, largely speaking, buys into the ideals laid out within it.

> Well, at least we can agree that their innermost thoughts are largely besides the point of what the Constitution actually says.

Precisely, and one can be in favor of what the Constitution actually says today without ever condoning racism or slavery.

I can tell from your parallel ongoing thread you're having trouble differentiating between the public and private aspects of a politician's life, and how the two can often be at odds.

I find myself spending way too much time trying to get twenty-something strangers on the internet to acknowledge their confusion. I've not yet succeeded, and I don't think I'll get a win here either.

> I can tell from your parallel ongoing thread you're having trouble differentiating between the public and private aspects of a politician's life, and how the two can often be at odds.

I don't think you're fully comprehending either thread: whether or not the public and private aspects of a politician's life may be at odds isn't the controversy — whether it matters is. The only way to determine that is by comprehensively evaluating the individual based on both the public and private aspects (as well as possible justifications) of a politician's life, weighted by the net impact of each.

My argument, across all threads, has been that the net impact of the public writings and deeds of Jefferson (Declaration of Independence proclaiming equality/Enlightenment values, US Constitution that's endured to this day sans slavery, public writings that lent authority to, and legitimized the abolition of slavery) outweigh the negative impacts of his private life, in my opinion, and in the opinion of many others. Ditto LBJ. Further, there are several circumstances I've cited that, at the very least, make the justifiability of the private aspects of Jefferson's life (idk about LBJ) plausibly debatable.

> I find myself spending way too much time trying to get twenty-something strangers on the internet to acknowledge their confusion. I've not yet succeeded, and I don't think I'll get a win here either.

If you've not yet succeeded and haven't been able to "get a win", it could also conceivably be the case that you're wrong, or missing context. All I'm to acknowledge here is that you seem to not think very highly of Jefferson (or LBJ). You're entitled to that opinion, but you also have to acknowledge that it's neither objective nor obvious.

I'm also in my 30s, for what it's worth.

> Do you have evidence that all of the founders thought slavery was categorically evil?

Not all, but many of the founding fathers were strong abolitionists: https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/03/america-founding-father...

> From my perspective that provides convincing evidence that the supreme entity described in those books does not provide a reasonable example of “good”.

Christianity was a primary catalyst of abolitionist sentiment. Virtually every culture believes in their own specialness--European Christians are unusual in their almost fanatical commitment to equality of all before God's eyes. This was not lost on pro-slavery advocates of the time. The Vice President of the Confederacy, for example, condemned abolitionists as religious zealots, while portraying slavery as being consistent with science: https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/cornersto... ("Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science. It has been so even amongst us. Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well, that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics.")

Remember, this is the 19th century, before we understood anything about genetics. The notion that all people were really equal, despite e.g. the vastly different technological development of Europe versus Africa, was a religious or at least moral belief. It wasn't a fact you could prove with the science of the time.

....European Christians are unusual in their almost fanatical commitment to equality of all before God's eyes.

At the time they did not overall believe this. At least not in deed. Some did and most didn't. Indeed, 100 years after the Civil War major American cities experienced massive declines in population due to the white flight that ensued as a result of desegregation. Also consider Irish treatment of blacks in New York City during the Civil War. There were Biblical justifications for slavery since the book does not outright say it is wrong. One justification was that Ham was cursed.

....isn't that they practiced slavery, but that they recognized that it was categorically evil (not just evil in particular applications).

It simply isn't true that at that the time Europeans more or less universally thought slavery was categorically evil.

>The Bible and Quran also describe slavery without condemning it as fundamentally evil.

The ten commandments were delivered to a band of freed slaves. "Thou shall not steal" was closer to "thou shall not kidnap (steal people)".

And those freed slaves themselves practiced slavery, and capturing female sex-slaves in warfare was explicitly permitted by Moses. The Old Testament also contains numerous laws and customs about the treatment and adjudication of slaves, no outright condemnation.

And the New Testament, Paul tells slaves in Ephesians to be loyal to their masters, and in Colossians, for slave masters to treat their slaves fairly. 1 Peter 2:18 even tells slaves to obey their masters when they're abusive.

