As Lincoln realized, there is a deep connection between the movement to end slavery and the American founding. Both, it turns out, are built on the same Christian foundation. Christianity had always held that all humans are equal in the eyes of God. Starting in the early eighteenth century, a group of Christians—first the Quakers, later the evangelical Christians—applied this belief directly to the slave trade between Africa and the New World. They interpreted human equality in God’s eyes to mean that no man has the right to rule another man without his consent. We see here that the moral roots of the anti-slavery movement are the same as the moral roots of democracy and America’s founding. Both are based on the idea that no person is justified in ruling another without consent.
The idea of consent is critical to understanding why slavery is so bad; it is also critical to understanding why slavery could not be immediately abolished by the American Founders. Lincoln understood this in a way that abolitionists and modern progressives never have. Lincoln agreed with abolitionists that slavery was abhorrent; he disagreed with them on how to fight it. In fact, he regarded their strategy as one that would help slavery. Lincoln’s understanding of slavery was built on two principles: the principle of self-ownership and the principle of consent. “I always thought that the man who made the corn should eat the corn,” Lincoln said. For Lincoln, the greatness of America—what made it “the wonder and admiration of the whole world”—was that “there is not a permanent class of hired laborers amongst us” and that “every man can make himself.” Lincoln envisioned a society in which people don’t merely command the price that their labor brings, but they also go into business for themselves. Thus “the hired laborer of yesterday, labors on his own account today, and will hire others to labor for him tomorrow.” The evil of slavery is that it is “a war upon the rights of all working people.” The black slave has “the right to eat the bread, without leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns.” In this respect, “he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas and the equal of every living man.” Slavery was based on “the same tyrannical principle” that Lincoln expressed this way: “You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.”14
Let’s analyze Lincoln’s argument. We own ourselves, so therefore we own our own labor and have a right to pursue happiness for ourselves. The means we employ is consent. We agree to sell our labor for a price that we agree upon, and we agree to be ruled by leaders whom we elect by our own free choice. In a representative democracy, consent takes the form of majority rule. In a free market, consent takes the form of agreement to work for a price, or contracts consented to by the parties involved. Without consent, there is tyranny. Slavery is wrong not because the work is hard and humiliating—immigrants in the North were doing work no less hard or humiliating—nor is it wrong because the slaves are not paid for their labor. I might agree to work for you and not be paid; this does not make me a slave. Slavery is wrong because the slave has not consented to the terms of employment. Against his will, he is made to work for free. We see here how Lincoln unifies the arguments for democracy, capitalism, and emancipation. They are all, at bottom, based on the primacy of individual consent.
Now we can answer the question: If the Founders really believed all men are created equal, how could they permit slavery? That the Founders were flawed and self-interested men of their time it is impossible to deny. Many were slave-owners, Jefferson being one of the largest. (Jefferson owned more than two hundred slaves, and unlike Washington, never freed them.) Yet Jefferson’s case is revealing: far from rationalizing plantation life by adopting the Southern arguments about the happy slave, Jefferson the Virginian vehemently denounced slavery as unfair and immoral. “I tremble for my country when I realize that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.”15 So the remarkable thing is not that a Southern planter owned slaves, but that this slaveholding planter nevertheless insisted that “all men are created equal.”
If Jefferson and the Founders knew that all men are created equal, why not outlaw slavery from the outset? The simple answer is that had they done so, there would never have been a union. Historian Eugene Genovese states the obvious, “If the Constitution had not recognized slavery, the Southern states would never have entered the union.” So the choice facing the Founders in Philadelphia was not whether to have slavery or not. Rather, it was whether to have a union that temporarily tolerated slavery, or to have no union at all. The continent of North America might then have become an amalgam of smaller nations—vulnerable to the depredations of foreign empires—and slavery might have continued longer than it actually did.
The Founders’ conundrum can be expressed in a deeper way. The Declaration of Independence says that “all men are created equal” and the Founders believed this. But the Declaration also says that governments must be founded by the consent of the governed. These are the core principles of democracy. The problem arises when a substantial segment of the people, perhaps even a majority, refuses to give their consent to the proposition that “all men are created equal.” In that case, how should the wise statesman respond? The progressive answer—which was also the abolitionist answer—is simple: forget about democracy. If the people aren’t ready to get rid of slavery—if they do not know what’s right and good—then force them. The Founders knew there was no way to do this, but even if they could, in doing so they would have destroyed democracy in its infancy. Slavery would be abolished, but tyranny would have to be established to do it.
