MDDM Ch. 72 Dixon's pistol?

[Scott Badger]

The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the
most boisterous passions; the most unremitting despotism on the one part and
degrading submissions on the other.  Our children see this and learn to
imitate it; the parent shows, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of
wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a'loose
to his worst passions, and thus nursed, educated and daily exercised in
tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must
be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such
circumstances. If a slave can have a country in this world, it must be any
other to that in which he is to be born to live and labor in preference for
another, or entail his own miserable condition on the endless generations
proceeding from him. Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that
God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.

Thomas Jefferson

A very confused country. Jes' waitin' for that Line to be drawn...

Soames



Terrance:
> And were some of the most brutal slave traders. And Quakers patrolled
> the streets at night, like everyone else did,  with guns, to prevent
> slaves from running away or simply running about at night. The Quakers
> took small, halting, and **Gradual** steps toward ending slavery. They
> did not all agree that it was against god, unjust, evil.
>
>
>
> The carrying of firearms was debated in Quaker meetings over and over,
> as was slavery.
> First the hunting and shipping of humans, next the christianizing of
> slaves, the buying of, then the selling of, (note that slaves were sold
> at meeting and/or votes were taken to decide if a member should be given
> financial support to buy, transport, sell, "care for" salves), the
> freeing of slaves, and so on.
>
> Dixon doesn't approve of slavery. Many Quakers at the time did not,
> others did.  So in the street Dixon is in real danger because people
> knew that Quakers and others did not approve of slavery and that some
> were actively working to put an end to the practice. But what Pynchon
> does from the first few chapters of M&D is to play on the many
> assumptions and ambiguities about Quakers and Dixon (not technically a
> Quaker since he has been "Read Out"). He plays with the historical facts
> and fictionalizes historical accounts. >