Neither Jews nor Christians saw slavery as fundamentally evil, rather they saw the relationship of master to slave as simply a reflection of humanity's relationship to God. Man was made in the image of God, and man was to God as a slave was to their master - something metaphorically touched upon numerous times in the New Testament.

The ethics of the Bible are a product of the time and culture in which any part of it was devised, so it not being explicitly anti-slavery isn't surprising. Concepts like universal human equality (Kings and nobles not having divine right) and slavery being objectively evil are progressive, post-Biblical ideals.

> And those freed slaves themselves practiced slavery

Then again, freed Black slaves ended up practicing slavery of other Blacks in Liberia, of all places. Truly, there's nothing new under the sun.

Nobody's asking to throw out the good ideas, most people raising that argument would just like people to stop treating it as an unerring sacred biblical text that can, and has never done any wrong.

It's obviously horrible that slavery happened, but what would add insult to injury would be to throw out a brilliant set of ideas

Were it not for slavery, we arguably wouldn't have to put up with the Electoral College, and I would not place the Electoral College in the bucket of "brilliant ideas". Instead I argue, "see? Make too many compromises, and you end up with bullshit like the Electoral College, where white men get to override the wishes of the general population because those voters can't be trusted."

My point is that, yes, it's obviously horrible that slavery happened. Now, how much of our governmental system is the result of "brilliant ideas" and how much is the result of appeasing those that feel they can own other human beings as property?

Why does the mechanism of election for the head of the federal executive branch matter so much? Because the federal government has so much relevance to the matters of the individuals living in the states.

The founders didn't care that much about maximizing fairness per person. They were trying to maximize fairness per state. The electoral college works fine for a federal government that's mostly confined to managing the states themselves which is what the founders were trying to build.

This stuff has been discussed in immense detail on AskHistorians, with citations to various historians (often with background on those historians for context), and the best you can likely say here about the electoral college is that it was a janky hack created to resolve an interminable squabble about apportionment. It had supporters among anti-slavery politicians and was uniformly supported by pro-slavery politicians, because it worked synergistically with the overt pro-slavery clauses in the constitution to tilt political power to the slave states.

"arguably" is doing a lot of work if you say that slavery was the reason for the E.C.

The electoral college has little if anything to do with slavery. That is all small state vs big state. It's mostly a wash for slave vs free states.

The big slave vs free state issue was how to count slaves and that ended with the 3/5s compromise where slaves counted as 3/5ths of a free person.

Go look at the state populations in 1789. The small states and big states were roughly evenly divided between free states and slave states.

Anti-majoritarian structures have nothing to do with "white men." They exist in many countries, like Switzerland, where the voters are overwhelmingly white. Indeed, for most of the 20th century, the Electoral College benefitted Black people and immigrants, because rural states voted Democrat. The FDR coalition featured rural whites and minorities against affluent coastal elites.

Wait, hold on. That logic doesn't work at all. For most of the 20th century, the Democratic party included the nation's staunchest supporters of Jim Crow. The Democratic and Republican parties of the first have of the 20th century have almost no relationship whatsoever to their modern incarnations --- we were, for much of the 20th century, effectively a four-party state, with two major factions of both major parties.

The institutional Democratic party didn't even meaningfully challenge the segregationist solid south until '48, and Thurmond didn't switch parties until the '60s.

It works well enough wrt. Black people in the North, where pervasive segregation and disenfranchisement weren't as much of a factor. Mind you, the Democrat coalition GP describes was not an easy one; there was plenty of conflict between often racist labor unions and the Black minority. But the new-comer Blacks in non-segregationist states shared enough commonality of interest with non-elite Whites and immigrants that, on balance, they were willing to join that political group.

If you constrict the logic to the north, then the electoral college isn't doing the thing Rayiner says it's doing; the logic stops working in a different way.

Rayiner seems to be saying that the electoral college ended up benefiting minorities and Blacks, compared to the alternative of not having one. You admit that Democrats outside the former south did not really care about ending segregation for quite some time (by which time the Civil Rights reforms could also count on critically important support from the non-urban-elite faction of 'Stalwart' Republicans), so I'm not sure what would change if we did not "constrict" the logic to the North. Southern disenfranchisement of Black voters simply did not face any kind of unified opposition outside the south prior to the Civil Rights reforms, least of all among Democrats themselves.

