If you've never seen neon up close, plasma is such an incredible light source. It's like the light is just floating being emitted from empty space. I took a neon workshop a few years ago, and it became clear why people are still willing to painstakingly make these signs - there is really nothing comparable to them, they're like magic
I love plasma so much, I have multiple “Jr.” globes from Aurora Plasma Design (which have a voltage? adjustment knob), some gas tubes, ancient indicator bulbs from Ukraine/Russia, and an ancient VTG/Rabbit Systems
“Eye of the Storm” E-6000 globe from 1987 (which has two adjustment sliders, and a few cheapo globes.
If you are interested in a globe, I’d highly recommend the “Phoenix Rising” Jr. globe they offer. At lower powers it’s near silent, and you can typically adjust them down to have 3-5 small tendrils wafting around each other lazily. APD’s gloves also have thicker glass, and are rated for running all day at below 80% power. At full power my phoenix rising globe uses ~12 watts, and at the lowest power it’s something like 3-4 watts. Unfortunately tariffs, inflation and noble gas cost have hammered the price in the last year.
I definitely prefer silent and lazy looking plasma instead of the frantic screeching storms that most globes have. I uploaded a few example videos here: https://imgur.com/a/bg8fsCW
One thing you can often do is take a cheapo Chinese glove, and use a voltage adjustable power supply and tune it down that way, though I couldn’t tell you if that’s ok for the electronics long term or not.
Maybe someone that has seen this first hand can chime in but I strongly suspect the real-life effect viewed with naked eye is much more disappointing compared to what is shown in this video. Real physics ain't need to get them likes and subscribes.
I don't know much about this genre but it comes to mind this this could fill in the gap in Steampunk for where light comes from without electricity as we know it. At any rate it seems very steampunk but it's 200 older than it needs to be.
To put it in perspective, people used to consume mercury-based medicine. I'm sure if the glass is thick enough, the risk of a spill (and your health) will be generally managed.
People used to do a lot of stupid stuff. If you live alone and are conscious of the risk, sure, this is not a terribly dangerous item if you're safe about it. If you live with pets or children, it's entirely sensible to be concerned about the risk. A mercury spill can seep between the floorboards and contaminate your house with volatile mercury vapors for years to come if not properly managed.
I suspect eutectic liquid InGa alloys would work, they stop wetting the glass when you are under vacuum. Although mercury is safe in the tube, just don't break the glass.
think about Benjamin Franklin twenty-five years before Declaration of Independence naming the first "battery" (out of the concept of lined-up artillery) by connecting a series of lynden jars (basically capacitors) - he also invented the concept of +/- positive and negative
now we've got space telescopes and probes leaving the solar system
Another fun fact is that it was impossible to deduce from any of Ben Franklin's experiments what material was transferred and what material remained in place to give rise to "charge" as we think of it. So he picked a convention that we've continued to use even after we learned that his negative charges were the material that gets transferred by friction.
On the plus side, in electroplating the positive ions are what actually moves. So in the experiments where you can visually see something move from one terminal to the other the conventional current direction is obviously correct.
somewhat more "fun" and impressive (despite useless) are "Franklin Bells" which way before anyone figured out electric motors, was the first example of electricity to mechanical energy
but it must be said, as genius as Franklin was, sadly he bears the original sin of owning slaves EVEN AS AN ABOLITIONIST and didn't free them until after his death (via will) - it's more than a little f-ed up
I don't think it's irrelevant that a brilliant man like Benjamin Franklin may not have been able to achieve as much as he unmistakably did WITHOUT the heavy assistance of forced slave labor in his life, from cradle to grave.
Pretending like these things can be separated is ignorance. Ignoring its brutality does a disservice to our history and that man's legacy
How did anyone manage to do it after slavery was abolished? Did the nature of genius change at that point?
Ben Franklin was one of the greatest minds worldwide of the 18th century. Odds are, even without slavery, he would have contributed just as much as he did with slavery. It's not like he made his money working slaves to the bone in a field and couldn't turn a profit without slavery.
He was a publisher. A few slaves were involved but they were largely incidental to the business. As in, he could have easily paid John and Sam a wage instead of paying to feed and house Peter and George and the business would be entirely unaffected
I'll accept your conceit but answer this: why didn't he liberate his slaves? If it's a wash, why keep humans in slavery at all?
I think it's because, in his own calculus, he believed he needed to desecrate human beings, destroy their families, and humiliate their dignity to maintain his greatness.
He did liberate his slaves, eventually. And one of the last things he did before he died was to formally petition Congress to abandon slavery.
