Slavery is a Bad Thing

There, I have gone public. I have taken the courageous anti-slavery stance and hope to inspire others to come forward and denounce slavery. I oppose slavery, including conscription and coerced jury service.

Now that my position on slavery is clear, I feel confident that I can engage in discussions about the War Between the States without being accused of being pro-slavery. I should be able to advocate the right of secession and decry the costs of the war without fear that anyone will mistake my views for a thinly veiled pro-slavery stance. I can also question received historical interpretations and posit alternatives without being misunderstood as a wannabe slavocrat. I can also honor my ancestors who fought for the CSA without ascribing slavocratic motives or having such motives ascribed to me. I am even free to criticize Abe Lincoln.

Wow, this is like a great load lifted from my shoulders. I reckon I should have come out as anti-slavery a long time ago. This would have prevented me from dealing with a lot of irrelevant, illogical, dimwitted argumentation about whether my point of view was a marker of slavocratophilia every time I have stepped out of the "WBTS was to stop slavery and Lincoln was a saint" narrative.

Over at Catallarchy, I saw the same argumentation perpetrated in the comments to a WBTS post (http://catallarchy.net/blog/archives/2005/05/08/civil-war-hypothetical/), and I proposed yet another corollary to Godwin's Law to apply to WBTS discussions:

"Perhaps we need a corollary to Godwin’s Law to apply in discussions of the War Between the States (Feel free to refer to this as Vache Folle’s Corollary): (1) The first person to characterize a discussant as “pro-slavery” or a “Neo-Confederate” or a “racist” automatically loses the argument unless the accused can be shown to have stated an explicit pro-slavery position, to have identified himself as a neo-Confederate (whatever that is), or to have made an explicitly racist comment. Questioning the morality of the war or its prosecution does not count as pro-slavery or racist or neo-Confederate, nor does discussing its costs. (2) Anyone who claims that the War Between the States was “about” something definitive automatically loses the argument. Such claims are entirely conclusory and represent assertions of a subjective interpretation of historical material. These interpretations are imposed on the historical record and have no objectively provable validity. They are merely more or less plausible and may or may not be illustrative of a relevant point in discussion. In this thread, these assertions are utterly meritless. The point of the original post was precisely that historical interpretations serve present purposes and that they are subject to change. The most interesting issue that arose in the thread involved whether the war was “worth it". The motivation for the war (as if this can meaningfully be reduced to a single cause ascribable to all the participants) is irrelevant to this discussion. (3) Anyone who claims superior historical knowledge automatically loses the argument unless he can point to his or her own scholarly work directly relevant to the subject at hand."