The rural Democrats Rayiner says were the beneficiaries of the electoral college were segregationists. The northern Democrats who opposed segregation were not beneficiaries of the electoral college.

This applied to the 'Solid south', but there was plenty of Democrat representation in the more contested states, specifically the Midwest. By contrast, the Northeastern U.S., not generally regarded as "benefiting" from the Electoral College system, were a stronghold of elite, urban, Progressive-leaning Republicans.

I'm not disputing that there were Republicans of the era working to end segregation; I'm disputing that the electoral college worked to the advantage of civil rights. It did not. Had a Republican won a solid south seat of the era, they'd have voted against civil rights as well (and that's exactly what happened after the failure of the Dixiecrat movement). This is a political science dispute, not a partisan one.

Some of those Republicans in office were in fact from the South. U.S. Senators Joseph I. France, John Marshall Butler, John Sherman Cooper and Thruston Ballard Morton come to mind; there might have been others.

Of course those were exceptions; you couldn't get a truly "solid" policy stance against segregation without other pre-conditions and reforms - in essence, attacking the damaging, backward-looking "Lost Cause" mindset at its root by fostering a truly viable and even honorable alternative. This is exactly what was not done, or for that matter even tried, post-Civil War. For better or for worse, the "Lost Cause" was turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Civil Rights laws then forced the issue and the South managed to turn itself around, redefining itself around a new set of values.

> The Democratic and Republican parties of the first have of the 20th century have almost no relationship whatsoever to their modern incarnations

That's a big overstatement, which is apparent given how often modern Democrats reference FDR. The segregationist wing of the Democratic Party was still recognizably Democrats in many respects. They favored labor, they favored a bigger government that invested in infrastructure in the rural south, where many Black people lived. Italian and Irish immigrants were a major constituency.

There is a reason Black people started voting Democrat in the 1930s, even though the party opposed civil rights until the 1960s. They joined the FDR coalition of minorities, rural, and working class whites against affluent white elites. The electoral college naturally puts a thumb on the scale against wealthy urban population centers. Ordinarily, that's a desirable thing.

I'm not lionizing the Democratic party; I'm speaking specifically to civil rights. I'm sure plenty of segregationist Democrats (and many Republicans!) favored labor rights and infrastructure, but none of that matters to the question at hand: the electoral college surely worked against the key issue for Black voters of the time, which was civil rights.

> surely worked against the key issue for Black voters of the time, which was civil rights.

It's not clear to me how salient the issue of civil rights in the south would have been to Blacks outside the south. The fact that they so readily joined a political coalition with labor-unions and lower-class whites suggests that issues other than racism would have been more relevant back in the day. It took a lot of raising-awareness to turn civil rights into something that could be addressed via the political process. (BTW, by and large, the "wealthy, urban population centers" disfavored by the electoral college were hotbeds of Progressive politics, which gave us great Civil Rights wins like, uh, eugenics. Or the modern focus on "white" political identity, replacing a far more intuitive celebration of national heritage (English, German, Eastern-European etc.). Back in the day, this was promoted as a way of fostering unity, but most people would of course disagree with this today. Progressive policymakers did basically zilch to oppose segregation and uplift Blacks; the issue was nowhere near their radar.)

Extremely salient? The segregationist south was blocking national civil rights legislation.

As strange as it might sound today, for much of the 20th century and prior to the Civil Rights-era-proper, broad-based uplifting of Blacks' overall condition towards a broadly middle-class status was judged to be more important than desegregation and civil rights within the Black community itself. Arguably, much of this was really a white Progressive memeplex which got taken up by Blacks themselves (it's not for nothing that this is described as an 'accommodationist' policy), but there was some limited truth to it. The establishment and development of what are today HBCU's was one especially visible outcome of that whole effort.

I mean, I'm familiar with the Booker T. Washington vs. W.E.B. DuBois thing; I'm just saying, the electoral college didn't help Black people just because Democrats benefited from it when they held more racist rural states. The Democratic part of the 1940s and 50s isn't the Democratic party of today. The point here seems pretty simple?

