#why should i care about this odious white man. do we not have enough morally dubious neglectful parental figures already in DC

[serialreblogger]

ok but. can anyone explain the “slade wilson” thing to me. because correct me if i’m wrong but based on everything i can find he is The Most irredeemable bastard ever to besmirch the already-dubious pages of comic book morality

like, fanon is as valid as canon when it comes to DC comics, we all know this, but just. look okay, here are my notes on him as he appears in canon:

deathstroke, aka slade wilson: wow bootlicker. okay

while actively fighting in the vietnam war, volunteered for experimental army program, reapplied to keep fighting after he eventually woke up from the coma it sent him into (“it gave me super strength tho officer”) & was depressed by the Lack Of Purpose he felt after he was denied the honour of fighting. in fuckin vietnam.

(VIETNAM. THIS MAN IS ALREADY AN IMPERIALIST WAR CRIMINAL AND THAT’S HIS PRE-VILLAIN STORY)

wife adeline kane, also an army general, privately trained him in guerilla warfare (this is fine) & they then got married. she got pregnant, he went to vietnam, baby grant was born; he came back (super-soldier-serumed up), she got pregnant, baby joey was born

after he got kicked out of the military he decided to satisfy his thirst for blood by becoming a “world famous safari hunter” (by day; by night he killed people) until some of the enemies he made broke into adeline’s house & kidnapped joey. kidnapper (“the jackal”) demanded some info on a client of slade’s, he refused bc he figured he could get to his kid in time (and everyone knows the US doesn’t negotiate) and was incorrect: joey’s throat got slashed, wrecking his vocal cords for good. adeline was so angry he’d endangered their son that she shot him in the face, which is how he lost his eye

(he learned nothing from this experience)

in conclusion: this man is a bastard with exactly zero redeeming characteristics. i hope he goes to he*k

he’s also. not a good dad. idk if “got his child’s throat slashed with his arrogance” doesn’t tell u what’s up but how about deliberately getting ur daughter’s adoptive family murdered so u can groom her into an assassin & pump her full of psychoactive drugs without her knowledge or consent? how’s that for fatherhood

i do love his kids tho, don’t get me wrong. he just, very evidently does Not. supplemental notes on Those fucked up relationships below the cut (bc i have a Lot to say about this):

rose wilson:

mom = prostitute (half-siblings with Joey [later aka Jericho] and Grant, both of whom die offscreen due to see below)

was discovered by an enemy of deathstroke when said enemy was off killing the extended deathstroke family. hostage situation, yadda yadda, slade won’t touch her bc his sons just died for someone else’s vendetta & “I’m Too Dangerous To Be Around” syndrome

but then like a year later he. anonymously hired The Same Guy to kill Rose’s adopted family. for bonding.

This Seems Like A Fun Dynamic

kidnaps her (“you’re all i have left”), manipulates her into murdering the guy He Secretly Hired & takes her on as his apprentice (Rose adopts username Ravager)

deathstroke secretly starts injecting her with performance-enhancing drugs that cause her to experience psychosis

Tries to force her to kill her half-bro Jericho (also Slade’s kid) while he (in evil undead ghost form) was possessing the body of her friend (ur kid, ur other kid, who is the first kid’s half-bro and also currently ur kid’s friend? that’s Four strikes At Once my dude)

she does not do so, because she is a human child

*but* to prove that she’s still loyal, she carves out one of her eyes. to match slade.

i am really struggling to see how ppl consider this man redeemable

anyway slade gives her a kryptonite eye prosthetic and tells her to kill superman

dick (who’s pretending to be evil at the time & is acting as rose’s caretaker bc dad can’t be bothered) talks her down and also lets her know that kryptonite is carcinogenic/radioactive

she is furious & finally cuts ties w slade

joins titans under tim’s leadership, bonds w kid devil in particular & shows herself to be brash & aggressive to compensate for transparent insecurity. Wonder Girl (cassie i think) is also in her corner

eventually ends up also bonding w damian. shared assassin trauma ig

oh yeah rose is psychic. btw. that’s a thing she can do

 precognitive w/ visions & dreams

dramatic titans showdown (raven is on the run with a USB stick that has a dead half-brother on it; accuses team of having a traitor, yada yadda, traitor turns out to be bombshell)

results in the resurrection of Rose’s previously undead (ghost-flavour) half-brother, Jericho, aka Joseph, aka Joey.

