I think there is a certain convenient self-righteousness to our regard of slave owners. We abhor the destruction of the whales prior to the invention of kerosene imagining whalers to be scourges of the earth while thinking nothing of everyone who read by the light of sperm oil. Two hundred years from now it may be that our descendants will curse us and think us monsters by puttering about in vehicles that produce 20 pounds of CO2 for every gallon of gasoline. We blithely fill the atmosphere with it while we’ve got bikes and trains and feet that work perfectly well.

Slave holders are a convenient pariah because dealing with one seems about as possible as dealing with a T Rex.

I think it’s important to note that abolition didn’t happen in human history merely once as our narrative of progress invites us to self-congratulate. It actually happened multiple times and in many places which means that it was regularly reinvented and restored. This should give us pause.

Slavery which is at the heart the control of another human being takes many forms. Part of the reason the South lost the Civil War was because in many ways slavery was not only cruel but also inefficient. The reason in American history slavery became race based WAS efficiency. Skin color is a fast way to categorize people. Bond slavery was common in the colonial period for whites and blacks. Virginia had the distinction in the colonial period of having the new and revolutionary idea of categorizing the offspring of master and slave as slave. So much for progress.

Wage labor proved itself more efficient than taking total responsibility for a human life. Lives have many periods of uselessness. childhood, sleep, pregnancy, illness, old age. Today as efficient accountants the employer manages to snip out the profitless times and maximize the utility of the employee. Only labor laws it seems protects workers from managers wringing more and more profit from and Lincoln said “the sweat of other men’s brows”. Foxconn in China created dormitory/factory life so inhumane for the production of our IPhones that the only escape newly industrialized peasants had from the post-abolition tyranny of their wage slavery was casting themselves off the factory roof. The solution? Install safety nets so even that hope of escape through death would be thwarted. Meanwhile the cult of Apple is one of the most celebrated and successful businesses in the world today. So much for our moral high ground.

I’m not saying any of this to undermine the enormous achievement of abolition. It just became apparent after the civil war that in reality we cared less about the actual slaves than we cared about other things such as the Union, our estimation of our own morality and the vitality of the new industrial world over the agrarian. We could raise the enormous expense of blood and treasure to wage war against the Southern states but 40 acres and a mule were simply a bridge too far.

So yes. The English and American abolitionist movements which were on the whole thoroughly Christian brought an end to an incredibly brutal institution, but what they were unable to do was to free us from all ills. As with most things when an old pattern is exhausted or blocked we find a new way to do what we always do, advantage ourselves at the expense of others. It’s simply far more emotionally convenient if the others are out of sight and out of mind, hidden by corporate branding and glass and marble shops which communicate transparency.