How Antebellum Christians Justified Slavery

[struggle4progress]

29. In other words, my own theory of history is dialectical and materialist:

it presumes a development that is complicated and mixed, not based on pure ideas but based on the evolving peculiarities of conflicting interests and histories

In my world, I can simultaneously see someone like Thomas Jefferson as a brilliant beacon, spreading the idea of democracy, while he is at the same time a hypocritical slave owner, treating Sally Hemings as both mistress and as a sex toy that was his property

The world has always been full of such contradictory figures, simultaneously villain and hero, depending on the shifting light. What should I make of Georgia plantation owner David Dickson, for example? On the one hand, he is a thoroughly reprehensible scoundrel, who raped a twelve-year-old slave girl. Then he allowed his own mother to raise the child of that rape as a Southern belle. And in the end, he left his vast fortune to that same child, so that one of the richest people in Georgia after the Civil War was the mixed race woman, Amanda America Dickson. His irate relatives attempted to have his will overturned but finally failed completely in that legal effort

The dead always lived in their own times, which always died with them when they died. Our task is not to reshape the past, which is something completely beyond our ability to do, but rather to shape the future, which is something we might actually accomplish to a degree