The Founders decided on a different course. They set a date a few years ahead for the ending of the slave trade—no more importation of slaves. They prohibited slavery in the Northwest Territory (essentially the modern upper Midwest, including Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio). Most important, they established a union on anti-slavery principles that nevertheless temporarily tolerated the practice of slavery. Nowhere in the Constitution is the term “slavery” used. Slaves are always described as “persons,” implying their possession of natural rights. The three-fifths clause, which some today think represents the Founders’ view of the worth of blacks, was actually a measure to curb the voting power of the slaveowning South—it helped over time to swing the balance of power to the free states. Many of the Founders believed that this approach would prove sufficient because slavery was losing its appeal and would steadily die out. In this the Founders were mistaken, because Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin in 1793—which the Founders had no way to anticipate—revived the demand for slavery in the South.
Still, the Founders’ efforts did undermine slavery. Before 1776, slavery was legal across America. Yet by 1804 every state north of Maryland had abolished slavery either outright or gradually; and Congress outlawed the slave trade in 1808. Slavery was no longer a national but a sectional institution, and one under moral and political siege.
Lincoln not only perceived the Founders’ problem, he inherited it. Lincoln sought to distinguish the principles of the founding from its compromises. Yet he also knew that the compromises were not merely base calculations to advance self-interest; rather, they were accommodations to prudence, and to the popular consent that is the cornerstone of democratic self-government. Lincoln too deferred to the Founders’ compromise, by saying he would not oppose slavery in the states where it existed, but would merely block slavery from coming into the new territories.
During the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Senator Stephen Douglas—sounding like Calhoun, and just as telling, like a modern progressive—ridiculed the idea that the Founders believed all men are created equal. Calhoun went even further; for him, the equality clause of the Declaration was not self-evidently true but rather self-evidently false, since people are obviously vastly different in size, in speed, in intelligence, and even in moral character. Lincoln sought to defend the Founders against these calumnies. Commenting on the Declaration, Lincoln responded on behalf of the Founders:
They intended to include all men, but they did not intend to declare all m
en equal in all respects… . They defined with tolerable distinctness in what respect they did consider all men created equal—equal in certain inalienable rights. They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all were then actually enjoying that equality, nor yet, that they were about to confer it immediately upon them… . They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit.16
Remarkably Lincoln’s position came to be shared by Frederick Douglass, who as we saw had once denounced the Constitution but who eventually reached the conclusion that it embodied anti-slavery principles. “Abolish slavery tomorrow, and not a sentence or syllable of the Constitution needs to be altered,” Douglass said. Slavery, he concluded, was merely “scaffolding to the magnificent structure, to be removed as soon as the building was completed.” Douglass came to understand what nineteenth-century abolitionists and twenty-first-century progressives do not—that the best anti-slavery program is not support for the grandest impractical scheme but rather “is that which deals the deadliest blow upon slavery that can be given at a particular time.”17
It took a Civil War to destroy slavery, and some six hundred thousand whites were killed in that war, “one life for every six slaves freed,” historian C. Vann Woodward reminds us. The real heroes of the Civil War are not the ones progressives idolize—former slaves like Douglass or Northern abolitionists like Walt Whitman, the Grimke sisters, and Charles Sumner. It is hardly a surprise that a former slave should oppose slavery, and Douglass ended up gaining fame and fortune for his worthy abolitionist strivings. Northern abolitionists had the luxury of railing against slavery in pews and convention halls, but with the exception of John Brown—who put his life where his conscience was—very few paid the ultimate price for their convictions. The ultimate price was paid by the men—many of them recent immigrants—who died in the war to end slavery. I am thinking of the three hundred thousand or so Union men who never owned a slave and yet fought to the death to get rid of the institution.
When I recently visited Gettysburg, the guide showed us a church that was during the war converted into a Union hospital—this is where they bandaged wounds and performed surgeries and amputations. The carnage was so bad that they had to drill holes in the floor for the blood to drain out. If we are doing “history from below” let us remember the white soldiers who died in order to achieve freedom for the slaves. They owed the slaves nothing; the slaves owe them their freedom, a freedom that the slaves were not in a position to secure for themselves.
Did America owe something to the slaves whose labor had been stolen? I think it did, although Frederick Douglass, of all people, largely disagreed. Speaking to the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society just days before the Civil War ended, Douglass raised the question: What must be “done” for the former slaves? Here is Douglass’s answer. “Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us… . If the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone… . If you will only untie his hands and give him a chance, I think he will live.”18
And what about today? Does America owe blacks now living reparations on account of slavery? No more than it owes reparations to the descendants of whites who died in the Civil War. I don’t mean this in the callous way of suggesting that what’s done is done. Rather, I mean that there is an enormous debt owed to the Northern men who died in the Civil War. But those heroes are dead, and their descendants are scattered. What is owed is more than money can pay; we discharge our debt by honoring and remembering. Similarly there is a debt owed to slaves whose labor was wrongly taken from them. That debt too is best discharged through memory, because the slaves are dead and their descendants—this will be a hard pill for progressives to swallow—are better off as a consequence of their ancestors being hauled from Africa to America.
