Wikipedia talk:Requests for comment/Rjensen

message: Should, in the intro, Hamilton's opposition to slavery be referred to by:
:A such moderate expressions as:
:*Hamilton was one of the prominent men who opposed slavery
:*Like many of the Founding Fathers, he expressed his detestation for slavery.
:*Hamilton was an abolitionist. 
:B statements like:
:*Along with his friend John Jay, he was the most conspicuous Founding Father in opposing slavery.
B, of which Rjensen has supplied several variants, steadily more extreme, violates WP:Peacock. 
Also, it's a statement of opinion. If such things appear in an intro, they should reflect an overwhelming consensus of scholarship; because there is no room to discuss the differences. (On this principle, I have left leading [American] constitutional lawyer in the intro.) 
I have seen no sources that actually support B, or anything resembling it; Rjensen has claimed some, which actually appear to say A. 
*James Oliver Horton: "Alexander Hamilton:Slavery and Race in a Revolutionary Generation." This is eight pages, but it's online here
*Richard S. Newman: The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic All Newman actually says on Hamilton is: 
*:The New York society joined its Pennsylvania counterpart as one of the most visible first-generation abolitionist organizations. Inaugurated in New York City in January 1784, the NYMS advocated the gradual abolition of slavery, established schools for free blacks, aided African Americans in  courts of law, and fought to end the overseas and domestic slave trades. Like the PAS, the New York group received official incorporation from the state government and welcomed prominent statesmen into its ranks, including John Jay and Alexander Hamilton. (18)
*:New York’s John Jay and Alexander Hamilton (both members of the New York Manumission Society) held corresponding status in the PAS.(28) (after similar mentions of PAS members from Massachusetts.
*David Brion Davis: Inhuman Bondage p. 154. What this says is:
*:"No less significant is the fact that many national leaders including Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, John Adams, John Jay, Gouverneur Morris, and Rufus King, slavery as an immense problem, a curse, a blight, or a national disease." 
*Bayard Tuckerman: William Jay and the Abolition of Slavery (a book from 1893)
*:Several abolition and manumission societies were formed. The oldest of these was that of Pennsylvania, which in 1787 chose Franklin for its president. A society was formed in New York in 1785 with John Jay as President and Alexander Hamilton as secretary; in Rhode Island in 1789, under the lead of Dr. Hopkins. IN 1791, before the Connecticut society, Jonathan Edwards the younger..." and so on
*Daniel C. Littlefield: "John Jay, the Revolutionary Generation, and Slavery" New York History 2000, 91-132. A forty-page essay on Jay, it mentions Hamilton four or five times. 
*:It concludes on Jay: "[ John Peronneau, John Adams, and Robert Carter III ] were contemporaries whose reflections on the injustice of slavery (or at least its inexpediency) caused them to act sooner, with more rectitude and at greater cost than Jay."..."If Jay was not in the vanguard of militant abolitionists, he was still a leader among men of property to recognize a wrong and move slowly and genteelly towards its eradication."(132) 
*:On Hamilton:
*:*He was reputed to be the father of a mulatto son, William Hamilton. (91) (Rjensen may be reading the frequent references to him, who was a leader of abolitionism, as to his father.)
*:*He lived, like Jay, near City Hall.(93)
*:*He had written the Continental Congress about a project to raise a regiment of freed slaves.(117)
*:*He was a founding member of the NY Manumission Society (119) [other sources disagree]
*:*He spoke once of slaves as "injured" humanity, and offended Southerners. (119)
*:*He "never owned slaves himself", but bought one for his wife (120)
*:*He may have refused a memorial from the Society to the Constitutional Convention.(122)
*:*He sent a slave back from New York to his owner,  Henry Laurens (126; Hamilton Papers 3:606-8)
(Not, on the whole, William Lloyd Garrison) Most of these facts are creditable, and some are in the intro; but they do not add up to B, and (more importantly) Littlefield does not say they do. Garrison would never have done the last three.   Septentrionalis 20:16, 8 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: The content dispute

message: I see that Rjensen has spent some time above attacking me for saying that William Lloyd Garrison was Hamilton's rôle model, an assertion I have never made; I explained my reference to Garrison above, in case this was a misunderstanding. This does not seem to have deterred him. He also attributes to Robert West several things he did not say. (And I did comment, briefly, on my RW politics on Talk:Alexander Hamilton; but Robert West is right -  I  should not have done so.) Unfortunately, Rjensen represents Hamilton's biographers with the same accuracy.
As for his claim of guilt by association (that I must be heir to the pro-slavery men, because I use their arguments) Robert West has already questioned its factuality  (and I concur; the pro-slavery view of abolitionism was as "insidious attackers", outside agitators undermining a contented society; quote from Wm. S. Jenkins; Proslavery Thought in the Old South, p.76).   
But his claim has a more serious problem: it has the same structure as:
:Alligators are green
:Watermelons are green
::Therefore alligators are watermelons.
Watch out for alligator pips! Septentrionalis 14:12, 10 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Logic and reading