On Jun 12, 2007, at 7:47 AM, Henry Wiencek wrote:

> We like to think that "they didn't know any better; we can't judge 
> them." But if you look at what
> Washington did and contended against, you find that he was not fighting
> against ignorance and indifference, but against profit. The modern 
> analogy I
> use is: getting Thomas Jefferson to give up slavery is like getting 
> Dick
> Cheney to quit pumping oil.

Henry, forgive me for not remembering more clearly, as it has been 
awhile since I read your book, but did Washington's (unquestionably 
admirable) freeing of his slaves in his will actually affect his own 
profits, or those of his wife?

On the broader point, I am not an economic historian, but it has always 
been difficult for me to imagine how slavery could have been abolished 
on a large scale, voluntarily or involuntarily, without causing 
personal economic collapse for most slaveholding Virginians without any 
clear remedy (which is why so many of them who freed their slaves did 
so post mortem).  The rare emancipations by major slaveholders 
underscore this point: Washington understandably deferred his 
emancipations until both he and his wife were dead, and had no children 
whose needs were sacrificed to those of his slaves; Robert Carter 
willingly (and wonderfully) sacrificed his own well-being during his 
lifetime, but went to great lengths not to exact a comparable sacrifice 
from his children.  The de facto quasi-serfdom that followed the Civil 
War for so many African Americans, cruel and oppressive in its own 
right, seems to me further evidence of the problem: erstwhile 
slaveholders were only too happy to save themselves from impoverishment 
at the expense of their former slaves, but that fact should not obscure 
the related fact that they were driven by economic no less than racist 
motives.

As for the assumption among many historians that the 1780s were a 
pivotal moment when white Virginians might have been induced to give up 
slavery had their politicians led them aright: the most detailed study 
of the evidence to date concludes otherwise.  See Eva Sheppard Wolf, 
Race and Liberty in the New Nation: Emancipation in Virginia from the 
Revolution to Nat Turner's Rebellion (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State 
University Press, 2006), which is likely to be the starting-point for 
all further scholarship on this subject among historians of Virginia.

If I see Virginia's persistence in slavery as tragically complex rather 
than simply evil, then, it's because I cannot see any large-scale 
alternative, once slavery had been established as the region's economic 
foundation, that would not have required slaveholders to put themselves 
and their families in dire economic jeopardy.  Should they have done 
so?  Of course.  In the aftermath of the Revolution, most of the 
societies they knew came to recognize that slavery was an intolerable 
abomination, and white Southerners' determination to disagree required 
one of the most willful acts of collective self-delusion on record.  
But that they did not do so?  That, surely, should not surprise us.

These issues may well be all too relevant to us today.  Assuming that 
the world is, in fact, at an environmental crossroads--global climate 
change--that will require Americans to sacrifice materially and 
painfully in order to save millions in places such as South Asia from 
devastating suffering, let us hope that we present-day Virginians will 
defy the slaveholders' example and summon the sacrificial selflessness 
they refused.

--Jurretta Heckscher