I don't think you really have any basis for that analysis of franklins psychology. If anything, I think the safe assumption is just that for most of his life slavery was there and people don't always question every part of society.
Brother, no he did not liberate a single one of his own slaves. Some escaped and he did not pursue, but his final slave died under Benjamin Franklin's enslavement 9 years before Franklin himself died.
I think it's a sound analysis, he was a thoughtful and philosophical man who considered the nature of slavery heavily, and he benefitted from it greatly, and dearly understood its terrible nature, and continued it's cruelty, and freed no one.
Plenty of people at the time thought slavery was evil. Franklin was even one of them, calling it "cancer." He said this while still owning slaves, which is rather peculiar, but people are complicated.
In this century we have a word for that kind of talk by slaveholders who professed some longing for abolition (Franklin. Jefferson, Washington, John Jay) but did not really wanna be inconvenienced: trolling.
Trolls do things for the LOLs. They are motivated by humor. Someone who wants rules for others but breaks those rules personally is better referred to as a hypocrite.
And while he did have a sense of humor (I hear that daylight savings time was just a joke), I don't think that is why he had slaves. He kept them because they were useful to him, and the moment he died they were no longer useful. The slaves owned by others were never useful to him, so they should be freed immediately.
My brother: trolls troll out of cynical cruelty, there are many children's books that can illustrate this clearly.
Franklin's ability to speak plainly about the evils of slavery, in between his own acts of unspeakable cruelty, and robbing families of their dignity and humanity, requires a level of disconnect and pride that is worth significant mention whenever we do justice to his great legacy.
This talk of human utility sounds like a lot of chump shit.
Yeah no, Norway and a few others are the free-est country in history, just because someone declares US is "free" doesn't make it true, we disappear citizens all the time, police can seize your property without cause, government can seize your land for datacenters and women lose more and more rights every year
Again, Franklin knew slavery was wrong, literally campaigned to end it for that reason, yet did it himself for decades in the meanwhile, not a difficult horror to grasp in any time
I consider freedom to include the free market. Norway has a mixed economy, due to its extensive regulation.
While it operates as a free-market country, the Norwegian government holds large ownership stakes in strategic industries, including petroleum, hydroelectric power, telecommunications, and banking.
Experts often characterize the Norwegian economy as a blend of private enterprise, state ownership, and social welfare that provides high standards of living.
Slavery was immoral during Franklin's time too, Walter. Many, many people of the time understood this. Even Franklin himself, hypocrite though he was, came around to it.
So what? That doesn't affect the morality of slavery one bit. Subjective and relative moral questions do exist, but slavery isn't one of them.
Likewise, Ben Franklin being a founding father doesn't somehow balance the scales in that regard. The existence of the United States doesn't retroactively make slavery ok.
What is moral and what isn't changes with the times. For example, blaspheming could get you murdered by the state in medieval times. The colonies had different views of morality, especially religious morality. It was immoral to work on the Sabbath. It was immoral to have sex before marriage.
The Founders saw fit to abolish the nobility, and disassociated religion from government. We've forgotten what an enormous leap both of those were (each of the colonies had an establishment of religion). I've seen endless documentaries on the founding of the country, and there's no mention of either of these.
Half of the colonies did abolish slavery. But, again, if it was demanded of the other half, the Union would never have happened.
Jefferson, Franklin, and Washington all held slaves.
I am certainly not advocating slavery. I'm merely pointing out that people should be judged on the morality of their times, not today's morality. If we judged past people by our modern standards, they would all be condemned.
You say that people should be judged by the morality of their times, yet as has been pointed out to you, these men were judged by the morality of their times, and condemned by many for their participation in slavery.
Also, if we must judge by the morality of the times, we must also view abolishing the nobility and separating church from state to be immoral and unchristian. You seem to want to avoid a "modern moral framework" when it would tarnish the reputation of a founding father, but embrace it otherwise. You're not advocating slavery, but you don't want to judge slaveowners harshly.
It's perfectly fine to acknowledge the good that people do, while also acknowledging the evil. Jefferson, Franklin, and Washington all held slaves, and they were all evil for doing so. If we judged past people by our modern standards, they would all be condemned, and if we believe at all in some form of moral progress (which you must, since you bring up American freedom and the establishment of a secular republic as virtues) then we can condemn them all for some things.
I've lived long enough to see a distinct shift in what people consider moral and immoral. Are you certain in your moral rectitude? (I am, even though I fall short of it, and change my mind now and then.)
