A Defense of America
A Defense of America: An
Introduction
By RICH LOWRY
July 9, 2020 9:24 AM
The last couple of months have been profoundly dispiriting.
We’ve gone from the George Floyd case and a discussion of some potentially
worthwhile police reforms to, in many influential precincts of our culture and
in the streets, a wholesale rejection of the police and a poisonous critique of
America at its roots. We’ve gone from a debate about the status of Confederate
statues to the toppling, defacing, and removal of statues of Washington,
Jefferson, Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt. We’ve gone from the 1619 Project’s
appearing in an issue of The New York Times Magazine to its becoming the
dominant narrative of America in many quarters. In recent weeks, demands that
would have been considered preposterous a short time ago — the band the Dixie
Chicks must change its name, the Florida Gators must abandon their chant —
instantly became reality. It is in this context that we’ve devoted our current
issue to a defense of America. The pieces range from history to data about
racism to culture, and all are devoted to the idea that, despite our current
tribulations, we still live in the last best hope of earth.
RICH LOWRY is the editor of National Review. @richlowry
America’s Founding
By RICHARD BROOKHISER
July 9, 2020 10:43 AM
Our job is to understand and uphold it
From Hamilton: An American Musical to rioters defacing every
stone Founder they can find: A lot can flip in a short time, especially in a
country as social-media-addicted as ours. But don’t tear up your tickets yet.
The American founding remains an epochal and admirable event in political
history.
“The Founding” is the period spanning the American
Revolution and the adoption of the Constitution, 1775–89. But the political
backstory begins in Jamestown, England’s first permanent American colony, in
the summer of 1619, with the first meeting of the General Assembly.
The Jamestown colony had been in existence since 1607. Its
early history was checkered. The first settlers arrived on the Virginia coast
during a severe drought, which made it almost impossible for them to raise
crops. In one bleak year, called the “starving time,” they were reduced to
chewing leather and eating vermin (and allegedly corpses). The colony attempted
to recover from that disaster by imposing martial law: Men had to work in gangs
under overseers; anyone who disobeyed was broken on a wheel (i.e., crushed to
death). Meanwhile the leaders of the hapless venture squabbled among
themselves.
Something had to change. In 1618 a new governor, George
Yeardley, was given a mandate for political reform.
The General Assembly, which he convened the following year,
was an innovation in European colonialism. It consisted of Yeardley and his
council of advisers, who were all appointed in England. But they were joined by
22 burgesses, selected by the eleven boroughs and plantations that composed the
settlement. The burgesses were elected according to the principle of one man,
one vote, and the assembly, when it met, made its decisions the same way. There
were limits —
indentured laborers and women had no vote in the boroughs,
and the governor could veto any measure the assembly passed. But this was the
seed of a representative body.
What topics did it discuss over the four days that it met?
It proposed a standard price for tobacco. It required church attendance,
forbade whoring, and directed that a man who had slandered his employer be
nailed by his ears to the public pillory. It reviewed the performance of one of
the colony’s emissaries to its Indian neighbors. The universal topics of
politics: the economy, morals, foreign affairs.
In the beginning the General Assembly’s resolutions were
advisory: Nothing could be enacted without approval from London. But
persistence in Virginia and inattention in England ultimately gave the
assembly’s decisions the force of law. The House of Burgesses, as it came to be
called, was the first essay in the fundamental American political liberty,
self-rule. This was the other 1619 Project, and it began weeks before
Jamestown’s first purchase of African slaves.
Over the decades, American colonists secured other rights.
Freedom of religion was the fruit of Enlightenment thinking, compromise (where
many religions jostled, it proved easier to let them be), and Christianity
itself (“desiring to doe unto all men as we desire all men should doe unto us,”
as the Flushing Remonstrance put it). Freedom of the press flourished because
colonial juries nullified English laws against sedition. But liberty, as Burke
observed, is power. Undefined and unfiltered, it inevitably degenerates into
the liberty of the strongest, whether in the form of anarchy or of despotism.
American thinking about the right matrix of liberty was summarized in the
Declaration of Independence, the national birth certificate.
Thomas Jefferson, its draftsman, claimed in his old age that
he had not been declaring his own particular thoughts, but simply supplying “an
expression of the American mind.” So he had: The Continental Congress, which
adopted his document, red-penciled his peroration and his indictment of George
III. It left the philosophical statement with which the Declaration begins — a
masterpiece of compression, only half of the second paragraph — almost
untouched. The representatives of all 13 states signed off on it because it
was, as Jefferson said, “the common sense of the subject.”
This half paragraph affirms American liberties in the most
sweeping manner. Self-rule gets mentioned (“Governments . . . deriv[e] their
just powers from the consent of the governed”), as do “Life, Liberty and the
pursuit of Happiness.” Perhaps its most startling word is “among” (“among these
[rights] are . . .”). The Declaration is not a bill of rights, because it won’t
presume to make an exhaustive list.
The source of American liberty is the “Creator” (“endowed by
their Creator with certain unalienable Rights”). Jefferson’s language can be as
elusive as it is ringing. Though he esteemed Jesus as a moralist, he was
personally no more religious than Ricky Gervais. But while he and Congress were
perhaps fudging a theological point, settling on a formula that would embrace
both him and a Calvinist nurtured in the Great Awakening such as Sam Adams,
they were making a vital political point: The rights Americans enjoy come from
outside history, and outside mankind. Thomas Jefferson did not confer them;
neither did Congress. As no one made them, so no one can efface them. Rulers
can trample them, of course (as Congress believed George III was then doing).
But they are as much a part of us as arteries or imagination.
The great half paragraph begins with a clause, the first of
its self-evident truths, that is as practical as it is philosophical: “all men
are created equal.” This is the Declaration’s balance wheel, the limit that it
places on everyone’s liberty. No man’s power may justly annihilate another’s,
because no man belongs to a different, superior order of being than any other.
The one-man–one-vote practice of the Jamestown General Assembly is rewritten in
gold.
The new Constitution, written eleven years later to replace
the Articles of Confederation, confirmed the point. Like the Declaration, it
had a skillful draftsman — Gouverneur Morris, the peg-legged ladies’ man from
the Bronx. (No prole he — Morris was a wealthy elitist, and proud of it.) But
the Constitution was a collective document, argued into shape by 55 men over
four months and then debated nationwide for a year. Four provisions and one
silence established equality in America’s fundamental law.
Article II, Section 1, gave the executive power to an
elected president, while Article IV, Section 4, guaranteed each state a
republican form of government. There would be no royalty in the United States,
neither nationally nor locally.
No lords either — Article I, Sections 9 and 10, prevents
both the federal and state governments from granting titles of nobility.
And while the Constitution wove slavery into American life
and government in several ways — mandating the return from one state to another
of fugitive slaves, partially counting slaves in the calculation of
representatives and presidential electors, allowing states to continue the
slave trade for at least 20 years — it did not use the word “slave,” referring
instead to “Person” or “Persons.” On paper, at least, there would be no classes
in American life.
The prohibitions against royalty and nobility may seem
needless, closing the barn door after the horse has been let go. But the
temptation to look up and exalt was — and is — strong. One of Washington’s
officers during the Revolution, Colonel Lewis Nicola, suggested Washington
become king afterwards; another, General William Alexander, claimed to be a
Scottish earl and was punctiliously addressed as “Lord Stirling” by his
comrades. Elected political dynasties have flourished throughout our history,
from Adamses to Cuomos — to say nothing of the worship Americans accord
athletes, entertainers, and now, it would seem, influencers. The Constitution
wisely prohibited kings and lords because Americans, like any other people, are
so often unwise.
law passed by the Articles of Confederation Congress in the
summer of 1787 was more forthright than the Constitution on the subject of
slavery. The Northwest Ordinance settled the status of one-fourth of the
country, bounded by Pennsylvania, the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, and the
Great Lakes. The authorship of the Ordinance, unlike that of the Declaration
and the Constitution, is somewhat clouded; Nathan Dane and Rufus King,
congressmen from Massachusetts, usually get the credit. Manasseh Cutler, a
Congregationalist minister and land speculator — what an American type — also
gave input. The Ordinance directed that the Northwest Territory become states,
on a par with the original 13, as soon as it was settled. It also declared that
“there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said
territory,” except as punishment for crimes.
Yet whatever the Northwest Ordinance said or the
Constitution didn’t say about slaves, there were almost 700,000 of them in the
United States when those documents were written (out of a population of almost
4 million). “Why is it,” the Tory abolitionist Samuel Johnson had asked as the
Revolution began, “that the loudest yelps for liberty are heard from drivers of
Negroes?”
Many in the founding generation asked themselves this
question. Their answers were various. Many had never owned slaves (John Adams,
the people of Vermont). Others freed those they owned (George Washington at his
death). Still others passed laws abolishing slavery, immediately or gradually,
in five states by 1789, in two more by 1804. And some Founders who continued to
own human property continued to agonize over the question. In 1835 James
Madison, one of the last Founders left standing, told Harriet Martineau, an
English traveler, that he hoped American slaves — over 2 million by then —
might be freed and sent to Liberia. (Martineau, who knew how few had so far
been sent there, was skeptical: “How such a mind as his could derive
alleviation to its anxiety from that source is surprising.”) Many felt no
anxiety. John Rutledge — whose brother Edward had signed the Declaration of
Independence for their home state, South Carolina — told the Constitutional
Convention, to which he was a delegate, that “religion and humanity” were
irrelevant when considering the slave trade. “Interest alone is the governing
principle with nations.”
Or maybe, when declaring that “all men are created equal,”
the Founders simply meant men like themselves — white men. This was the
argument advanced by racists, south and north, in the 19th century, and oddly
by BLM protesters today. It was answered, in every generation, by those
(Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr.) who asserted that
the founding documents were freedom documents, setting a standard against the
day when it might be met.
1
It is important to get our founding right, for the world as
well as for us. The American Revolution was the first of an era of revolutions
that has not ended yet. So many of them have turned out worse. The two nearest
to ours in time set the pattern. France would not find domestic tranquility
until the Third and Fifth Republics. Haiti is still looking.
We once brought a great thing into the world. Our job is to
understand and uphold it.
Historian RICHARD BROOKHISER is a senior editor of National
Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.
The Exceptional First
American Century
By DAN MCLAUGHLIN
July 9, 2020 11:07 AM
Our first hundred years are startlingly unique
The startling growth of liberal democracy and free markets
over the past century sometimes obscures the extent to which America, in its
first century of existence, from 1776 to 1876, stood nearly alone in the world.
