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Geez Louise - and Gee Louis!
Mark Lause and Artesian are having a field day misquoting Matt Russo. What
is this, simply drunken speed reading, simple intellectual sloppiness, a
stupidity contest?
First Mark ascribed to Matt the idiotic notion th slavery had not been
prohibited before the US civil war in northern states - when in fact Matt
had written before the American revolution!
Now Artesian says Matt called the abolitionists provacateurs, when what he
was actually saying was almost the opposite ("This is true even in their
ostensible role as provocateurs,
pushing the slaveholders to an overreaction they could have easily
"rationally" avoided.")
Can't you guys read a little more carefully!
If you don't agree with Matt, argue with what he says, don't put words into
his mouth.
The key idea Matt advanced is that the driving force for westward expansion
in the north was "free soil" not abolitionism or opposition to slavery as
such. Artesian has in his saner moods said almost the same thing, and Mark
probably also agrees with this notion. The deeper implications of "free
soil" for the formation of social classes in the United States are hinted at
in Matt's second paragraph. Please take a sober moment to read it.
I beg the moderator´s indulgence, but I have copied Matt's original note in
its brief entgirety below.
Anthony
Matt wrote,
Message: 2
Date: Tue, 19 Jan 2010 20:48:58 -0800
From: Matthew Russo <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [Marxism] The Barbarism of Slavery by Charles Sumner
To: [email protected]
Message-ID:
<[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
The "free soil" farmer-settlers (and never forget that these were *settlers*
bent upon the eradication of the indigenous population) were not strong
enough as a social force at the time of the American Revolution; on the
contrary the strongest settler current was coming out of the Upland South
(i.e. Virginia and North Carolina) at that time. Some of the northern
states had not even abolished slavery yet. Their only competitor were the
Yankee farmers of New England (where land was largely settled and owned
relatively evenly, therefore rents were high), who had hardly begun their
irruption into upstate New York in search of cheap rents.
More to the point, the deleterious effect of slavery upon ground rent, due
to its suppression of capital accumulation on the land in general outside of
the accumulation of slaves, was hardly perceived at that time. But by the
1850's the Midwestern farmer-settlers had come to understand very well the
negative effects of slavery upon the prospective market price of their land,
much as a homeowner neighborhood association might perceive the effects of
the opening of a house of prostitution in their midst. It was these
"Indian-hating", "Negrophobic" Midwesterners, whose idea of "free soil" also
meant soil free of natives and Blacks, who, organized into federalized state
militias were the social force that toppled slavery despite themselves.
It certainly was not the abolitionists, to whom far too much attention has
been paid. This is true even in their ostensible role as provocateurs,
pushing the slaveholders to an overreaction they could have easily
"rationally" avoided. For the absolute condition for the effectiveness of
the abolitionist propaganda was the existence of the mass of slaves
themselves as an objective fact, and nobody knew better than the slaveowners
themselves the terror that would ensue should there be an uprising.
It was the psychotic terror of the slaveowners themselves, so similar to the
Islamophobic terror that seems to govern the U.S. ruling class today, that
was the accidental trigger for the Civil War; it was the Midwestern
settlers-in-arms that were their gravediggers, as their almost unbroken
string of victories in the Western military theater shows.
-Matt
reply-type=original
Matt described the Abolitionists in the role of provocateurs, driving the
slaveholders to an irrational response to a situation they could have
rationally managed.
I disagree. The abolitionists were not provocateurs, and the slaveholders
were driven to attack the Union not by the abolitionists, nor by the fear of
a slave revolt. They were driven to attack the Union by the realization
that their hold on the political machinery of the government, their minority
rule was endangered by the growth of the free territories. Fear of slave
revolts was real enough, but that's not an explanation for Bloody Kansas.
How would expanding slavery have mitigated the prospects of slave revolts?
It would not, but expanding slavery would have added two senators to the
slaveholders' bloc for every slave territory achieving statehood in the
union, and with control of the senate, and with that body being the dominant
political force in the country, the indemnification of slavery would have
been assured.
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