Yes, I know Paine was anti-slavery, to his eternal credit. I'm just not sure he qualifies as "rabid[ly] Abolitionist." Unless you radically alter the meaning of "rabid."
Issues with this approach:
- It turns into majority rule. But isn't that democracy? Sure, but democracy is a crap system if you're in a minority.
- You can't get anything done. It'd be even worse than the current system. People would vote for all the quality of life improvements that cost money, and the next thing they would do is vote to cut taxes, making it impossible to pay for the thing they just voted for.
As much as I hate party-based representative political systems (in which everyone's more worried about trading off one thing against the other because their party told them to or in order to get someone else's support on another issue, than is actually representing the people that voted for them), they're a far better alternative than putting the power directly in the hands of the people.
Just program an AI and put that in charge, at least then things would actually get done.
Yes, I know Paine was anti-slavery, to his eternal credit. I'm just not sure he qualifies as "rabid[ly] Abolitionist." Unless you radically alter the meaning of "rabid."He was credited for a while with writing the very first abolitionist article, African Slavery in America. While scholars no longer think he was the writer of that anonymous piece, they still believe that his anti-slavery stance is largely responsible for his marginalization after the American Revolution. While not radical by the standards of later years, it certainly was at the time.
I thought his authorship of The Age of Reason and his anti-Christianity stance were largely responsible for his marginalization after the American Revolution?
I don't doubt for a second that Tommy was radical for his day and age (and for many days and ages that were to come after him). What I doubt is that he could be considered a "rabid Abolitionist." But perhaps there were other rabid Revolutionaries who would qualify as rabid Abolitionists of whom I am not aware.
I thought his authorship of The Age of Reason and his anti-Christianity stance were largely responsible for his marginalization after the American Revolution?Yes, I know Paine was anti-slavery, to his eternal credit. I'm just not sure he qualifies as "rabid[ly] Abolitionist." Unless you radically alter the meaning of "rabid."He was credited for a while with writing the very first abolitionist article, African Slavery in America. While scholars no longer think he was the writer of that anonymous piece, they still believe that his anti-slavery stance is largely responsible for his marginalization after the American Revolution. While not radical by the standards of later years, it certainly was at the time.
Nah. The Founding Fathers had no problems with taking potshots at Christianity. Click on that Treaty of Tripoli link I posted; the English translation outright states the United States is not founded based on Christianity and will never be ruled by it. Note that the version translated into the other language didn't include this.
Nah. The Founding Fathers had no problems with taking potshots at Christianity.
Except that the Founding Fathers weren't the only people who could shun you in post-Revolutionary America.
From wikipedia, which isn't modern scholarship, alas, but will do for now:
He became notorious because of his pamphlet The Age of Reason (1793–94), in which he advocated deism, promoted reason and freethinking, and argued against institutionalized religion in general and Christian doctrine in particular. He also wrote the pamphlet Agrarian Justice (1795), discussing the origins of property, and introduced the concept of a guaranteed minimum income. In 1802, he returned to America where he died on June 8, 1809. Only six people attended his funeral as he had been ostracized for his ridicule of Christianity.
But I suppose Citizen Lensman could have meant that the purported anti-slavery tract was largely responsible for his marginalization among the Founding Fathers. Although I'm not sure I believe that either.
Thomas Jefferson, fellow deist and also a slaveowner extraordinaire, was one of the few FFs who welcomed Tommy back in 1802.
Nonetheless, it's one thing to have your doubts about the sanctity of the Gospels and quite another to publish a pamphlet in which you state:
“Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is no more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory to itself than this thing called Christianity. Too absurd for belief, too impossible to convince, and too inconsistent for practice, it renders the heart torpid or produces only atheists or fanatics. As an engine of power, it serves the purpose of despotism, and as a means of wealth, the avarice of priests, but so far as respects the good of man in general it leads to nothing here or hereafter.”
(Chosen randomly; there's quite a few juicy ones)
There's probably a reason Tommy claimed he had waited til the later years of his life to pen such a pamphlet.
Finally, the further south you went, you got more acceptance of slavery AND more loyalists. Any trend one can extract about slavery and the revolution is that the Union (in the sense of set theory) of Slaveowners/Slavery supporters and Loyaltists is far larger than the Union of Slaveowners/Slavery supporters and Revolutionaries.
I google searched various permutations of "slaveowner loyalist american revolution" when you first asserted this, but couldn't find anything at all.
This time I look up Loyalist on wikipedia and find the following:
Historian Robert Middlekauff summarized scholarly research on the nature of Loyalist support as follows:
The largest number of loyalists were found in the middle colonies: many tenant farmers of New York supported the king, for example, as did many of the Dutch in the colony and in New Jersey. The Germans in Pennsylvania tried to stay out of the Revolution, just as many Quakers did, and when that failed, clung to the familiar connection rather than embrace the new. Highland Scots in the Carolinas, a fair number of Anglican clergy and their parishioners in Connecticut and New York, a few Presbyterians in the southern colonies, and a large number of the Iroquois Indians stayed loyal to the king.[29]
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I've never read this book, either. Any neat-o links demonstrating that the further South you went, the more Loyalists there were?
Have been discussing the Counterrevolution thesis with my dear friend, Omar the Former Arab Terrorist. He came up with most of the same objections as Citizen Gnorc, including the one that there were more Loyalists in the South. Last time I saw him, though, he said he had read through TJ's original draft of the Declaration of Independence and was struck by the following passage, especially the bolded part:
"he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemispere, or to incure miserable death in their transportation hither. this piratical warfare, the opprobium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. [determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold,] he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce [determining to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold]: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he had deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another."
While he was reading it to me, it occured to me that the King of England was probably a lot less responsible for bringing slaves to the New World than the merchants and planters that Tommy represented. Man, that Jefferson. What a guy.
A large part of Jefferson's reasoning was his girlfriend of the time; see, as much as slavery was frowned upon, interracial relationships were frowned on so much more. He was opposed to manumission because the only way he could protect his girlfriend was with her as his property.
The interracial bit was actually a fault of a successful campaign to prevent the colonists from running off to join Native American tribes. So, basically, we owe about three hundred years of racial trouble to a group of people trying to solve an emigration problem and a bunch of greedy businessmen.