Confederate "Heritage" Month 2017, April 13: Slavery vs. democracy (even for whites) in the Missouri crisis

In my last post in this series, I referred to the intriguing but challenging analysis of the evolution of the slavery issue by William Freehling in The Road to Disunion, Vol. 1: Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854 (1990) with particular reference to the Missouri crisis of 1819-1820. And I mentioned how the three-fifths clause of the Constitution set up a situation which, over time, became more and more obviously a limitation of democracy for whites. And for the most part, American democracy then was restricted to adult white men. When the more radical democrats talked about defending needs of the common man, they mainly really did mean man.

What we now call the Missouri crisis is understood to have begun when the Missouri Territory, which had been part of the Louisiana Purchase, applied for admission to the Union as a state. New York Republican Congressman James Tallmadge, Jr. (1778–1853) introduced a bill to require the phased elimination of slavery in Missouri as a condition of admission as a state. On February 16 of that year, he declared in Congress (from Annals of Congress):

Sir, ... my purpose is fixed, it is interwoven with my existence, its durability is limited with my life, it is a great and glorious cause, setting bounds to a slavery the most cruel and debasing the world ever witnessed; it is the freedom of man; it is the cause of unredeemed aud unregenerated human beings.

Sir, if a dissolution of the Union must take place, let it be so! If civil war, which gentlemen so much threaten, must come, I can only
say, let it come! My hold on life is probably as frail as that of any man who now hears me; but, while that hold lasts, it shall be devoted to the service of my country - to the freedom of man. If blood is necessary to extinguish any fire which I have assisted to kindle, I can assure gentlemen, while I regret the necessity, I shall not forbear to contribute my mite. Sir, the violence to which gentlemen have resorted on this subject will not move my purpose, nor drive me from my place, I have the fortune and the honor to stand here as the representative of freemen, who possess intelligence to know their rights, who have the spirit to maintain them. Whatever might be my own private sentiments on this subject, standing here as the representative of others, no choice is left me. l know the will of my constituents, and, regardless of consequences, I will avow it; as their representative, I will proclaim their hatred to slavery in every shape; as their representative, here will I hold my stand, until this floor, with the Constitution of my country which supports it, shall sink beneath me. [my emphasis]

Freehling explains the sectional resentment of Yankee critics of slavery in this way:

Another southern state, Yankees argued, meant more illegitimate political power for the South, more slaveholding Presidents, more northern politicians relegated to undeservedly inferior positions. The North was not yet ready to slice the three-fifths clause from an otherwise healthy Constitution. The better remedy earlier seemed to be containment of the disease. James Tallmadge would slowly eliminate a new state's slaves and thus prevent the three-fifths clause from swelling the Slavepower. This proposal showed no concern for blacks. Instead, for the first of many times, Northerners demanded their own liberation from slaveholders' unrepublican rule. [my emphasis]

The view of slavery as a limit to or diminution of (white) democracy combined with the changing understanding of slavery in free and slave states and with the lessons that critics of slavery drew from the experience of abolishing slavery in Northern states to produce a strange result, in which opposition to slavery was often merged with hostility and active hatred toward blacks. Freehling's reference to Tallmadge's proposal "showed no concern for blacks" in his Missouri proposal is probably too harsh a judgment. But it references how the abolitionist viewpoint at that time was heavily influenced by the belief that "diffusion" of the slaves over a broader territory was key to the ultimate abolition of slavery. These are issues we'll examine further in following posts.

Freehling also quotes New York Sen. Rufus King (1755–1827), who had been the Federalist Party's last Presidential candidate in 1816, on the Missouri controversy:

Proponents of Tallmadge's Amendments admitted that they sought only white men's egalitarianism. I have no business with slavery as a social system over blacks, Rufus King declared. I oppose slavery's expansion because it bears upon whites' "great political interests." The three-fifths clause would rob Northerners of all "political power or influence in the Union. The slave region will parcel out the great offices, will determine all questions," and will forever "remain our Masters."

That reference to Southern slaveowners acting as masters to white citizens of the North was an expression of the deep and ultimately irreconcilable contradiction of democracy and republican principles, on the one hand, and slavery, on the other.

