I have enjoyed this little debate, Troy.  Far from nauseam, the issues we cover here are vital. 

1)  I am aware and sensitive to counter arguments for the most part.  Mine is from a reading of the primary documents regarding the War and what led up to it.  There is no Founder who said slavery was a positive good and believed that the Founding was meant to secure the superiority of the White race.  I do think that is clear.  The reason for that is because there is no public or private evidence for such an opinion.  Something happened in the South–and I suggest that Jefferson was correct in his Notes as to what influenced that change, partly.   

2) I think to the contrary, there is much evidence and study about the antebellum period in economy, etc.  Matter of fact, I have a filing cabinet full of such stuff from Eugene Genovese himself (whom I had conversations with about these matters in the researching of my book).  From Drew Gilpin Faust, to DuBois, to Kevin Gutzman, Gary Wood, Julian Boyd, Merrill Peterson, Fehrenbacher, etc.  My own Bib follows. 

As to the claim that there is little historical contect available for the Declaration, if I understand you correctly, I think that’s incorrect.  Jefferson and others have delineated much of the motivation behind the charges against the King.  As it pertains to slavery, Virginia tried many, many times to eradicate the slave trade with a view to ridding Old Dominion of slavery itself.  A whole host of primary documents attest to that fact.  Letters form the Founders themselves, as well as colonial governors, and the legal/legislative record make a pretty solid case for the King keeping the state captivated in their slaves–for he negatived many such proposals to tax, with an effort to rid slavery, from the Burgesses.  The best secondary source for this is DuBois.  

As to Byrd and Mather:  agreed.

As to the anti-slavery movement “never” being about human equality:  I think that is an overstatement and incorrect.  There is a difference between equality of man, and the statesmanship required to get us to realize the lofty goal of the Founding.  What may be seen as a slight against the equality of blacks, might really be a practical solution to the problem caused by slavery itself.  See Jefferson on these points.  He speaks unequivocally about human equality, but worries about their talents and their acceptance in society, etc.–something whites caused, btw, with the enslavement of those humans.  In order for the will of the majority/citizens to be rightful, it must be reasonable.  Slavery deprived a certain class of citizens education and enlightenment in the proper (i.e. right) exercise of their rights.  How to get from slavery to liberty?  It is a difficult practical question.  So, while there may be individual expamples of people who were anti-slave (or even abolitionist–the 2 are different), generally speaking, it was not so I think in the way you mean it here.

3)  Agreed.  But beside the point I am making.  My argument cuts across abolitionist and the pro-slave  faction.  Again, I take Founding seriously, as I do statesmanship.  I understand you are in the tradition of history (but not the kind of Thucydides, Polybius, or Plutarch).  

I still have not drawn the thread to the Germans and the Romantics:  But Drew Faust and others have done a nice job of this.  The South rejected reason for emotion and history long before the Civil War.  They began to model their southern institutions of higher education on the German model.  The elites, by the 1850s were completely turned, for the most part, to German rationalism and Romanticism by them.  John Randolph, the Tuckers, and many, many others like Thomas Dew followed folks like Hegel, Fichte, and Rousseau into a new style of politics–one that had no foundation in the Constitution much less the Declaration.

Thanks for this lively discussion.  I hope Locke readers have enjoyed it too. 

 

Happy Holidays all.  Bib follows:




Adams, Charles.  When in
the Course of Human Events:  Arguing the
Case for Southern Secession
. N.Y.:  Roman and Littlefield,
2000.
 




Bean, W.G.  ?Anti-Jeffersonianism
in the Ante-Bellum South.?  The North Carolina Historical Review 12
(April 1935) :  103-124.
 




Becker, Carl L.  The
Declaration of Independence:  A Study in
the History of Political Ideas
N.Y.: Vintage, 1942.
 




Bozeman, Theodore
Dwight.  ?Joseph Leconte: Organic Science
and a ?Sociology for the South.??  The Journal of Southern History 39, no.
4 (November 1973) :  565-582.
 




Bruce, Dickson D.  The
Rhetoric of Conservatism:  The Virginia
Convention of 1829-30 and the Conservative Tradition in the South
.  San Marino, California:  The Huntington Library, 1982.
 




Chandler, Julian A.C.  The
History of Suffrage in Virginia
. Baltimore:  The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1901.
 




DuBois, W.E.B.  The
Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America
1638-1870
. With an Introduction by Herbert Aptheker.  Millwood, N.Y.:  Kraus Thomson, 1973.
 




Eaton, Clement.  ?The Freedom of the Press in the Upper
South.?  The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 18, no. 4 (March
1932):  479-499.
 




Faust, Drew Gilpin. 



  A
Sacred Circle: The Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old South.
 Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.




________.  ?A Southern Stewardship: The Intellectual and
the Proslavery Argument.?  American Quarterly 31 (Spring 1979)
:  63-80.




Fehrenbacher, Don E.  Sectional
Crisis and Southern Constitutionalism
. Baton Rouge:  Louisiana State
University Press, 1995.




Fladeland, Betty L.  ?Compensated Emancipation: A Rejected
Alternative.?  The Journal of Southern History 42, no. 2 (May 1976):  169-186.
 




Freehling, William W.  The
Road to Disunion:  Secessionist at Bay,
1776-1854
.  N.Y.:  Oxford University Press, 1990.




Gallagher, Gary, and Alan
T. Nolan.  The Myth of the lost Cause and Civil War History.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.
 




Jaffa, Harry
V.  A
New Birth of Freedom
.  Lanham,
Maryland:  Rowman & Littlefield,
2000.

 

________. Crisis of the House Divided.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.




Middlekauff, Robert.  The
Glorious Cause
.  N.Y.:  Oxford University Press, 1982. 

 

OK, that’s enough for now.  I could have continued for pages.