They’re friends <3

anyway now if u want to write rose &/or joey wilson content here, u now have some canon-sourced footnotes to kick off of. please write rose & joey content. i am desperate for some sympathetic depictions of these poor siblings that also fully punish slade for his whole odious deal, that’s my wish fulfillment and i have too much chronic illness to write it myself (i am Once Again Asking for extremely specific fandom content that is not created by me)

[46ten]

curious as to your take on the current debate going on in hamiltonia re: hamilton a slaver vs hamilton not a slaver?

Whew, this is going to be a long answer. Since Jessie Serfilippi’s “As Odious and Immoral A Thing” was first published (I posted a few brief quotes here), likely as part of an ongoing interest in the Schuyler Mansion State Historic Site with the subject of the Schuyler and Hamilton families and slavery (see here for blogposts labeled ‘slavery’ including a couple about AH specifically), there have been three versions of a rebuttal by Michael E. Newton and some people calling themselves Philo (”Love”) Hamilton, one of whom is Doug Hamilton*. The ongoing engagement on this topic also brings up issues of historiography and hagiography.

In this whole discussion there is only one new piece of evidence that Serfilippi has referenced on Twitter but is not part of her article - I’ll get into that below. Everything else is a re-analysis of known and fairly popular sources, so I don’t think going through it point by point would be helpful.

But let’s be clear about something. This discussion around AH is in large part because of this Chernow falsehood: “[f]ew, if any, other founding fathers opposed slavery more consistently or toiled harder to eradicate it than Hamilton.” Chernow also calls AH a “fierce abolitionist” and a “staunch abolitionist” because Chernow doesn’t know what abolitionism is. This lie got tons of mileage with Lin-Manuel Miranda, whose musical character AH may have personal moral defects, but not blind spots as huge and disastrous to a modern audience as a lackadaisical approach to the owning of other human beings. (That Miranda’s approach totally riled some Black artists and scholars is well-known, and I wrote briefly about it here.) Serfilippi’s article doesn’t get the media play it does without the popularity of the abolitionist Founding Father myth that Miranda put on stage. So this conflict and news-cycle interest arose from Chernow’s need to give AH the moral high ground by claiming that he was the best best best abolitionist because Chernow is interested in hagiography, not biography. Unfortunately, Newton-Hamilton seem interested in the same thing.

A brief note on word usage: an enslaver, in most current usage, is defined as someone who participated in any aspect of the slavery enterprise. Considering AH’s undisputed role as money-handler (or the more laughable ‘he was a banker’ assertion in the Newton-Hamilton essay) for members of the Schuyler family acquiring enslaved persons, AH was an enslaver.

In my opinion, on the issue of slavery, AH is damned by his extensive ties from 1780 onwards to the Schuyler family. There’s nothing that can explain away the fact that AH at times lived with, visited, and sent his wife and children for extended stays and to be educated by his slave-owning in-laws. AH did not somehow become innocently involved in slave trading and ownership. Rather, he knew what he was doing when he married into the heavy slave-trading and owning Schuyler family and when he engaged in business acts for that family, including helping them to acquire/sell enslaved persons. These were morally weighty - and abominable acts, argued even in his day - and he did them anyway. There is not any record that remains that he had a problem having his children reared within an abhorrent system/household where people were enslaved and served them; in fact, given the number of times he sent his children to his father- and mother-in-law’s home for extended periods, it could be suggested he found nothing morally objectionable going on there. Philip Hamilton even thanked his enslaver grandfather for his advice on how to “be a good man.” P. Schuyler’s wealth and trading was through the slavery economy. Moreover, AH’s economic concerns were also inextricably tied to slavery - keep in mind that every mention of tariffs on sugar is connected to the slave trade. Almost everything led back to that evil institution.

During AH’s lifetime, a number of white AND Black persons articulated that all enslaved Black and Indigenous persons should be freed, that the practice of enslavement was a grave moral failing. AH was well-informed enough to know that Black Americans were articulating how freedom should be applied to them - indeed, many of the manumission policies of the original states arose from these efforts. So AH was fully aware of the arguments. (His son was involved!) Maybe this helped inspire him and his slave-owning friends and political colleagues to form the NY Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves, although none of this group agreed to give up their own enslaved persons as part of the organization of this group.

Or, as Newton-Hamilton audaciously state, “[AH] was more involved in building a nation” sotto voce based on enslavement and racial distinction than he could be bothered to care about the lives of enslaved people. This shouldn’t be a surprise when it comes to AH’s major moral failings/blind spots - he didn’t care about the lives of the people affected by his whiskey tax either. If one wants to nevertheless call this a “good man,” we’re probably looking at each other from across a void.