> these men were judged by the morality of their times
Half the colonies considered slavery to be moral in their time. So much so that, a few years later, fought and died in a terrible war to defend it.
I can't control how the future judges me, if at all, and I won't let fear of that affect my own morality.
But I don't own other humans as property, so at least I have that going for me.
>I've lived long enough to see a distinct shift in what people consider moral and immoral.
And yet you have no issues making moral judgements yourself, as you so often do in political threads. You seem to believe in the absolute moral good of the US and free market capitalism, and the absolute moral evil of socialism and leftism, but you just can't bring yourself to say the founding fathers were immoral for owning slaves. Why? Because maybe in the future slavery might come back and someone might say "That Walter Bright guy didn't even believe in slavery that shmuck, we should tear down his statues forthwith?" Is that really how you think?
I'll leave you with the last word, since you're starting to go in circles. Good night.
Nope. It is wrong that Franklin, Jefferson, and Washington kept slaves. But they grew up in a society that accepted slavery, and so harshly judging them as evil is unjust.
But they did make the leap of getting rid of the notion of nobility, and separating church and state. In that they rose above what was the accepted norm, implemented their new ideas. Those were huge changes for their time, and that makes them great men. That they did not go all the way to today's morality is an unjust indictment of them.
P.S. Franklin, Washington, and Jefferson would have been drawn and quartered if the British had captured them. Are you that brave? I doubt I am.
Walter, you sort of gave the game away with this last post when you wrote 'It is wrong that Franklin, Jefferson, and Washington kept slaves.'
It was wrong, but by whose standards exactly? Not the standards of the time as half the colonies, by your own account, thought it was fine. So you're judging them by a fixed standard that sits above the mores of 1787 and is the exact thing you spent the entire thread insisting people shouldn't do.
Not only that, but you just did it again when you said that they 'rose above the accepted norm' by abolishing nobility and the dominance of religious institutions because 'rose above' only means something if there's a fixed height to measure against. You can't say "they rose above the norm" and 'don't judge them against anything but the norm' in the same paragraph. So I wouldn't say that the position you're taking is one of historical relativism but more of a universalist with a conspicuous discontinuity on at least this specific issue.
As someone who is fond of American history but is relatively unknowledgeable about the pre-civil war era this thread and previous conversations that we have had on George Washington have piqued my interest, so I did some digging.
Even if we provide the most charitable interpretation of your argument that the American founding fathers were a 'product of their time' that kind of defense only works when someone is blind to a wrong because nobody around them has conceived of or articulated an objection to slavery but that certainly isn't something that can be said in this situation. So, let's use the examples of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington to see why that isn't the case.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
Thomas Jefferson enslaved roughly 600 people over his lifetime, holding about 130 at any given moment across his numerous properties. He initially inherited his slaves from his father and in far greater numbers from his father-in-law. Despite being an owner of hundreds of slaves throughout his lifetime Jefferson was critical of the practice and advocated for restrictions on the practice.
His draft of the Declaration of Independence contained a passage [0] criticizing King George III over the British slave trade which was struck by the Congress. The passage read as follows:
"he has waged cruel war against human nature itself,
violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the
persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another
hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their
transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the
opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the
CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a
market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted
his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to
prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce..."
At the time he wrote this Thomas Jefferson was thirty-three and he owned about 175 people.
Somewhere between 1781-1785 (I'm seeing a lot of different publishing dates for this and I'll leave it to someone else to pin down the exact date if they're interested) in Notes on the State of Virginia Jefferson wrote of slavery: "The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other"[1] and argued that it corrupted the slaveholders' own children, who learned tyranny by imitation. Jefferson even wrote "Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever."[1]
The Virginian abolitionist Edward Coles[2] who in his youth had been neighbours with Jefferson wrote to him in 1814 asking him to lead an emancipation movement. Jefferson replied that he was too old to do so and he counseled Coles to stay in Virginia and keep his slaves rather than free them. Coles ignored him, moved to Illinois and freed his.
So what motivated Jefferson to hold these incompatible views and maintain his abhorrent practices while counselling others to do the same? Why the thing which you value most Walter -- money.[3] Thomas Jefferson lived beyond his means his entire adult life and died owing more than $100,000.[4] The people that he enslaved were his collateral and capital. In an 1820 letter to his son-in-law John Wayles Epps Jefferson wrote, "having scruples about selling negroes but for delinquency, or on their own request. but your proposition gets me over these scruples as it is in fact to keep them in the family." and went on to tell Eppes, "I know no error more consuming to an estate than that of stocking farms with men almost exclusively. I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man of the farm. what she produces is an addition to the capital, while his labors disappear in mere consumption."[5] Keep in mind that Jefferson wrote this six years after he told Coles that he was too old to lead an emancipation movement.