And that difference also manifested itself felt in practical politics, both as Federalists vs. Republicans, as North/South differences within the Democratic Party and later as differences within the Whig Party, as well as various factional manifestations along the way. Only with the formation of the Republican Party in 1854 was there a major party committed to antislavery principles. And its position was to contain slavery, as Tallmadge attempted to do with the admission of Missouri, not to abolish it within states where it existed.

Another prominent New York Republican Congressman who co-sponsored the Tallmadge Amendment was John Taylor (1784–1854), who would later become Speaker of the House. William Johnson ("Prelude to the Missouri Compromise" Arkansas Historical Quarterly 2:1 (Spring 1965), described Taylor's approach in an attempt to extend the proposed antislavery provision from the incoming state of Missouri to the Arkansas Territory, as well:

Now, in 1819, along with his colleague Tallmadge and the other restrictionists, Taylor was attempting to exclude the institution of slavery from all United States territory west of the Mississippi, except for Louisiana which had already entered the Union as a Slave State. He had good reason to be confident of success since many of the Southerners conceded that Congress had full constitutional authority to legislate concerning slavery in a Territory, although they insisted that no such right existed in the case of a State. If Taylor could only maintain the Northern majority achieved by the restrictionists in the vote on Missouri, the task would be accomplished.

An admiring biographical article from 1920 gushed, "During the Missouri controversy [Taylor] had had no equal in boldness, persistency, or vigilance." (D. S. Alexander, "John W. Taylor" Quarterly Journal of the New York State Historical Association 1:2; Jan 1920)

Here I want to call particular attention to the fact that slavery had now become a partisan club in conventional politics. Freehling:

Southerners answered that jealous Rufus Kings and James Tallmadges sought the White House, not equality for whites. That cynicism both shrewdly diagnosed and partially ignored northern malaise. Yankees assuredly resented Virginians' power. But Northerners' sorest point was that the Slavepower's unequal ascendency defied the new egalitarian wisdom. If black slaves were allowed to spread, areas of white men's egalitarianism would further shrink: that was the political fire ignited in the North. [my emphasis]

Political motives on major issues are typically overdetermined. The fact that a moral issue became useful in partisan disputes doesn't mean that there is no moral issue involved. That antislavery politicians focused on the cost of slavery to free whites doesn't mean that their attacks on slavery were a matter of indifference to black slaves and their future. Freehling usefully calls attention to the partisan incentives for politicians on both sides of the slavery issue:

Of the 18 Yankees who either voted the South's way [on the Missouri Compromise] or (as helpfully) voted not at all, only one was a Federalist. The 17 northern Republicans who leaned southwards talked publicly of saving the Union. They also feared privately that a Rufus King triumph on Missouri might revitalize the Federalist Party. Their attitudes, partisan and nonpartisan, prefigured the opportunity the minority South would seize again and again to control the North-dominated House of Representatives in pre-Civil War crises. In the Missouri Controversy, as later, the minority South could secure no concessions on slavery from northern nationalists, Federalist or Whig. But appeals to Union and party could attract some saving Yankee states' righters, Jeffersonian or Jacksonian.

In the Missouri Controversy, as later, the South needed only a few Yankee allies because the Slavepower possessed extra House power. The three-fifths clause, the most important reason why the James Tallmadges fought the enslavement of Missouri, ultimately defeated the Tallmadge Amendments. In a House apportioned sheerly on white numbers, the South would have had 17 fewer members in 1820. The Slavepower needed almost all those 17 boosts in power to defeat Tallmadge by three votes. [my emphasis]

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2013, April 19: Abolitionists against Indian removal

Natalie Joy has an article on another issue that was a major theme for the Jackson Administration, Indian Removal. As I've said more than once here, even though this blog's name is a recognition of the vital democratic tradition that Jacksonianism represented, the Indian Removal Act of 1830 was one major accomplishment of his that was a bad decision, and an immoral one by the standards of the time.