The Democratic party of the 1940s and 50s had some Blacks already in its coalition. And while the racist South was rural and benefited from the electoral college (increasingly so as its elites disenfranchised a chunk of its population; less so as that population headed out), other parts of the country - the Midwest and West - were more pro-Black. A simple model is that, if you get rid of the Electoral College, the big cities elect Progressive, anti-Black presidents like Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson throughout the 20th century. Good luck pushing that kind of politics in a pro-Civil Rights direction - their ideological opposition to that possibility was no less strong than the segregationists'.

You've lost me. Connect the dots for me to urban voters retarding civil rights in this counterfactual?

It fits quite closely with what was in fact the common mindset at the time. To quote rayiner from a previous comment:

> Remember, this is the 19th century, before we understood anything about genetics. The notion that all people were really equal, despite e.g. the vastly different technological development of Europe versus Africa, was a religious or at least moral belief. It wasn't a fact you could prove with the science of the time.

Much of that description also applies to the early-to-mid 20th century. The urban Progressives were the "I F---ing Love Science!" people of their own day - except that the "Science!" they loved to rely on included a batsh-t extreme (by current standards!) variety of scientific racism. Outright dehumanizing views of blacks were not outside the realm of possibility, back in the day. They could reach a racism no less extreme than that of the slavery-reminiscing southern segregationist, if by a rather different, seemingly more "objective" and detached thought process. Again, this is not speculation - it fits handily with what those people were saying and writing about the matter, back in the day.

You know that you don't have to axiomatically derive whether urban voters supported civil rights, right? That you can just look this up?

Good point - a useful phrase to look up would be "Nadir in American race relations". Um, this does not exactly bode well for your POV, does it? The point of that 'axiomatic' reasoning was to show how, in a counterfactual where urban politics increases in importance, the "nadir" can last longer and the stakes be higher. So it only gets harder to campaign for civil rights among urban voters, and the broad dynamic that led to the actual Civil Rights era has a much harder time getting established.

Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, arguably the most consistently pro-Black presidents during the "Progressive" nadir, were critically supported by rural, not urban voters.

Black voters joined the Democratic Party during the FDR era because, despite the party’s segregationist wing, they benefited from FDR’s economic policies: https://www.umbc.edu/che/tahlessons/pdf/African_Americans_an...

> Over time, African Americans received assistance from these programs, in part, due to greater intervention from Washington. The New Deal offered a degree and level of support to African Americans that differed markedly from past administrations. While segregation and discrimination was prominent in the local administration of relief programs, this reality ran counter to the administration’s official policy. National policy was difficult to enforce at the local level, particularly in the South, leading many African Americans to feel excluded from relief programs. Nonetheless, the administration sought to ensure that the programs were implemented fairly, which, for African Americans, represented a drastic break from the status quo.

Recall that, at the time of FDR, the south, where most Black people lived, was far behind the north and Midwest. The median income in southern states was half that of the northern and Midwestern states. That’s a bigger gap than exists today between white people and Black people. Black people and poor southern whites were at odds over civil rights, but had a mutual interest in redistributing wealth from populous northeast and Midwestern states to the rural south.

That was what Democrats has always been able to offer Black people that Republicans ideologically cannot: robust intervention from a big government to alleviate economic inequalities. In that respect the Democratic Party of Woodrow Wilson is no different than the Democratic Party of Joe Biden.

It's a weird just-so story to say that Black citizens somehow benefited from segregationist rural Democrats because of FDR's economic policies.

Regardless, like I said downthread, you can just go look this stuff up --- as I'm sure you've already done --- and see from what corners of the country civil rights legislation was supported, and opposed. The electoral college worked against civil rights.

Switzerland, where the voters are overwhelmingly white where the voters are overwhelmingly white.

Switzerland is a curious example - they are not overwhelming men and it took them till 1971 to give full voting rights to women.

