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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
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What nonsense, American society did not arise ex nihilo with the Founders acting as godheads thus to act as if they could've just snapped their fingers and banned slavery is just ridiculously ahistorical. They were just as much acted on by their society as they were its actors, we should view their positions critically but this is giving them far too much agency over the views they were socialized into and the society that they could not unilaterally change.
You were not born tolerant, neither was I. If we were born into their class and their society then the odds are heavily skewed that we would've become the exact same as them. That doesn't make their actions acceptable but to ignore historical context as you are is just ridiculous.
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji YangSaying they set the ground work for the Civil Rights Movements sounds like a huge stretch, and I'm not going to pretend to know most of their opinions on slavery but, yeah, pretending as if they could just slavery whenever they wanted is pretty ridiculous.
The Founding Fathers are deified way too often, but erase context of their lives and positions isn't much better.
There were white men in the 1770s writing scathing critiques of the hypocrisy of the American revolution’s bold declarations of equality versus the south’s enslavement of blacks. Let’s not pass out “oh they didn’t know any better” cards. They damn well did, they just rationalized their own self interest as more important than human rights.
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And how many did that? 1%? 0.01%?
To act as if a few people deviating from social norms means that those norms did not exist and were not incredibly powerful is just ridiculous, I don't agree with the claim that the Founding Fathers in anyway credibly laid the foundation for Civil Rights but to act as if they were "writing the rules" and could just outlaw slavery has no connection to reality.
It simply was not possible regardless what the individual Founders would've wanted.
This. Both tolerance and intolerance are socialized traits, I don't have any interest in doing anything as reductive as talking about 'natural states'.
Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Oct 29th 2018 at 9:28:40 AM
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji YangAlso, the Constitution explicitly contains a bit about how they'll reevaluate slavery 20 years later. I don't think there's any doubt that this was a political compromise. Which, well, maybe tells us what sorts of things they were willing to compromise on, but it's been a controversial issue from the beginning.
@Robrecht: They actually couldn't just end slavery even if they wanted to (and they didn't). They needed the support of slave-owners for the country to be founded to begin with.
And yeah, they restricted voting rights to property-owning white men. However, that was one more category of people who had such rights than before. The goal of civil rights movements (in the US) is functionally to repeat this goal for other groups. They got the ball rolling.
@LSBK: Their opinions (which themselves conflicted) on slavery were mixed IIRC, they viewed it as acceptable but not ideal. They expected it to go away as technology increased (and they typically viewed this as a good thing) but were willing to participate in it in the mean time.
Though my point's more that they were a step in the right direction (even if by accident), not that they were outright anti-slavery. (And I should note I don't think they were infallible, I think they were the tiny snowball that started an avalanche that'll keep going)
@Wisewillow: Strangely, that's actually my point. Fixing that hypocrisy is the purpose of civil rights movements. Without the Founding Fathers, there wouldn't even be a hypocrisy to fix.
Edited by Protagonist506 on Oct 29th 2018 at 6:46:59 AM
Leviticus 19:34There was a movement to abolish slavery with compensation to owners. It was implemented in a number of Northern states.
Jefferson, notably, opposed it.
BTW, it also worked.
Edited by CharlesPhipps on Oct 29th 2018 at 6:46:00 AM
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.It's also worth noting that the reference for a democratic government that the Founders and pretty much everyone else at the time was Greece, which also legitimized slavery and barred women from the vote. The idea of a truly egalitarian democracy where equal rights are afforded to everyone is, all things considered, a pretty recent concept.
EDIT: I should clarify I'm not really trying to excuse the Founding Fathers or anything, just that what they did is part of a larger pattern.
Edited by Draghinazzo on Oct 29th 2018 at 9:49:17 AM
Of course it should probably also be noted (for both sides of the argument) that a major part of what pressed the issue of slavery is the invention of the Cotton Gin and its impact on the slave industry. Industrialization was assumed to be something that would lower the usefulness of slave labor but it unexpectedly had the opposite effect on various industries-in particular the cotton industry.
So opinions of slavery around the time of the civil war tended to be more extreme on both sides than shortly after the revolutionary war (The Confederacy was very fanatically pro-slavery to a Planet of Hats degree). So to some extent the current issues with race-relations America is struggling with are the result of things considerably newer than the US itself.
Leviticus 19:34Thing is: They really didn't.
This decision, as you've noted, pre-dated the cotton gin and, therefore, pre-dated the southern reliance on a slave economy.
