From: Fred C. Moulton (moulton@moulton.com)
Date: Wed Jun 23 1999 - 22:47:00 MDT
At 07:27 AM 6/23/99 -0400, Christopher Maloney <dude@chrismaloney.com> wrote:
>But make no mistake: the war was about slavery. The reason the South
>wanted to leave the Union was over conflicting opinions about whether
>slavery should be extended into the territories.
Let us be careful to not confuse two different issues. One is the reason the
some of the states left the Union. The other issue is the Union response to
the succession. There were several factors which lead to the succession,
slavery was certainly a key one, but there were others such as tariffs. The
second issue is that the Union response to succession was not necessarily
to go to war. The option to let the Confederate States succeed could have
been
taken. In fact the radical abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison
denounced the Constitution as "a covenant with death and an agreement with
hell" and urged that the North succeed from the South. One of the factors
that facilitated slavery in the South was the enforcement of the fugitive
slave
laws in the Northern states. Thus a slave had to get all the way to Canada
or be subject to return to the slaveholder. For a discussion of this
alternative
see the book Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men by Jeffrey Rogers Hummell
particularly pages 352-353.
>So here's the conundrum:
>should a subset of your population be free to the extent that they are
>allowed to oppress and enslave another subset? I don't think so, but
>it's a hard question, and it comes up all the time.
The issue here is what "your population" means in a political context. Note
that many people associated with the extropian movement are anarchists and
thus perhaps different view of the legitmacy of the government. Further even
if one grants that the federal government has some responsibility to act, then
the issue is what action to take and as noted above there was a reasonable
alternative to war.
>> I consider Lincoln to be extremely non-extropian in his actions.
>
>Uh, oh -- I think I detect the embroyo of a thought police here.
I am going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you did not
really mean the comment about "the embroyo of a thought police".
I will conclude with the following quote from Lincoln discussing his
official duty:
"My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not
either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without
freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the
slaves
I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others
alone I would also do that." Lincoln writing in the New York Tribune;
reprinted
in Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men page 207-208.
>> Fred Moulton
>
>Here's a question I have for the group: does "extropian" necessarily
>mean "libertarian"? I read your extropian manifesto, and in section
>5 (politics) it seemed like a pretty good description of the old US.
>I am inclined to be libertarian, when I am not thinking. But then I
>come to my senses, and realize that this world is full of way too many
>would-be oppressors in every possible form (especially economic) for
>any form of pure libertarianism to work.
>
>
>
>--
>Chris Maloney
>http://www.chrismaloney.com
>
>"Knowledge is good"
>-- Emil Faber
>
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