This doesn't read like a man who was oblivious to the consequences of his actions or his financial motivations. This reads like a man who knew what he was doing was abhorrent but wasn't willing to stop because it would have led to his financial ruin and suffering.
The first President of the United States of America, George Washington, was also a wealthy Virginian plantation owner with 8000 acres of land and the people that he forced to work on it. Washington started with ten slaves inherited from his father and aggressively scaled up his operation as a young man with most of the growth happening largely through birth -- 293 child slaves were born at the Mount Vernon plantation between 1750 and 1799.[6]
In 1799, the year that Washington died, the census was taken at Mount Vernon and it records 317 enslaved people at Mount Vernon with 123 of them being outright owned by Washington, 153 as dower property from the estate of his wife's previously husband and 40 rented from a neighbour.
Over the years that George Washington brutally enslaved human beings some of his contemporaries tried to convince Washington to end slavery on his plantation and free his slaves. Some personally reached out to Washington imploring him to do so while others went ahead and did it to serve as an example to people like Washington and Jefferson.
In 1783 Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, a man who even named his own son George Washington Lafayette wrote a letter to Washington proposing that they buy an estate and settle it with formerly enslaved people as tenant farmers as a demonstration that emancipation could work. Washington answered warmly but did nothing. Lafayette went ahead and did it alone and in 1785 bought plantations in French Guiana and placed roughly seventy people on them with instructions that no one was to be sold or physically punished, that they be schooled and paid wages, and that they be moved gradually toward freedom. It ultimately went badly as the local government confiscated his property in 1794 and Napoleon eventually reinstated slavery in French colonies in 1802, but it serves as an example of Washington's contemporaries trying to free slaves.
Another example of this was Robert Carter III, a Virginia plantation owner who performed the largest manumission in America prior to the war when he freed 450 people. This is a man who was shunned for his actions and resisted by his family and neighbours but went ahead with freeing people and paying them for their work anyways.[7]
Though in his later years Washington came to regret his participation in the practice of slavery he paid little mind to his contemporaries who opposed it and during his career as a human slaver there were too many illustrative examples of Washington's absolute wickedness to his slaves to list here but these two caught my eye:
In a 1766 letter[8] reminiscent of the Epstein emails on jmail.world Washington wrote to the Captain of a schooner Swift Joseph Thompson, which opens with the following: "With this Letter comes a Negro (Tom) which I beg the favour of you to sell, in any of the Islands you may go to, for whatever he will fetch, & bring me in return for him" Washington goes on to provide what reads like a shopping list for a 2am run to 7-11 munchies to get booze and snacks to keep the party going:
One Hhd of best Molasses
One Ditto of best Rum
One Barrl of Lymes—if good & Cheap
One Pot of Tamarinds—contg about 10 lbs.
Two small Do of mixed Sweetmeats—abt 5 lb. each
And the residue, much or little, in good old Spirits
What prompted Washington to sell Tom? Why Tom tried to run away of course. Tom's crime was merely wanting what every human being is entitled to -- his freedom and George Washington punished him for that. How was selling Tom a punishment you ask? The working conditions and treatment of slaves in the Caribbean were utterly brutal. While slave populations in America grew 20% decade over decade they declined at the same rate in the Caribbean. And Virginian slave owners like George Washington knew this. They knew this and they held the threat over the heads of their slaves. Work hard and don't try and run away or I'll punish you by having you worked to death, even faster than you'll die here.
Another fascinating instance of Washington's involves Ona Judge, Martha Washington's dower maid, who escaped from the presidential household in Philadelphia in 1796. Washington paid for newspaper ads calling for her return and pursued her through federal officials and family connections for years, including an attempt to have her seized in New Hampshire. Despite George Washington's best efforts to have her returned to his brutal subjugation Ona Judge Staines died in as all human beings should, as a free person in New Hampshire in 1848.[9]
Something interesting that I learned during reading up on this is that Pennsylvania's 1780 gradual abolition act freed any enslaved person who were kept in the state for more than six months and this is relevant because during this period Philadelphia served as the US capital. Washington, not wanting to lose out on the forced labour of human beings rotated his household staff in and out of Philadelphia to reset the clock. His written instruction to his secretary Tobias Lear was that the rotation be accomplished under a pretext that would deceive both the enslaved and the public. In other words, George Washington, the first President of the United States deliberately evaded a state emancipation statute.[10]
"… in case it shall be found that any of my slaves may… attempt their freedom at the expiration of six months, it is my wish and desire that you send the whole or part of them as Mrs. Washington may not chose to keep… although I do not think that they would be benefit by the change, yet the idea of freedom might be too great of a temptation for them to resist… it behoves me to prevent the emancipation of them, otherwise I should not only lose the use of them, but may have them to pay for. [If] it is found expedient to send them back to Virginia, I wish to have it accomplished under pretext that may deceive both them and the public – and none I think would effectually do this as Mrs. Washington coming to Virginia next month."
