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> They were, and remain, literally some of the most functional human beings in history. All of human history? Seems excessively generous tbh. > Fascinates me
by ke88y 3y ago
> They were, and remain, literally some of the most functional human beings in history.
All of human history? Seems excessively generous tbh.
> Fascinates me to see these two extremes in behavior.
I too would need a half bottle of port to write about freedom and liberty while my slaves built me a countryside mansion.
- junofan 3y agoInterestingly they wrote about how they were worried the British would eventually enslave them. About 10% were captured and tortured during the war.
- crooked-v 3y agoClearly they knew from firsthand experience, as the slavers, how the slaves would be treated.
- ffhhttt 3y agoTo be fair it went both ways. Also they were mad at the British for not allowing them to steal Native American land in a disorganized way. You had to go the Crown which would negotiate with the tribe on your behalf etc. Washington (especially) of course had other ideas..
- junofan 3y agoYeah it’s one of the grievances in the Declaration of Independence. They were pretty explicit about what they wanted.
- hef19898 3y agoSo not just keeping slaves and getting tax excemptions but also being allowe to steal native american's land every way they want?
- chrisco255 3y agoThe Crown had no plans to end slavery in 1775. That had nothing to do with the cause of the war. The northern colonies in fact wanted to end slavery at the onset of the revolution. The colonists were upset about having to fight wars for an increasingly distant monarch while they were largely self sufficient, and yet not given power at Parliament. In particular, the French and Indian War fought just a decade prior to the onset of the revolution, was a major precursor: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_and_Indian_War https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_and_Indian_War
- hef19898 3y agoHistory disagrees: - 1706: Slaves entering England are freed - 1772: no slaves can be removed from England,remaining slaves emanzipated - 1779: all slaves fleeing from tha US are freed, regardless of their willingness to fight for the crown So, yes, the crown had legal precendent and plans to abolish slavery as far back as the early 18th century. Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slavery_and_serfdom https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_sla...
- mtreis86 3y agoEnglish ships hauled slaves around a lot later than that. https://www.slavevoyages.org/voyages/Elnd5Nzy https://www.slavevoyages.org/voyages/Elnd5Nzy
- ffhhttt 3y agoThose were just the decisions of local of judges which declared that slavery can’t exist in Britain because without additional legislation. The British Crown and the upper classes had no issue at all with African Anerican and Indian slavery in the colonies and were happy to profit from it. Abolitionism was a fringe view at the time.
- jcranmer 3y ago- 1833: Britain forbids slaves in its colonies Sure, England had a ruling that slavery was illegal in England... but there was no push to interdict slavery elsewhere in the empire (not even Scotland and Ireland, IIRC), especially the colonies. And do recall that some individual Caribbean islands had more slaves than all of British North America. That's in fact why the British Caribbean didn't revolt during the American Revolution: they were like "what, revolt and risk dealing with a slave revolt without backup from the British Army?"
- chrisco255 3y agoThey were mad over the French and Indian War which the Crown had gleefully dragged the colonists into, under which some tribes allied with the French and others with the Brits, to fight over territory, a story as old as time. Inter tribal and international warfare was, of course, an ancient pasttime among both native Europeans and native Americans.
- avgcorrection 3y agoThe Colonists Genocided The Natives But It Could Have Gone Either Way The comment.
- ffhhttt 3y agoTo be fair they didn’t quite manage to complete it since at the end the British decide the Indian to keep most of the land the colonists expected to get. e.g. Washington and his soldiers were promised quite a bit of land in Ohio(?) as a reward for helping fight the french. All of that land ended up being an Indian reserve the Crown decided to establish instead.
- avgcorrection 3y agoAnd the Armenians still exist.
- ffhhttt 3y agoI’m not sure what you’re implying?
- avgcorrection 3y agoI’m replying, not implying. > > To be fair they didn’t quite manage to complete it
- ffhhttt 3y ago
- eesmith 3y agoI've never heard that "10% were captured and tortured" number before. When trying to learn more about it I found a Snopes article at https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-price-they-paid/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-price-they-paid/ discussing a letter going around titled "The Price They Paid" making the claim "Five [of the 56] signers were captured by the British as traitors and tortured before they died." Snopes comments that while five of the signers were indeed captured, four appear to have been treated as normal prisoners of war after being captured in battle ("they were not tortured, nor is there evidence that they were treated more harshly than other wartime prisoners who were not also signatories to the Declaration") and the fifth - singled out for signing - was sent to prison. Wikipedia comments that the fifth, Richard Stockton, was "intentionally starved and subjected to freezing cold weather. After nearly five weeks of brutal treatment, Stockton was released on parole with his health ruined." quoting a 1823 biography. But was that torture? Reading the biography, at https://archive.org/details/biographyofsign03sand/page/100/mode/2up?q=prison https://archive.org/details/biographyofsign03sand/page/100/m... , the issue appears to be that rich Mr. Stockton, used to living the high life, has been placed in the commoner jail rather than the comfy jail for rich people: > On his removal to New York, he was ignominiously consigned to the common prison, and without the least regard for his rank, age, and delicate health, for some time treated with unusual severity. As Congress described it, "that he hath been ignominiously thrown into a common gaol, and there detained". And the common jail had horrible conditions. Quoting https://www.americanwars.org/american-prisoners-revolution/prisons-new-york-jonathan-gillett.htm https://www.americanwars.org/american-prisoners-revolution/p... : > "The New Jail was made a Provost Prison, and here officers and men of note were confined. At one time they were so crowded into this building, that when they lay down upon the floor to sleep all in the row were obliged to turn over at the same time at the call, 'Turn over! Left! Right!' > "The sufferings of these brave men were largely due to the criminal indifference of Loring, Sproat, Lennox, and other Commissaries of the prisoners. > "Many of the captives were hanged in the gloom of night without trial and without a semblance of justice. It doesn't seem like any of the founders were tortured during the war.