They could have abolished slavery if they'd extended the franchise to... Say... The former slaves, the poor tenant farmers of the South and their own soldiers from across all the former Colonies who had fought in the war out of patriotism and opposition to tyranny and then found themselves not part of the franchise because they didn't own any land. Because for many of those people in the Southern States that were slave owners who ended up getting the vote, slaves were, in fact,their only property, which is why they wanted slavery to continue to exist if voting rights were only going to be extended to property owners. If they had agreed between themselves that property ownership need not be a condition for enfranchisement and proper repayment would be made to their former owners, slavery could have been abolished with a minimum of fuss.
But that would have meant relinquishing a measure of power out of the hands of their own social class and into the hands the hoi polloi.
Saying that the Founding Fathers laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement is like saying that Julius Caesar 'laid the groundwork' for the First Crusade. Yeah, sure, his actions led to things which led to other things which led to yet other things which ultimately resulted in the First Crusade, but that's not 'laying the groundwork', that's just 'being part of linear time'.
Edited by Robrecht on Oct 29th 2018 at 3:22:55 PM
Angry gets shit done.I think I remember reading it somewhere on this very Wiki that the wounds of the past are still raw in America simply because Americans won't stop picking at them. I think it was the US Civil War Page.
Not saying complicated and thorny issues shouldn't be discussed - they should. But there's this mad rush by people to deify one side and demonize the other.
Were that to happen in Europe, there wouldn't be an European Union. Almost wasn't.
Still, that willingness to debate and discuss, even if in a raucous and unruly fashion, is a unique virtue. It just sometimes doesn't quite work out the way people wanted it.
I hold the secrets of the machine.To quote Thurgood Marshall: “We the People” no longer enslave, but the credit does not belong to the framers. It belongs to those who refused to acquiesce in outdated notions of “liberty,” “justice,” and “equality,” and who strived to better them."
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Quite the opposite. The problem is that we ignored a lot of old wounds for too long, letting them fester. Or stuck a cheap bandaid on them. That's how the "Lost Cause" crap still persists to this day.
A similar thing is happening now. A lot of what's going on is because we made the mistake of assuming that the fight for Civil Rights was over, that we were living in a "post-racial" society.
Edited by M84 on Oct 29th 2018 at 10:19:16 PM
Disgusted, but not surprisedThe Civil War happened primarily because Americans let slavery be an issue that was kicked down the side over and over again until it was literally a cultural phenomenon that people clung to like a religion.
Circa 1776, it was a thing but not a deeply rooted thing.
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.And as noted by our quote page for the American Civil War, people saw that it was going to lead to war all through the antebellum period, going back to when the ink was still wet on the Declaration of Independence.
Edited by Parable on Oct 29th 2018 at 7:40:28 AM
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Indeed. It was, in fact, the restrictive nature of the original franchise that made it a deeply rooted thing, far more than the Cotton Gin.
Because while the Cotton Gin facilitated the creation of a slave economy in the South, the fact that voting rights were tied to property ownership meant that owning even a single slave was a far more affordable avenue for acquiring voting rights than owning land in the South. Because most of the land in the South was, after all, already owned and hideously expensive, whereas slaves were a cheap enough property that even a poor tenant farmer could own one or two to work the land they were leasing because they couldn't afford to buy it.
Angry gets shit done.I'd also like to argue that whether or not the Founders could have ended slavery isn't even necessarily relevant. They didn't exactly invent the concept either, and you can't just say a system of government is completely broken just because its framers weren't perfect-especially when the evil they're engaging in was extremely common and normalized at the time.
Leviticus 19:34

Like fuck.
It was their country, they were making all the rules... And whilst making this big fuss about freedom from tyranny and 'no taxation without representation', they created a system that still had slavery legally enshrined in all States (even if only as a recognised institution that simply wasn't practiced locally). Not to mention that these same assholes then went back to their home States and, as the Constitution they themselves wrote mandated, set their requirements for who got to vote:
White males who owned private property.
So much for 'all men are created equal'.
It's very, very clear from the way they structured the Constitution and the State legislation during their own time in power that most of the Founding Fathers were adamantly interested in keeping power restricted to their own race, gender and social class and therefore if they laid the groundwork for Civil Rights, it's entirely by accident, because it's pretty goddamn obvious from how hard many of them fought against extending the voting franchise to even non-property owning white males during their later political careers that at the time of writing the Constitution, they were solely interested in creating a system where their own power was secure.
Angry gets shit done.