this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2025
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I don't understand why we would grade on a curve like that when it's clear that he understood that slavery was wrong based on his writing, yet he did it anyway.
Wouldn't it be better to ask the people he enslaved rather than his peers?
There were plenty of abolitionists at the time, it's not exactly a hard moral question to answer; he just wanted to exploit and debase people for money. It was a horrible and vile institution all by itself; I don't see why he would need to be worse than his contemporaries to qualify as a genuine piece of shit.