A modification of this is that "you can't judge them by modern view points." But I imagine a sizable specific population back then also viewed slavery negatively.
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That is pure nonsense. Ask any anthropologist. Human are the same as we’ve always been. Every single one of them, as is the case today, knew it was wrong.
aug 26, 2025, 11:27 pm • 9 0 • view
That i have to disagree with about knowing it was wrong. We can make all sorts of justifications to inflict harm on an outgroup that many people will internalize. Whether or not such justifications are fashionable or legal in society at any given time is the temporal aspect.
aug 26, 2025, 11:33 pm • 9 0 • view
Simply not true. And you’re conflating two things. Historiography teaches to not use that to skew objective analysis. Again, ask any anthropologist or classicist.
aug 26, 2025, 11:38 pm • 0 0 • view
Yeah, I am not disagreeing with not using those grounds to skew objective analysis. I am saying people are perfectly capable of believing post-facto bullshit to give permission to doing horrible shit.
aug 26, 2025, 11:43 pm • 2 0 • view
I didn’t think you were. My point is they can’t lie to themselves. I’m getting out of my lane but physiologically humans are the same.
aug 26, 2025, 11:46 pm • 1 0 • view
Gonna agree on that.
aug 26, 2025, 11:47 pm • 1 0 • view
And I totally get what you’re saying. The morality was definitely worse and worse things were acceptable.
aug 26, 2025, 11:49 pm • 0 0 • view
Whether or not a slaver deserves to have a personal meeting with John Brown is timeless.
aug 26, 2025, 11:33 pm • 11 0 • view
Knowing it was wrong vs knowing it causes suffering
aug 27, 2025, 1:01 am • 1 0 • view
Nah, I think they knew it was wrong the way we know genocide and fascism are wrong here- but people are willing to play stupid or rationalize it if it benefits them.
aug 27, 2025, 12:57 am • 2 0 • view
aug 27, 2025, 1:04 am • 0 0 • view
Beliefs can do primarily two things. Create a permission structure for all the horrible shit you want to do or constrain your actions so you comport in accordance with those beliefs.
aug 27, 2025, 1:05 am • 0 0 • view
But the entire time, you know it’s wrong. That’s the basic point here.
aug 27, 2025, 1:05 am • 1 0 • view
No, I fully believe in the ability for a person to twist themselves into knots to believe that an evil is good for "reasons".
aug 27, 2025, 1:08 am • 0 0 • view
I don’t disagree that those people exist, but I’d argue that the few who truly believe that would be statistically insignificant. It would about the same percentage as the flat earthers who actually believe the earth is flat.
aug 27, 2025, 1:16 am • 0 0 • view
So, 100%? Nobody calls themselves a flat earther for teh lulz, those people sincerely think they're getting one over on the scientific community.
aug 27, 2025, 8:04 am • 0 0 • view
They absolutely do. They just want to belong to a club. They know the earth isn’t flat.
aug 27, 2025, 11:21 am • 0 0 • view
Man, you should see some documentaries where the flat earthers do some science and it unequivocally points to a curved earth and see how they react and justify themselves. People will believe some shit to belong in a group.
aug 27, 2025, 1:28 am • 2 0 • view
Maybe, but I think people enjoy doing admittedly evil things. Like Israel mocking starving and dying Palestinians. There's no way they think it's good, they just enjoy it.
aug 27, 2025, 1:13 am • 2 0 • view
I don't like the whole "maybe they had a belief that made it make sense", like ... the belief was they hated doing their own labor and hated Black people
aug 27, 2025, 1:11 am • 1 0 • view
The exploitation of outgroups are politely expressed in the belief of deficiencies of the outgroups that justifies that they are exploited or ,sometimes less politely, the belief in the virtues of the in group to exploit.
aug 27, 2025, 1:24 am • 0 0 • view
This how is how we conceptualize justifications to the innate monkey moral conflict of "be a dick if I can get an advantage" vs "don't be a dick because harmony with the group is beneficial"
aug 27, 2025, 1:24 am • 0 0 • view
Whether or not that belief is that people are better off enslaved or there is an underlying more honest belief that the strong have the inherent right to enslave is unimportant for outcomes and is more of a political issue than moral.
aug 27, 2025, 1:06 am • 0 0 • view
The belief was that it was wrong but they didn't care and who was gonna stop them, essentially. They didn't care about Black people enough to inconvenience themselves even a little. Much like today.
aug 27, 2025, 1:10 am • 2 0 • view
I would have to disagree with that. Some people justified slavery as a net good for black people that it was better than the lives they would have had in Africa. A lot of people were pretty indifferent to slavery, even in the North. Keep in mind most people had zero idea about the horrors of slavery
aug 27, 2025, 12:34 am • 0 0 • view
They know enslaving another human being is wrong. Humans have never not known that. Every generation should be judged by that universal fact.
aug 27, 2025, 1:02 am • 0 0 • view
I think you're giving too much credit to 19th century people. Hardline abolition of slavery was a fringe stance even in the North in the antebellum years.
aug 27, 2025, 1:15 am • 0 0 • view
I’m not giving them anything. You’re arguing morality vs innate sense of wrong. They aren’t the same thing.
