[Extracted from Slavery Reconsidered - All formatting in original]

Whip hand: the free-thinking Carlyle Club abolishes Whig history, serves up some primary sources, and cottons on to a south-side view in this, our masterful third issue. It’s bound to please!

Question: what’s wrong with slavery?

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You know, it sounds like the good people of Detroit would benefit a lot from some sort of a combination of adoption, which provides stability, security, and lifelong support, and lifetime employment, which provides stability, community, and social harmony, especially for low-skilled workers (like in Detroit). Now, if only American history could furnish us with an example of a social arrangement combining adoption and lifetime employment— But I digress.

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That reminds me of something Thomas Carlyle wrote in [i]Shooting Niagara[/i] (1867), a pamphlet considered extreme even by Victorian standards:

Servantship, like all solid contracts between men (like wedlock itself, which was once nomadic enough, temporary enough!), must become a contract of permanency, not easy to dissolve, but difficult extremely, — a “contract for life,” if you can manage it (which you cannot, without many wise laws and regulations, and a great deal of earnest thought and anxious experience), will evidently be the best of all. [—] Of all else the remedy was easy in comparison; vitally important to every just man concerned in it; and, under all obstructions (which in the American case, begirt with frantic “Abolitionists,” fire-breathing like the old Chimaera, were immense), was gradually getting itself done.

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Anyway, since the practical, day-to-day realities of slavery were much better than you have been led to believe, this idea makes no sense, and you need to re-assess slavery. Maybe it wasn’t bad after all.

Are you re-assessing slavery?

You’re not re-assessing slavery, are you?

Okay, try the second idea: slavery was bad regardless of what it was actually like, because slavery contradicts Liberty, Equality, and other, miscellaneous abstractions (Human Dignity springs to mind), which are to be considered good regardless of how much misery they have created over the centuries. In that case, congratulations: you, like the abolitionists, have got religion. Kindly keep your Church far away from the State.

If neither idea suits you, it might be a combination of the two, sort of circular in shape: everyone knows slavery was bad, because the slaves weren’t Free and Equal, which was terrible for them, because they were whipped and beaten ceaselessly for no reason, and if you say they weren’t, why, you’re just excusing slavery, which everyone knows was bad, because the slaves weren’t Free and Equal — and round and round we go, abandoning even the pretense of straightforwardness, and always returning to Liberty, Equality, and we might as well throw in Fraternity, so ultimately the argument turns out to be a popular late 18th century murderous insurrectionary war cry.