The first American century was when the United States was, most truly, an
exceptional nation.
America at its founding was republican, in the sense of
having no king; democratic, in the sense of grounding all political power
ultimately in the consent of the people; liberal, in the sense of protecting
the individual, natural-law rights of the people; and constitutional, in the
sense that political powers and rights were set down in a written instrument
binding on the state. None of these were entirely new ideas in 1776 or 1787,
but all of them had failed more often than not in the past. Trying them meant
explaining why they would work this time, a question very much in doubt — then,
and for a century thereafter. What was true in George Washington’s time was
still largely true in Abraham Lincoln’s: Nobody had ever tried republicanism,
democracy, liberalism, and constitutionalism at the same time.
Not only was this experiment novel; it was tried on an
unprecedented scale. France was then the dominant power on the European
continent; the original 13 states, spanning the Eastern Seaboard, covered an
area a third larger than France. The Northwest Territory, ceded by Britain in
1783, expanded the new nation by a third; the 1803 Louisiana Purchase then
doubled it. After Florida was acquired from Spain in 1819, the Mexican War and
the settlement of the Oregon Territory between 1846 and 1848 expanded the
country by a third yet again. Seventy-two years after independence, the United
States was still the world’s only republican, democratic, liberal, and
constitutional state, and it spanned the width of a continent. There was
nothing like it on earth.
The young United States was, as Alexis de Tocqueville
observed, unlike the Old World in that the building of its civilization could
still be observed, rather than recalled from ancient texts and stones. Much of
the nation’s westward expansion took place over land that had never been
settled in the European sense, either because the Native American population
was sparse in places or because the tribes eschewed European-style permanent
agricultural settlements and cities. When the Spanish arrived in the San
Francisco Bay area in 1769, for example, it was home to 17,000 people grouped
in communities of 50 to 400, where over 7 million people live today. By the
time of the American conquest 80 years later, the population of California had
dropped in half again. And the non-Native populations of the territories
acquired from France and Mexico were far smaller than the Native populations.
The Founding generation was painfully aware of the historical
weight against it. The brief effort to remake England into a republic in the
mid 17th century had been a bloody, illiberal fiasco. France’s revolution would
soon provide its own grisly example. The Federalist Papers are shot through
with explanations of how the new Constitution was designed to avoid the
pitfalls that had felled past republics and democracies. Madison devoted three
consecutive essays to discussing ancient Greek confederacies, the election of
Holy Roman emperors, the Polish republic (which was then in the process of
being dismantled by its neighbors), the Swiss cantons, and the Dutch republics.
The corruption of the Roman republic into an empire weighed heavily on the
Founders. Washington and other key Founders were devoted to Joseph Addison’s
tragedy Cato, about the republican hero Cato the Younger’s failed opposition to
Julius Caesar’s dictatorship.
The uniqueness of the American experiment did not end with
the Declaration or the Constitution. It persisted into the 1860s, even compared
with the mother country and her possessions. Britain, in 1776, was increasingly
liberal, but was still a monarchy governing an empire. Even to this day, it has
no formal, written constitution approved by its people and binding on
Parliament. Not until a 1975 referendum on membership in the European
Communities were the British people directly consulted on their form of
government. Britain granted significant representative home rule to colonies
such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand only in the 1850s and 1860s. Canada
did not adopt a written constitution until 1982. In 1845, it was still possible
for the Duke of Wellington to argue that “the Democratic Party throughout the
World is inimical to this country. . . . Wherever a democratical influence or
even a democratical Press exists, we must expect to find enemies.”
Until the British Great Reform Act of 1832, the House of
Commons did not even pretend to be a representative institution with districts
of vaguely similar proportions. Entire industrial cities had no representation
at all. Even with Parliament ascendant over the throne and its members forming
into modern parties, the hereditary House of Lords retained significant powers
well into the mid 19th century. The lords were stripped of their veto over national
budgets only in 1911. Britain maintained property qualifications until 1867
that prevented five out of six adult males from voting. The United States, by
contrast, had eliminated all property barriers to universal manhood suffrage
(at least among white men, and in some states free black men as well) in all
but three states by the end of the 1830s.
On the European continent, monarchy still ruled. It
successfully crushed or co-opted the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, many of
which made strikingly modest demands for constitutional government. Much of the
continent lay under the power of the Russian, Austrian, French, and Spanish
thrones, and smaller monarchies covered the rest, from Stockholm to Naples,
Brussels to Athens. The center of Italy was still ruled by the pope. Italy was
finally united under a king in 1860–61, Germany under a kaiser in 1871. Only in
1870–71 did France establish a durable republic, on its third try, after
Napoleon III was defeated in a war with Prussia. Crowned heads still ruled much
of Europe all the way to the First World War. Asia, Africa, and the Ottoman
Empire had even fewer representative institutions or guarantees of individual
rights or limited government. Even the Confederate States of America, founded
on the enslavement of four-tenths of its people, was a constitutional republic
with more democratic institutions and liberal guarantees (such as a free press
and no established churches) than most of the world had in 1861.
The only significant republican exceptions in Europe, for
most of the first American century, were the Dutch republics and the Swiss
cantons. Neither was as democratic or liberal as the United States, and both
were much smaller. The Dutch republics were aristocratic oligarchies, and their
chief executive was a hereditary stadtholder, later a king. Only in the
revolution of 1848 did the Netherlands adopt a constitutionally limited
monarchy. The Dutch did not adopt universal manhood suffrage until 1917. In
Switzerland, reformers held up the American example as a model for attempted
constitutional reforms on multiple occasions, but the cantons were simply a
loose confederation of aristocratic enclaves until the 1847 Swiss revolution.
European liberal reformers looked to the American example,
and while early Americans were skeptical of involvement in European affairs,
their sympathies and sometimes financial support were with the liberals. The
French revolution remained popular in the United States until well into its
illiberal turn. The Marquis de Lafayette and Tadeusz Kosciuszko tried, and
failed, to bring American ideas home to France and Poland. So did Tocqueville
in 1848. After the 1848 revolutions, Giuseppe Garibaldi fled Italy for Staten
Island, Hungarian revolutionary Lajos Kossuth toured America to great acclaim,
and scores of German and Irish rebels fled to American shores. The German-born
Emanuel Leutze’s epic Washington Crossing the Delaware, shown in New York and
Washington to tremendous fanfare in 1851–52, was painted in Düsseldorf as a
statement of American inspiration to frustrated German liberals after the
failed revolutions of 1848.
The only part of the world that followed the American lead
before the Civil War was Central and South America, with decidedly mixed
results. Haiti was the second republic in the Western Hemisphere, but its
governments were unstable, with monarchies proclaimed in 1804, 1811, and 1849.
Mexico resisted monarchy after its independence in 1821, but it proved
similarly unable to resist frequent backsliding into authoritarian rule under
the multiple presidencies of Antonio López de Santa Anna between 1833 and 1855.
In its liberal turn under Benito Juárez in the 1860s, Mexico looked naturally
to the United States for support. Argentina was riven by civil war and dictatorship
until 1861. Brazil remained an empire, Paraguay a dictatorship, Cuba a Spanish
colony, Nicaragua a playground for revolutionaries and filibusterers. Suffrage
was widely restricted by literacy tests across Latin America long before they
were introduced in America as instruments of Jim Crow. Caudillo governments
predominated.
Early American republicanism was social as well as
political. The American Revolution touched off — quite unintended by its
leaders — a revolution in social mores. Colonial American society was
hierarchical and dominated by elites, albeit less so than the rest of the world
at the time. Not only slavery but indentured servitude existed in every colony,
and social deference to gentlemen was expected.
All of this but southern slavery was swept away in waves of
republican sentiment in the decades following the Revolution. Tocqueville,
visiting America in 1831, began his famous study by observing: “Among the novel
objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States,
nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of condition among
the people.” He explained to his European readers that this produced a
different type of informed, self-reliant citizen: “The Americans never use the
word peasant, because they have no idea of the class which that term denotes.”
He saw even the most primitively housed settler of the frontier as “a highly
civilized being, . . . who penetrates into the wilds of the New World with the
Bible, an axe, and some newspapers”: “I do not think that so much intellectual
activity exists in the most enlightened and populous districts of France” as on
the American frontier.
The wide-open spirit of America, its lack of hierarchies and
restrictions compared with Europe, made it an enormous engine of material and
scientific progress and economic mobility. America’s population exploded,
growing at four times the rate of Europe’s between 1810 and 1860. With 31
million people in 1860, it was still comparable in population to France or
Austria, and had fewer than a tenth of the population of China, but it
supported a third of the world’s newspapers. Indiana had one newspaper in 1810;
by 1840, it had 73. The United States boasted the most railroad mileage in the
world in 1850, and more than doubled that over the next decade. Samuel Morse’s
telegraph grew far faster than its equivalents in Britain and France, because
American businessmen instantly adopted it to coordinate railroad schedules and
trade commodities.
Early Americans were acutely aware of their uniqueness. As
Lincoln told the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society in 1859, in America,
“there is not, of necessity, any such thing as the free hired laborer being
fixed to that condition for life. . . . Many independent men, in this assembly,
doubtless a few years ago were hired laborers. . . . The prudent, penniless
beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to
buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account another while,
and at length hires another new beginner to help him.” Even in Britain, where
industry was booming, this was not so. British workers saw their wages stagnate
and perhaps decline in absolute terms between 1800 and 1850. Land was not so
easily obtained anywhere in Europe as it was in America.
Early Americans were also uniquely unmilitarized, a
cherished sign of limited government and independence from foreign intrigues.
On the eve of the Civil War, the Army consisted of little more than 10,000 men,
and its largest extent had been 49,000, at the peak of the Mexican War. By
contrast, Austria had 300,000 men under arms; Prussia, with half of America’s
population, conscripted 40,000 new recruits every year.
The great exception stood out. Slavery was common throughout
Africa, Brazil, and the Ottoman Empire in the mid 19th century, but it became
all the more conspicuous in America because of its contrast to the
egalitarianism of American society. The nation’s debates over slavery were so
heated precisely because Americans after the Revolution prided themselves on
being unlike the class-ridden societies of Europe and the despotisms of Asia.
The many foreign critics of the unique American system returned constantly to
the hypocrisy of slavery because it was a convenient deflection from the American
example.
