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