DF Mills asks "May I dare say that just about any one of us, given the miserable opportunity and the economic prowess, had we lived back then, probably would have owned some slaves?
Are we so high minded that we can just sit here and slam away?"

To my mind, this is a central issue in the conversation.  To unpack why it is central, let me make a few elementary observations.

First of all, I think it reasonable to class slavery as a moral atrocity.  There are worse atrocities, of course--genocide, for example, is worse than slavery.  But slavery is a pretty big deal, so far as "bad things" go.  

Now *why* is slavery a "bad thing?"  There are many possible answers to this question.  Some focus on the material conditions of slavery, which were certainly bad enough.  But to my mind the central ones are broadly speaking spiritual and political.  Slavery robs the slave of the opportunity to become self-governing; it denies liberty to the slave; it forbids the slave to embark on a project of self-improvement; it denies the autonomy and dignity of the slave.  These are classically American values, and we honor Thomas Jefferson largely because he is one of the handful of people in our history who articulated our values the best.

So Jefferson's participation in slavery, his moral failure to act on his own political principles, and his contribution to the line of thinking that attempted to reconcile slavery with the best of his political commitments, are all disappointing.  They are not disappointing just by *our* standards--this is not simply a case of judging people in the past by our own contemporary moral standards.  Some people at the time understood the issue of slavery as I am presenting it here.  

This leaves us with a number of unsettling possibilities.  One is that, at least so far as slavery is concerned, Jefferson was a huge hypocrite.  Perhaps he was so blinded by his self-interest that he was simply unable to see clearly the moral choices that he was making.  But more likely, and more humanely, it seems to me, is that Jefferson lived in a world that condoned slavery.  He lived enmeshed in the company of people--good, decent people--who made their peace with slavery.  

And that raises before us the profound moral issue of what, in a different context, Hannah Arendt referred to as "the banality of evil."  We could, of course, just sweep slavery into the oblivion of the past, and, as DF Mills would seem to suggest, not try very hard to grapple with its significance.  But to do so, it seems to me, is to turn our eyes from evil, either because it is transcendent and inhuman--Satanic, if you would; or else because it makes us uncomfortable; or perhaps because we view is solely as an artifact of the past that has nothing to teach us about the present.

As an historian, that last possibility concerns me.  Part of the reason we study the past is so that we can learn from it.  One of the failures of modern historiography is that contemporary historians are reluctant to celebrate the positive in the past, from which, surely, we can learn much.  But it is equally a mistake not to study evil in the past--I would argue, and do argue with my students, that we learn much about ourselves from examination of the conditions in the past that permitted evil to flourish.

So let me reframe DF Mill's question.  Let me ask the bigger question, what has to be true of the society, culture, and public order of the world in which I live, that *I*, a presumably decent and thoughtful person, might own slaves?  What would have to be true for *you* to own slaves?  

If we start with the presumption that Jefferson was a thoughtful man, who tried to live an ethical life--a safe assumption, it seems to me--then we can ask that question of him as well.  What had to be true, in Virginia, at Monticello, for Jefferson to own slaves?  Its easy to see why a *bad* person might own slaves.  But how could a person striving for an ethically sound life do so?  
Kevin R. Hardwick, Ph.D.
Department of History
James Madison University

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