|
|
Post by nabeav on Sept 16, 2016 12:21:45 GMT -8
|
|
|
|
Post by wilkyisdashiznit on Sept 16, 2016 12:43:06 GMT -8
If Key was to do what he did today, he would be a criminal. However, he did not live in our time. At that time, people were almost literally slaves of the king or queen of their countries (or at least they felt like they were). So, to say that the United States was the land of the free was wildly accurate. I mean England actively (or at least very passively) sought to exterminate the Irish in the Great Potato Famine in the 1840s and 1850s and killed, enslaved, and deported the Irish in the decades and centuries before. As for Francis Scott Key, he owned slaves but released seven of his slaves in his lifetime (that may have been all of his slaves, but I cannot figure that out definitively). He also worked pro bono to release several slaves from their masters. He worked to free the more than 400 slaves of John Randolph of Roanoke and to provide them with land to support themselves for over a decade. One newspaper editorial indicated that Key was so anti-slavery that he was referred to derisively as the "Ni--er Lawyer." Perfect? Certainly not, but he was more anti-slavery than several of his countrymen at the time. One need only remember that Ulysses S. Grant, the champion of the North was a slave-owner until 1859. The "free" states of New Hampshire and New Jersey still had slaves until passage of the 13th Amendment in 1865. The whole issue of slavery is a very complex one. I do not think that you should try and paint people in broad strokes as "good" or "bad" based on the issue without looking at the all of the facts first. I actually have looked at a lot of these facts that you have stated, and fairly in-depth at that. Francis Scott Key was actually all over the place on the slavery issue; as a practicing private lawyer and as a prosecutor, he tried both pro- and anti-slavery cases. Yes, he was a man of his times, but I think people give way too much leeway on the issue of slavery in the 19th century. Obvious slavery existed, but the abolitionist was well underway by the late 18th century and there were many people advocating the end of that "peculiar institution" long before the Civil War occurred. Contemporaries of Francis Scott Key did criticize his "land of the free" line in the context of him as slave owner.
Sorry I turned this into a political discussion. I know people are trying to avoid it on the board.
If you are going to fault Key for doing that, you have to fault Hillary Clinton for getting that child rapist off and getting the the other plead down to one year in jail. (Girl was unconscious for five days after she was raped. Clinton got the bloody underwear thrown out. Then laughed about it later. Just a model human being.) Key was a prosecutor. It was his job to try "pro-slavery" cases. I note, though, that he tried anti-slavery cases for free. (Do you actually have anything that shows that he took a pro-slavery case of his own volition? I see he had a couple "pro-slavery" cases as a district attorney that he was required to try, because of his position. I also see that he lost all of the "pro-slavery" cases that he tried.) |
|