Those aren't the actions of a man whose hands are tied. Those are the actions of a man driven to keep people subjugated in terrible conditions so that he could live opulently on his 8000 acres with his every whim served by slaves.
Somehow you managed to pick as your examples of men too embedded in their era to know better, men who wrote about knowing better! Men who knew well enough to dodge the laws and keep people in bondage! Your suggestion that some slavers were products of their time and should be absolved of their heinous actions by history may hold for some slaveowners, but it doesn't hold for this bunch.
The 'product of their time' argument that you present falls apart Walter not because of modern people imposing 21st century morality on the American Founding Fathers but because these men wrote plainly that the understood the moral hazard but continued anyway for reasons that they also wrote down. Both had contemporaries who either directly advocated the practice of manumission to them or lead by example and did it themselves to prove that it was possible and just.
I'm not quite sure why you are so insistent about this subject Walter. You could just as easily say that these were men who did great things that people around the world still benefit from, and who also subjugated human beings for profit. Both things are true and the truth is what we should aspire to tell, especially when it's uncomfortable or complicated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barometric_light
If you are interested in a globe, I’d highly recommend the “Phoenix Rising” Jr. globe they offer. At lower powers it’s near silent, and you can typically adjust them down to have 3-5 small tendrils wafting around each other lazily. APD’s gloves also have thicker glass, and are rated for running all day at below 80% power. At full power my phoenix rising globe uses ~12 watts, and at the lowest power it’s something like 3-4 watts. Unfortunately tariffs, inflation and noble gas cost have hammered the price in the last year.
I definitely prefer silent and lazy looking plasma instead of the frantic screeching storms that most globes have. I uploaded a few example videos here: https://imgur.com/a/bg8fsCW
One thing you can often do is take a cheapo Chinese glove, and use a voltage adjustable power supply and tune it down that way, though I couldn’t tell you if that’s ok for the electronics long term or not.
Example video demonstration: https://youtu.be/Q4sUre79ncA
More if you liked that:
Zerg Labs [TeslaCoilPro]: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRKfNzc7-524yD8nlyZC5Zg
BackMacSci: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7D566ClLdr1By2JnKh_DgA
zilipoper: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJeTqOt4xDuL2imX7zYnJlw
https://environment.ec.europa.eu/topics/chemicals/mercury_en
That being said, life without any risk is boring.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_lamp
it's amazing how far we've come
think about Benjamin Franklin twenty-five years before Declaration of Independence naming the first "battery" (out of the concept of lined-up artillery) by connecting a series of lynden jars (basically capacitors) - he also invented the concept of +/- positive and negative
now we've got space telescopes and probes leaving the solar system
imagine what's coming in another 300 years
That's an amazing fun fact.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_bells
of course incredibly crude
(imagine showing a paperclip motor to someone in 1750 https://player.vimeo.com/video/120255518 )
but it must be said, as genius as Franklin was, sadly he bears the original sin of owning slaves EVEN AS AN ABOLITIONIST and didn't free them until after his death (via will) - it's more than a little f-ed up
Also you may freely ignore his change of stance, the laws and norms of the time, etc
Some people can't help themselves from bringing irrelevant facts to the conversation.
Pretending like these things can be separated is ignorance. Ignoring its brutality does a disservice to our history and that man's legacy
Ben Franklin was one of the greatest minds worldwide of the 18th century. Odds are, even without slavery, he would have contributed just as much as he did with slavery. It's not like he made his money working slaves to the bone in a field and couldn't turn a profit without slavery.
He was a publisher. A few slaves were involved but they were largely incidental to the business. As in, he could have easily paid John and Sam a wage instead of paying to feed and house Peter and George and the business would be entirely unaffected
I think it's because, in his own calculus, he believed he needed to desecrate human beings, destroy their families, and humiliate their dignity to maintain his greatness.
I don't think you really have any basis for that analysis of franklins psychology. If anything, I think the safe assumption is just that for most of his life slavery was there and people don't always question every part of society.