Joy's article is on Cherokee Slaveholders and Radical Abolitionists: An unlikely alliance in antebellum America Common-Place 10/4 (July 2010). She gives the background of the Act this way:

The election of Andrew Jackson to the presidency in 1828 famously signaled a new era in U.S. Indian policy, one that had dire consequences for thousands of Native Americans. Once in office, Jackson urged Congress to pass federal legislation authorizing him to sign removal treaties with all Indians living east of the Mississippi River, thus freeing up millions of acres of land for white settlement. The states most eager for such legislation were in the South, not coincidentally a region that had offered Jackson significant support precisely because he promised to make Indian removal a top priority of his administration. Georgia was particularly eager for the federal government to make good on its 1802 promise to extinguish Indian land titles within its borders, which included a significant portion of the Cherokee Nation. But Jackson's plan did not go unchallenged. In 1829, as both houses of Congress prepared their own version of what would become the Indian Removal Bill, reformers throughout the northern United States joined with Native Americans to fight its passage. [my emphasis]

I won't go into the complexities of Old Hickory's general approach to Indian policy here. I discussed it in this earlier post, Old Hickory and the Indians 04/08/2004, a review of Robert Remini's Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars (2001). My focus here is more on the "antiremoval" coalition, as Joy calls them. "Antiremovalists," she notes argued against removal on moral grounds and defended the sovereign rights of the native tribes. "Most importantly," she notes, "antiremovalists believed that Anglo-Americans had a moral duty to bring Christian civilization to Native Americans, a project that would be greatly hampered by removal."

Morality in their eyes was deeply connected to Christianity and capitalism:

Making Indians "civilized" had been a central component of federal U.S. Indian policy since George Washington's administration, but it was not formalized until the passage of the 1819 Civilization Act, which provided funds for missionary organizations eager to participate in the conversion of "savages." "Civilization," it was commonly understood, was the only way for Indians to avoid extinction—the inevitable fate of uncivilized peoples who came into contact with more advanced cultures. What exactly "civilization" entailed was a matter of debate in the nineteenth century, but most people agreed that to be civilized, Indians would have to be guided by Christian morality, live as settled farmers, and abide by a written system of laws and government. Most importantly, Indians needed to acknowledge and embrace private property, including individual landownership. In 1789, no less a figure than Henry Knox, Washington's Secretary of War and the architect of early national Indian policy, argued that the key to civilizing Indians was "to introduce among [them] a love for exclusive property."

Abolitionists believed, as did most Americans, in the myth of the "noble savage," whose innocence of civilization was the source of his virtuous purity, but also his greatest weakness, for it left him vulnerable to the introduction of unwanted vices ... [my emphasis]

This is a reminder to be cautious about anachronism, the projecting of current understandings onto an earlier time. By liberal or left standards of 2013, even the Indians' white partisans weren't interested in assisting the Indians by putting them under white American laws, practices and institutions, especially the institutions of Christian churches and private property.

The irony acknowledged in the title of Joy's article is that the Abolitionists opposing Indian removal to prevent the spread of slavery found themselves in coalition with Cherokee slaveowners:

Most Cherokees did not own slaves, nor did they radically alter their traditional ways of living to conform to the standards of American civilization, but those who did were part of a growing class of wealthy and politically powerful elites who lived on large plantations like their white neighbors. And it was this elite class with whom antiremovalists, including abolitionists, had the most contact in print and in person.

And that coalition had many of the problems of such the-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend alliances:

Throughout the debate over Indian removal in the 1830s, abolitionist support of the Cherokee cause was contingent upon a romanticized picture of Indian slaveholding. As part of their support for the Cherokee Nation's fight against removal, abolitionists found themselves in the unusual position of acting as apologists for Indian slaveholding, mounting a defense that drew heavily from the testimony of Cherokee leaders. Abolitionists accepted such testimony as fact, even when they had good reason to doubt its truthfulness, because it reinforced their own ideas about Indians, slavery and civilization. [my emphasis]

Politics is politics, as Joe Stalin said shortly before he signed the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact in 1939.

The antiremoval Abolitionists found themselves defending slavery in a kind of Hegelian way, arguing that the adoption of black slavery by the Cherokees was evidence of their progress in the American Christian form of civilization, including this unfortunately element of it. Joy observes that the establishment of classical liberal notions of constitutions and the rule of law, and slaveowning Cherokees were on board with that part of the program to some extent:

In 1827 the Cherokee Nation had written its own constitution, which included numerous provisions protecting the interests of slaveholders, including barring slaves and their descendants, free or enslaved, from holding office or voting. Many other laws including those against interracial marriage attest to the legal and political institutionalization of black chattel slavery in the Cherokee Nation.

