toomuchtime_
Gold Member
- Dec 29, 2008
- 20,030
- 4,945
You haven't demonstrated any fallacy. If you are going to ask if slavery offered any positives, you have to ask for whom. Certainly not for the slaves, but there were for the American economy and America's early economic growth.simply coincidence. the NYT and Hannah-Jones admitted error in stating that perpetuating slavery for Englishmen, once England ended it, was the most important motivation for the American Revolution. But there would never have been a constitution without accepting slavery. Did Cotton mean that accepting slavery was an evil that necessarily had to be tolerated to achieve the const?
Bill by Sen. Tom Cotton targets curriculum on slavery | Arkansas Democrat Gazette
WASHINGTON -- A New York Times-based school curriculum emphasizing American slavery instead of American independence has been targeted by U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton.www.arkansasonline.com
“We have to study the history of slavery and its role and impact on the development of our country because otherwise we can’t understand our country. As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction,” he said.
Instead of portraying America as “an irredeemably corrupt, rotten and racist country,” the nation should be viewed “as an imperfect and flawed land, but the greatest and noblest country in the history of mankind,” Cotton said.
First of all, there's no source that shows Lincoln believed the FOUNDERS put America on a path to end slavery. Quite the opposite, as facts developed ending in his assassination. LOL
But does he believe in the intellectual fallacy that slavery offered "positives?"
Slavery As A Necessary Evil - WriteWork
Slavery as a Necessary Evil It is inevitable that with the mention of slavery emotions will be aroused within whoever is present. Today most people look at slavery as one of the biggest mistakes our country has ever made. However, some will say they ca...www.writework.com
The southern agricultural economy at the time provided much of the impetus for the growth of the northern shipping, finance and manufacturing economies. Northern banks financed each year's cotton crop, and northern factories sold much of what they produced to southerners and northern shipping companies carried southern cotton to European markets and brought back European manufactures, and the southern cotton that fueled all this economic growth was competing in world markets with cotton grown in Egypt and India where where workers were paid essentially slave wages, so American cotton would not have been competitive in the world markets without slavery and the American economy would not have grown so quickly. The conclusion has to be that while slavery was not a positive for the slaves, it was for the rest of America.
But while Cotton says unequivocally that slavery was evil, he says it was a necessary evil, but was it necessary? One might argue that since we don't know how the American economy would have developed if African slaves had not been brought here, one can't say slavery was necessary for the growth of America. But that is a frivolous argument. Given the conditions at the time when African slavery was widespread and widely approved of in the West, it was inevitable that African slaves would be brought to America, and given the vast tracts of land available to the relatively small population of the colonies, which gave the colonies a natural economic advantage in agriculture, and the lack of an indigenous population to pay slave wages to as the British had in their Asian colonies, it was inevitable that African slavery would play a large role in the development of the American economy.
So perhaps instead of calling slavery a necessary evil, Cotton should have called it an inevitable evil. Still, saying that evil is inevitable, rankles the mind. Clearly it was inevitable, and clearly in our present context it was an almost unimaginable evil, but imagine that you were born in the late eighteenth century into a slave owning family in the South and not only did your whole family, your parents, your grandparents, your brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles and cousins believe slavery was fine, but all your friends and everyone held in high esteem in your society either owned slaves or approved of slavery, how likely would you be to think slavery was evil?
