The Englishman, Samuel Johnson, charged planter patriots with hypocrisy: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”
How could southern slaveholders talk about a natural right to liberty? What did they mean by “liberty”?
This question, so simple when looked at first, is so complex in fact when wanted to answered at.
First, we do have to remember that we have two interests here at clash : the english one and the colonial one. Why and when di dit come to differ is NOT discussed here in economical grounds only (if ever) but on value one, used as a strategical arguments against another strategical argument.
The discourse is not only : why do you want NOT to pay taxes when other do and when you have all but no duties to the english crown…it is a discussion based on an « ideological »grounds…and it is often so because then, it has a stronger impact since the battles most feriouscly fought are ones on ideas and ideals.
Another question posed here is how this society of slaverous came to the grasp of the very term of liberty…what di dit mean for them ? di dit mean the same for them than it means to us, after the notion of historical nationalism is born only from the 19ths and on…not at that time…
Isn’t it strange that a society that gave birth to a slave society, would give too a notion for a society of liberty… ? that is the contradiction expressed in Johnson –quite cunningly tho one must confess, nobody i guess was a fool to the different levels that questions could be heard- statement as in Prof Mc Curry : How did that south society both came with an hybridis child of slave on the one hand and liberty on the other when none of them were suppose to occur and were forecasted at its start….
Prof Mc Curry is telling us that the answer is not that obvious of how did these societies became slave societies….and obviously soi t is the same for the notion of liberty.
To narrow it on economical grounds only too, it to answer to it by only a narrow margin….
If one needs another exemple, how deos from the most monstrous of phenomenon can be born a principle which is completely opposite to its other very basic nature : slavery….
Of course, it has taken thousands of years for humanity to be considering values as universal to all or not. It is a moral debate here. One can be good to its dog but completely emotional less to its slave and Prof Mc Curry has many times used the word THING as per the one in servitude, just a few decades before the South societies became slaves societies.
I will only end my argument with one which has not been used and heard many times. We all know today that the railroads to Auschwitz were not bombed by the allies although they knew, but that time that the Jewish people and other millions of lives were exterminated by the Nazis at that time… there were many reasons to that… but a little is known about the episode of a lately polish citizen sent as a spy in Bergen Belsen to tell the allied world about what was going on in these camps….
When he met President Rooselvelt and recounted for what he saw,as early as 1942, his reaction was …..not responsive to say it mildy but for one question only that he asked this survivor : « ah yes…what happened to the polish horses used at the war against the Nazi invasion in 1939 ? ».