... Abolitionists accepted that Cherokee slaveholding—at least in the short term—was compatible with and even evidence of civilization. The Cherokees' adoption of black chattel slavery, and the larger cultural, legal and political changes it wrought, proved their inherent capacity for progress. Because abolitionists did not believe slavery to be the basis of a civilized society, Indian slaveholding had to be merely an intermediary stage, not the end result of the process of civilization. [my emphasis]

But even given the complexities and moral ambiguities that politics often produce, the Abolitionists were fighting for the rights of the Indians, as they understood them. "Even after passage of the Indian Removal Act in May 1830, abolitionists continued to support Indian rights, often folding the plight of Indians into their condemnation of black chattel slavery," Joy writes.

Even though the Abolition movement was still relatively small, the conflicts between the North and the South due to slavery were already beginning to affect issues not directly connected with slavery as such:

Abolitionists joined the Indian cause because they saw in removal the influence of the slaveholding South. "One would think that the guilt of African slavery was enough for the nation to bear," one writer lamented in 1829, "without the additional crime of injustice to the aborigines." Although the Indian Removal Bill applied to nearly all Indians living east of the Mississippi River, southern slaveowners were clearly the most eager to obtain fertile Indian land, and abolitionists feared that removal would hasten the westward expansion of slavery at the expense of national honor. [my emphasis]

The Hegelian World Spirit was evidently at work in the alliance of the Abolitionists with Southern Cherokee slaveholders revealing to some of them the problems with their supported for colonization of African-Americans back to Africa after the abolition of slavery, i.e., mass deportation:

The fight over the Indian Removal Bill immediately preceded the radicalization of the antislavery movement in the early 1830s. This was no accident, as several historians have noted. Many reformers who supported the American Colonization Society and other moderate antislavery activities in the 1820s had been radicalized by their involvement with the antiremoval cause. Antiremoval activism convinced many antislavery reformers to reconsider the colonization of free blacks to Africa. They found themselves increasingly unable to justify their support for one policy (colonization) that bore such strong similarities to another (removal) which they strongly opposed. By 1831, leading abolitionists, including, most famously, William Lloyd Garrison, were denouncing the gradualism of colonization in favor of immediate emancipation, a crucial shift brought about, at least in part, by the debate over Indian removal in the late 1820s and early 1830s. [my emphasis]

The colonization idea for black Americans, which never gained more than marginal popularity among black Abolitionists, was nevertheless still seen by many whites as a viable option up until the Civil War.

And, if we count Theodore Bilbo, even long after.

But that's a topic for tomorrow's post.

Tags: abolitionism, andrew jackson, confederate heritage month 2013, indian removal act, robert rimini, slavery

Confederate"Heritage" Month 2006, April 21: John Brown and antislavery Christianity (1)

John Brown saw the world through Christian eyes. A religious understanding shaped his views of politics, family life, history, business, war.

The early nineteenth century was a more intensely religious period in America than the time of the Revolution.  Thanks to various waves of revivals and and more mundane efforts of Protestant demoninations to save souls and provide churches for the growing flocks, more people were attending church.  And more people were conceptualizing social and political issues in religious terms.

The American Cromwell

John Brown was more intensely religious than the average American of those days, though. His contemporaries often spoke of him as a throwback to two centuries earlier, to the time of Oliver Cromwell. Americans today might generally recognize Cromwell's name, and know that he was some kind of religious or political leader in England. Richard Boyer wrote of Brown's presentation of himself as he became well-known at least in antislavery circles due to his role in the Kansas fighting:

As John Brown told of his victories in Kansas and Missouri over this hitherto invincible figure, it was almost as if he were simultaneously creating in himself and with himself an answering legend to that of the gallant slaveholder, the legend of the Bible-reading, hymn-singing Puritan, fierce throw-back to Cromwell's Ironsides of two centuries before who had defeated the cavaliers of King Charles as Brown would defeat the slaveholders of the South. If he never characterized himself thus, he did not need to. The circumstances of his life and ancestry had combined to so suspend him in time, to so keep him in the Puritan ethic of the seventeenth century, or so his admirers felt and said, that they instantly recognized him as an almost exact reincarnation of Cromwell's warriors. Like them, the rhythms of the Old Testament beat within him, offering him succor and strength on the day of battle, and the psalms of David they had sung or recited around campfires two centuries distant were a part of the very core of John Brown. Sanborn was typical in his reaction to Brown when, in an address to Concord schoolchildren in March 1857, he said,

"I have lately met a person who so well illustrates in himself the Puritan of Cromwell's time that he seems to me worth describing. ... I refer to the justly famous Captain Brown of Kansas, otherwise known as 'Old Brown' and 'Osawatomie Brown' of whom you have no doubt heard something in connection with recent events in Kansas."