- junofan 3y agoThe Snopes article is misleading. Conditions for POWs at the time were appalling.
- Slava_Propanei 3y ago[dead]
- lynx23 3y agoThanks for this comment. It absolutely made my day, and it couldn't be more on the point!!!
- coldtea 3y ago>All of human history? Seems excessively generous tbh. Just regular good old ancestor / politician worship.
- lobf 3y agoYes, the founding fathers of the world’s oldest democracy were just like any old grandpas.
- tech_ken 3y agoI mean no doubt The Constitution is great, I'm a very big fan, but the US is less than 250 years old which is nearly nothing on the stage of history. Let's see how the next few decades break before we elevate them entirely to deity status
- lobf 3y agoYet we have watched other governments come and go, and here we are: the oldest democracy on earth.
- coldtea 3y agoThere were plenty millenia older democracy, including the place where the very term got its name. And, yes, the founding fathers (...) were just like any old grandpas. They were men of state at a particular place and time. Just because it happens to be your ancestral place and time, doesn't make it anything more impressive than hundreds of other leaders in history, including near history. The main reason they get celebrated is because they place they founded got rich, but that was due to factors other than their brilliance.
- lobf 3y agoI didn’t say the first, I said the oldest. > And, yes, the founding fathers (...) were just like any old grandpas. They were men of state at a particular place and time. Just because it happens to be your ancestral place and time, doesn't make it anything more impressive than hundreds of other leaders in history, including near history. This is the definition of edgy contrarianism. They were on the forefront of enacting a new-ish system of thought into a stable and long-lasting democratic republic, the first really liberal and representative version of such. They were exceptional men in a unique time and capitalized on that to the benefit of hundreds of millions or arguably billions of people. They were unique men.
- avgcorrection 3y ago> All of human history? Seems excessively generous tbh. Don’t interrupt that sober-minded Patriotism, now.
- chrisco255 3y ago> I too would need a half bottle of port to write about freedom and liberty while my slaves built me a countryside mansion. Indeed, after deposing the monarchy of your mother country, and setting about to create a republic in the face of thousands of years of bloody noble rivalries over succession to the throne, a tall pint of cider is well in order.
- avgcorrection 3y agoReminds me of the Bolshevik Revolution.
- mwbajor 3y agoExcept it actually resulted in a functional country.
- avgcorrection 3y agoFrom peasant-based aristocratic power to an industrialized superpower in not many decades. Seems functional to me.
- mwbajor 3y agoGive me 3 examples of Bolshevik influence that still remain today. You don't even need to give me positive examples, just examples.
- tech_ken 3y agoGazprom? Maybe someone else will come up with the other 2
- avgcorrection 3y agoWhy are you moving the goal post? The country was functional although it didn’t last forever, and was eventually disbanded.
- pookha 3y agoI doubt Ben Franklin the abolitionist was slave driving in the 1780's. And even though he was old as hell he was probably one of the most functional human beings in history.
- giraffe_lady 3y agoGood thing he was the only one involved I guess.
- Izkata 3y agoLooks like he wasn't openly anti-slavery until the late 1780s, and he did own slaves before the 1780s, so he might still have had some in the 1780s. https://benjaminfranklinhouse.org/education/benjamin-franklin-and-slavery/ https://benjaminfranklinhouse.org/education/benjamin-frankli...
- mminer237 3y agoMost of the framers didn't own slaves.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y agoJust under half. 25 out of 55. Slaves weren't cheap to buy.
- pc86 3y ago> I too would need a half bottle of port to write about freedom and liberty while my slaves built me a countryside mansion. You almost certainly would not have, had you been born in the same period of time. Let's not pretend that people in the past were monsters simply because they lived during the period of time they lived. Maybe they were all racist monsters by today's standards, but had they been born today they'd be completely different. We are not inherently better than them because we happen to have the dominant opinions of our time and they had the dominant opinions of theirs.
- cdelsolar 3y agoYou know there were people back then that were very much anti-slavery?
- scythe 3y agoA list that includes John and Samuel Adams and Alexander Hamilton, who eventually cajoled all of the other Founding Fathers into condemning slavery and (except for Madison and Jefferson) freeing all of their slaves.
- pc86 3y agoOf course there were, especially regarding the chattel slavery we had in the US that was very much different than slavery in other parts of the world, and historically. They were also very much in the minority, and most people were at least indifferent to it. My point is that it's easy to take our 2023 ethics and apply them to people in the 1700s but all that does is prove you don't have a proper context or frame of reference for history. It lets you conveniently ignore things in the most intellectually lazy way. I mean, look at my comment's parent and GP. In reverse order, a perfectly rational and reasonable point about how the framers drank a lot while writing a document that would found a new country (and perhaps the difference between how it affect those people vs. his family). And the knee-jerk, lazy, boring response of "yeah but SLAVES."
- pessimizer 3y ago> And the knee-jerk, lazy, boring response Do you think that this response is innovative and thoughtful? Somebody literally said that the framers of the US constitution were collectively some of the "most functional human beings in history" and they were reminded that those people were vile and violent. If you're a black American, you have a reasonable chance of being one of their descendants because they would buy human beings to rape. They also accomplished many things, and some of them wrote very interesting things. Jefferson was often very insightful, but he also raped slaves. Lots of drunks have written interesting things.
- mwbajor 3y agoI guess we should stop using toilet paper because Hitler used it.
- likeclockwork 3y agoIf you're only using toilet paper because Hitler used it then I suggest you stop doing that and find other reasons to use toilet paper.
- dang 3y agoWe detached this offtopic subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36873092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36873092.