Your statements regarding the Electoral College here are horribly simplistic and ill-informed about the separation of powers and system of checks and balances. There were no functioning constitutional republics (the US was never intended to be a pure democracy) at the time the Constitution was written. The tyranny of mob (majority)rule was as much of a consideration as tyranny by a king. The Electoral College was intended to be a check on rule of the mob. This is also why every state gets 2 senators.

The founders intention was very much to prevent the kind of things that eventually happened during the French Revolution.

The electoral college was almost entirely intended to be a component of the compromises with slave holding states. That's why the number of electors is the number of congressmen from a state, your two senators plus the number of representatives. Originally the president was simply going to be elected by congress directly, but it was decided that that was an issue with separation of powers. Then a direct popular vote was suggested, but that had the same 'issue' that led to the three fifths compromise, so instead it's a vote from each state weighted by the same algorithm that became the three fifths compromise for federal representation in congress. James Madison saying at the time

> There was one difficulty, however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to the fewest objections.

http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llfr&fileName=00...

This is only a big factor so long as a large, disenfranchised population (whether as a result of slavery or Jim Crow) is concentrated in a minority of states. Black people ended up fixing this by voting with their feet and migrating en masse out of the segregationist South.

No, it's a compromise that explicitly accepted it's poor approximation of the popular vote in exchange for getting the slave holding states on board with staying in the union by allowing them to partially count slaves towards federal representation while still not treating them as full people who could vote.

Now we're simply left with a poor approximation of the popular vote. I fail to see how the migration of black people after emancipation makes that better. If anything their migration to north east cities while keeping the electoral college means that they continue to have less federal representation.

I think the idea is that we don’t deify people who were largely just normal politicians, sorting out political compromises of their own time.

They didn’t invent democracy, nor republicanism, they built on long standing traditions.

We should throw out all ideas from flawed people. Then we can truly enjoy bliss.

'Corrupted' doesn't mean unsalvageable. It's easier to patch a broken system than it is to make a flawless system on the first try.

You can't start patching a brilliant set of ideas until you look directly at the flaws and their sources. Like, voting is a great idea, but they forgot women in v1.

Both options have the potential to be right, but only accepting patch fixes is prone to being stuck in local minima.

I'm increasingly with Thomas Jefferson and the idea that the constitution should be rewritten fairly often, on the order of each generation. If there's consensus each 20 years for simple patch fixes (or even no changes), great! If there's consensus for a more radical restructuring then that's just democracy in action.

That "brilliant set of ideas" included a number of overtly pro-slavery clauses (most notably the 3/5ths Compromise), and others that worked synergistically with the over pro-slavery stuff to prolong slavery (and which have janked up our democracy every since).

For more detail on this argument than you'll ever want, here's a starting point:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2243060

Having spent significant time in the South, but not being from there, I have conflicting feelings about the civil war.

The divide that existed then is a permutation of what bitterly divides the US now. People outside the South seem to despise southern people and their values more than ever, and the south is no closer to sharing their values.

I often wonder if we would have been better off fighting the war to free existing slaves, embargoing further slave trade, and just leaving the Confederacy alone as its own country.

(With apologies for responding more to the theme than to the article itself, which is a nice summary.)

What notion of the Confederacy exists outside of the institution of Slavery? It's so core to the DNA of the founding of the Confederacy that it almost seems nonsensical to suggest waging a war to free existing slaves, when that would've led to the same outcome of the total dissolution of the Confederacy.

Yes, perhaps so. I suppose what I mean to say is that it seems misguided, in hindsight, to treat preserving the Union as some ultimate good. 150 years later, and all we have is two groups that seem to bitterly hate each other still and a dysfunctional government incapable of reconciling the two different value systems.

The Confederacy may well have dissolved, as you said, but the rest of the Union would be left a whole lot more coherent and ideologically unified.

To wildly over simplify it, it strikes me as a bit like going to extraordinary lengths to save a marriage to a spouse you hate.

The "split" isn't north vs south though, nor is it based on slavery or the Mason-Dixon line.

Our government is dysfunctional because the main structure of government was created before the industrial revolution. The writers of the constitution couldn't envision just how little of the population would be engaged in an agrarian lifestyle. The US government is broken because all three branches are, at least some of the time, minority rule.