It might have puzzled those who saw John Brown as a latter-day Cromwell, as well as a good many other of his contemporaries, had they known that his role in history was later to be described only as that of a solitary fanatic. To them it seemed as if he were in the mainstream, the victor of Kansas, at the very center of the country's greatest crisis, the man who could act when others only spoke, the man who could wield the authority of the gun when most of his admirers, "not men with fists," as Theodore Parker called them, had only the power of rhetoric. (Boyer; 13-14)

Brown's Outspoken Christianity


Some of his religious statements after his capture became instantly famous. Others were contained in letters that came to light over time. For example:

I think I feel as happy as Paul did when he lay in prison. He knew if they killed him, it would greatly advance the cause of Christ; that was the reason he rejoiced so. On that same ground "I do rejoice, yea, and will rejoice." Let them hang me; I forgive them, and may God forgive them, for they know not what they do. I have no regret for the transaction for which I am condemned. I went against the laws of men, it is true, but "whether it be right to obey God or men, judge ye."

And also:

'He shall begin to deliver Israel out of the hands of the Philistines.' This was said of a poor erring servant many years ago; and for many years I have felt a strong impression that God had given me powers and faculties, unworthy as I was, that He intended to use for a similar purpose. This most unmerited honor He has seen fit to bestow; and whether, like the same poor frail man to whom I allude, my death may not be of vastly more value than my life is,I think quite beyond all human foresight.

Brown's remarkable performance in his interrogation after his capture, wounded and exhausted, at Harpers Ferry, included a number of religious references.  The interrogation was fortunately reported first-hand by a reporter from the New York Herald. It included exchanges such as the following:

Q: "Who sent you - who sent you?"

Brown: "No man sent me - I acknowledge no master in human form!"

Q (from Virginia Gov. Wise): "Mr. Brown, the silver of your hair is reddened by the blood of crime, and you should eschew these hard words and think upon eternity. You are suffering from wounds, perhaps fatal; and should you escape death from these causes, you must submit to a trial which may involve death. Your confessions justify the presumption that you will be found guilty; and even now you are committing a felony under the laws of Virginia, by uttering sentiments like these. It is better you should turn your attention to your eternal future than be dealing in denunciations which can only injure you."

Brown: "Governor, I have from all appearances not more than fifteen or twenty years the start of you in the journey to that eternity of which you kindly warn me; and whether my time here shall be fifteen months, or fifteen days, or fifteen hours, I am equally prepared to go. There is an eternity behind and an eternity before; and this little speck in the centre, however long, is but comparatively a minute. The difference between your tenure and mine is trifling, and I therefore tell you to be prepared. I am prepared. You have a heavy responsibility, and it behooves you to prepare more than it does me."

W.E.B. DuBois also described Brown's attitude toward the Southern slaveholders' version of Christianity at the time he was being held in Virginia for execution:

Against slavery his face is set like flint: "There are no ministers of Christ here. These ministers who profess to be Christian, and hold slaves or advocate slavery, I cannot abide them. My knees will not bend in prayer with them, while their hands are stained with the blood of souls." He said to one Southern clergyman : "I will thank you to leave me alone; your prayers would be an abomination to God." To another he said, "I would not insult God by bowing down in prayer with any one who had the blood of the slave on his skirts." (DuBois; 372)

Earlier Religious Life

For Robert Penn Warren in his 1929 biography of Brown, the antislavery fighter was a scamster and insane to boot. His antislavery activities in Kansas were simply a cover for horse and cattle theft. And his religion was nothing but a way to wrap a phony mantle of self-righteousness around his misdeeds. Warren emphasized what he found to be "one of the most significant keys to John Brown's career and character; his elaborate psychological mechanism for justification which appeared regularly in terms of the thing which friends called Puritanism and enemies called fanaticism." (Warren; 446)

