Michele Bachmann's pro-slavery mentors.

[RandySF]

Bachmann’s comment about slavery was not a gaffe. It is, as she would say, a world view. In “Christianity and the Constitution,” the book she worked on with Eidsmoe, her law-school mentor, he argues that John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and John Adams “expressed their abhorrence for the institution” and explains that “many Christians opposed slavery even though they owned slaves.” They didn’t free their slaves, he writes, because of their benevolence. “It might be very difficult for a freed slave to make a living in that economy; under such circumstances setting slaves free was both inhumane and irresponsible.”

While looking over Bachmann’s State Senate campaign Web site, I stumbled upon a list of book recommendations. The third book on the list, which appeared just before the Declaration of Independence and George Washington’s Farewell Address, is a 1997 biography of Robert E. Lee by J. Steven Wilkins.

Wilkins is the leading proponent of the theory that the South was an orthodox Christian nation unjustly attacked by the godless North. This revisionist take on the Civil War, known as the “theological war” thesis, had little resonance outside a small group of Southern historians until the mid-twentieth century, when Rushdoony and others began to popularize it in evangelical circles. In the book, Wilkins condemns “the radical abolitionists of New England” and writes that “most southerners strove to treat their slaves with respect and provide them with a sufficiency of goods for a comfortable, though—by modern standards—spare existence.”

African slaves brought to America, he argues, were essentially lucky: “Africa, like any other pagan country, was permeated by the cruelty and barbarism typical of unbelieving cultures.” Echoing Eidsmoe, Wilkins also approvingly cites Lee’s insistence that abolition could not come until “the sanctifying effects of Christianity” had time “to work in the black race and fit its people for freedom.”




http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/08/15/110815fa_fact_lizza#ixzz1UhaZPMyE

[AndyTiedye]

1. Certainly Not a Gaffe. Appealing to the Real Repiglickin Base

[Scurrilous]

2. K & R

:thumbsup:

[loyalsister]

3. It's true that people thought that way

There were people who honestly cared about their slaves but still did not consider them human. They managed to draw a curtain to hide the more ruthless slave owners.
The stereotypes of blacks in that period were worse than what the author stated. People honestly thought of them as animals. It assuaged their guilt as they went along with the reality of slavery. Even northerners tolerated it for a long time based on a belief that there were enough good people that the cruelty was negligible.
"Uncle Tom's Cabin" provides a very revealing picture of the dynamics of the time. It is very telling that the slaves are often referred to as "creatures" even by abolitionists.
Slaves were used as financial leverage when owners were losing their property and livelihood. That does not make them blameless, but it does explain how people who were not evil and cruel were caught up in it.
There is a story recounted where a man sells his slaves on the condition that they would not be "sold down the river" - literally. The farther south the worse it got in some cases.

It was an entirely different reality. It confuses me that it would be used as analogy or reference for anything in the modern world.

I am not sure what they are getting at. But it can't be good.