The part of the essay that made me the most introspective was: " Princeton professor Robert George recently wrote: I sometimes ask students what their position on slavery would have been had they been white and living in the South before abolition. Guess what? They all would have been abolitionists! They all would have bravely spoken out against slavery, and worked tirelessly against it. " I had to stop and ask mysel…
It’s a weakly specified / trick question. Do you get to keep your knowledge of the world as it is today ? if not how are you different than people 200 years ago ? So you can just ask what your ancestor’s position would have been. Which we already know the answer to.
It's an interesting question for a lot of reasons. I live in the South, so perhaps if I had been living in the South in 1859 I would have supported slavery. But my ancestors were living in the North, in Pennsylvania and Ohio, and fought in the Civil War on the side of the Union, so presumably they opposed slavery. So if I had been reared by those ancestors, I likely would have opposed slavery. But then again, I'm a bit of a contrarian by personality, so I may have had the opposite viewpoint from my surroundings. Perhaps not opposing slavery in the South, but opposing fighting to preserve it. Perhaps not supporting slavery in the North, but opposing a destructive war and supporting the rights of individual states to determine their own fate and secede. Or personal things could be involved. Suppose as a northerner I saw an opportunity to join the family of a wealthy Southern planter. Or as a southerner, I wished that certain slaves who were friends could be free. So it goes down to what your environment is and what person you are in that environment.