But this is well-trod territory. Several articles post-Chernow have evaluated and summarized positions on AH and slavery that I share:

“Hamilton's position on slavery is more complex than his biographers' suggest. Hamilton was not an advocate of slavery, but when the issue of slavery came into conflict with his personal ambitions, his belief in property rights, or his belief of what would promote America's interests, Hamilton chose those goals over opposing slavery. In the instances where Hamilton supported granting freedom to blacks, his primary motive was based more on practical concerns rather than an ideological view of slavery as immoral. Hamilton's decisions show that his desire for the abolition of slavery was not his priority.” Michelle DuRoss, “Somewhere in Between: Alexander Hamilton and Slavery,” Early American Review, 2011 [part 1, part 2]

“But it does illustrate something that his primary modern biographers have been reluctant to concede: Hamilton routinely subordinated his antislavery inclinations to other family and political concerns, and he did not ever approach even a modest level of engagement on the issue in his otherwise voluminous published works.” Phil Magness, “Alexander Hamilton’s Exaggerated Abolitionism,” 2015

“He was not an abolitionist...[h]e bought and sold slaves for his in-laws, and opposing slavery was never at the forefront of his agenda.” Annette Gordon-Reed, “Correcting ‘Hamilton’,” Harvard Gazette, 2016.

Serfilippi extends this:

When those sources are fully considered, a rarely acknowledged truth becomes inescapably apparent: not only did Alexander Hamilton enslave people, but his involvement in the institution of slavery was essential to his identity, both personally and professionally.

I have no objection to her statement. We simply have no record of AH strongly challenging the institution of slavery, while several of his colleagues and friends most certainly did. Instead, we have the financial transactions, the possible use of enslaved labor, and the possible ownership of enslaved persons, alongside his strong personal, professional, and political ties to owners of enslaved persons. And the new evidence: the inclusion of the following in a list of persons dead of Yellow Fever in NYC 1798, “Hamilton Alexander, major-general, the black man of, 26 Broadway” An Account of the Malignant Fever, Lately Prevalent in the City of New-York, 1799. We cannot know if this was an enslaved man or a free Black man who lived and labored for the Hamiltons, but it should eliminate anyone confidently stating that the Hamiltons did not own enslaved persons.

Thus, Serfilippi has successfully accomplished at least one important goal: bringing to the forefront the names (as we have them) of persons, servant or enslaved, connected to the Hamiltons.

I wrote above that part of the problem here is hagiography. If his concern is with the truth, I certainly look forward to Newton’s chapter-by-chapter repudiations of books written by Chernow, Brookhiser, and Knott on AH and the AH/GW relationship.This leads to the second issue that has arisen: the unprofessional, and frankly gross, glee in trying to punch down on a young female scholar. In my own field (an ex-partner is a military historian so I’ll speak for their field too), the approach when one believes a colleague is publishing in error and one has additional information that could illuminate the issues is to contact them and seek to work together to analyze and draw conclusions. Newton and the anonymous Love Hamilton clan didn’t treat Serfilippi as if she were deserving of this respect. Moreover, Newton has never, to my knowledge - and I purchased his books! - gone this hard after Chernow, who certainly deserves it even more.

But Newton-Hamilton betray their own concerns here: “Considering the era in which Hamilton lived, the challenges he faced, and his accomplishments, it is not difficult to understand why Hamilton did not make opposition to slavery his primary focus. His attention was on building a nation.” And what kind of nation was that? At the Constitutional Convention, AH’s lengthy speeches on the formation of the government have been recorded. There is no record of him offering any statements about the slavery issue, unlike his friend Gouverneur Morris.

Newton-Hamilton continue: “Unfortunately, that meant neglecting other important matters, not just slavery but also his own financial well-being.” Wow, a comparison is made between AH’s personal finances and the ownership of human beings. Could these authors be any clearer that the slavery issue is an inconvenience that they are ultimately unconcerned about? I’m unsure if Newton-Hamilton realize just how gross their attempt at addressing this issue has been, and that it’s hard to take their interpretation and analysis of the evidence seriously when these are the kinds of statements making their way into the rebuttal essays.

Now there is an interesting discussion about how even later abolitionists did not see a conflict in the employment of enslaved labor, but that too isn’t something that Newton-Hamilton show interest in. Instead, their approach seems to be that AH needs to be celebrated at all costs, and thankfully, those days are passing into history.

*It’s ridiculous that a group of people have given themselves a stupid pseudonym to avoid attaching their actual names to a so-called scholarly article. And I’m aware that I’m writing this anonymously, but on tumblr where maybe 5 people have made it to the end of this (I’m not publishing it on my real blog).

**I will not link it, but it can be found on Newton’s blog discoveringhamilton.