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Contemporary liberalism often appears strange and unmoored, but it sits squarely within an older moral tradition: Western abolitionism, a movement that combined genuine humanitarian concern with a pronounced fanatical element. From its inception, abolitionism elevated distant moral causes above domestic social obligations, rejected incremental improvement, and justified coercion in the name of absolute moral ends. (more…)
US Civil War recruiting poster, 1863 (image courtesy of Picryl)
US Civil War recruiting poster, 1863 (image courtesy of Picryl)
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Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)
[The present constitutional crisis over slavery] embraces the fearful issue whether the Union shall stand, and slavery, under the steady, peaceful action of moral, social, and political causes, be removed by gradual voluntary effort, and with compensation; or whether the Union shall be dissolved and civil war ensue . . . — William H. Seward, speech to the US Senate, 1850
Their vices are vices aped from white men, or that white men and bondage have taught them: improvidence and intemperance and evasion — and laziness . . . Promiscuity. (more…)
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So they want to ban Gone With the Wind? Pity, because a movie they would really like to strangle is Santa Fe Trail. Made in 1940, Santa Fe Trail is an Errol Flynn/Olivia de Havilland Western with lots of action and romance that discusses slavery and the Southern point of view in rational terms.
Errol Flynn plays Jeb Stuart, and Ronald Reagan plays George Custer. They are classmates at West Point in 1854 (more…)
Auguste Raffet, Attack and take of the Crête-à-Pierrot, 1839.
Auguste Raffet, Attack and take of the Crête-à-Pierrot, 1839.
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As Saint-Domingue sank ever deeper beneath the churning waves of black filth, those whites fortunate enough to survive fled for the greater Caribbean, including the antebellum American South. The colonists were no longer welcome in their home of France, (more…)