Independent republican citizens, neither slave nor master,
made up the great bulk of Americans. The 1860 census found that only 1.3
percent of Americans owned slaves. Even accounting for the fact that these
slaveholders were heads of multi-member households who loaned out slaves to
some of their non-slaveholding neighbors, slaveholders were a minority in every
state, and slaveholding families have been estimated at about 7.4 percent of
American households. Over 60 percent of the country lived in states or
territories with no slaves. That proportion had been growing steadily for over
half a century. The critical mass of free citizens in the North and West
enabled the Union to prevail.
COMMENTS
The Gettysburg Address stands as the most concise statement
of Lincoln’s view of the Civil War as “testing whether [this] nation, or any
nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure,” and whether
“government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from
the earth.” This was not hyperbole, or some idiosyncratic theory of Lincoln’s.
Still unique in the world, little over a decade after the collapse of hope for
liberal, democratic, constitutional republics in Europe, America still had to
prove its case against the skeptics. In 1865, speaking from Napoleon III’s
empire, French republican Eugène Pelletan observed, “America is not only
America, one place or one race more on the map, it is yet and especially the
model school of liberty. If against all possibility it had perished, with it
would fall a great experiment.”
The early Americans seem to us today unaccountably harsh in
certain ways, from their brutal wars against the Native Americans to their long
tolerance of slavery. Yet we owe them much. That debt goes far beyond the ideas
of the Founding. Ideas that die in practice do not command imitation. The
Americans of the nation’s first century stood essentially alone on the world
stage, and they proved that a nation that was democratic, republican, liberal,
and constitutional could not only survive challenges external and internal, it
could expand, prosper, innovate, reform itself, and endure. Their ideas — and
even the principles against which we now rebuke them — would not cover so much
of the world today without those labors.
DAN MCLAUGHLIN is a senior writer at National Review Online.
@baseballcrank
Slavery and the
Constitution
By PHILLIP W. MAGNESS
July 9, 2020 11:27 AM
From the beginning, it pointed toward racial equality
A stunning legal drama unfolded before the King’s Bench in
London in early 1772. James Somerset, a slave brought to England from the
American colonies, petitioned the court for a writ of habeas corpus, which
would free him from confinement on his enslaver’s ship. Lord Mansfield, the
judge reviewing the case, granted the writ in a stinging rebuke of Somerset’s
captors: “The state of slavery is of such a nature, that it is incapable of
being introduced on any reasons, moral or political; but only positive law,
which preserves its force long after the reasons, occasion, and time itself
from whence it was created, is erased from memory.” As no such law existed in
England proper, Somerset was to be freed.
The judgment’s narrow construction intentionally limited its
immediate implications. When word of the case crossed the Atlantic, Benjamin
Franklin wrote his abolitionist friend Anthony Benezet to denounce “the
hypocrisy of this country, which encourages such a detestable commerce by laws
for promoting the Guinea trade; while it piqued itself on its virtue, love of
liberty, and the equity of its courts, in setting free a single negro.”
Somerset’s case would nonetheless put the first chip in the legal edifice of
plantation slavery, and with it set the foundations for a neglected tradition
of anti-slavery constitutionalism.
When mentioned at all today, Somerset’s case often suffers
from the political distortion of our present moment. The New York Times’ 1619
Project attempted to repurpose Mansfield’s ruling as evidence that the American
colonies revolted some four years later in response to the existential threat
that the case supposedly created for the colonial slave system. In reality, the
British Empire still remained a half century removed from emancipation — a
cause that found its earliest parliamentary support among Charles James Fox,
Edmund Burke, and other Whig supporters of the American revolutionaries. And
while the Times grudgingly walked back its claim that protecting slavery
provided a primary impetus for the events of 1776, the paper offered no indication
that Somerset’s brand of anti-slavery constitutionalism took root in the
nascent United States.
The next blow came in Massachusetts in 1783, with future
U.S. Supreme Court justice William Cushing instructing a jury in a strikingly
similar “freedom suit” that “the idea of slavery is inconsistent with our own
conduct and [state] Constitution; and there can be no such thing as perpetual
servitude of a rational creature.” The resulting verdict released Quock Walker
from bondage, leading the commonwealth to become the first of the original 13
colonies to carry out immediate emancipation.
Freed from London’s oversight, American independence
unleashed an early wave of similar actions across the northern states. Between
the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the Constitutional Convention of
1787, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Connecticut adopted
gradual-abolition plans under their newly constituted state governments. The
national Northwest Ordinance of 1787 successfully barred the entry of slavery
into the modern-day Midwest. And Vermont, which joined the union as a state in
1791, had operated under an anti-slavery constitutional provision since it
broke from Britain in 1777 against the backdrop of the Revolution. New York
would follow in 1799 and New Jersey in 1804, both with gradual processes.
The political entrenchment of slavery in the southern states
obscures this important constitutional legacy today, particularly as
revisionist historical accounts such as the 1619 Project attempt to re-center
the American founding around the maintenance of a plantation economy. The
Times’ Nikole Hannah-Jones accordingly speaks of the founding generation as if
they were a unitary voice conspiring to preserve slavery, charging that, “in
the texts in which they were making the case for freedom to the world, they did
not want to explicitly enshrine their hypocrisy, so they sought to hide it.”
Such simplistic narratives strip this era of its nuance,
though, denigrating the constitutional component of the abolitionist project in
the process. It is true that the framers of the Constitution omitted direct
mention of slavery, even as they accepted the now-notorious three-fifths clause
and mechanisms to return fugitive slaves to bondage. Yet many delegates
recognized the moral fault of these political concessions. In denouncing a
clause that preserved the slave trade until 1808, Constitutional Convention
delegate Luther Martin chastised the institution as “inconsistent with the
principles of the Revolution, and dishonorable to the American character.” In
doing so, Martin echoed the Fairfax Resolves of 1774, in which George
Washington and George Mason condemned the British Crown for sustaining this
“wicked, cruel, and unnatural trade” in its colonies.
In the legal context of the 18th century, the Constitution’s
conspicuous evasion of the word “slavery” carried another meaning, at least
among critics of the institution. Just as Mansfield constructed the Somerset
ruling on British law’s silence about slavery, the omission — some
abolitionists hoped — of the word in the U.S. Constitution might be construed
at a future date to deprive the slave system of affirmation in positive law at
the federal level.
On the opposing side, southerners pressed for the fugitive-slave
clause as an attempt to avoid recurring repetition of the Somerset outcome. “If
any of our slaves . . . go [to the North], and remain there a certain time,
they would, by the present laws, be entitled to their freedom, so that their
masters could not get them again,” James Iredell explained to the North
Carolina ratifying convention. In defending the clause, he then acknowledged
that “the northern delegates, owing to their particular scruples on the subject
of slavery, did not choose the word ‘slave’ to be mentioned.”
The clause conceded to slave owners a horrific tool by which
the resources of the federal government could be mustered in subsidy and
support for their institution, yet at the same time the Constitution’s unusual
evasion of the term set up a legal tension between pro-slavery and anti-slavery
constitutional theories that persisted until the Civil War. The political
entrenchment of the former lies at the root of most modern critiques of the
document, particularly because the “positive good” theory of slavery espoused
by John C. Calhoun displaced that peculiar creature of the founding generation,
the slave owner whose trepidations about slavery’s moral wrongs led him to cast
about for a political solution that might eventually wean the country from its
original sin.
Thomas Jefferson would famously “tremble” for his country
when he reflected “that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever.”
Some three decades later the philosophical tension persisted, but the hoped-for
political solution remained elusive. “We have the wolf by the ear, and we can
neither hold him, nor safely let him go,” he wrote, summarizing the
predicament. “Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”
Jefferson and others of his mindset explored the possibility of diffusing the
institution into the western lands, out of the belief — now known to be
mistaken — that it would dwindle away. James Madison lent his support to a
solution rooted in colonizing manumitted freedmen abroad in locales such as Liberia.
Though hopelessly impractical and at times racist in its designs, the
colonization program gained an influential following before the Civil War,
passing next to Henry Clay as an advocate of the weaning strategy before being
taken up by the moderate but certain anti-slavery voice of Abraham Lincoln.
Distance from the founding generation emboldened a new
pro-slavery legal theory that read more-explicit affirmations of slavery into
American constitutionalism. In the founding generation, notes legal historian
William Wiecek, “even slave-state jurists at first accepted [Somerset’s]
anti-slavery premises,” only to work around them by constructing exceptions and
exemptions. The ascendance of Calhoun’s pro-slavery doctrine transformed the
Constitution’s implicit concessions to slavery into an explicit and affirmative
sanction — a legal theory that the 1619 Project casually adopts, albeit as a
repurposed indictment of the Constitution itself. As with Calhoun, this step
requires rejecting the Founding’s aspirational principle that all men are
created equal — “an error” that was “inserted in our Declaration of
Independence without any necessity,” according to the South Carolina senator.
Less discussed is the parallel emboldening of Somerset’s
anti-slavery constitutionalism in the hands of abolitionists. Consider an 1817
“freedom suit” case in which Justice John McLean of the Ohio supreme court
opined, “Were it proper to consider it, the Court, as well as from the
principles recognized by our Constitution and Laws, could not hesitate in
declaring that slavery . . . is an infringement upon the sacred rights of man.”
Within a generation, abolitionist legal theorists William Goodell and Lysander
Spooner had each penned elaborate treatises applying Somerset’s reasoning to
the U.S. Constitution, contending that it lacked a clear affirmation of slavery
as positive law. While modern scholarship is apt to relegate such doctrines to
the political periphery, they counted no less than Frederick Douglass among
their converts. A direct legal lineage to Somerset may be seen in Douglass’s
famous 1852 Fourth of July address, in which he argued precisely the case that
the Times today rejects: “Interpreted, as it ought to be interpreted, the
Constitution is a glorious liberty document.”
COMMENTS
Douglass’s appeal entailed more than fiery abolitionist
rhetoric, though. In five years’ time another “freedom suit” would come before
the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of a slave named “Dred Scott.” The decision’s
infamy derives from its clumsy attempt to enshrine pro-slavery
constitutionalism as national doctrine, creating a primary catalyst for the
Civil War in the process.
