Imagine if you will that the year is 1855. An anti-slavery pamphlet has just been published. It features testimony from former slave owners and former slave traders, information meant to show that blacks are fully human and possess human rights, facts abo ut cruelty and violence in the slave trade, and eloquent efforts to convince the public that slavery is morally wrong.

Now imagine the following letter to the editor: The problem with the people that argue pro-slavery and anti-slavery stances is that they are too often caught up in their own little "black and white" notions, while the fact of the matter is that slavery i s an issue colored in shades of gray. What it comes down to is that "the big picture" of slavery, the aspect of whether it should be legal or not, is not a moral stance, but a practical one.

First, the welfare of the Negroes. Yes, oh jeez, I said it, the welfare of the enslaved Africans. In many cases, freed slaves are beaten or lynched in a very abusive environment. This means there are many plantation owners who do not want to free slaves d ue to such atrocities. This is just one example of why plantation owners turn to slavery (and such cases are quite real, I assure you).

The second reason government has no right to enforce anti-slavery laws is because it practices incarceration as punishment. If the right to freedom extends to blacks, which I affirm it does, it most certainly does not end when one commits a violent crime. Government cannot have the double standard of saying one life is worth setting free more than another. It certainly is not government's right to decide, and in fact, it is not government's right to imprison. Government cannot and should not outlaw slaver y, simply because government has no place to dictate morality (when it practices amoral acts such as legalized imprisonment) and because, most of the time, eliminating the choice is worse than having it there. At least having that choice there makes us th ink about whether slavery is moral or not, for ourselves, without the holier-than-thou government telling us what to think about it. At least then, we can decide whether it is moral to own a slave, individually, without having to be told to feel bad about it or good about it.

Slavery is not black and white, and it certainly doesn't have just one level of thought. It is an issue that is riddled with gray and composed of many planes of thought. However, it is the individual plane that should be moral, and the legislative plane w hich should be practical, for the slaves' and for the plantation owners' sakes.

Or we might see this, to the pamphlet's printer: The printing of this pamphlet for money is very irresponsible on your part. I find it repulsive to say the least. It is propaganda. It is sick.

Slave-owning is a very private affair. It is never an easy decision. But it is an option that must be kept open. You are implicitly supporting the efforts of others to foster guilt on a plantation owner who makes a decision to own slaves. I am dishearten ed that an institution such as the press would stoop to such a low tactic to punish plantation owners by printing this pamphlet. You are putting yourself in the same category as those who print pamphlets denying child exploitation in factories. While it i s a matter of a free press, responsible journalism means considering that you may be giving tacit approval to the pamphleteers you select. You are ultimately responsible for this. I still don't believe that you did this.

Or this: It warms my heart to see there are people out there that have so much love for this nation's Negroes. Whoever they are, they have certainly spent a great deal of money to put illustrated pamphlets on our streets.

I cannot help but wonder, however, if the thousands of dollars that were spent to produce this hysterical, ego-driven harangue might not be better spent on cotton subsidies, tobacco advertising campaigns, grants to pay workers' wages, or a host of other s ocial service organizations that try to help make plantation owners' lives a little better, instead of cursing them as sinners.

Lastly, if you'll permit me an anachronism, perhaps Ian Shoales might have said, "In a world where Cabbage Patch Kids get more affection than human beings, it's hard for me to take a debate on slavery seriously." Indeed.

John Keisling would have been an abolitionist in 1855. He is a math Ph.D. candidate whose column appears Wednesdays.