Them facts you were looking for: https://share.google/J4zlTt102nc81Fhay
I think it's a sound analysis, he was a thoughtful and philosophical man who considered the nature of slavery heavily, and he benefitted from it greatly, and dearly understood its terrible nature, and continued it's cruelty, and freed no one.
Besides, without Franklin, there would be no United States, the free-est country in history.
And while he did have a sense of humor (I hear that daylight savings time was just a joke), I don't think that is why he had slaves. He kept them because they were useful to him, and the moment he died they were no longer useful. The slaves owned by others were never useful to him, so they should be freed immediately.
Franklin's ability to speak plainly about the evils of slavery, in between his own acts of unspeakable cruelty, and robbing families of their dignity and humanity, requires a level of disconnect and pride that is worth significant mention whenever we do justice to his great legacy.
This talk of human utility sounds like a lot of chump shit.
Again, Franklin knew slavery was wrong, literally campaigned to end it for that reason, yet did it himself for decades in the meanwhile, not a difficult horror to grasp in any time
While it operates as a free-market country, the Norwegian government holds large ownership stakes in strategic industries, including petroleum, hydroelectric power, telecommunications, and banking.
Experts often characterize the Norwegian economy as a blend of private enterprise, state ownership, and social welfare that provides high standards of living.
(Cribbed from google)
Likewise, Ben Franklin being a founding father doesn't somehow balance the scales in that regard. The existence of the United States doesn't retroactively make slavery ok.
The Founders saw fit to abolish the nobility, and disassociated religion from government. We've forgotten what an enormous leap both of those were (each of the colonies had an establishment of religion). I've seen endless documentaries on the founding of the country, and there's no mention of either of these.
Half of the colonies did abolish slavery. But, again, if it was demanded of the other half, the Union would never have happened.
Jefferson, Franklin, and Washington all held slaves.
I am certainly not advocating slavery. I'm merely pointing out that people should be judged on the morality of their times, not today's morality. If we judged past people by our modern standards, they would all be condemned.
Also, if we must judge by the morality of the times, we must also view abolishing the nobility and separating church from state to be immoral and unchristian. You seem to want to avoid a "modern moral framework" when it would tarnish the reputation of a founding father, but embrace it otherwise. You're not advocating slavery, but you don't want to judge slaveowners harshly.
It's perfectly fine to acknowledge the good that people do, while also acknowledging the evil. Jefferson, Franklin, and Washington all held slaves, and they were all evil for doing so. If we judged past people by our modern standards, they would all be condemned, and if we believe at all in some form of moral progress (which you must, since you bring up American freedom and the establishment of a secular republic as virtues) then we can condemn them all for some things.
I've lived long enough to see a distinct shift in what people consider moral and immoral. Are you certain in your moral rectitude? (I am, even though I fall short of it, and change my mind now and then.)
> these men were judged by the morality of their times
Half the colonies considered slavery to be moral in their time. So much so that, a few years later, fought and died in a terrible war to defend it.
But I don't own other humans as property, so at least I have that going for me.
>I've lived long enough to see a distinct shift in what people consider moral and immoral.
And yet you have no issues making moral judgements yourself, as you so often do in political threads. You seem to believe in the absolute moral good of the US and free market capitalism, and the absolute moral evil of socialism and leftism, but you just can't bring yourself to say the founding fathers were immoral for owning slaves. Why? Because maybe in the future slavery might come back and someone might say "That Walter Bright guy didn't even believe in slavery that shmuck, we should tear down his statues forthwith?" Is that really how you think?
I'll leave you with the last word, since you're starting to go in circles. Good night.
Nope. It is wrong that Franklin, Jefferson, and Washington kept slaves. But they grew up in a society that accepted slavery, and so harshly judging them as evil is unjust.
But they did make the leap of getting rid of the notion of nobility, and separating church and state. In that they rose above what was the accepted norm, implemented their new ideas. Those were huge changes for their time, and that makes them great men. That they did not go all the way to today's morality is an unjust indictment of them.
P.S. Franklin, Washington, and Jefferson would have been drawn and quartered if the British had captured them. Are you that brave? I doubt I am.
Not only that, but you just did it again when you said that they 'rose above the accepted norm' by abolishing nobility and the dominance of religious institutions because 'rose above' only means something if there's a fixed height to measure against. You can't say "they rose above the norm" and 'don't judge them against anything but the norm' in the same paragraph. So I wouldn't say that the position you're taking is one of historical relativism but more of a universalist with a conspicuous discontinuity on at least this specific issue.