Still, the anti-slavery constitutional message may be seen
in the case itself for raising the issue of Scott’s legal claim to freedom. To
this end, the same John McLean of the earlier Ohio decision, now sitting as an
associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, penned one of two dissents. In his
biting attack on the ruling of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, McLean paid homage
to a predecessor freedom suit, noting that “it is a sufficient answer to all
objections to that judgment, that it was pronounced before the Revolution, and
that it was considered by this court as the highest authority.” He was
referring to Somerset’s case.
This article appears as “Interpreted as It Ought to Be” in
the July 27, 2020, print edition of National Review.
PHILLIP W. MAGNESS is a senior research fellow at the
American Institute for Economic Research.
On George Washington
By NOEMIE EMERY
July 9, 2020 11:46 AM
His letters show his changing view of slavery
George Washington, father of his country, which was the
first to say that men were born free and thus ought to be equal, was also the
owner of slaves. So were three of the next four men to succeed him in office,
who were also Virginians, and who had even fewer reservations about this than he.
Back in the day, this was noted by many, Samuel Johnson among them, who
wondered in London just how it happened that “the loudest yelps for liberty”
from the other side of the ocean had come from the drivers of slaves. Among the
Founders, there would be two extremes, from Alexander Hamilton, the “Bastard
Brat of a drunken Scotch Pedler,” as John Adams once called him, who came to
the country at age 17 a convinced abolitionist and stayed so forever, to Thomas
Jefferson, who talked a good game by declaring loudly in print that “all men
are created equal,” and endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights, but
whose conduct in keeping some people in chains seems to say otherwise.
Of the three, Washington alone changed his perspective,
starting his life by accepting the status quo as it was in his own home state
of Virginia, and ending it by going so far in advance of most public opinion
that he wanted to see slavery outlawed. He seems to have given the matter
itself, or the human bondage with which he lived, no thought at all through his
late twenties. Though he inherited ten slaves from his father when he was
eleven and bought eight more for himself later on, he hardly seems to have been
around them, or his home, for that matter, at first absent for long stretches
of time on surveying trips for his friends the Fairfaxes (at that time the
colony’s most powerful people), and later on military missions for the local
militia, during which he began and then fought in the French and Indian War.
That war and his derring-do in it would bring him the cachet
and the fame that allowed him to woo and to win an extremely rich woman —
Martha Dandridge Custis, heir to her husband’s very large fortune — whom he
married in January 1759. She brought with her when she came to Mount Vernon
some 80-plus slaves from the estate of her late husband, more than four times
the amount Washington had owned or commanded before. No comments of
Washington’s survive from this period about race, or slaves, so it seems fair
to assume he took the system for granted, as the way things were and would go
on forever, as most people do the world they grew up in. But that would change
with the oncoming war.
It was not what Washington said or did about slaves during
the eight years of the Revolution that marked the extent of what happened in
it, that marked the tremendous extent of the change. In the meantime, he had
led an army with 5,000 black soldiers, traveled and lived in the parts of the
country that had very few slaves and no large plantations, had as his younger
aides and associates Alexander Hamilton, John Laurens, and the Marquis de
Lafayette, who were fierce abolitionists, and had eight long years to think of
the sheer incoherence in fighting a war on the premise that all men deserved freedom,
while some people at home were in chains.
Whatever the cause — and perhaps all were the reason — when
Washington was back home for good (as he thought) at Mount Vernon, he started
to write things such as these: “There is not a man living who wishes more
sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for this Abolition,” he wrote in a
letter in 1784. “It is much against my inclination . . . to hurt the feelings
of these unhappy people by a separation of families,” he wrote two years later.
“Were it not . . . that I am principled against selling negroes, as you would
do cattle in the market, I would not, in twelve months from this date, be
possessed of one as a slave,” went one other letter. And another insisted, “I
never mean, unless some particular circumstance should compel me to it, to
possess another slave by purchase; it being among my first wishes to see some
plan adopted by which slavery in this country may be abolished by slow, sure,
& imperceptible degrees.” In the will he wrote in the year that he died, he
stipulated that if his wife survived him, he would free on her death all the
slaves he owned outright, while those from the Custis estate, whom he did not
control, would revert to those owners. After he died, Martha became so
concerned that the slaves would kill her in order to gain their own freedom
that her attorneys set them all free.
Why was Washington the only slave owner among all of the
others who set his slaves free?
COMMENTS
One answer was that he had a more evolved social conscience,
but the other was that he belonged to a wholly unique mercantile order: They
were inheritors and agrarian planters; he was a self-made man, and an
entrepreneur. Jefferson was born into great wealth and raised in a feudal and
class-ridden system; Washington was born the third son of a middle-rank planter
who rose by his own efforts and made his own wealth. He understood the
free-enterprise system: Men discovered their talent and sold their own service,
for whatever their talents would bring. He demanded hard work of himself, and
all men black and white who worked for him, but soon realized blacks would
never work to capacity unless they could realize a gain. Under slavery, they
could never improve their own status or standard of living, so why should they
work for another man’s gain?
“Despite all of Washington’s talents as an entrepreneur,
enslaved men, women, and children had by their labor played a vital role in
creating his wealth,” says Edward G. Engel in his book First Entrepreneur.
Though
time had taught him to view their continued labor as a grave
moral injustice, it was his conception of a moral economy . . . that led him to
decide that slavery as a system was not only bound to fail, but would, so long
as it existed, hinder the growth of national prosperity. . . . By undermining
the basic principles of industry, such labor morally degraded not just the
slaves but those who owned them. . . . It was for this reason above all that
Washington came to believe that he had to free them — albeit, true to the
principle of interest, in a way that did the least harm either to the enslaved
or to his estate.
Washington, though a fourth-generation Virginian, was in his
essence a Northerner, one who believed in the egalitarian, freewheeling,
immigrant-friendly culture of the Northeast, and of the Midwest, as it would
develop, and leave the South — which would not revive until the late 20th
century when segregation was beaten — behind. He was the world’s first and only
Northern Virginian, which is why we revere him today.
This article appears as “George Washington” in the July 27,
2020, print edition of National Review.
NOEMIE EMERY has also written for the Washington Examiner
and The Weekly Standard.
On Thomas Jefferson
By MYRON MAGNET
July 9, 2020 2:19 PM
He trusted to the advance of the Enlightenment to end
slavery
Nobody embodies the paradox at the heart of the American
founding more vividly than Thomas
Jefferson, the slave owner who penned the American creed of liberty in
the Declaration of Independence and who, with a slave as his concubine, would
“dream of freedom in his bondsmaid’s arms,” as Irish poet Tom Moore jeered
during Jefferson’s second presidential term. As young vandals torch our
national heritage, in an infectious delusion that America was conceived in
slavery, not in liberty, take a good look at our third president, warts and
all. You’ll find, despite his undeniable flaws, one of history’s great men who
helped build history’s greatest nation. He is especially relevant now, when the
qualities he placed at the center of our culture are at once so beleaguered and
so essential.
By his order, Jefferson’s gravestone identifies him only as
the father of the University of Virginia and the author of both the Declaration
of Independence and the Virginia statute of religious freedom — intellectual
accomplishments all. Of his presidency and other government offices there’s not
a word. He was a true child of the Enlightenment, most at home in the world of
ideas and convinced that reason would lead to truth, material improvement, and moral
progress. Hence his emphasis on religious freedom in a Virginia that, even
after the Declaration of Independence, had an established Anglican church,
exacting taxes from all citizens and forbidding the promulgation of unorthodox
religious beliefs.
No one can make you profess or support dogmas you don’t
believe, Jefferson countered. The first freedom is the freedom to think
whatever thoughts you like and say whatever your reason tells you is true. No
one can deny, his statute declared, echoing Milton’s sublime Areopagitica,
“that truth is great and will prevail if left to herself; that she is the
proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the
conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument
and debate; errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to
contradict them.”
So simple and so obvious: but can one find a college
administrator or newspaper editor with the courage to say this to politically
correct mobs howling down unorthodox speakers or writers today? Would any one
of them declare, with Jefferson, “I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal
hostility to every form of tyranny over the mind of man?”
Then there is America’s foundational idea, proclaimed in the
Declaration of Independence, summing up Locke’s political theory with
diamond-like compression and clarity, and adding to it a uniquely American
flourish that makes it something new in political thought. Men are born equal
in their rights to life and liberty, and they form governments only to protect
those rights. Public officials thus work for the citizens; even “kings are the
servants, not the proprietors of the people,” as of course are the
administrative state’s meddlesome “swarms of officers [who] harass our people
and eat out their substance.” All can be fired for abuse or neglect of their
trust, including failure to keep citizens safe in their homes and streets.
But there’s one more unalienable right with which we’re
born: the right to “the pursuit of happiness.” “Familiar words, easy to take
for granted; easy to misconstrue,” wrote the great English novelist V. S.
Naipaul, whose Trinidadian childhood as the grandson of Indian indentured
laborers made him never take Jefferson’s formulation for granted. It is, he
marveled, “an immense human idea” that contains a world of possibility: “a
certain kind of awakened spirit, . . . the idea of individual responsibility,
choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and
achievement.” We are born, Jefferson declared, with the right to forge our own
happiness in our own way, to make the most of whatever talents and energies,
tastes and curiosities lie within us. Who before, in man’s history of serfs and
lords, could dare dream of such liberty?
When Jefferson claimed to have fathered the University of
Virginia, he was not kidding. Arguably America’s greatest architect ever,
amateur or professional, he designed its meltingly beautiful campus as a
textbook of classicism. He oversaw its construction, served as its rector,
hired its faculty, and devised its curriculum, “based on the illimitable
freedom of the human mind to explore and to expose every subject susceptible of
its contemplation.” His educational aspirations had been even grander than this.
Early in his political career he had lobbied hard, though unsuccessfully, for a
purely meritocratic system of public education that would make every Virginian
literate and send the most talented on to secondary school and then university,
with the selection more rigorous at each stage, to generate a constantly
renewed “aristocracy of virtue and talent.” Now that cities spend $25,000 a
year to send each child to elementary school and parents shell out $65,000 for
a year at an elite university offering more snob appeal than learning, we are
rapidly discarding such a meritocratic ideal, heedless that our predatory
global competitors are overtaking us in wealth and power as a result. But even
in Jefferson’s day, his ideal was hard to realize. His students got drunk,
brawled, shot off guns among his classical pavilions, and roughed up their
professors. Jefferson, then 82, came down from his mountaintop home to
remonstrate with them. He mounted the stage, tried to speak, and burst into
tears.
