William,

You may or may not be aware of this, but many active slavers, among them John Taylor of Caroline, described slavery as an “evil” while simultaneously opposing, both in their words and their deeds, all immediate efforts to end it. “Evil” is a word which has many shades of meaning, and in the 18th and 19th centuries it was far more commonly used than it is today to refer not only to deliberate acts of wickedness, but also to more generally bad conditions such as hurricanes, earthquakes, or general ignorance and folly. Many anti-abolitionists and slavers viewed slavery as an “evil” in the latter sense (in that they would rather be rid of it, but did not believe that white slavers had any immediate moral obligation to stop enslaving the black people that they held captive). Robert E. Lee, for example, was of this school of thought (the letter in which he famously described slavery as a “moral and political evil” was actually a letter primarily devoted to denouncing abolitionism as a doctrine and Northern abolitionists as a group). So was John Taylor of Caroline. So was Jefferson, at times, although at other times he made hypocritical gestures towards a more anti-slavery position. It is either pure ignorance, pure folly, or pure chicanery to try to represent this position (which recognizes no moral obligation to stop enslaving actually existing slaves, and which explicitly prefers the indefinite continuation of slavery unless and until all black people could be ethnically cleansed from their life-long homes in the American South and forced to foreign colonies in Africa) as an anti-slavery position. Real abolitionists in the 19th century were quite familiar with this position (since it was the official position of the American Colonization Society, an organization of which John Taylor of Caroline was an early supporter and officer), and they denounced it furiously. (See, for example, William Lloyd Garrison’s Thoughts on African Colonization.) As well they should have, since the position is, first, racist rubbish, and, second, quite clearly calculated to ease the consciences of squeamish slavers rather than to free those held in bondage. Those who sentimentally wished for slavery to end, somehow or another, in some far-off day which they perpetually deferred in the name of some other goal that justified their keeping slaves in the meantime — as, for example, with John Taylor of Caroline and his dreams of a Negerrein Virginia — no more count as anti-slavery for those idle remarks than George W. Bush counts as anti-war for having said (in his speech announcing the Iraq war) that war is terrible and he longs to live in peace.

This is the necessary context — that is, the context of John Taylor of Caroline’s actual thoughts about the nature of the “evil” in question and what if anything ought to be done to “alleviate it” (short of “wholly cur[ing]” it), and what all that actually meant in practice for the many black people whose slave-labor he himself was living off of while he wrote those lines — that your isolated use of that single quotation, and your frankly outrageous attempt to paint this active slaver as being anti-slavery, omits.

As for your accusations of plagiarism, I thank you for quoting the passages that you claim to have “caught” me plagiarizing. I’ll be happy to let the reader judge whether what I wrote could fairly be described as “plagiarizing” either of the other passages that you mention here.

William:

Far more difficult is to consider the status of slavery in its own time …

The “status of slavery” where and for whom?

For black people in Virginia, or for that matter for white slavers in Virginia, it was a pretty important issue.

William:

… and ask the question that all persons of moral character asked at the time: what can we do to get rid of this wretched institutional inheritance? If American history shows nothing else, it is that there was no easy answer to that question.

What do you mean by the question “What can we do?”

If it’s intended to be a moral question about what those who were in positions of legal power, or who perpetrated slavery as individuals should have done to get rid of it, the answer is easy: immediate, complete, and unconditional emancipation. This is something that Garrison, Spooner, and Gerrit Smith all believed in, advocated, and acted (in different ways) to bring about. It’s something that Jefferson and Taylor explicitly rejected in favor of continuing slavery, and gradual emancipation conditional on forced exile from America.

If it’s intended to be a strategic question about what abolitionists ought to have done in order to get around the efforts of obdurate or unrepentant slavers to prevent or halt emancipation, then that’s a more difficult question, but it’s a question that is only difficult because of the difficulties inserted by slavers like Jefferson and Taylor. It’s certainly not a “difficulty” that offers any reason to mitigate the judgment on Jefferson’s character, or his libertarian credentials.

William:

The same may be said with equal relevance to Jefferson’s concept of decentralized republicanism. And I’ll leave it at that.

I’m going to repeat this one last time, to make sure that we are clear. Nothing that I have said concerning Jefferson’s political views is a denunciation of “decentralized republicanism.” I’m an anarchist, so I don’t believe in any form of government, no matter how decentralized or how republican. But as it happens, I think that political decentralization is better than political centralization, and republican and democratic governments are better than monarchical governments.

The issue here is not that I’m using slavery in order to stop discussions of decentralized republicanism. This is either a careless or a deliberate distortion of what I’ve explicitly and repeatedly said. What I’m doing is denying that the political system actually advocated by Thomas Jefferson counts as a form of decentralized republicanism, any more than the Roman Catholic Church counts as a “democracy” on account of the cardinals voting for the Pope.

