“Anger hath a privilege“, as Kent said in Shakespeare’s King Lear, but it does not do well to abuse it. I do not regret my demagoguery of the other day, but I do think I need to clarify one thing.
I do in fact believe that it is possible for someone of good faith to argue that slavery would have gone away on its own. Though I have rarely seen it happen.
I thought of making this clear when I was writing my last post, but I decided against it for style reasons. If one is going to be demagogue, one can’t go putting in caveats every time one turns around. But since the Grumpy Old Man is putting it about that I claim that it is a sin to “have asked whether, if the North had let the South go without war, slavery would have long persisted in the South” I feel I ought to offer up a more nuanced view of what the Grumpy Old Man’s sin was.
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