The actual split in America is largely those areas that are economically advanced and those that are not. Places that support conservative candidates tend to be poor, mostly uneducated, and religious while the opposite is true for liberal candidates. Voters in Atlanta have more in common with New York City than they do voters in Lumber City.

I'll also point out that there isn't much hate for rural people in the cities. You have at best indifference. The hate is very much one sided.

I guess it's just that deplorables and coal miners live in rural areas. The people in cities don't hate them, just want them unemployed, disarmed, disenfranchised and re-educated.

I guess if that's the conspiracy theory driven world you want to live in, that's your right but thank you for perfectly illustrating how the "split" is largely in the imagination of rural voters.

Yeah, no hate in terminology like hicks, hillbillies, flyover country, deplorables, etc. etc.

I mean, I grew up in what is now trump country in a rural area and heard the term 'hicks' and 'hillbillies' as self-descriptors and descriptors of others but I now live in an urban area and never hear those terms. Its just projection bud.

Now deplorables is a different story. Supporting racists/misogynists' is deplorable and Hillary Clinton was right on the money with what she said. But again, most urban folks just have anger and confusion on why rural people consistently vote against their own interests and support racists like trump. It's not really a 'hate' thing. I don't see people from urban areas travelling to rural areas to attack people and hold hate-rallies.

People like Hillary Clinton have never voted consistently in the interests of people who voted for Trump. It's under her own husband's presidency that many of those people's jobs were shipped abroad. Under her former boss's Presidency that the banks who made them lose their homes were bailed out. Not saying Trump's presidency was any more beneficial, both parties don't give a shit about the little guy, but calling 30 million people "deplorable" certainly qualifies as broad brush hate.

>People like Hillary Clinton have never voted consistently in the interests of people who voted for Trump.

Examples? I'm not a Clinton fan personally but Clinton and the rest of the Democrats have consistently proposed and voted for legislation that heavily benefit rural voters including importantly the ACA and Medicaid expansion which trumps base heavily relies on for access to medical care.

I'm not really interested in debating the merits of HRC because she's just slightly less conservative than the GOP in general.

> Not saying Trump's presidency was any more beneficial, both parties don't give a shit about the little guy

One party has proposed voting rights bills, a massive infrastructure program that would provide jobs and opportunity for millions of rural people, bills that would massively lower the costs of prescription medicine, and bills expanding access to medical care for millions of impoverished Americans. The other party was in power for four years and only accomplished one massive tax cut for the ultra wealthy. The "both sides" thing is bullshit. The Democrats aren't perfect and lord knows that the Democratic leadership needs to go but to pretend the Democrats and republicans are the same is delusional.

>but calling 30 million people "deplorable" certainly qualifies as broad brush hate.

Here is the actual quote

“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?” Clinton said. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”

She's not wrong about that. trump is a hate monger and his supporters reflect that. The last time I checked, HRC wasn't a tastemaker. The question was whether urban Americans hate rural Americans and they just don't. Most people just want to reduce the influence rural Americans have over the majority of Americans lives. If people in Alabama want to live in a religious back-water, that's their call, just stop dragging the coasts down with you.

And yet despite three Democratic presidential terms since 1992, the average American is way poorer and sicker than they were 30 years ago. The consistency of these Democratic congregations is undermined by rotating villain strategies where actually beneficial pieces of legislation are weakened and made toothless. The ACA and Medicaid expansion you listed as things that the Democrats have done for their constituents both were undermined by a lack of a public option and healthcare costs for the average American are no better than they were 30 years ago.

Frankly I don't care about proposals for bills. The Democrats deserve some praise for the infrastructure bill, but in the end that was a massively stripped down bill that only accomplished a fraction of its proposed aims. For a party in total power over government that's a whole long list of proposals without much to show for it.

I don't even claim that the Republicans are much better, but at least Trump's rhetoric over cleaning house in Congress and draining the swamp is admitting that there is a problem in the government, and not claiming oh-so-righteously that the Democrats would solve all our problems were they just given all the electoral tools needed to do so. They've had those tools at multiple times the last 30 years and utterly failed in their aims.

