There is some comparative historical research on serfs and slavery - Journal of Southern History in the 80s as I recall, comparing Old South and Prussian "Junkers" or something, and I seem to remember a monograph, too.  Don't have the citations to hand, but anyone interested could probably track them down in LVA's on-line catalogue or through JSTOR.

Regarding the arguments against slavery, Jack Rakove has a thoughtful essay in Jan Ellis Lewis and Peter S. Onuf, eds. _Sally Hemings & Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture (Univ Press of Va 1999) in which he links the rise of the argument against slavery on moral and religious grounds to the 19th-century evangelicals - pp. 228 ff. are especially pertinent to the question of 21st-century perspectives and our "judgment" of past generations.  I think Rakove's essay is brilliant, and recommend it highly to anyone with a genuine interest in the current discussion on VA-HIST.

Ranke said - Jede epocha standt im mitterbar zu Gott - every generation stands immediately before God.  A good historian has to empathize with past generations sufficiently to understand them in the context of their own times and values, and having done that, to explain them to his or her own age with its own concerns and perspective - if one attends too closely to the past alone, the result is sterile antiquarianism; focusing too closely on one's own time blinds us to past realities and causes misunderstandings rooted in presentism.  Rakove's essay is especially helpful because it contrasts the criticisms of slavery that were not common in Jefferson's day (a social evil, impolitic, dangerous, etc.-- see for example David Brion Davis's treatment of Patrick Henry's 1773 letter about slavery in his Slavery in the Age of Revolution -- with the subsequent religious denunciation of slavery as "sinful" that undergirded the abolitionist campaigns of the 1830s-1860s -- and recast the debate into familiar moral terms that are widely held today.
By way of analogy, what if the issue were, say, global warming. It wasn't seen as a problem 30 years ago - opinions are conflicted today - but if 30 years from now the consequences are dire enough, people may look back at the differences between our rhetoric and our conduct, judge them as immoral, and they'll be chastizing our generation for continuing to drive SUVs when we should have known better and for failing to ratify the Kyoto accords, etc.  Upon reflection, the failings of past generations probably should prompt some humility on our part - we see the speck in their eye but not the log in ours.


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