I never thought I'd be that guy to complain online about his professors saying stupid (*)(*)(*)(*), but here I am. We were talking about Lincoln and freedom/slavery. We were reading two historians, one who basically was Lincoln's defender, and one who was his critic. Lincoln's critic said that Lincoln never actually freed a single slave himself (with the Emancipation Proclamation) and that it had all the moral weight of a cargo list. Now my professor - actually one of my favorite professors, because of his skill and enthusiasm for his job and not his political diatribes - stopped to say about what freedom meant to Lincoln. This is the just of what he said (I won't pretend to remember a string of sentences this long verbatim, but it's the basic jist): "Now, Lincoln wasn't talking about the same kind of freedom people thinking about today. He wasn't talking about voting, he wasn't talking about civil rights. He certainly wasn't talking about going to the mall and spending as much money as you want, driving as fast as you feel like on the highway getting there. No, that's libertarianism! Lincoln is talking about a different kind of freedom...." I immediately looked across the room to one other guy who I knew to be a libertarian, and he was looking at me with the same scrunched eyesbrows that just said Seriously, I shake my head at all the idiotic things posters here sometimes say about libertarianism, but when academics and professionals are making the same moronic statements? God help us all. How can an academic make a reductio ad absurdum argument and not even realize it?
You need to look at what it meant to be a freed black person in the time leading up to the Civil War. Freedom today means something very different. Not taking a side on what your prof said, just my thoughts.
