Op-ed: Abolition - "distinctively Western"

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Second installment of three, of an article by Dinesh D'Souza, published in 1995. The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of the poster.

Who Killed Slavery?

Although slavery was a universal institution, not confined to the West, what is distinctively Western is the abolition of slavery. Many people have, of course, resisted being captured and sold as slaves, but no society, including all of Africa, has ever on its own account mounted principled opposition to human servitude. In all the literature condemning Western slavery, however, few scholars have asked why a practice sanctioned by virtually all people for thousands of years should be questioned, and eventually halted, by only one.

Paradoxically, it is in America and nowhere else in the world where the legacy of slavery is a contemporary issue, the American Constitution is condemned as a document that compromised with slavery, and the Framers are routinely denounced for being racist hypocrites. The irony is compounded by the recognition that the prevailing view of the Constitution as proslavery was precisely that of Justice Taney in the Dred Scott decision. By contrast, Abraham Lincoln strongly denied Taney's view, and his position came to be enthusiastically embraced by Frederick Douglass, the greatest black leader of the 19th century. It is to the debates over the legitimacy of slavery in the West that we must turn to decide whether Taney and many 20th-century scholars are right, or Lincoln is.

Throughout world history, slavery had few defenders for the simple reason that it had few critics. The institution was uncontroversial, and that which is established and taken for granted does not have to be justified. The American South was unique among slave societies in history in that it produced a comprehensive proslavery ideology. In part, this was because slavery was under assault to a degree unrivaled anywhere else in the world.

The simplest defense for slavery was economic necessity: Someone has to do the dirty work, and better them than us. This position was based on an implicit premise that whites in the South were in a position to compel blacks to perform menial but necessary tasks. It is force, rather than right, that kept the system of slavery in place.

Southerners were also familiar with a European tradition, going back to the Crusades, that held it was permissible to enslave pagans but not Christians. In response to this, the leading forces in the South formulated an identical justification: Africans were heathens, so slavery would serve as a kind of moral education to introduce them to Christianity. But once slaves embraced the Christian faith of their masters, other excuses became necessary in order to justify keeping them in servitude. Here many Southern divines intervened to offer a racist rationale. They promulgated a dubious interpretation of a story in the book of Genesis in which Noah curses the descendants of his son Ham, who impudently looked upon his father's nakedness. Thus, in this account, the children of Ham were condemned to blackness and future enslavement. For a long time there was little challenge to this absurd innovation in biblical exegesis.

It was only when the institution of slavery came under moral assault for betraying the Declaration of Independence and Christian charity that many Southern apologists such as John C. Calhoun, James Henry Hammond, Edmund Ruffin, George Frederick Holmes, and George Fitzhugh responded by formulating an audacious defense of slavery as a positive good. Hammond, among others, repudiated the Jeffersonian doctrine of equality as "ridiculously absurd."

Their case for slavery depended on a paternalistic worldview in which Negroes, like women and children, occupied positions in an organic society commensurate with supposed limited moral and intellectual abilities. Eugene Genovese writes in The Slaveholders' Dilemma, "Southerners from social theorists to divines to politicians to ordinary slaveholders and yeomen insisted fiercely that emancipation would cast blacks into a marketplace in which they could not compete and would condemn them to the fate of the Indians or worse." Although defenders of slavery were right about the harshness of Northern capitalism, their paternalistic vision foundered in that the community of interests that could generally be presumed between husband and wife, or between parents and children, could not be presumed between master and slave.

The Southern doctrine of Negro inferiority immediately extended to whites, even those who were destitute and ignorant, membership in an exclusive racial club and a social position above that of all blacks, both slave and free. Edmund Morgan argues in American Slavery, American Freedom that the racial defense of Southern slavery strengthened, among whites, the conviction that, despite conspicuous differences of wealth and position, they were equal just as the Declaration of Independence posited. Racism, in other words, became a source of white social status.

The dilemma over slavery ultimately came down to one of the oldest Western arguments, which we find in Plato's Republic: The wise should rule over the unwise. During the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Stephen Douglas defended the right of states to decide for themselves whether they wanted slavery in precisely these terms:
"The civilized world has always held that when any race of men have shown themselves to be so degraded by ignorance, superstition, cruelty, and barbarism, as to be utterly incapable of governing themselves, they must, in the nature of things, be governed by others, by such laws as are deemed to be applicable to their condition."