Recently, among the Jacobin mobs vandalizing our cities,
some yahoo in Charlottesville graffitied a statue of Jefferson near the
university with the legend “Racist + Rapist,” making him an almost complete
intersectional villain. What about those charges?
It is true that Jefferson owned slaves, and that Monticello,
built to his exquisite design of bricks made and laid by slaves, as in Egypt of
old, was a slave plantation, its rare and precious furnishings and books, even
the Château Margaux and Château d’Yquem in its cellars, bought by the sweat of
slaves’ brows. (I write this with some trepidation, lest the mob come to
demolish America’s most beautiful house.) But he knew to the marrow of his
bones that slavery was wrong, an affront to his most cherished principles and
those of the new nation, and he began saying so publicly at 26, when he tried
unsuccessfully to persuade the legislature to make it legal for Virginians to
free their slaves. Later, he needed Benjamin Franklin’s avuncular consolation
when his fellow congressmen edited out of his draft of the Declaration of
Independence his condemnation of George III for allowing the slave trade, a
“cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of
life and liberty.” The existence of slavery endangered the liberty of all
Americans, he thought, for it undermined citizens’ belief that human liberty
comes from God and is not to be violated without His punishment. Indeed, he
wrote of the slaves, in words that sound like Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, “when
the measure of their tears shall be full, when their groans shall have involved
heaven itself in darkness, doubtless a god of
justice will awaken to their distress, and by diffusing light &
liberality among their oppressors, or at length by his exterminating thunder,
manifest his attention to the things of this world, and that they are not to be
left to the guidance of a blind fatality.”
Jefferson trusted to the advance of Enlightenment to end an
institution that had existed in America for more than a century before the
Revolution and that the Founding Fathers couldn’t abolish at a stroke if they
wanted their new nation to comprise all 13 colonies. But they blocked its
spread with the Northwest Ordinance; they set a date to end the slave trade;
and they foresaw that tobacco’s exhaustion of the soil would make slave
plantations uneconomical and slavery unviable. But then came the cotton gin and
the 1820 Missouri Compromise, extending slavery westward and giving it renewed
life. “Like a fire bell in the night,” Jefferson wrote, the compromise “filled
me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union.” It would
have to be exterminating thunder, after all. In the midst of the Civil War’s
bloodshed, it was to Jefferson’s immortal words that Lincoln turned to proclaim
America’s new birth of freedom.
COMMENTS
Finally: “Rapist.” The sans-culotte with the spray paint
doubtless meant Jefferson’s slave Sally Hemings, the half-sister of his beloved
wife, who left him a widower when he was 39. Begotten by Jefferson’s
father-in-law upon a slave woman whose own father was an English sea captain,
Sally was three-quarters white and, according to one contemporary, “decidedly
good-looking.” A teenager in Jefferson’s household when he was the American
minister in Paris, she was pregnant when he was to return to the United States
and, because she was free under revolutionary France’s law, would agree to come
back with him only on his promise to free her baby and any others she might
have when they turned 21, a promise he kept, as her son, Madison, recounted the
whole story in 1873. Of other women in the normally hot-blooded Jefferson’s
life after this we hear nothing. What DNA evidence exists is inconclusive.
Historians have spun fantasies — that she looked like her half-sister, that he
felt, . . . that she felt . . . But more we do not know.
Freedom of thought and speech; all men equal in rights,
including the right to the pursuit of their own happiness in their own way; a
meritocratic society: We need Jefferson’s seminal ideas, the ideas that formed
the core of our American identity, now more than ever.
This article appears as “Thomas Jefferson” in the July 27,
2020, print edition of National Review.
MYRON MAGNET — Mr. Magnet, a National Humanities Medalist,
is the author of The Founders at Home: The Building of America, 1735–1817 and,
most recently, Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution.
On Abraham Lincoln
By ALLEN C. GUELZO
July 9, 2020 11:13 AM
‘Great emancipator’ is right
‘The moment I was president,” sighed Abraham Lincoln in the
spring of 1864, people “seemed to think . . . I had the power to abolish
slavery.” He didn’t. And despite the demands, the pressure, and even the
bullying of abolitionists, politicians, and journalists, he was correct.
American slavery, as it existed before 1861 and the outbreak of the Civil War,
was a creation of state statutes. In an era that knew nothing about an
“incorporation doctrine” requiring the conformity of state law with the federal
Constitution, a jurisprudential firewall separated the authority of the federal
government (and of Lincoln, as its executive) from the states. In strict
constitutional terms, then, Abraham Lincoln’s hands were tied on the subject of
slavery. “Before I could have any power whatever,” he explained, “I had to take
an oath to support the Constitution of the United States and execute the laws
as I found them.”
That did not mean that Lincoln was indifferent to the
hideous wrong of enslaving other human beings. “The slavery question often
bothered me as far back as 1836 to 40,” he remembered. “I was troubled and
grieved over it.” And in 1837, as a newly minted Illinois state legislator, he
had sponsored a resolution condemning slavery as “founded on both injustice and
bad policy.” But even then, he acknowledged that the firewall between federal
and state authority gave the federal government “no power, under the
constitution, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the different
States.”
True as it was that Lincoln hated especially “to see the poor
creatures hunted down and caught and carried back to their stripes and
unrequited toil,” and described himself
as “one who abhors the oppression of negroes,” his only political option in the
1850s was to “oppose the extension of slavery” into the western territories of
the old Louisiana Purchase. Even as president, Lincoln candidly declared, “I am
naturally anti-slavery,” and he believed that “if slavery is not wrong, nothing
is wrong.” But he had “never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me
an unrestricted right to . . . practically indulge my primary abstract judgment
on the moral question of slavery.”
The Civil War altered that landscape for him. The
Confederate insurgency called on Lincoln to exercise his constitutional designation
as “Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the
Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the
United States,” and equipped him with the mandate to do whatever was militarily
necessary to suppress that insurgency. Those “war powers,” he believed,
included emancipating the Confederacy’s slaves, arming them, and turning them
into a weapon to win the war.
But the Constitution nowhere spelled out exactly what
Lincoln’s “war powers” were, and so it required a risky shimmy onto the
constitutional limb on January 1, 1863, to issue an Emancipation Proclamation
“warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity.” Even Lincoln was not
entirely convinced that the Proclamation would survive post-war litigation,
which is why in January 1865 he twisted so many arms in Congress to ensure the
adoption of the 13th Amendment, constitutionally abolishing slavery. “I cannot
recall my proclamations,” he insisted, but “whether they are binding or not
will be a question for the courts.”
Once the Proclamation was issued, though, Lincoln
countenanced no turning back. Even before issuing the Proclamation, he promised
that “the slave of every rebel master who seeks protection of the flag shall
have it and be free,” and that “no slave who becomes for a time free within the
American lines will ever be re-enslaved. Rather than have it so, I’d give up
and abdicate.” Once he signed it, he was adamant. He “should be damned in time
& in eternity,” he wrote, if he should abandon the freed slaves. In his
last presidential report to Congress, he warned that any movement to revoke the
Proclamation would be met with his resignation from the presidency: “If the
people should, by whatever mode or means, make it an Executive duty to
re-enslave such persons, another, and not I, must be their instrument to
perform it.”
Lincoln described the 13th Amendment as “a King’s cure for
all the evils,” since it put emancipation beyond any reach of judicial recall.
“It winds the whole thing up.” And yet, not the whole thing. As early as
September 1864, Lincoln dispatched a staffer, William Stoddard, to assist in
implementing reconstruction in Union-occupied Arkansas, and urged him to “do
all you can, in any and every way you can, to get the ballot into the hands of
the freedmen.” And in his last speech, on April 11, 1865, he proposed phasing
in an extension of “the elective franchise . . . to the colored man” in
Louisiana. This infuriated one of his audience, who swore that for this outrage
against white supremacy, “I will put him through.” Which is, three nights
later, what happened. The infuriated hearer was John Wilkes Booth.
Six weeks after Lincoln’s murder, the black abolitionist
Frederick Douglass took the stage at a memorial meeting in New York City’s
Cooper Institute (where, five years before, Lincoln had delivered the speech
that almost certainly made him president) and described Lincoln as
“emphatically the black man’s president.” At the outset of Lincoln’s
presidency, Douglass had been sharply critical of Lincoln’s slow, prudential
pace toward emancipation. But after meeting Lincoln for the first time in 1863,
Douglass was impressed by Lincoln’s freedom from racial cant and bias. “He was
the first great man that I talked with in the United States freely, who in no
single instance reminded me of the difference between himself and myself, of
the difference of color,” Douglass wrote years later, “and I . . . account
partially for his kindness to me because of the similarity with which I had
fought my way up, we both starting at the lowest round of the ladder.” Lincoln,
declared William Howard Day during a fund-raising event for the Emancipation
Memorial being created by the sculptor Thomas Ball, was “the dearest friend,
the kindest man” that “as president” the freed slaves “ever knew.”
And that, for most of the following century, was the
prevailing African-American view of Lincoln. Booker T. Washington, who came the
closest of any African American to being a national spokesman for American blacks
in the Jim Crow era, lauded Lincoln in 1891 as “that great man, the ‘first
American.’” In his autobiography, Washington claimed: “I think I do not go too
far when I say that I have read nearly every book and magazine article that has
been written about Abraham Lincoln. In literature he has been my patron saint.”
William Lilly, Lincoln’s first African-American biographer, was certain when he
wrote Set My People Free: A Negro’s Life of Lincoln in 1932 that “the figure of
the president who emancipated the blacks has become more vivid and dynamic.”
Lilly, however, was wrong. Emancipation was not followed
seamlessly by a color-blind integration of black and white in a single
republican society, and the disappointment showed especially when Douglass was
invited to speak at the dedication of Ball’s Emancipation Memorial in
Washington in 1876. “We are at best only his step-children,” Douglass said,
“children by adoption, children by force of circumstances and necessity.”
Still, it was not until the 1950s that the erosion of African-American
approbation of Lincoln became noticeable. By then, a black middle class was
making its first serious inroads into Jim Crow segregation, using its new
economic leverage to force the old Confederacy, and then the rest of the country,
out of its contentment with second-class black citizenship. And it did so at
the behest of black leaders — Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, Ralph
Abernathy, Bayard Rustin — who saw themselves as self-acting, not as patrons of
friendly whites, and who resented the rotted cream of condescension offered by
white liberals almost as much as they did the unshirted bigotry of the Ku Klux
Klan and the White Citizens’ Councils.
