"I don't promote violence, I just encourage it..."

Fred Reed on Slavery:

...In judging slavery in the United States, which we are frequently asked to do, it is useful to ask what one would oneself do if in the situation of the slave. The question brings clarity. A wide gulf lies between tolerating the wrongs inflicted on others, and suffering them oneself. We all bear up well under the misfortunes of others.

My attitude toward slavery is about as simple as things get.

If anyone tried to enslave me, or my family, I would kill him if I could.

...Now, you may ask, does that mean that if I had been a slave I would have killed Thomas Jefferson and George Washington? Yes. A nice prose style and enlightened ideas about other things do not justify slavery. Nothing does. Not, at any rate, if I am the slave.

If this seems excessive, ask: Would you, today, allow yourself to be made the chattel of a latter-day Jefferson, or of anyone else? Your children? Then why might you expect anyone else to view things differently?

...Confusingly, many who owned slaves were not bad people. As the child of slave-owners in the rolling countryside of central Virginia, I might have known my mother to be kindly, my father to be a good-hearted man of principle who believed in fairness, the neighbors to be upright and civic-minded. The mind being the strange contrivance that it is, men of noble inclination can found a nation on freedom while having their farms worked by slaves. There was nothing unusual here. Hypocrisy is the natural condition of man. Today Christians insisting that God is Love bomb Moslem children. Praise Jesus.

...Having come to adulthood in the circumstances of Charlottesville, what would I have then done, or thought, about slavery? I might have equivocated, had qualms, as many did. I might have had my slaves freed upon my death, as many did. This of course would have amounted to saying that slavery was a great evil, but not as great as my having to do my own work. It is the exact moral equivalent of buying goods made by sweated labor abroad while making indignant noises.

...A virtue of outrage is that it requires little effort. Today, the country’s black children rot in wretched schools. This offends virtuous whites, who nonetheless do nothing about it. Neither do the children’s parents. If indignation were petroleum, Saudi Arabia would be a minor supplier. Few, however, will suffer inconvenience to end evils they do not actually see. Ah, but we talk a good show.

A great many Southerners regarded slavery with distaste, as a moral sore, Lee and Mosby among them. I might also have. Would I have given up the wealth and comfort of my plantation, suffered the opprobrium of all around me, and cast myself adrift in life from objection to slavery? Probably not. Instead I would have treated my slaves humanely, talked of the need to find some way of eventually ending the region’s peculiar institution, and enjoyed the benefits of compulsory servitude while doing nothing about it. In today’s terms, I would have been a liberal.

What would you actually have done? The world is rife with evils today. What are you doing about them? Me either. At bottom, most of us are nothing but talk.