But whatever the psychological roots of Brown's religious feelings and convictions, there is no reason to doubt that he took his religious seriously, and looked at the world through a religious perspective. Stephen Oates gives this account of Brown in 1832, more than two decades before he arrived in Kansas:

Eventually Brown decided that what the township needed was a church of its own. On January 1, 1832, he organized an Independent Congregational Society in New Richmond [Connecticut], drawing up the articles of faith himself. The society held its services on the second floor of Brown's tannery. Sometimes a minister came to deliver the sermon: on other mornings Brown gave it himself, preaching from the works of the older Jonathan Edwards, whose mystical Calvinism, as expressed in such sermons as "The Eternity of Hell Torments," "The Evil of the Wicked Contemplated by the Righteous," and "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," had powerfully influenced Brown's own beliefs. He told his congregation one Sunday: "Is not the reflection that full, & complete justice will at last be done enough to make the very Heavens & Earth to tremble?" Before him, on the second floor of his tannery, sat his employees and their families, the Delamaters, and his own wife and children. "Providence," Brown went on in his hairing but imperious manner, "unfolds to our darkened minds, Three cardinal traits in the character of the true God, vis Justice, mercy, & love of propriety." Yet there was one attribute men should have above all others. "Humility," Brown  declared, for "What can so properly become poor dependent, sinning, & self condemned mortals, like us ... as humility?"

He preached about the nature of sin, too, and wrote of how "Our stupidity ingratitude disobedience we have great reason to mourn [&] repent of." He himself felt that he should expect God's judgments because His mercies had not awakened more of Brown's "love & gratitude, zeal for his honor." In his sermons and his morning Bible classes Brown drew his scriptural examples largely from the Old Testament, reminding his listeners how the wrathful Jehovah of ancient Israel brought famine and pestilence to those who did not "fear the Lord thy God" and failed to "serve him and swear by His name." For "the fear of God," as the Preacher taught in the last chapter of Ecclesiastes, "is the whole duty of man." (Oates; 22)

For better or worse, John Brown conceived his antislavery mission in Christian religious terms. That's not to say he was unaware of its political dimension.  Near the end of his life, he explained to George Stearns, one of the Secret Six:

I believe in the Golden Rule, sir, and the Declaration of Independence. I think that both mean the same thing; and it is better that a whole generation should pass off the face of the earth - men, women, and children - by a violent death than that one jot of either should fail in this country, I mean exactly so, sir.

The apocalyptic vision of that comment is dramatic, and could be used as an example of a certain fanaticism. But we don't have to guess at what he might have done in pursuit of such a vision. Even his bloodiest deeds showed that he was highly disciplined and directed in his use of violence. His reference there was surely to biblical symbolism about the authority of God: "than that one jot of either should fail" would have been immediately recognizable to Americans of his time as a refernce to a statement of Jesus about the Jewish law in the King James Bible translation.

However one may judge his deeds or his Christianity, it seems clear to me that his comment about the Golden Rule represented his own values that governed his actions. His conception of his mission in life was both a Christian religious one and a radical-democratic one.

It was consistent with John Brown's own conception of himself and his mission that his admirers defined him in religious imagery:

While John Brown still lived, Wendell Phillips, one of the greatest anti-slavery figures, who himself had prior knowledge of Brown's plan, was comparing him to Huss and Wycliffe, martyrs of the Reformation, "who died violent deaths for breaking the laws of Rome," as well as to George Washington, who, "had he been caught before 1783 would have died on the gibbet, for breaking the laws of his sovereign." And in Kansas, William A. Phillips, another who was privy to the plot, one of the foremost newspaper correspondents of his day and later a soldier and congressman of distinction, was soon declaring that the best of an epoch and its men were combined in John Brown. It was during these days of waiting that Emerson said that if John Brown were hanged he would "make the gallows as glorious as the cross," while Victor Hugo, writing from his exile in Guernsey, was pleading for the life of John Brown, declaring that for Americans to take it was like "Washington slaying Spartacus." (Boyer; 21)

(See Sources on John Brown for references.)

Tags: abolitionism, confederate heritage month 2006, john brown, neo-confederates

The Christian Right and the antislavery movement

The New York Review of Books has recently published two articles on one of my favorite Civil War-related subjects, John Brown. Unfortunately, they haven't made either of them available free on their Web site.