That assertion of independence impacted African-American
views of Lincoln much as any coming of age loosens trust, makes dependence look
suspect, and encourages the dismissing of nobility that falls short of
perfection. As Julius Lester wrote in 1968, “one of the bigger lies that
America has given the world is that Lincoln freed the slaves, and that blacks
should be grateful from can to can’t because Mr. Lincoln was so generous.”
This disenchantment with Lincoln took two forms. One,
promoted by Lerone Bennett Jr. (in Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White
Dream), was to underscore a number of embarrassingly unenlightened comments
Lincoln had made in the 1850s on race and thus prove that Lincoln “believed
until his death that the Negro was the Other, the inferior, the subhuman, who
had to be . . . subordinated, enslaved, quarantined to protect the sexual,
social, political, and economic interests of Whites.” The other, introduced by
Vincent Harding and Barbara Fields, is the “self-emancipation thesis” — that
slaves took advantage of the tumult of the Civil War to run away in such
numbers as to mount “a full-blown inner civil war . . . within the South” and
force Lincoln’s hand in issuing the Proclamation.
COMMENTS
These disenchantments flourish more through their polemical
force than because of any serious historical evidence. It was actually a
surprise to many Northerners that the slaves did not use the Civil War as an
opportunity for insurrection (and why should they, given the risks such
insurrection ran?). A moment’s reflection will remind nearly anyone that slave
runaways had no voting rights, and thus no way to influence Lincoln’s decision
on emancipation. And while it is easy to cherry-pick Lincolnian comments that
lack modern sensitivities on race, it is also more than a little unusual to
find in a mid-19th-century white man so little trace of racist demagoguery.
A century and a half ago, Thomas Ball’s Emancipation
Memorial showed how a white man could open a door to the future for a black man
and both rise the taller for it together. Even Frederick Douglass, for all his
disappointments, could say at the memorial’s dedication that Lincoln “is doubly
dear to us, and his memory will be precious forever.” Today the voices not of
unreconstructed bigotry but of contemptuous historical ignorance demand the
toppling of the Emancipation Memorial and decry Lincoln as the model racist. If
we have lost the mutuality that Lincoln represents, the capacity to rise as
citizens together, then we have almost certainly lost Lincoln. And if we have
lost Lincoln, we may very well have lost ourselves, black and white, together.
This article appears as “Abraham Lincoln” in the July 27,
2020, print edition of National Review.
ALLEN C. GUELZO is the senior research scholar in the
Council of the Humanities at Princeton University and the director of the James
Madison Program’s Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship.
On Systemic Racism
By ROBERT VERBRUGGEN
July 9, 2020 11:31 AM
A useful concept misapplied
For several decades now, America has struggled with a new
development in race relations: Jim Crow is gone, and the great majority of
whites have abandoned openly racist attitudes, and yet severe racial inequality
has persisted. Where it was once obvious why blacks lagged whites on numerous
measures of thriving, today the explanation is more complicated, involving the
prejudice that indisputably still exists, the legacy of past discrimination
reflected in the environments that blacks experience, and cultural and
behavioral differences between the two groups. This is one reason the term
“systemic racism” has caught on with the Left: It ties all of this together,
places the blame on a white-dominated power structure, and through the word
“racism” links the situation today with the earlier one whose brutality roused
voters to take action.
The point of this article is not to debunk or endorse the
notion of systemic racism, or indeed to get bogged down in the semantics of the
term at all. (In the broadest uses it can refer to any social process that
results in racial disparities, in which case it’s more of a catch-all concept
than a testable claim.) It is, instead, to briefly explain the racial dynamics
at the center of the current problem — including how they’ve changed and what
causes them — and to chart a path forward rooted in conservative principles.
The clearest positive development is that white Americans
have overwhelmingly, though not entirely, abandoned the explicit racism many of
them proudly professed half a century ago. In 1972, a quarter of whites told
the General Social Survey they would refuse to vote for a black president; in
2010, fewer than one in 20 did. As recently as 1990, two-thirds of whites said
they would oppose or strongly oppose it if a close family member married a
black person, a number that fell below 15 percent in 2018 — and to half that
among those under 40.
Concrete results have mostly improved too, though different
measures find improvement at different paces and at different times, and it
isn’t impossible to find indicators that remain stagnant. By one measure, the
black poverty rate fell from 47 percent to 25 percent between 1970 and 2014,
while the white poverty rate dropped only from 17 percent to 11 percent. The
earnings gap between white male and black male workers has shrunk from 43
percent to 33 percent since 1950 — though if you include nonworkers with no
earnings, such as those incarcerated or out of the labor force, the number has
actually remained flat at 49 percent. Standardized-test scores have converged
as well, though this trend slowed to a crawl after about 1990. Even
incarceration, which skyrocketed in the 1980s and 1990s as legislators
toughened policies in response to high crime, is on its way down — with the
black rate declining much faster than the white one.
Americans are mixing socially with people of different races
much more frequently as well. According to work by the demographer William
Frey, to completely integrate neighborhoods in 1970, you’d have had to move
more than 70 percent of the black population to new places; by 2010, that had
fallen below 50 percent. And according to an analysis by the Pew Research
Center, only 4 percent of white newlyweds had a spouse of a different race in
1980, compared with 11 percent in 2015; blacks’ rate of intermarriage rose from
5 percent to 18 percent over the same period.
Of course, this is slow progress. Almost 15 percent of
whites still have a problem with interracial marriage, and fully integrated
neighborhoods would look a lot different from the neighborhoods we actually
have. It is also clear that discrimination in the job market persists: If you
send a white person and a black person with identical résumés out to apply for
low-skill jobs, the white person will get significantly more callbacks. (Of
course, sending them to apply to college or a high-level position at a big
corporation might well give the opposite result, owing to affirmative action,
an odd way in which the most help is given to the most well-off.)
However, as racial disparities have declined and white
attitudes have simultaneously improved, the former have become less of a
function of the latter — and deeper issues, including racial differences in
wealth, neighborhoods, schools, skills, culture, and personal behavior, have
risen in importance. In one recent study, the demographer John Iceland took the
black–white poverty gap and “decomposed” it into factors such as education,
family structure, and age. In 1959, these “observable” characteristics
explained only half of the gap. (The unexplained portion of the gap cannot be
interpreted purely as the effect of discrimination, but it indicates that
blacks and whites fared differently even when they had the same measured
characteristics.) By 2015, these traits explained two-thirds, with family
structure especially gaining in importance: It explained 12 percent of the gap
at the beginning of the time period but a third at the end.
A limit of Iceland’s study is that his data include only a
level of education, with no more-precise numbers on skills. (Two people with
high-school degrees can have very different skill levels, and B.A.s from
different schools can mean very different things.) By contrast, a 2014 study by
Bhashkar Mazumder on upward mobility included the result of a cognitive test
taken in adolescence and, like some previous work, found this to be very
important: “The black–white gap in moving out of the bottom [income] quintile
is only 5.2 percentage points for those with median [scores on the Armed Forces
Qualifying Test], compared with the unconditional gap of 27 percentage points.”
This suggests the educational-achievement gap is the root of much else.
Criminal-justice disparities are similar. There are
countless studies, some of them well conducted, finding bias at various stages
of the process — from police-deployment patterns to prison sentences — but
there can be no denying that racial differences in crime rates play a major
role. The black homicide rate is roughly seven times the white one, for
example; and there are significant if smaller disparities for lesser offenses
as well, even if we rely on surveys of crime victims, rather than arrests
(which may result from biased policing), to estimate offending rates.
Differences in offending, by themselves, likely explain most of the
incarceration gap, though studies disagree as to the exact proportion.
Studies of police use of force paint the same picture:
There’s bias — perhaps a lot of bias, depending on which measures one prefers —
but even perfect cops, deployed to neighborhoods purely on the basis of crime
and not race, wouldn’t find themselves needing to use force against all racial
groups equally. Blacks are actually a higher percentage of people who kill cops
than of people killed by cops, so obviously suspects of different races attack
cops at different rates.
These problems are far more difficult to address than the
ones we faced in 1960, when lunch counters were segregated, businesses could
(and did) openly refuse to hire blacks, and interracial marriage was illegal.
White racism may ultimately have caused today’s problems, but eliminating white
racism, at least in the conventional sense of that term, can only mitigate them
somewhat. And the racism that’s still around is usually much less blatant, and
therefore harder to identify and stamp out. These days it’s tricky to
demonstrate bias at the statistical level, let alone prove it was at work in
any specific case absent a smoking gun.
The modern Left’s response to this state of affairs has been
multifaceted, but always racially divisive in a way likely to stoke backlash,
and often in denial of the fact that behavioral gaps are a part of the problem.
One new tactic from the realm of corporate consulting is to browbeat whites
into admitting their subtle complicity in racism and then accuse them of “white
fragility” when they get defensive. There have also been the usual race-based
policy proposals, from affirmative action to reparations for slavery. The
practical, political, and constitutional problems with these approaches are
obvious enough to any conservative, and I won’t repeat them here.
What the Left gets right, though, is to look at the question
of race relations in a broader way, moving beyond yesterday’s de jure
segregation and open racism and encouraging whites to reflect on what they can
do to improve things. The Right can do this as well without joining in the
drive to label everyone and everything “racist” and enact explicitly race-based
policies in the name of antiracism.
Public policy can improve black outcomes and speed
integration in a way that advances conservative principles. And thus we as
conservatives can do more than highlight differences in behavior — as real and
important as those differences may be — and then say the solutions can come
only from the black community itself.
This is not the place to outline a full platform, but here
are a few examples of policies that might help. Education reform has long been
a strong suit of the Right, with even many deep-blue cities having come around
to seeing the virtues of charter schools and other forms of school choice. The
Right, always wary of government abuses, can also sign on to moderate policing
and incarceration reforms: Cops and prisons are both important for cutting
crime, but that isn’t to deny that cops should be held accountable when they do
wrong or to say that no U.S. jurisdiction could stand to incarcerate less.
(Senator Tim Scott’s policing bill and the FIRST STEP Act are both good
examples.) Perhaps most important for long-term integration, which is the
surest way of breaking down racial barriers, a war on local zoning regulations
would shrink the scope of government and make it easier for poor families to
live in thriving neighborhoods.
