Juretta--

You know the literature better than do I, but didn't most emancipations north of Virginia proceed on gradual lines that permitted slave owners to recoup their investments as well as some profits?  If I recall correctly, the 1831 emancipation proposal discussed and defeated in the Virginia legislature suggested a gradual plan, not a single abrupt termination of the institution.  

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Regarding evil:  this is one of the real failures of Holocaust studies, at least as reflected in the experiences of my own students (almost all of whom have been to the Holocaust museum in Washington DC).  For my students, the evil of the Holocaust is concentrated into the persona of Adolf Hitler, whose evilness is transcendent.  The consequence of this imaginative move is to remove human choice and human agency from the equation--and even more critically, to remove the responsibility for evil from human society.  

In a sense, the Holocaust museum succeeds too well.  My students all report an intense affiliation with and empathetic connection to the victims of the Holocaust.  They walk out with a deep understanding of the consequences of the Holocaust for the victims, but with no understanding at all of the work necessary to bring otherwise normal Germans to perpetuate it.  In particular, they have no sense of the *political* work that had to transpire to transform German culture, to make the Holocaust possible (work that was, of course, underway in 20th century Virginia too--as several recent studies have demonstrated).

The consequence of this failure in what is, to be sure, a difficult act of historical imagination, is that my students are unable to imagine something akin to the Holocaust happening anywhere else, and certainly not in the United States as they know it.  Since the collapse of the Wiemar republic is an obvious exemplar of the failure of a constitutional democracy, it has direct parallels for anyone who teaches American constitutional or political history--its precisely the sort of thing that the Founders feared.  Thus, one important civic lesson of the Holocaust is lost for my students--and I suspect that they are pretty typical of most visitors to the museum.  

If you think about the Holocaust at all seriously as the kind of thing that can happen when democracies fail, it makes the polemics of contemporary public intellectuals as diverse as Robert Bork, William Bennett, and Al Gore all the more relevant.  Our political class, or at least significant members within it, is deeply worried about contemporary public life, and is actively imagining the possibility that American democracy can fail.  It is something that the Founders worried about--but its not something that seems to resonate all that deeply among contemporary American citizens.

Equally, the failure of the Holocaust museum as public history has consequences for how we teach slavery.  Just as my students imagine that the Holocaust was an act of inexplicable, perhaps Satanic intervention into the otherwise decent and civil course of history, so they imagine that the slave owners must have been transcendently evil as well.  They *must* have been people consumed by inhuman brutality and malice.  Rhys Isaac's wonderful book on Landon Carter thus strikes me as superior to those studies of slave owners that emphasize the demonic aspects of their subjects.  Isaac's Carter was on occasion both brutal and malicious--but it was never an inhuman brutality, nor a demonic maliciousness.  We need a great deal more work like that, it seems to me.

All best,
Kevin
Kevin R. Hardwick, Ph.D.
Department of History
James Madison University