But I'm going to post about the latest one anyway, because it explores some of the bad historical analogies that the Christian Right uses to justify anti-abortion militancy in particular.

In reviewing the new book Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America by Fergus Bordewich, George Fredrickson in "The Long Trek to Freedom", New York Review 07/14/05 issue, writes of John Brown:

There has long been controversy over whether or not he was excessively committed to violence. In Kansas in 1856 he presided over the murder [sic] of five proslavery settlers who neither owned slaves themselves nor were guilty of any known acts of violence against the antislavery settlers with whom they were competing for control of the territory. Recent discussions of Brown have raised the question whether he was a prototype of the modern "terrorist" driven to extreme actions by religious zealotry and by a belief that there was direct divine sanction for his deeds. In his recent biography of Brown, David S. Reynolds tries to distinguish Brown's kind of terrorism from that of modern suicide bombers and plane hijackers. Reynolds argues that Brown's methods can be justified by the need to challenge the need to challenge the enormous and exceptional evil of slavery, by the lack of other means of dealing with it, and by the better society that was envisioned as a result of taking violent action against it.

In his more general discussion, Bordewich compares the religiously inspired abolitionists involved in the more militant actions of the Underground Railroad with contemporary anti-abortion activists, who attack clinics and commit other illegal acts in response to a "higher law." He concedes that "uneasy questions" remain "about what happens when revealed religion collides with a secular society that shares neither its politics nor its reading of the Scriptures." But he concludes that the faith of the "deeply pious activists of the underground ... was also balanced by a generous idealism, and by an uncompromising devotion to the rights of others" that he suggests would be difficult to find among the more militant members of the contemporary anti-abortion movement. The implied argument here is that slavery was an obvious and flagrant denial of personal liberty, while the woman's "right to choose" might be considered an assertion of that liberty. Bordewich does not resolve the question of the legitimacy of violence and civil disobedience but by raising it he brings to his account the moral seriousness it deserves.

That latter paragraph is a bit lacking in its analytical perspective, but it poses a good question. One that calls for a common-sense reality check.

What did anti-slavery activists do and what risks did they run? In the South after 1832, antislavery agitation was nearly completely suppressed. Not even those free whites who opposed slavery - and there were some, though not nearly as many as neo-Confederate fantasists would have us believe - were allowed to agitate publicly. Where laws against inciting "servile rebellion" were insufficient to formally deal with such deviations from the standards of the higher civilization that slaveowners and their propagandists claim to have built, less formal methods of social ostracism, economic reprisal and direct violence were sufficient to make up the difference.

Even nonviolent antislavery activists in the free states were often targets of hostility and outright violence by proslavery mobs. The South did a profitable business in many cities of the North. And many Northerners not directly benefited from such business nevertheless viewed antislavery advocates as dangerous and subversive agitators. Even at times in as thoroughly Yankee a city as Boston. (The neo-Confederate crowd have their own pseudohistorical twist on this phenomenon, as well.) In one of the most notorious incidents, antislavery editor Elijah Lovejoy was killed by a mob in Alton, Illinois.

John Hope Franklin and Alfred Moss, Jr., describe the situation in From Slavery to Freedom (2000 [8th] edition):

Antislavery lecturers often found it difficult to rent halls in which to speak. Even if they succeeded, they could not be certain that their program would go off as planned, for many a meeting was broken up by mobs. Even women who supported the antislavery crusade were in danger of suffering insults and indignities. When Prudence Crandall, a Quaker teacher, admitted a black girl to her school in Canterbury, Connecticut, white patrons boycotted it. After she decided to open a school for black girls, with the aid of abolitionists like [William Lloyd] Garrison and Lewis Tappan, the citizens broke windows, insulted the teacher, and had her arrested for violating a state law that forbade the teaching of blacks who were not residents of the state. Abolitionists could expect little help or protection from the federal government. ...