As someone who is fond of American history but is relatively unknowledgeable about the pre-civil war era this thread and previous conversations that we have had on George Washington have piqued my interest, so I did some digging.
Even if we provide the most charitable interpretation of your argument that the American founding fathers were a 'product of their time' that kind of defense only works when someone is blind to a wrong because nobody around them has conceived of or articulated an objection to slavery but that certainly isn't something that can be said in this situation. So, let's use the examples of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington to see why that isn't the case.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
Thomas Jefferson enslaved roughly 600 people over his lifetime, holding about 130 at any given moment across his numerous properties. He initially inherited his slaves from his father and in far greater numbers from his father-in-law. Despite being an owner of hundreds of slaves throughout his lifetime Jefferson was critical of the practice and advocated for restrictions on the practice.
His draft of the Declaration of Independence contained a passage [0] criticizing King George III over the British slave trade which was struck by the Congress. The passage read as follows:
"he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce..."
At the time he wrote this Thomas Jefferson was thirty-three and he owned about 175 people.
Somewhere between 1781-1785 (I'm seeing a lot of different publishing dates for this and I'll leave it to someone else to pin down the exact date if they're interested) in Notes on the State of Virginia Jefferson wrote of slavery: "The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other"[1] and argued that it corrupted the slaveholders' own children, who learned tyranny by imitation. Jefferson even wrote "Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever."[1]
The Virginian abolitionist Edward Coles[2] who in his youth had been neighbours with Jefferson wrote to him in 1814 asking him to lead an emancipation movement. Jefferson replied that he was too old to do so and he counseled Coles to stay in Virginia and keep his slaves rather than free them. Coles ignored him, moved to Illinois and freed his.
So what motivated Jefferson to hold these incompatible views and maintain his abhorrent practices while counselling others to do the same? Why the thing which you value most Walter -- money.[3] Thomas Jefferson lived beyond his means his entire adult life and died owing more than $100,000.[4] The people that he enslaved were his collateral and capital. In an 1820 letter to his son-in-law John Wayles Epps Jefferson wrote, "having scruples about selling negroes but for delinquency, or on their own request. but your proposition gets me over these scruples as it is in fact to keep them in the family." and went on to tell Eppes, "I know no error more consuming to an estate than that of stocking farms with men almost exclusively. I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man of the farm. what she produces is an addition to the capital, while his labors disappear in mere consumption."[5] Keep in mind that Jefferson wrote this six years after he told Coles that he was too old to lead an emancipation movement.
This doesn't read like a man who was oblivious to the consequences of his actions or his financial motivations. This reads like a man who knew what he was doing was abhorrent but wasn't willing to stop because it would have led to his financial ruin and suffering.
[0] https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-01-02-0...
[1] https://archive.org/details/notesonstateofvi1787jeff/page/27...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Coles
[3] https://youtu.be/5V6GHnxEJjg?t=108
[4] https://www.monticello.org/encyclopedia/debt
[5] https://founders.archives.gov/documents/ Jefferson/03-16-02-0052
(My full comment was too large so I have had to split it into two comments)
The first President of the United States of America, George Washington, was also a wealthy Virginian plantation owner with 8000 acres of land and the people that he forced to work on it. Washington started with ten slaves inherited from his father and aggressively scaled up his operation as a young man with most of the growth happening largely through birth -- 293 child slaves were born at the Mount Vernon plantation between 1750 and 1799.[6]
In 1799, the year that Washington died, the census was taken at Mount Vernon and it records 317 enslaved people at Mount Vernon with 123 of them being outright owned by Washington, 153 as dower property from the estate of his wife's previously husband and 40 rented from a neighbour.
Over the years that George Washington brutally enslaved human beings some of his contemporaries tried to convince Washington to end slavery on his plantation and free his slaves. Some personally reached out to Washington imploring him to do so while others went ahead and did it to serve as an example to people like Washington and Jefferson.
In 1783 Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, a man who even named his own son George Washington Lafayette wrote a letter to Washington proposing that they buy an estate and settle it with formerly enslaved people as tenant farmers as a demonstration that emancipation could work. Washington answered warmly but did nothing. Lafayette went ahead and did it alone and in 1785 bought plantations in French Guiana and placed roughly seventy people on them with instructions that no one was to be sold or physically punished, that they be schooled and paid wages, and that they be moved gradually toward freedom. It ultimately went badly as the local government confiscated his property in 1794 and Napoleon eventually reinstated slavery in French colonies in 1802, but it serves as an example of Washington's contemporaries trying to free slaves.