All of these policies would help to address racial
inequities and speed up our agonizingly slow pace of integration, both of which
deserve to be conservative priorities.
ROBERT VERBRUGGEN is a policy writer for National Review.
@raverbruggen
America’s Racial Progress
By DAVID FRENCH
July 9, 2020 11:48 AM
It is remarkable, and it continues
There are two things that I believe to be true. First, that
America has a long history of brutal and shameful mistreatment of racial
minorities — with black Americans its chief victims. And second, that America
is a great nation, and that American citizens (and citizens of the world)
should be grateful for its founding. Perhaps no nation has done more good for
more people than the United States. It was and is a beacon of liberty and
prosperity in a world long awash in tyranny and poverty.
In much of our modern political discourse, it seems to be
taken as a given that the existence of one truth has to negate the other. A
nation simply can’t be great and also inflict such immense pain and suffering
on so many millions of black and brown citizens.
And so the public debate warps and twists. Speak about the
greatness of the nation, and critics immediately accuse you of minimizing the
undeniably hideous sin of white supremacy. Emphasize white supremacy, and
opponents will accuse you of minimizing the immense sacrifices of black and
white soldiers in the Union Army, the undeniable progress in civil rights since
Jim Crow, and the obvious fact that black and brown citizens from across the
globe flock to our shores in search of the American dream.
Let’s dodge that back-and-forth and go back and ask two
more-fundamental questions. What is the nature of man? And what does that
nature imply for the history of nations and cultures? Absent truthful answers
to those questions, it’s not possible to accurately analyze a nation’s worth.
And the answers are grim.
Human beings, to quote no lesser authority than Jesus
Christ, are evil. As G. K. Chesterton observed, original sin is the “only part
of Christian theology which can really be proved.” It doesn’t take a historian
to know that a survey of human civilization over the ages leads us to conclude
that social justice has been hard to find. Indeed, there isn’t even a straight
line between, say, Athenian democracy and American liberty, or the Magna Carta
and the American Constitution. Instead, there were times when three steps
forward were followed by nine steps back.
The American republic was thus founded against the backdrop
of millennia of conquest, oppression, slavery, monarchy, and tyranny — all of
it an expression of humanity’s dark nature. That doesn’t mean there weren’t
pockets of virtue or periodic prophetic condemnations of wickedness, but the
presence of evil in human affairs has been persistent and often overpowering.
Noting that the evils of slavery and conquest have been
pervasive doesn’t make them less evil. It does, however, help us to explain our
appreciation for the American founding and the trajectory of the American
nation.
That founding and that trajectory were hardly inevitable.
Indeed, the introduction of slavery to our shores in 1619 showed that there was
nothing particularly special about our new civilization. It was more of the
dreary human same. The signing of the Declaration of Independence and the
ratification of the Constitution (and the Bill of Rights) were, by contrast,
remarkable. They marked the beginning of something new.
It’s important to emphasize the word “beginning.” I’ve been
struggling to think of the right analogy to describe the role of the American
founding in world history. Let’s try a term from counterinsurgency warfare:
“the ink blot.”
In counterinsurgency warfare, the strategist looks at a
nation or countryside in chaos — one that’s descending into a state of nature —
and attempts to establish an island of safety and security. The purpose is for
that island of safety and security to spread across the map the way an ink blot
spreads across the paper.
The American founding declared universal principles: “We
hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they
are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these
are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” But then its constitution and
laws granted only a particularized and narrow defense of those rights.
Even the Bill of Rights, sweeping in its language, was
extraordinarily limited in its scope. It originally restrained only the actions
of a small and relatively weak central government. The ink blot of liberty was
tiny. The only people who could confidently assert those universal rights were
a small class of white male property owners clustered on the Eastern Seaboard
of the new United States.
Everyone else, to a greater or lesser extent, lived still
within the ordinary state of nature, with slaves, as always, the most
vulnerable of all. But the combination of a universal declaration of liberty —
and the obvious joy and prosperity of its exercise — created an unbearable
tension within the new nation. There was a tension between our founding ideals
and our founding reality.
Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner, understood this tension.
These words, adapted from his writings, are engraved on Panel Three of the
Jefferson Memorial:
God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a
nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the
gift of God? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just,
that His justice cannot sleep forever. Commerce between master and slave is
despotism. Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that
these people are to be free.
It is absolutely true that too many of those Americans who
enjoyed the blessings of liberty did not ponder the question Frederick Douglass
posed: “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?” Too many, once they cashed in
their own “promissory note” of freedom, did not concern themselves with those
who were still owed a debt of liberty. But in every generation, there were
Americans — white and black, slave and free — who sought to close the gap
between promise and reality.
And make no mistake, in the face of often violent
resistance, the American promise is prevailing. The ink blot of liberty is
spreading, blotting out the default human background of oppression and misery.
Critically, that ink blot has jumped our borders. The mightiest military power
in the history of the world has used its strength to defeat the world’s worst
tyrannies, secure the existence of liberal democracies from Japan to Germany,
and then maintained a long and prosperous peace.
But it’s a mistake to think that our chief task is to point
backwards, to look at the immense gap between slavery and freedom, between Jim
Crow and civil rights, and believe that our work has been done. One does not
undo the consequences of 345 years of legalized oppression in a mere 56 years
of contentious change. Instead, our task is to continue the struggle to match
American principles with American reality. It’s to spread the ink blot — to
continue the American counterinsurgency against the chaos of history.
In July of every year, I think of two seminal infantry
charges. The first occurred on July 2, 1863, when Colonel Joshua Chamberlain
led the 20th Maine Infantry Regiment on a desperate counterattack against
Confederate troops on Little Round Top on perhaps the most fateful day in
American history — day two of the Battle of Gettysburg.
The second charge happened just 16 days later, when the 54th
Massachusetts Infantry launched its own desperate attack against the walls of
Fort Wagner in South Carolina. The 54th was a black regiment, and its charge
was a direct and physical manifestation that America’s black citizens were
rising up to seize their inheritance.
The lesson of those two historic moments has been repeated
time and again throughout American history. It took white Americans and black
Americans to end slavery — and not through a revolt against the Founding but
rather through a defense of the Founding. It took white Americans and black
Americans to end Jim Crow. Again, not through a revolt against the Founding but
rather through a defense of the Founding. Through appeals to America’s founding
promise, every marginalized American community has muscled its way into
more-complete membership in the American family.
It’s right to celebrate a nation that has — over time —
combined courageous people with righteous principles to secure a “more perfect
union.” Light the fireworks. Defend the monuments to the imperfect (though
indispensable) people who in their turn and their time advanced human liberty
and dignity.
It’s most important, however, that we run the race in our
turn, that we look forward so that future generations can look back and say of
us that we didn’t simply secure and maintain the gains of the past — we made
our own payments on that promissory note of freedom. We continued to close the
gap between American principles and American reality. We have far to go, but
the courageous history of this great nation should give us confidence that the
best part of the American story is yet to be told.
This article appears as “On Racial Progress” in the July 27,
2020, print edition of National Review.
DAVID FRENCH is a senior editor at The Dispatch.
@davidafrench
Color Blindness Should Be
the Norm
By ANDRE M. ARCHIE
July 9, 2020 12:00 PM
Not every idea deserves equal consideration
To defend America in these culturally turbulent times,
conservatives must jettison an intellectual assumption popularized by the
19th-century British thinker John Stuart Mill. The assumption is that truth
will emerge if competing ideas are equally entertained in the public square.
Otherwise, according to Mill, we would be robbing the human race, if these
ideas are right, of the chance to exchange error for truth, and, if they are
wrong, of the chance to see more clearly because of the “collision with error.”
Mill was committed to the belief that human progress is inevitable.
As a matter of fact, the inevitable triumph of good ideas or
truth is not guaranteed, and certain ideas should not be allowed to gain a
foothold in the public square at all. Among those who understand that ideas
have consequences, conservatives in particular should be aware of the moral
hazard of legitimizing certain ideas by thinking they can be defeated solely by
open and rational discussion. One such idea that conservatives failed to
challenge and debunk before it took root (in the early 2000s) in influential
sectors and institutions of American society is the idea of anti–color
blindness. Proponents of anti-color-blind pedagogy believe that the best way to
navigate cultural differences in the United States is to openly discuss and
highlight racial and ethnic differences. Highlighting differences of race, they
argue, makes explicit the structural nature of white economic and social power,
and how it is perpetuated at the expense of black Americans and other people of
color. Any attempt to downplay ethnic and racial differences, or “homogenize”
communities of color by offering platitudes about a supposed “American
identity,” is seen as a pernicious form of color-blind racism.
Contemporary American conservatives failed to see just how
corrosive and revolutionary the anti-color-blind pedagogy is. They took it for
granted that the idea of color blindness was a bedrock notion that stood very
little chance of being displaced. Legal precedent seemed to confirm
conservatives’ complacency. The legal fight against those who opposed the idea
that all people are equal before the law was difficult and bloody, but the
fight was believed to be just and on the right side of history. In the 1850s,
the Frederick Douglass wing of the abolitionist movement made the case for a
color-blind reading of America’s founding documents. That reading led to a
split with Garrisonian abolitionists, who agreed with Chief Justice Roger
Taney’s pro-slavery interpretation of the Constitution. Most important, it was
Lincoln’s “new birth of freedom” and its attendant Civil War amendments that
laid the conceptual groundwork for a color-blind interpretation of the founding
documents. In 1896, Justice John Marshall Harlan’s dissenting opinion in Plessy
v. Ferguson eloquently explained the relationship between color blindness and
the Constitution of the United States:
But in view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law,
there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There
is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor
tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are
equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The law
regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color
when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are
involved.
Nearly five decades later, the civil-rights movement was
effective because it sought equal, color-blind protection before the law,
ensuring that black Americans would be judged not by the color of their skin
but rather by the content of their character. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter
from a Birmingham Jail” and “I Have a Dream” speech are powerful indictments of
segregation and its anti-color-blind position precisely because they appeal to
the same founding American documents and Western philosophical texts that were
also used erroneously to support segregation.
Given this historical effort in getting America to live up
to its color-blind principles, one would think that any attempt to divide
Americans along racial and ethnic lines for the sake of fomenting racial
grievances would face stiff resistance. Unfortunately, this is not the case.
