A 1859 NYT editorial scolding abolitionists as unreasonable and doing harm to the cause...

[tenderfoot]

... of opposing slavery!!!

“The very best thing that could possibly be done towards the abolition of Slavery would be for the North to stop talking about it.”

“Ten years of absolute silence would do more than fifty of turmoil and hostility, towards a peaceful removal of the evil. It is quite possible that the Abolition crusade may force a bloody and violent termination of the system, but this no sane man desires”

“The great necessity is to let the South alone—to leave them leisure to think of their own affairs—to throw upon them the necessity of studying their own condition & of looking into their own future…Emancipation whenever it comes, must be the work of the Slave States themselves”

https://www.nytimes.com/1859/01/19/archives/the-abolition-of-slavery.html

NYT has always been more interested in preserving the status quo at all costs rather than making this world a better place.

[dalton99a]

1. 1946-pres.: "Leave Donald Trump Alone!"

Meanwhile:

[ellie]

2. Wow

They have always sucked.

[Tommymac]

3. Yellowcake.

No need to say more.

[moondust]

4. 18 years later

the Compromise of 1877 resulted in the United States federal government pulling the last troops out of the South, and ending the Reconstruction Era.

~
Some black Republicans felt betrayed as they lost their power in the South that had been propped up by the federal military, and by 1905 most blacks were effectively disenfranchised by the now-democratically elected state legislatures in every Southern state.
~

Leaving emancipation up to "the Slave States themselves" was one of the biggest mistakes in U.S. history.

[Marcuse]

8. The Compromise stultified the country for a century. The legacy of voter suppression continues.

[Silent3]

5. We did end up with a big, bloody civil war, and the former slaves hardly got full freedom...

...out of it, but rather decades of Jim Crow and KKK terrorism, and racial discrimination that still hasn't gone away, with significant penalties in opportunity and financial status and health and lifespan still in effect this very day.

I don't think it's unreasonable to ponder if some alternative would have turned out better, like a phase-out of slavery as opposed to a sudden declaration of abolition in the middle of a civil war.

I know the concept of permitting an evil like slavery to continue and compromising with it, rather than simply putting it to an immediate stop, is repugnant to our modern sensibilities. But I still think a phase out, with strongly enforced laws for the treatment of slaves, might have turned out better in the end, even for the slaves themselves.

NYT has always been more interested in preserving the status quo at all costs rather than making this world a better place.

You say this as if you absolutely know that insistence on immediate abolition was even possible or would have been productive. If it had been, that would have been wonderful. It wasn't, however. And if immediate abolition simply won't work, don't be so hard on people writing in 1859 for pondering other solutions that don't match your 21st century-perspective purity tests.

[Thomas Hurt]

7. The bigots make that very argument - that slavery was going to naturally terminate anyway,

market forces, blah, blah, blah, and the Civil War was unnecessary...blah, blah, blah.

[Silent3]

9. I never said anything about simply doing nothing and waiting...

…for slavery to “naturally” come to an end.

I really don’t know that the Civil War could have been avoided at all, but this old NYT article is about people grappling with how to avoid a war, and perhaps do better by the then-slaves as well.

What would you have recommended in 1859, and would it have just been self-righteous moral posturing, or do think you have a real workable solution that would have avoided war, ended slavery immediately, and not resulted in the Jim Crow/KKK backlash?

[Thomas Hurt]

10. Where did I say that you said anything one way or the other....I didn't. I was commenting

that this is an argument that has been made by the revisionists and bigots in the past.

[bullwinkle428]

13. We actually got Reconstruction following the end of the Civil War, and a

significant number of black Americans made absolutely amazing progress, in business and politics particularly. Jim Crow came about as a backlash/"white-lash" to this, when a bunch of white knuckle-draggers became insanely jealous of the gains they were making.

[AZProgressive]

6. I see something similar to a lot of things today

I don’t really care if something is unpopular or not but it is the right thing to do but this reminds me of current media.

[lagomorph777]

11. Wow - MAGA Haberman could've written that.

[Hortensis]

12. Don't forget CONTEXT. It was a hugely passionate issue that involved and divided

families, towns, the entire nation. A lot lke today. There were various anti-slavery factions and parties, a group for every range of viewpoint-- all the way from those trying to confine slavery to the southern states and prevent its spread on one end (likely including this NYT piece's author) to those who cheered the murders of non-slaveowning farmers by probably psychopathic raiders -- in the name of god and abolishing slavery. And of course the passions of those who believed god ordained slavery, or just passionately feared having to wash their own laundry.

Craziness, violence, factional anger, irrationality, fear rampant. There were years of calls to calm down before it destroyed their democracy and factional murders in regions where slavery was contested became much worse. This one came shortly before it finally blew up in civil war.

Sound familiar at all? Society changes, personality doesn't.