You saw what happened to Fogle and Engermann with “Time on the Cross.” Even the question “was slavery profitable” turns into a flame war when white academics are asked to weigh in.

Personally, I think individual black and white folks can trust each other and talk about anything. But first you have to have the trust. And it’s not automatic.

Listen, genocide is genocide.

And I repeat…when “the right thing to do” intersects “market forces”, pick “the right thing to do.”

Callimachus, do you think blacks and whites should be able to have this historical conversation? Do you think that such an open and frank discussion could facilitate more positive racial relations in this country?

In any event, you can have a discussion about whether or not it would have been better for slaves to suffer through another 35 years of genocide, but something tells me that point of view wouldn’t be welcome hardly anywhere.

Yep. I couldn’t have said it better. Nobody starts conversations with African-American friends and neighbors by saying, “You know, we’d all be a lot better off now if you folks had stayed slaves for another two or three generations.”

Justin — the seriousness of the British threat of intervention in the ACW is still a much-debated topic. Hard to deal in “would haves.” Conventional wisdom, I think, still is that the Emancipation Proclamation preserved the North from the forces in the Palmerston government who wanted to intervene. But that has been attacked in the last decade. I don’t quite know where things now stand.

35 years of genocide? I thought the whole idea of slavery was to maintain a viable, although physically forced, work force. Slavery is bad enough, you don’t really need to drop the G-bomb (which I believe would be a rather tortured definition if applied) to make your point. Would genocide in the context of American slavery be the equivalent of purposefully killing all of your live stock.

This is exactly the type of bullshit that irritates me to no end. One makes a historically speculative and reasoned argument that if the country had not gone to civil war, but allowed for the economic pressures of increasingly cheap European labor, a cotton recession and industrialization, plus political compromise — to supplant the rather the high price of maintaining slaves, lives could have been saved and race relations could have been much better — What is your retort: You support genocide!

Please Ward, grace us with your definition of “genocide” so that us unclean and obviously uneducated bastards might have a moral watermark in which to judge our inevitable damnation. And while your educating us, why don’t you explain to the black folks in 9th Ward NOLA how well the Civil War turned out — I’m sure they’ll be fascinated by your opinion.

Please Justin — since you’ve accused me of supporting 35 years of genocide, grace us with your definition of this “genocide”.

At least as it stands now. I will happily whip myself for my ignorance if Iraq is free and peaceful in twenty years.

And what if it’s not?

Would you have taken that chance? Would you have told them to wait and endure? Or would you have gone to war “to make men free�?

If I’ve said it once, I’ll say it a thousand times, when “the right thing to do” and “the free market” collide, always pick “the right thing to do.”

Oddly enough, the South nearly secured the backing of both England and France because they had Judah Benjamin lobbying that this war was merely a property dispute. So there’s definitely precedent even during the war for this argument. And correct me if I’m wrong here Cal, but wasn’t the South only one major victory away from getting those two countries backing? I know that was probably still at a desperate time, but there were receptive ears on the other side of the pond.

In any event, you can have a discussion about whether or not it would have been better for slaves to suffer through another 35 years of genocide, but something tells me that point of view wouldn’t be welcome hardly anywhere.

But to answer your question in the context of Iraq;

Would you have taken that chance: Yes.
Would you have told them to wait and endure: Yes.
Or would you have gone to war “to make men free”: No.

At least as it stands now. I will happily whip myself for my ignorance if Iraq is free and peaceful in twenty years.

Would you have taken that chance? Would you have told them to wait and endure? Or would you have gone to war “to make men free”?

This was a face-saving political cop-out. In many cases a bevy of Southern sheriffs, mayors and municipal and state officials openly aided and abetted the lynch mobs. The Justice Department had two powerful legal statutes to go after them. The statutes authorized prosecutions of public officials and law enforcement officers who, acting under color of law, committed or conspired with others to commit acts of racial violence. They were based on the 14th Amendment’s due process and equal protection clause.

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/310.html

I assume this is what Callimachus meant?

Which is kind of like blaming lynchings on the 14th amendment.

Blames lynching on due process? I’m sorry, I don’t get what you’re saying.