The industry that undermines the idea of color blindness the most today is the
diversity-training industry and the many experts it employs to further its
goals. The ease with which diversity training has gained wide institutional
support, both on campus and off, has been mind-boggling. The sad fact is,
diversity experts have been very successful at promoting racial and ethnic
consciousness among their clients.
Diversity training is an outgrowth of anti-color-blind
pedagogy. It is intended to make white people aware of their unconscious racism
towards people of color and lead them to accept that structural racism against
blacks specifically is what accounts for the social disparities that afflict
these communities. The training also tries to make an emotional impact on
whites in order to encourage them to think sympathetically about the hard life
experiences that communities of color face on a daily basis. The true intention
of current diversity training in academic and corporate settings is not to offer
a genuine understanding of the “lived experiences” of minorities, and blacks in
particular. In many cases it is designed to promote intimidation and
psychological control over concerned, but racially passive, white Americans.
There is a self-reflective component to diversity training
as well. It requires that white Americans see how the lives they live actually
work against all people of color in every way possible. For example, if a white
person goes to college, gets a degree and a job, and then buys a home in an
up-and-coming, affordable neighborhood, he is unwittingly contributing to
systemic racism by pushing out people of color who rent in the neighborhood. As
this thinking goes, the white person is racist for contributing to gentrification.
When the focus on racism is as vague as “systemic racism” is, it is doubtful
that the mandate of the diversity-training experts will ever be achieved. This
lack of achievement is good for the experts because it keeps them employed, but
bad for society because it stokes racial consciousness and, thus, resentment.
The virtue of color blindness is that it complements
individual responsibility. Martin Luther King Jr. understood the transformative
power of personal responsibility. His successful efforts in fighting racism
during the civil-rights movement led to changes in the American political
system by extending equal access to all Americans, but especially to black
Americans and those who had been marginalized historically. To turn away from
these changes is to undermine the integrity of individual choices and personal
agency by simply judging others on the basis of their skin color.
For far too long, American conservatives have been too
willing to give a fair hearing to points of view and ideas that are contrary to
core American beliefs. In a heterogeneous society such as America, very few
ideas or points of view have been as destructive as the anti-color-blind
pedagogy. To highlight the racial and ethnic differences among Americans is to
devalue the unifying elements that have traditionally defined the American
identity. The color-blind approach is more integrative than self-regarding
identities based on race, gender, or sexual orientation, and more effective at
promoting a sense of American identity. The homogenizing role that faith,
family, and tradition have played and continue to play in the evolution of the
country, both politically and culturally, should be promoted by conservatives.
Black Americans would especially benefit from this
homogenizing effort. As one of the oldest minority groups in America, the black
community has already debated the merits of color blindness versus
anti-color-blind pedagogy in the fight for racial equality. Unfortunately,
given the history of blacks in America, it is difficult for some in the
community to see that real racial advancement has steadily come through
color-blind policies, not through the intimidation of white people.
ANDRE M. ARCHIE — Mr. Archie is an associate professor of
ancient Greek philosophy at Colorado State University and the author of
Politics in Socrates’ Alcibiades: A Philosophical Account of Plato’s Dialogue
Alcibiades Major.
America, Nation of Misfits
By MICHAEL BRENDAN DOUGHERTY
July 9, 2020 12:38 PM
From Luther Martin to Bob Dylan
In a short, punchy biography, the writer Bill Kauffman
hailed the Anti-Federalist Luther Martin as our “Forgotten Founder, Drunken
Prophet.” The historian Clinton Rossiter designated Martin “an influential
pricker of egos and consciences.” A farm boy who got a good education at the
College of New Jersey (later Princeton) and became Maryland’s attorney general,
Martin never internalized the inflated ambitions of his peers. According to the
future chief justice Roger Taney, Martin showed “utter disregard of good taste
and refinement in his dress and language and . . . manner of eating.” He was a
serial small-debtor, forcing creditors to chase him for utterly paltry sums. He
was a speculator in land confiscated during the Revolution. The historian
Catherine Drinker Bowen called him “impulsive, undisciplined, altogether the
wild man of the [Constitutional] Convention.” And another, Forrest McDonald,
reflecting on Martin’s low birth and unwelcome manners, called him “a misfit in
the Maryland aristocracy.”
That judgment was correct: Martin was a misfit. Almost in
disbelief, in 1787 in Philadelphia, Martin witnessed Madison and Hamilton
execute their coup against the state governments, constructing a Constitution
he called “a misshapened heterogenous monster of ambition and interest” that
would attract unscrupulous men to the new national offices and pay them from
federal, not state, revenue. This was done in the open hope of transferring the
affections of the people from their particular state governments to the national
one. The New York Anti-Federalist George Clinton prophesied that the federal
city that the Framers of our Constitution proposed “would be the asylum of the
base, idle, avaricious and ambitious.” Was he wrong? One of the aims of the
Framers was national greatness. At the Convention, Martin denounced just that.
In one of his interminable jeremiads against the nationalist plotters, he let
fly with a most lapidary critique of their project: “Happiness is preferable to
the Splendors of a national Government.”
The legacy of Martin and his fellow misfit Anti-Feds was the
Bill of Rights. Had there been no Constitution enabling and empowering the
federal monster and its pretension of a relationship with “the people,” there
would be no need for a charter of individual rights. Ever since its adoption,
America’s misfits have had some protection from the power of mobs and the base
idlers of the federal city.
If Madison’s work on the Constitution made D.C. into one
kind of asylum, muggy with ambition and avarice, Martin’s work on the Bill of
Rights allows the rest of the country to be a different kind of asylum, a freer
one. The wheels of history are occasionally turned by genuine cranks, so it’s
best to give them room.
In American arts and letters, there are always those who
denounce the country as an oppressive place, which is exactly what a
freedom-loving people would do in a free country. Doing so helps to maintain or
expand their freedom. Sticking his own thoughts into the mind of an imagined
Russian czar, Mark Twain held that the only true and rational patriotism is
this: “loyalty to the Nation all the time, loyalty to the Government when it
deserves it.” Twain himself was a misfit and rascal who wrote about the same. A
nation that had been saturated by two Great Awakenings naturally produced
Twain, a scoffer, as its leading literary jewel.
The writer and literary editor Jessie Redmon Fauset, a
protégée of W. E. B. Du Bois, not only nurtured writers of the Harlem
Renaissance such as Langston Hughes, but, keeping her distance from the
mainstreams of black and white political traditions, created her own literature
of black American misfits, in a series of novels. Edith Wharton, born into a
gilded home, managed to feel out of place in the Gilded Age, and in her forgotten
novel Twilight Sleep a misfit finds an escape from the tyrannies of the rich
and fashionable. Our first freedoms mean we can have the wild poets who double
as political activists. Walt Whitman sang his song of himself, and his barbaric
yawp aimed at free soil and free men. In America a misfit like E. E. Cummings
made avant-garde poetry popular with the masses. Meanwhile, he was a staunch
man of the Right who supported America First in the years before World War II,
and Joseph McCarthy after it.
Pop culture is driven by misfits. The Laurel Canyon sound of
rock groups like the Byrds was conceived as a deliberate provocation to the
increasingly stuffy and formal world of folk music. It was a genuine American
genius and weirdo like Brian Wilson who could transform pop music from mere
formula into a surprise symphony, and provoke the Beatles to get weird too. Bob
Dylan seemed to go through musical and religious conversions the way runway
models at a fashion show change their clothes, so quickly you could blink and
miss it.
By making government authority something dispersible and
often ignorable, the volcanic energies of religion tend to be more pacific in
America than what we find in our European forebears. During the Reformation,
German-speaking lands produced the bloody peasant revolts, and the theocratic
disaster of John of Leiden’s Münster, which flamed into a truly totalizing
theocracy and ended in a melodramatic siege and elaborate executions in less
than two years. In misfit America, the Shakers have all but died out, but we
still buy their furniture. While things got a little hot out in Deseret, the
legacy of America’s signature religious misfits Joseph Smith and Brigham Young
is nothing more threatening than the Osmonds, the Romneys, and a tabernacle
choir. The truly destructive cults in American life, like the Peoples Temple,
had pledged loyalty to the Soviet Union. Their revolutionary suicide in Guyana
was understood by those who undertook it as an Un-American Activity.
The sciences have their misfits too. One of those
on-the-loose inmates in the American experiment was the late, great, and
decidedly weird John C. Lilly. A physician and psychoanalyst who did
government-funded research during World War II into the physiological effects
of high-altitude flying, Lilly spent the supposedly buttoned-down and
repressive 1950s investigating interspecies communication with dolphins, even
building a seaside lab where dolphins and humans could cohabitate. He invented
the sensory-deprivation tank. Within a few years he was studying
psychedelic-drug use and promoting astral projections. He became a fixture of
the alternative-medicine and New Age communities. But even as he failed to
teach dolphins English grammar, along the way his oddball research yielded
useable and durable insights into dolphin brains and the electrical stimulation
of the nervous system in mammals. The sensory-deprivation tank is one of the
hottest wellness trends six decades after he invented it.
The stories of America’s great innovators and entrepreneurs
are almost always stories of breaking out against the authority of regulators
(as did Howard Hughes), or rebelling against stifling corporate climates like
IBM’s (Bill Gates and Steve Jobs). Some of the great American tech companies started
as little more than garage bands for geeks.
Even the conservative movement was launched and nurtured by
outsiders. William F. Buckley Jr. had a sui generis accent, a mashup of English
boarding school, Texas, and Yankee. He was devoted to irascible odd-men-out
like Albert Jay Nock, the essayist and peer of H. L. Mencken. It was reputed
that Nock could be contacted outside his office only by leaving notes under a
certain rock in Central Park.
Americans, it turns out, often turn their backs on Tocqueville’s
feared tyranny of common opinion, whether a snobby Manhattan salon or some
hipster music scene. There is almost always some grand ambition being cooked up
in the madhouse of Washington, D.C. But the nation usually provides abundant
frontiers in which misfits can run free. The misshapened heterogenous monster
of ambition and avarice can never tame for good a nation of misfits like us.
Whether we pursue a new way to make money, to talk to dolphins, or to worship
the one true God, the pursuit of happiness remains preferable to other
splendors.
This article appears as “A Nation of Misfits” in the July
27, 2020, print edition of National Review.
MICHAEL BRENDAN DOUGHERTY is a senior writer at National
Review Online. @michaelbd
Ray Gruszecki
July 10, 2020
