…and the modern left:
Over the centuries, New England has changed its theology while remaining loyal to its cultural foundations. The Calvinist orthodoxy of the seventeenth century yielded increasingly to Deism and Unitarianism in the eighteenth — and Harvard officially became Unitarian in 1803, dropping its belief in the divinity of Christ. In the nineteenth century literary and intellectual New England hedged its bets, backing a range of horses from Emersonian transcendentalism to the more evangelically flavored Calvinism of the Victorian years. During the second half of the twentieth century the mind of New England became more secular than in past generations– but nothing has ever changed the deep belief in this cultural stream that, however defined, morality exists and that it is the job of the state to enforce true morals and uphold right thinking.
They’re just prudes about different things.
As a long-time resident some time ago, I think he’s not quite right. There are surely roots of Puritanism in New England — but also in Philadelphia and New York, from Quaker and Dutch Calvinist tradition, respectively. Maryland derives tradition from English Puritanism, and Virginia has always thought itself better than everyone else and entitled to rule the rest of us.
I think New England Puritanism has been strongly colored by regional identity anxiety since at least the early 1800s, when its pre-Revolution dominance was swept away by Virginia and New York. Indeed, arguably the pinnacle of New England political Puritanism is President Calvin Coolidge — who specialized in leave us the f*** alone. Additionally, there is the powerful New England based abolition movement to consider, another movement in which the Puritan dedication to liberty fueled the ultimate urge to tell other people what to do (Don’t think you can own other people!)
I would root the Modern Left more in the can-do industrialist barn-raising Chicago-centered collectivism of the 1890s Midwest, fused with the cynical aristocratic noblesse oblige machine politics of the wealthy money people centered in New York at about the same time.
Additionally, there is the powerful New England based abolition movement to consider, another movement in which the Puritan dedication to liberty fueled the ultimate urge to tell other people what to do
Which cost over a quarter of a million American lives, when to purchase every single slave in the nation and set them free like Brazil did would have cost about $2 billion dollars in 1860 money.
The Puritan skinflints were more than happy to sacrifice the lives, for the greater good of course, than the money.
You remind me, Dennis, of the section in Starship Troopers when his instructor asks young Rico how many POW/MIAs in enemy hands it takes to start a war. The answer is just one.
A very insightful interesting article. Dogmatic religious belief is alive and well on the Left. They threw the baby Jesus out and kept the bathwater.
I thought Maryland started as a Catholic colony.
Not to mention all the utopian planned societies of the 19th century – Massachusetts is littered with their former sites. And it goes further back than that – the earliest Puritan settlements were communes which nearly starved the residents until they reluctantly moved to private agriculture!
quarter of a million American lives
Make that three quarters of a million.
It did.
Buy the slaves’ freedom, Dennis? I don’t know what happened in Brazil, but I suspect that slavery there was not as regionally concentrated. Certainly my understanding was that here, antebellum Southerners considered slavery as essential to their way of life, so I doubt they would’ve agreed to that. Or at least those in control and/or with the money would’ve objected. Also: did individual states within Brazil have the kind of standing such that they might feel at liberty to secede? If not, again that argues a very different environment for buying slaves out of their condition.
It seems ironic that indoctrination is antithetical to individualists when it’s just what’s needed to counter the indoctrinists (I think I just invented that word.)
It might have even worked in reverse here. The slaveholders might have held out for a good price, then bought two slaves to replace the one lost. Who knows? But it might have been worth a shot.
You’re quite right, Andrea. An interesting fact I’d forgotten.
If not, again that argues a very different environment for buying slaves out of their condition.
We will never know, but what is clear is that both sides wanted it cleared up in an “effusion of blood” as it was called at the time and no effort was made to come up with another plan that would not result in that bloodletting. In reading the rhetoric of 1860 and today, that is worrysome.
to purchase every single slave in the nation and set them free like Brazil did would have cost about $2 billion dollars in 1860 money.
You are aware, Dennis, that $2 billion represents 50% of the GNP of the United States in 1860? Can you think of a method today that would raise an amount of capital equal to half the GDP, given that the rate of return would be exactly zero (because the slaves will merely be set free)? If you can, you should get into the VC business. There are a lot of brilliant ideas that merely await the availability of $10 trillion in capital investment.
no effort was made to come up with another plan that would not result in that bloodletting.
I suggest that is historically ignorant. An enormous effort went into finding a cheap and easy solution to the problem of slavery from the ratification of the Constitution down to the eve of Fort Sumter. What were the Missouri Compromise, the Wilmot Proviso, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Compromise of 1850, the founding of Liberia and the American Colonization Society? Men of honor on both sides tried mightily to thrash out something that would not lead to widespread disruption and the devastation of somebody’s lives. It was all futile, but it’s not that nobody tried, or tried very hard.
If you want to argue that men — even the Founders — should have simply bit the bullet and done what needed to be done, at whatever cost, I would not argue. After all, eventually they did, in 1861. I am confident that had the Founders in 1787 known of the events of 1861-65, they would certainly have done something different. But as they say, denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.
And looking ahead to the coming SS/Medicare train wreck and the necessary betrayal of either the young or old or both, I can’t say we have any standing to criticize them.
Eli Whitney and automation were what ultimately doomed slavery. Machinery could do more with less resources and machines didn’t revolt.
I cannot see how slavery could have gone on more than another twenty years even if the war never happened.
Actually, M, I believe by 1860 the big money in the slave states was in slave breeding and trading, not cotton farming. It’s one of the filthy little secrets of the slaveocracy. In part, their propaganda about “our way of life” with the sweet image of antebellum Tara and the kindly master looking after ol’ Mammy after she was too old to work is an effort to avoid having their own countrymen — the majority of white Southerners did not own slaves — from peeking too closely at what was really going on. This also helps explain why they took such a fierce stand on allowing slavery in the territories: the slave dealers needed an expanding market.
The folks who were really betrayed by all this were, of course, the Southern whites who had no part of it — but nevertheless fought and died for people and a government not morally fit to black their boots.
It was not Eli Whitney’s cotton gin that doomed slavery. Quite the opposite. The Founders expected slavery to become less economically attractive over time. One big factor was the cost of the mouths to feed of the slaves needed to clean the cotton by hand.
With the cotton gin, and that process mechanized, slave owners could make a much higher profit per input of resources to keeping slaves alive, and increase profits further by expanding cultivated acreage and the number of slaves whose labor was used for that.
Whitney’s invention actually ‘saved’ slavery as a profitable enterprise, thus contributing greatly to the factors that led to the Civil War
My first heads-up on the heavy Puritan strain in contemporary American Leftism was when George McGovern denounced Proposition 13 tax-rebels in California as “hedonists.”
Prop-13, back in 1977, killed my internship which was to be at JPL. I was a teenager that didn’t own any real estate and didn’t really consider CA my home. Yet I was all for it.
It’s a sickness really wanting what’s right.