Wisdom and Consent

We may think Stephen Douglas's view to be crude and hateful, but Abraham Lincoln did not. He agreed with Douglas: It is absurd to construct a regime in which the wise do not rule; surely no one wants the mediocre or the foolish to rule. In fact this raises a problem with democracy that the American Founders and Lincoln recognized: How can the wise, who are by definition the few, be reliably identified and chosen to rule by the many? Representative government is based on the hope that the majority will exercise their power on behalf of right, that they will choose others who are wiser than themselves to govern. Yet modern democracy introduces a crucial qualification to the claim of the wise to rule: Such rule is only legitimate when it is vindicated by popular consent. The majority is not the best judge of what is wise, but most people do recognize their own interests. Hence representative democracy is a "mixed regime," which seeks to reconcile the claims of right and expediency.

This debate is the crucial backdrop to an examination of the antislavery movement of the 18th century, because it provided the context and the moral terms for the issue. The two principles that would form the basis for the first serious challenge to the institution of slavery and the doctrine of black inferiority are both encapsulated in the Declaration of Independence: the Christian belief that all persons bear the image of God and are equal in His eyes, and the distinctly modern European political conception that all human beings enjoy a natural right to freedom and self-government that can only be abridged by their consent.

In the second half of the 18th century, a small but militant group of religious and political activists began to apply the doctrine of equality more broadly and concretely in order to reform the injustices of this world, what David Brion Davis terms "a sacralization of social progress." Tocqueville wrote: "We have seen something absolutely without precedent in history -- servitude abolished, not by the desperate effort of the slave, but by the enlightened will of the master. . . . It is we who have given a definite and practical meaning to the Christian idea that all men are born equal, and applied it to the realities of this world."

The first group to mount an organized campaign against slavery was the Society of Friends, the Quakers, first in Europe in the second half of the 17th century, then in the United States. Ignoring passages in the Bible that had been invoked to justify slavery, leading Quakers such as George Fox in England and John Woolman and Anthony Benezet in the U.S. emphasized that spiritual freedom -- man's capacity to choose the good in his quest for moral perfectibility -- required freedom of choice in this life. Slavery, according to this view, represented the moral imprisonment of God's children and thus was wrong, even blasphemous. Drawing on the religious energies of the Great Awakening, the first of a serious of revival movements that would energize America between the mid-18th century and the end of the 19th, many evangelical Protestants began to embrace a similar interpretation. They applied Christ's injunction -- do unto others as we would have them do unto us -- directly to the relationship between slaveowners and slaves.

In l772, Lord Mansfield issued a landmark decision in Britain abolishing slavery on English soil. In l833, thanks to the abolition campaign of Granville Sharp, Thomas Clarkson, and especially William Wilberforce, slavery was outlawed throughout the British empire. Economic motives undoubtedly contributed, but scholars now generally agree that religious and political principles were indispensable in achieving the abolition of servitude. Antislavery victories soon spread to France, which forbade slavery in its territories in l848, and to other European nations as well. In a bizarre development, tribal leaders in Gambia, Congo, Dahomey, and other African nations that had prospered under the slave trade sent delegations to London and Paris to vigorously protest the abolition of slavery. "Africans felt that the rules of their traditional life had been called into question," Mohamed Mbodj writes, "by initiatives which destabilized the bases of their society."

Eventually the British example, backed by diplomatic and even military measures, eradicated slavery in all foreign areas of influence. In America, although there were many among them who shared prevailing prejudices against blacks, the abolitionist movement contained the first antiracists. Leading abolitionists agreed that blacks were civilizationally inferior and incapable of ruling themselves. But black inferiority, they said, is no justification for slavery; rather, it is the product of slavery itself. Some abolitionists endorsed the idea of helping blacks to resettle in Africa, but those who recognized the implausibility of such schemes attempted to show that blacks were capable of living as free people. In order to directly rebut the Southern argument that blacks were better off being ruled by their betters, abolitionists began a slow but relentless quest for intelligent blacks who would be standing refutations of theories of intrinsic inferiority.

Three prime exhibits for opponents of slavery to demonstrate the intellectual capacity of Negroes were Phillis Wheatley, the Negro poet; Benjamin Banneker, the black mathematician and scholar; and Frederick Douglass, the runaway slave and later statesman and orator. For many Americans, it was so unbelievable that a black person could produce a serious work of literature that 18 eminent whites (including John Hancock, who signed the Declaration of Independence, and Thomas Hutchinson, the governor of Massachusetts) offered an "attestation to the publick" that, upon examination, Wheatley's poems were verified to be her original work and that she was indeed a full-blooded black woman. Additionally, abolitionists stressed the physical and mental sufferings of slaves in order to recruit humanitarian sentiment on behalf of emancipation. No one was more successful in this than Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, published in l852. Perhaps the most influential political tract of the 19th century, Stowe's sentimental novel was credited by Lincoln for turning the North irrevocably against slavery, setting the stage for the confrontation that culminated in the Civil War.

http://www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review/article/8103
 
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