You may want to talk about decentralized republicanism more than you want to talk about Thomas Jefferson and slavery. That’s fine; it’s an interesting subject. But this post is, again, about Thomas Jefferson and slavery. You are the one changing the subject in order to try to redirect conversation to something other than the original topic. Not me.

As for your comments on John Taylor of Caroline, again, you are taking the passage out of its context and directly ignoring the many other things that Taylor said about slavery. I quoted several of these. Taylor was a colonizationist, not an abolitionist, and he explicitly stated that while slavery was an “evil” that continuing to enslave black people was preferable to freeing them without the condition of forced deportation to Africa. He specifically criticized Jefferson’s own writing on slavery because he felt that Jefferson was too negative about it, and that “well managed” slaves were better off than free blacks in America. I gave you several direct quotations in order to contextualize your own quotation and to explain the ways in which his views were a point of transition between the older anti-abolition views of Jefferson and the later positively pro-slavery views of Calhoun, Ruffin, Fitzhugh, et al. You have simply ignored these quotations rather than engaging with them and repeated the original quotation, apparently unaffected by direct evidence to the contrary of your interpretation of it. I don’t know whether or not you have any actual knowledge of John Taylor of Caroline’s political writings on slavery other than the quotation you’ve misused here, but I do know that so far you haven’t engaged with his full views in anything resembling a comprehensive or accurate way, even when the full content of those views has been directly pointed out to you.

Gil:

And I agree that it’s easy to imagine that we would have applied our modern sensibilities …

Abolitionism is not a “modern sensibility.” It already existed in the 18th and 19th centuries. Jefferson in particular was familiar with the abolitionist arguments; at times he even made some of them himself, while consistently refusing to act on the conclusions that he drew.

William:

What is being argued, though, is that the late 18th century system of Jeffersonian republicanism in the U.S. (though indeed marred by the imperfection of slavery) …

Chattel slavery was not some minor “imperfection” marring a fundamentally humane system. It was the central organizing principle of the law and daily life in Jefferson’s Virginia. It was a crime against humanity that sustained a thoroughly hideous cannibal-empire filled with self-satisfied thugs and posturing hypocrites, who lived on the blood and labor of their fellow creatures, and who passed law after law to protect their neo-feudal economic system and fortify their prison camp plantations at government expense. In Jefferson’s Virginia, this legal cannibalism devoured the lives, property, and labor of three hundred thousand souls, about 40% of the entire population of the state. A conversation about early American politics that ignores such plain facts or marginalizes them as “imperfections” in a basically worthwhile system (rather than what they were — the ghoulish essence of the system itself) is bullshit. And bullshit conversations like that ought to be stopped.

Me:

You forgot to add an important qualifier. What you no doubt meant to say was “the decentralized republicanism advocated for white people by Jefferson.”

William:

Of course such a qualifier was hardly “forgotten” as I had acknowledged Jefferson’s fault on slavery from the outset and readily contextualized that grievous fault aside his better characteristics long before you got here. So you return to the slavery canard not to inform the discussion, that discussion already being informed of it, but rather for its conversation-stopping shock value.

No, the reason that I return to chattel slavery is that to describe Jefferson’s slavocracy as “decentralized republicanism” is to carelessly spread an absurd lie. What Jefferson actually believed in, and actually practiced, was decentralized republicanism for white men, patriarchal tyranny for white women and children, and a hereditary, invasive, absolute tyranny accountable to none save God alone for all black people regardless of age or gender. You may as well describe the Roman Catholic Church as a democracy, because, after all, the Cardinals all get to vote on the Pope.

William:

First, by means of comparison between Hamilton’s “views” and Jefferson’s “practice” it appears that you intend to cast the latter as comparatively more offensive.

No, I don’t intend anything of the sort. As I’ve repeatedly said, I consider Hamilton to have been perfectly loathsome, and to be directly responsible for all kinds of political rot. I can’t speak for anyone other than myself, but I’ve never claimed that Jefferson is “worse,” from a libertarian perspective, than Hamilton. I don’t even know how that kind of global comparison would be made — each one was clearly much worse than the other in some respects, and much better than the other in others, and I neither know, nor much care, how you’d make those different respects commensurable with one another to make the comparison.

The reason for linguistically leaning on Jefferson’s practice is that, in addition to being a slaver, he was also a posturing hypocrite, especially on this issue, so the preferences manifest in hisd eeds sometimes need to be stressed over his idle words, when it comes to assessing his character or his legacy.

William:

Second, why the need to constantly qualify Hamilton’s faults …

I don’t.

William:

Why is it not sufficient to fault Hamilton as Hamilton for things he did in and of themselves?

It is.

