Hi! I hope no one minds if I peek in here and see what my simple question generated! Actually, because the topic got pushed down the page by others, I didn't realize until now that the Sir Thomas/Antigua/slavery issue was still going on.

Anyway, I have found this discussion very interesting. I am from the United States, where slavery is usually taught as the country's Original Sin, it is interesting to see a slightly different point of view from other English-speaking countries. However, while this may be an American prejudice on my part, I do tend to agree mostly with Linden's very-anti-slavery POV.

The "other poor/oppressed people suffered horribly too" argument, doesn't matter to my belief that slavery itself, the idea that a human being could be owned, bought and sold at a whim, is wrong. It almost sounds to me like some people think that if the masters had treated their slaves well, then slavery wouldn't have been a problem. I am not saying other labor practices aren't immoral too, but that doesn't make slavery any more moral.

Not that this is a new argument, though...I read Uncle Tom's Cabin, which is an anti-slavery story, and Tom's second master (he has three in the course of the novel) is portrayed as a "good" slave owner. He defends slavery to a Northerner by saying that factory workers in the North suffer terribly, and their bosses don't care a whit about their workers, while many slave owners actually do care about their slaves and provide for them. But this man dies, and Uncle Tom is sold to a "bad master" who beats him to death. So far, the book could be taken as just as saying mistreating slaves is bad. But in the end, the son of Tom's original owner decides to free all of his slaves, even though he is also a "good" slave owner, he decides that is not good enough.

I agree, however, with the contention that the act of owning slaves does not make an entire person evil. The United States has often had problems with how to look at historical figures who are seen as mostly "good", yet owned slaves. Thomas Jefferson is probably the most controversial figure, because he wrote many documents supporting freedom and liberty, yet was a slave owner, accused in his lifetime of things like having an affair with a slave and selling his own children, etc.