Well Doug, my feelings again, How well can one possibly treat one's slave? If you had to generalise, how about, It Appears They Tried To Treat The Slaves Decently? They Treated Them Well is a crude, tenditious generalization that I very much doubt they could know very well anyway. If they found evidence that the owners served their slaves breakfast in bed, I wouldn't object to them saying they had found that evidence.

More pointedly, if many slaves stayed after emancipation, I don't mind them saying so, but if it is meant to demonstrate much of anything, and it seemed to be, then it's very slanted, to a point of view I object to (and to a kind of communication I object to maybe as much) since a world of opportunities did not suddenly open to most slaves.

Slavery aside, I don't think I could ever finish saying exactly what bothers me about it. It seems to me to smack into the face of genuinely imagining the reality of history. Apart from being awful sentimentality, in my opinion, it's still also mere sentimentality.

I didn't exactly say that it was wrong for anyone to enjoy luxuries that others don't have, I said I think it's wrong that we enjoy luxuries while others suffer for want of necessities. I think so, maybe other people don't, but it seems there is something horribly wrong in a culture of self-righteous striving for excess, when people are hungry. When I watch someone spend $50,000.00 on a rug they don't even like, because in their fantasy of themselves as cultured aristocrats they feel they are supposed to have it, no, I don't envy them. I don't believe that people with more money are proportionally more happy, or that because I have less money I am proportionally less guilty. (Maybe a little, sometimes, but that's my own fantasy.)

I was simply trying to make the point that I didn't want to be very high-handed about slavery, since it's been pretty easy for me not to have slaves, or be a slave. But that there are perhaps comparable injustices I feel powerless to change, but am a party to. A lot of our individual moral lives are marginal to more general, institutionalised, moral injustice. I was trying to imagine if I were a slave, could I possibly love my owner's family? Maybe. Maybe not. The children seem easier. Could I live my life in sustained moral outrage? Probably not, though I had reason. The truth of the past lives I imagine is as hard and particular as our lives now, and so I object to remarks like They were good to their slaves, no matter what on earth was meant by it.

Greg, I think we agree--in general. And thanks for your input.