Another example of this was Robert Carter III, a Virginia plantation owner who performed the largest manumission in America prior to the war when he freed 450 people. This is a man who was shunned for his actions and resisted by his family and neighbours but went ahead with freeing people and paying them for their work anyways.[7]
Though in his later years Washington came to regret his participation in the practice of slavery he paid little mind to his contemporaries who opposed it and during his career as a human slaver there were too many illustrative examples of Washington's absolute wickedness to his slaves to list here but these two caught my eye:
In a 1766 letter[8] reminiscent of the Epstein emails on jmail.world Washington wrote to the Captain of a schooner Swift Joseph Thompson, which opens with the following: "With this Letter comes a Negro (Tom) which I beg the favour of you to sell, in any of the Islands you may go to, for whatever he will fetch, & bring me in return for him" Washington goes on to provide what reads like a shopping list for a 2am run to 7-11 munchies to get booze and snacks to keep the party going:
One Hhd of best Molasses One Ditto of best Rum One Barrl of Lymes—if good & Cheap One Pot of Tamarinds—contg about 10 lbs. Two small Do of mixed Sweetmeats—abt 5 lb. each And the residue, much or little, in good old Spirits
What prompted Washington to sell Tom? Why Tom tried to run away of course. Tom's crime was merely wanting what every human being is entitled to -- his freedom and George Washington punished him for that. How was selling Tom a punishment you ask? The working conditions and treatment of slaves in the Caribbean were utterly brutal. While slave populations in America grew 20% decade over decade they declined at the same rate in the Caribbean. And Virginian slave owners like George Washington knew this. They knew this and they held the threat over the heads of their slaves. Work hard and don't try and run away or I'll punish you by having you worked to death, even faster than you'll die here.
Another fascinating instance of Washington's involves Ona Judge, Martha Washington's dower maid, who escaped from the presidential household in Philadelphia in 1796. Washington paid for newspaper ads calling for her return and pursued her through federal officials and family connections for years, including an attempt to have her seized in New Hampshire. Despite George Washington's best efforts to have her returned to his brutal subjugation Ona Judge Staines died in as all human beings should, as a free person in New Hampshire in 1848.[9]
Something interesting that I learned during reading up on this is that Pennsylvania's 1780 gradual abolition act freed any enslaved person who were kept in the state for more than six months and this is relevant because during this period Philadelphia served as the US capital. Washington, not wanting to lose out on the forced labour of human beings rotated his household staff in and out of Philadelphia to reset the clock. His written instruction to his secretary Tobias Lear was that the rotation be accomplished under a pretext that would deceive both the enslaved and the public. In other words, George Washington, the first President of the United States deliberately evaded a state emancipation statute.[10]
"… in case it shall be found that any of my slaves may… attempt their freedom at the expiration of six months, it is my wish and desire that you send the whole or part of them as Mrs. Washington may not chose to keep… although I do not think that they would be benefit by the change, yet the idea of freedom might be too great of a temptation for them to resist… it behoves me to prevent the emancipation of them, otherwise I should not only lose the use of them, but may have them to pay for. [If] it is found expedient to send them back to Virginia, I wish to have it accomplished under pretext that may deceive both them and the public – and none I think would effectually do this as Mrs. Washington coming to Virginia next month."
Those aren't the actions of a man whose hands are tied. Those are the actions of a man driven to keep people subjugated in terrible conditions so that he could live opulently on his 8000 acres with his every whim served by slaves.
Somehow you managed to pick as your examples of men too embedded in their era to know better, men who wrote about knowing better! Men who knew well enough to dodge the laws and keep people in bondage! Your suggestion that some slavers were products of their time and should be absolved of their heinous actions by history may hold for some slaveowners, but it doesn't hold for this bunch.
The 'product of their time' argument that you present falls apart Walter not because of modern people imposing 21st century morality on the American Founding Fathers but because these men wrote plainly that the understood the moral hazard but continued anyway for reasons that they also wrote down. Both had contemporaries who either directly advocated the practice of manumission to them or lead by example and did it themselves to prove that it was possible and just.
I'm not quite sure why you are so insistent about this subject Walter. You could just as easily say that these were men who did great things that people around the world still benefit from, and who also subjugated human beings for profit. Both things are true and the truth is what we should aspire to tell, especially when it's uncomfortable or complicated.
[6] https://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/slavery/the-gr...
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Carter_III#Manumission
[8] https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/02-07-02-...
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ona_Judge
[10] https://revolutionarywarjournal.com/george-washington-slaver...
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