It's incredible that you claim urban Americans don't hate rural Americans and then condescendingly dismiss Alabama as a religious back-water and that they need to stop dragging the glory of the coasts down with them. The people who live in "religious back-waters" like Alabama are some of the most disadvantaged people in the country who've grown steadily and steadily poorer as the wealth of the nation flows in one direction (or two) towards the coasts. Maybe that's not hate, maybe that's more indifference, but to the people at the losing end of an economic rebalancing I'm not sure that's all that different. No wonder they're all so angry if this many people outright dismiss the struggle half this country seems to be going through.

>And yet despite three Democratic presidential terms since 1992, the average American is way poorer and sicker than they were 30 years ago.

I'm not advocating the neoliberalism on the 1990s, I'm talking about the modern day Democratic party but lets be real about we are talking about. since 1992, A Democrat has been President 17 of those years. They've had control of Congress and the Presidency maybe four or six of those years. Of the last 30 year, the GOP has had control of the house for twenty of those years and they had control of the Senate 16 of those years. The POTUS is part of the executive branch, the legislative branch. The GOP has had control of the legislative branch for the majority of the last 30 years and done absolutely nothing.

Obama, for all his flaws was able to get the ACA passed, which is probably the most important, best piece of legislation to come from the US government since the Carter administration.

>Frankly I don't care about proposals for bills. The Democrats deserve some praise for the infrastructure bill, but in the end that was a massively stripped down bill that only accomplished a fraction of its proposed aims. For a party in total power over government that's a whole long list of proposals without much to show for it.

Who do you think stripped out all the good stuff? It wasn't progressive Democrats. The Democrats are not in 'total power' and never have been. Like I said in my original comment, the US government is extremely biased towards minority rule. republicans hold 50 Senate seats but the states they represent only make up 43% of the country. That in itself isn't terrible because the Senate was always intended to represent states, not people. What is actually terrible is the House of Representatives. The House, also known as The Peoples House is supposed to represent the people and give more representation to states with more population. Because the House is capped, smaller states are over represented in the House. Brookings estimated that the GOP got an extra 21 seats in the 2016 election due to conservative over representation

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2017/02/22/misrepresen...

It's really hard to get enough of a majority when every elected part of the government is biased to benefit the minority of Americans. Democrats are at the mercy of their most conservative members and always will be because West Virginia and Alabama get far more say in America than California.

Remember, all 50 republicans opposed a massively popular infrastructure bill. Only 2 Democrats opposed it. That doesn't sound like 'both-sides' to me. It sounds like our broken system of government is failing us.

>I don't even claim that the Republicans are much better, but at least Trump's rhetoric over cleaning house in Congress and draining the swamp is admitting that there is a problem in the government, and not claiming oh-so-righteously that the Democrats would solve all our problems were they just given all the electoral tools needed to do so. They've had those tools at multiple times the last 30 years and utterly failed in their aims.

trump is the swamp though. I don't think Democrats pretend that everything is okay in Washington and if you have some primary sources indicating that they do, I'd love to see it. I've also never seen Democrats claiming they "would solve all our problems". I usually see Democrats pushing specific legislation and talking about the benefits of that legislation. They've had control of both the Presidency and congress for what, 4 years in the last 30. And in that time they passed a landmark health care bill that has saved thousands of lives. What have republicans done? The republicans only do well in opposition because they have no ideas. We can see this today. We have a President who is working on legislation that is both popular and sound and we 50 republicans who vote no in lock stop because they don't want Biden to succeed. The GOP is more than willing to hurt Americans if they think it'll help them in the next election and we are seeing that right now.

>It's incredible that you claim urban Americans don't hate rural Americans and then condescendingly dismiss Alabama as a religious back-water and that they need to stop dragging the glory of the coasts down with them.

Firstly, I didn't claim they were religious backwater, I said if they want to be one, they should do it without dragging down the coasts. Secondly, I feel you have a deep misunderstanding of what the word "hate" means.

Hate is "intense or passionate dislike". I don't hate Alabamans. I think they are as a group politically foolish. I think they have, as an aggregate, a terrible value system. I think they make terrible electoral choices over and over again that hurt them. There are good people in Alabama, they are just greatly outvoted by people who love hate mongers like trump.

