Is This an April Fool's Joke?
Charles Lane of the Washington Post:
PostPartisan: Some in the antislavery movement were as extreme, in their way, as the Southern “fire-eaters.” We tend to think of the secessionists as resisting federal authority during the run-up to Fort Sumter. But the antislavery side had its moments of nullification as well. In 1851, a Boston crowd broke into a federal courthouse to free “Shadrach,” a black man being held there by U.S. marshals enforcing the Fugitive Slave Law.... I am not suggesting a moral equivalency between the anti-slavery and pro-slavery forces. But I am suggesting an attitudinal equivalency...
First of all, Shadrach Minkins has a name--which does not deserve to be put into scare quotes. He was a human being.
Charles--excuse me, "Charles"--sees an "attitudinal equivalency" between the ">black abolitionists who "arrested Minkins from his court officers, carried him off and temporarily hid him in a Beacon Hill attic... Boston black leaders Lewis Hayden, John J. Smith and others helped Minkins escape from Massachusetts, and he eventually found his way to Canada on the Underground Railroad..." and Jefferson Davis and his ilk who raised armies that killed 100,000 Americans.
I am sorry: those who kill tens of thousands have a different "attitude" than those who set people free without killing anybody.
Worst Washington Post writer alive. Shut it down now.