However, Wilkinson’s original post was about Thomas Jefferson. It was not about Alexander Hamilton at all. My post was about Thomas Jefferson. It mentioned Alexander Hamilton only to explain what a dangerous creep I think he was. Wilkinson’s kind notice of my post was, again, about “Thomas Jefferson’s loathsomely anti-libertarian credentials.” It is only the people trying to apologize for Jefferson who keep insisting on dragging Alexander Hamilton into the discussion, apparently in order to try to change the subject from Jefferson’s anti-libertarian positions to something else — e.g., Hamilton’s Caesarianism, or European monarchy, or the United States Constitution, or just about any damn thing other than the original topic. I responded to some of these comparisons, initiated by you and not by me, by pointing out that American chattel slavery is actually a salient issue in the comparison you’re trying to make, not something that can be waved or set aside, and now, for my trouble, I am told that I ought to be faulting Hamilton as Hamilton rather than comparing him to somebody else. This is really too much. If you want to know my views about Alexander Hamilton or George Washington or the U.S. Constitution or the Whiskey Rebellion or slavery in New York or slavery in the Caribbean or central banking or the Civil War or the Ludlow Massacre or any number of other things, I’ve written about them all, on their own, elsewhere, and I’d be happy to discuss them with you, on their own, in a forum other than this one, but for here and now you should not be surprised that my focus is on Jefferson, not Hamilton, in discussing an article on Jefferson; and you also should not be surprised that if you insist on inserting a comparison with Hamilton into the discussion, I’ll urge that you consider the crime of slavery if that’s one of the salient issues in the comparison. I certainly will not waste my time “faulting Hamilton as Hamilton” in a discussion that’s about something other than Hamilton’s many follies, vices, and crimes.

William:

And that is why I make the claim that decentralized republicanism is a lesser evil than monarchy or other autocracies.

For what it’s worth, I agree with you about this. What I deny is that Jefferson advocated decentralized republicanism, if either the term “decentralized” or the term “republican” means anything at all. What he actually advocated, and practiced, was a form of brutal autocracy for everyone other than his fellow white men.

William:

If you doubt that ask yourself this: is a child inherently marked with evil character if, by pure chance of his birth, he happens to inherit the plantation of his slave-owning father?

No. However, if, as an adult, he continues to spend the rest of his life enslaving those people, even though he had decades in which to legally emancipate them, or simply to treat them as free men and women (by letting them come and go as they pleased, work or not work on what they chose, distributing his unearned lands to the people his father had forced to till, and generally treating them as his equals rather than his servants), and did nothing of the sort for his long life, and continued to live his life of idleness on the backs of his victims and their forced labor–well, then, that certainly does indicate very deep and grave vice in that man-stealer’s character.

William:

But he also advanced in goodness, even on slavery, …

Well gosh, William, that was mighty white of him. But the only way that a slaveholder can “advance in goodness” that matters more than a tinker’s cuss is to stop holding innocent people as slaves. Jefferson didn’t do that. And that’s important.

William:

He called the agrarian trades morally superior to manufacturing based on the fact that manufacturing interests at his time were using the government to subsidize their own existence and tax their competitors abroad.

As opposed to Southern “farmers,” who never sought favors or subsidies for their interests from the United States government.

I don’t know whether you actually intended to endorse this view of Jefferson’s, or merely to explain it. But whether you do or not, it’s worth noting that this is just another example of Jefferson’s posturing hypocrisy. And it’s certainly true that the Southern slavocracy went on for the next three-quarters of a century demanding and getting more and more privileges and protections from the state and federal governments (gag orders, fugitive slave laws, etc. etc. etc.) through the same processes of political back-scratching and log-rolling; something that Jefferson somehow failed to predict.

William:

I’m no expert on Jefferson’s correspondences, but I do know of his influence on the most prominent follower of his agrarian model, John Taylor of Caroline.

Another Virginia slaver and “colonizationist,” who wrote that the abolition of slavery without forced exile for the freed black people, would bring “miseries on both their owners [sic] and themselves, by the perpetual excitements to insurrection,” and that “the blacks will be more enslaved than they are at present; and the whites in pursuit of an ideal of freedom for them, will create some vortex for engulphing the liberty left in the world and obtain real slavery for themselves,” and who had the shamelessness, after a life of man-stealing and useless slave-driving parasitism, to dare to assert that free black farmers, when not forced into exile from their homes, are “driven into every species of crime for subsistence; and destined to a life of idleness, anxiety, and guilt.” Perhaps less of a posturing hypocrite than Jefferson, in the sense that he was rather more explicit and consistent about his belief that the “evils” he condemned were to be remedied by ethnic cleansing, not by emancipation, and, if that wasn’t available, the lesser-evil alternative in his view was for “well managed” slaves who were “docile, useful, and happy,” and a slave-lord “restrained by his property in the slave, and susceptible of humanity.” Taylor is widely considered to have been an important step in the ideological transition from the older Jeffersonian “necessary evil” defenses of slavery to the later Calhounian “positive good” arguments.

You’re making things harder on yourself by bringing up John Taylor of Caroline, not easier.