Better off? The point is illustrated by the great African American boxer Muhammad Ali. In the early 1970s Muhammad Ali fought for the heavyweight title against George Foreman. The fight was held in the African nation of Zaire; it was insensitively called the “rumble in the jungle.” Ali won the fight, and upon returning to the United States, he was asked by a reporter, “Champ, what did you think of Africa?” Ali replied, “Thank God my granddaddy got on that boat!” There is a characteristic mischievous pungency to Ali’s remark, yet it also expresses a widely held sentiment. Ali recognizes that for all the horror of slavery, it was the transmission belt that brought Africans into the orbit of Western freedom. The slaves were not better off—the boat Ali refers to brought the slaves through a horrific Middle Passage to a life of painful servitude—yet their descendants today, even if they won’t admit it, are better off. Ali was honest enough to admit it.
So was the black feminist writer Zora Neale Hurston. Of slavery she wrote, “From what I can learn it was sad. Certainly. But my ancestors who lived and died in it are dead. The white men who profited by their labor and lives are dead also. I have no personal memory of those times, and no responsibility for them. Neither has the grandson of the man who held my folks… . I have no intention of wasting my time beating on old graves… . Slavery is the price I paid for civilization, and that is worth all that I have paid through my ancestors for it.”19
Our case is settled not by Ali or Hurston but by the actual choices made by African Americans from the end of the Civil War to the present. Here we get back to the American Colonization Society. Many of the free blacks who supported the idea of colonization held what we would today recognize as progressive assumptions. They held that America was founded as a white man’s country and would remain a white man’s country. They believed that blacks would never be able to call America home, and that they would never in good conscience be able to celebrate the Fourth of July. They insisted that the only way for blacks to be truly free was to found their own country, write their own Declaration of Independence, and build it themselves.
The idea of colonization disappeared after the Civil War because black leaders like Frederick Douglass realized that their premises were wrong. America was founded by white men, but it was not founded as a white man’s country. America was founded on the principle of equality—not just equal dignity, but also the equal right of people to govern themselves and advance themselves and freely sell their labor. It took a bitter war to reconcile those principles and extend the pledge of equality to the enslaved African American, but hundreds of thousands of whites fought that war and paid in blood for their country’s sin of slavery. The African slaves suffered horribly in their passage to America, and in the treatment that was too often meted out to them here, but their descendants enjoy something that no previous African did, and that few Africans do now. Today’s African Americans, like all Americans, have the immeasurable benefit of living with freedom and opportunity in a country big enough to realize human dreams.
CHAPTER 9
“THANK YOU, MISTER JEFFERSON”
They were signing a promissory note, to which every American was to fall heir.1
MARTIN LUTHER KING, I HAVE A DREAM
On September 18, 1895, the black educator Booker T. Washington spoke before an all-white audience at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta. He was the first African American invited to address this Southern group. In his speech, Washington said, “The wisest of my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremist folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all of the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing… . It is important and right that all the privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of these privileges.” Remarkably the leading black statesman in the country gave an endorsement of segregation, saying in effect that blacks should focus more on self-improvement than on equality of rights under the law.
In the previous
chapter, we focused on slavery. Here we examine what came after slavery—segregation and racism—and examine whether they are forms of theft. Consider the plight of the freed slaves and their descendants. They opt to stay in America, the only land they know, the land they have chosen as preferable to returning to Africa or going someplace else. Even so, in America they suffer systematic and virulent discrimination, both in the form of law and private conduct, especially in the South. This continues for a century. Only then, in the Civil Rights era of the 1950s and 1960s, is legal segregation finally ended and equal rights under the law finally affirmed.
Even so, racism continues to exist. For the America film, I interviewed the African American scholar Michael Eric Dyson, who teaches at Georgetown. I’ve debated Dyson a couple of times over the years—he’s a gregarious scholar who calls me “Brother D’Souza.” Dyson says that despite racial progress blacks continue to face serious obstacles that are the unquestionable product of past and present bigotry. Dyson infers this, in part, from the fact that blacks in America aren’t doing as well as whites. Even non-white immigrants, he points out, are doing better than African Americans. Dyson presumes that this differential in black success is a measure of how much has been—and is being—taken from them. Dyson, like many progressives, contends that America has been and continues to be guilty of stealing the opportunities and labor value of African Americans. If this is true, he says, the thief must be held to account, and pay.
As for Booker T. Washington, he is regarded by progressives as a kind of sell-out, a so-called “Uncle Tom.” Dyson is too kind to say this, but he is not a fan. And the sell-out accusation was even made at the time, by Washington’s nemesis W. E. B. Du Bois. I focus on the Washington-Du Bois debate because it illuminates America’s racial history from slavery to the present. It helps us to understand what it is about segregation and racism that constitutes theft, and what doesn’t. Moreover, it is an illuminating study of how groups at the bottom can climb up the ladder.
Dinesh D'Souza - America: Imagine a World without Her Page 13