aug 27, 2025, 1:17 am • 0 0 • view
aug 27, 2025, 1:40 am • 0 0 • view
I didn’t mean it to insult so apologies if it came across that way. I just meant that humans innately know it’s wrong to enslave other humans. What they do from there is a whole other can of worms.
aug 27, 2025, 1:43 am • 0 0 • view
This attitude didn't start to change until after the start of the civil war and Union soldiers started writing home expressing the horrors they witnessed. The idea that morals don't change with time is laughable.
aug 27, 2025, 12:36 am • 0 0 • view
Now did some people have slaves and thought it was wrong? Absolutely. In pre-Constitution United States openly supporting slavery was considered uncouth. Attitudes had changed by the start of the civil war.
aug 27, 2025, 12:40 am • 0 0 • view
99% absolutely knew it was wrong.
aug 27, 2025, 1:03 am • 0 0 • view
Most people! It was already banned in most of Europe!
aug 27, 2025, 4:04 am • 1 0 • view
Many Popes owned slaves.
aug 27, 2025, 6:41 am • 0 0 • view
lol George Washington had to move his slaves out of Philadelphia once every 6 months in a legal loophole to avoid the laws *abolishing slavery within the state*. People definitely knew it was wrong.
aug 27, 2025, 1:18 am • 178 12 • view
Pretty sure the Quakers and a few other religious groups were against it the whole time too. Because yeah like, it’s pretty obviously evil. Like, literally watching most of the base logistical processes of slavery, like transport and auction, would make an unprepared person sick.
aug 27, 2025, 1:20 am • 94 4 • view
You gotta have massive sociocultural mind-fortresses to keep that shit functional in society. There’s a reason that kind of chattel slavery was invented *after* capitalism. Big structures need to be in place to keep that evil from festering over and falling apart.
aug 27, 2025, 1:22 am • 61 3 • view
Also: the willful societal blindness to evil fed into the shift from viewing chattel slavery as a “necessary evil” (as Washington et al envisioned in a pre-industrial era) to a “positive good” (as Jefferson Davis et al envisioned it in the industrial era)
aug 27, 2025, 4:16 am • 2 0 • view
I’m Gen X. We weren’t taught details abt slavery & I was educated in MA. It wasn’t until I moved to Sac that I heard the term Jim Crow. I vividly remember seeing a picture of 2 water bubblers next to each other labeled “whites only” & “negroes” We can thank the Daughters of the Confederacy for that
aug 27, 2025, 2:16 am • 22 0 • view
I grew up in, and was largely educated in MA also. I can concur. I educated myself on the matter by reading outside materials.
aug 27, 2025, 10:53 am • 1 0 • view
I was lied to my entire childhood. Moving to SC I was blown away by the brutal reality we weren’t educated to know. I was gobsmacked. If schools taught Emmett Till's story in middle school, our country would be different. Lincoln predicted this would happen..they killed him to silence the truth.
aug 27, 2025, 11:46 am • 1 0 • view
Oh! You wanna know why? A book called Lies My Teacher Told Me shows how textbooks won't make regional editions, so all this time MA kids' education was dragged down by the Daughters of the Confederacy(!) via the school boards of Texas and Kansas, even though we were a solid Union state.
aug 27, 2025, 11:42 am • 9 1 • view
I never realized that all the textbooks were written by white guys. It wasn’t until I moved to SC & watched George Floyd get murdered that I made the realization that I’d been lied to since birth. It pissed me off It’s no wonder we’re in this mess. Daughters of the Confederacy is a terrorist org.
aug 27, 2025, 11:52 am • 7 0 • view
100% agreed. And the way they infected the entire country with their filth is infuriating. It's not the top reason I homeschooled (learning disabilities) but it was in the top 5.
aug 27, 2025, 1:14 pm • 3 0 • view
quakers owned slaves, and it took at least a decade from the first suggestion they not to actually threatening dismembership for owning slaves. not to mention the amount of time before even that
aug 27, 2025, 1:44 am • 2 0 • view
I went to the African American history museum in DC this summer and just reading about the way people were treated on the slave ships made me almost pass out. I know everybody says this, but however bad you think it was, it was probably worse.
aug 28, 2025, 10:59 am • 0 0 • view
“No one knew it was bad, that’s why it was illegal in most of the northern states and all of Europe.”
aug 28, 2025, 12:03 am • 0 0 • view
and a lot of those people who viewed it negatively would be considered racist by todays standards. Many white supremacists, for example, viewed it negatively because of course they did.
aug 27, 2025, 3:04 pm • 0 0 • view
Also in their own life I doubt they’d be cool with “they just didn’t know any better” as an excuse for anything bigger than like a mild inconvenience, but generational chattel slavery is an exception I guess
aug 27, 2025, 1:42 am • 0 0 • view
You don't have to imagine it, many did, and they wrote eloquently and often about it. I had to defend the skill of reading cursive last year to make this point. They wrote in print of course, but also copiously in letters, journals, and legal papers. Follow @tadstoermer.bsky.social.
aug 27, 2025, 11:39 am • 0 0 • view