>The people who live in "religious back-waters" like Alabama are some of the most disadvantaged people in the country who've grown steadily and steadily poorer as the wealth of the nation flows in one direction (or two) towards the coasts.

I agree! That's why it's in their best interest to vote for people who want to help them because its the modern economy that caused the wealth to flow to the coasts, not a political decision. trump did well because he lied to them and told them what they wanted to hear. He sold the lie that they could live their whole life in a tiny town with no economy and make a living wage. These small towns can survive but only if they modernize their economies. They need real leaders, not ones who spend their time fear mongering about Critical Race Theory in schools where it isn't taught in the first place.

>Maybe that's not hate, maybe that's more indifference, but to the people at the losing end of an economic rebalancing I'm not sure that's all that different. No wonder they're all so angry if this many people outright dismiss the struggle half this country seems to be going through.

The Democrat infrastructure would have been an economic boom for rural parts of the country. All 50 GOP Senators opposed it. A lot of working class people who would have benefitted from the infrastructure projects that the country overwhelming supports voted for the people who killed the project. They will vote for them again because they will be afraid of whatever boogyman the GOP uses for the mid-terms. That seems foolish to me.

We can potentially say that in hindsight but politicians at the time could not come to that conclusion. After 80+ years the US was still the only major democracy and it was teetering. Unionist politicians, embodied by Lincoln, were afraid that letting the US fall apart would deal a blow to democracy everywhere. Lincoln so eloquently voices this concern in the Gettysburg Address.

Historian Joseph Ellis said (I think in his book "Founding Brothers") that we now take democracy as the inevitable conclusion of liberalizing politics but that formed only after the US Civil War.

(This also doesn't address the moral horror of allowing slavery to continue for who knows how many years in the Confederacy.)

The majority of the people in those groups don't like each other because they've been pit against each other by the media and corporate interests who know a divided house is easier to rule.

There’s a strong counter factual argument that can be made that if the Confederacy was allowed to exist seperately, then when we go into WW2 Hitler counts them as an Axis ally. Having a direct Axis ally on the continent probably means he can defeat the US, causing the Allied powers to lose the war. So: if the American Civil War had come to a draw, you can make a convincing argument the fascist powers (Germany, Japan, Italy, and a Confederate US) would dominate the world now. A scary thought.

>Having a direct Axis ally on the continent probably means he can defeat the US,

I don't think I've ever heard an argument as weak as this...

That's a very interesting thought. Given the poverty the South was left with even with Reconstruction, I think you're right that a defeated-but-intact Confederacy could have potentially been an Axis power.

It's difficult to extrapolate out details though. It's certain American history would be drastically different, but predicting how is near impossible.

Southern states were British colonies also. There's very little likelihood they would have aligned with their enemy during such a war.

They would have aligned with Mexico and the Caribbean by the time WWI happened - the social structure would have been very similar in both, due to the institution of slavery. The Northern states would perhaps have aligned closer to Canada. This would have had interesting implications well before WWII or any 'Axis'.

None of this would have happened, because the butterfly effect would have wiped Hitler from existence, not to mention the U.S. being split across two polities would also have significant consequences for European history.

People outside the South seem to despise southern people and their values more than ever, and the south is no closer to sharing their values.

Just speaking personally, this doesn't align with my experience. It might be the parts of the south I lived in. But the values of urban North Carolina and the values of urban Ohio seemed quite similar to me, and many people seemed to happily move back and forth between the Midwest and South without suffering any culture clash. Coastal California values do feel quite different from either of those, though, although I wouldn't say most Californians "despise" the red states.

There's truth to the statement that the divide then is a permutation of what divides us now. But the south isn't monolithic, so when non-southerners paint the south as a single thing, they're disregarding the experience of a large portion of southerners who don't believe in the lost cause myth or other harmful/racist opinions. That's especially true for black southerners, but there are also white southerners who don't fall under that flag either. Then and now.

If we left the Confederacy alone, then we would've left those people behind. As a white southerner who doesn't fit into the majority worldview of other white southerners, I'm glad to not be left alone.

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