It was the countenancing of violence by abolitionists that caused many law-abiding citizens to oppose them and rendered utterly hopeless their schemes to obtain government support. Convinced that slaveholders had the law of the land on their side, abolitionists resorted to the principle of a higher law, which they felt justified their circumventing or breaking the law. Garrison and his followers, although nonviolent, pointed out the inevitability of the violence of the Nat Turner insurrection. In 1839 Jabez Hammond of New York said that only force would end slavery and that military schools for blacks should be set up in Canada and Mexico. When slaves revolted aboard the Creole on a voyage from Hampton Roads to New Orleans, Representative Joshua Giddings not only opposed treating the slaves as common criminals but even praised them for seeking freedom. The House of Representatives, shocked by his open defiance of the law, censured Giddings. Forthwith he resigned, went home to Ohio, and was immediately returned to Congress by his antislavery constituency. The redoubtable Giddings later praised other blacks and whites for seeking to abolish slavery, and finally the House became accustomed to his tirades against the institution. By 1850 the philosophy of force was so integral a part of abolitionist doctrine that many viewed it as a movement toward anarchy.

Although the antislavery movement recognized the inevitability of violence to counter the genuine everyday violence of slavery, no notable figure in the abolitionist movement was advocating a violent insurrection against the US government or for servile insurrection." Nor was John Brown.

Brown's plan that was cut short by the failure of his raid on Harper's Ferry was to encourage limited armed resistance and the flight of slaves by setting up a network of resistance bases in the Upper South. It was the Slave Power, the slaveowning planters who controlled the governments of the Southern slave states, that advocated and put into practice a violent overthrow of the American Constitutional government. And that's no rhetorical posture to say that the Slave Power was simply to blame (which they certainly were!), but a description of what happened.

There were a number of turning points in the years 1850-1860. In 1850, a new Fugitive Slave Act became law, outraging many Northerners who weren't particularly sympathetic to the abolitionists. Among its provisions was a requirement that any male citizen in free states could compelled to take part in federal posses hunting for fugitive slaves from slave states. This imported a version of the Southern slave patrols, in which nonslaveowning whites were required to patrol for slaves violating their strict rules, to free states.

It was also plain by then that slavery was in many ways a lawless institution. There were official legal limits on what punishments could be inflicted on a slave. But it was rare indeed for a white person to be punished for any kind of torture or even murder to be inflicted on a slave. And there was no doubt that slavery involved very real cruelty to millions of real live human beings.

In the Kansas crisis in which Brown fought as a guerrilla for the antislavery side, Stephen Douglas' proslavery notion of "popular sovereignty" was put into practice. That was the nominally democratic idea that voters in Kansas could decide whether it would be slave or free. The slaveowners, especially those in Missouri, sent settlers into Kansas Territory in large numbers to insure that it became a slave state. What happened in Kansas was a small-scale guerrilla war, with both sides intending to counter the other by force. The grim fact is, whether it fits a pretty picture of American history or not, is that if the antislavery forces like Brown and his men had not been willing to use force and to use it effectively, they would have been driven out, defeated or killed by the proslavery group. Despite massive fraud by the proslavery side, Kansas was eventually admitted as a free state.

In 1857, the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision - which antiabortionists liken to Roe v. Wade - effectively eliminated the power of Congress to restrict slavery in the territories. And free states residents feared, with good reason, that the Slave Power intended to use the proslavery Supreme Court to eventually nullify antislavery laws in the free states. In the context of the time, this effectively removed the chances of resolving the slavery dispute without large-scale violence, though most Northern abolitionists and the new Republican Party tried hard to work out such a nonviolent method.

It seems to me that the Christian Right uses the antislavery example for a couple reasons. One is that in American history and popular sentiment, the pro-democracy, antislavery movement looks much more benign than the Slave Power and the Confederacy. Since most antislavery activists claimed Christian religious for their antislavery views, this fits nicely with the Christian Right's position on abortion today - as long as you ignore the fact that the far more violent slaveowners and the proslavery advocates also claimed divine sanction from the Christian God for their actions and their "peculiar institution" of slavery.

Another reason is that the core of the Christian Right are the direct political and ideological heirs of the Southern segregationists of the 1950s and 1960s. There are exceptions, of course. But segregationist and fundamentalists are often obsessive about trying to turn the arguments of their victims around on them. "The whites aren't mistreating the Negroes," they argued in the segregation days. "It's the Yankees and the civil rights outside agitators who are turning the contented Southern Negroes against us white folks and discriminating and promoting prejudice against the (white) South." Although the Christian Right is strikingly unsympathetic to the priorities of civil rights advocates or programs of special interests to minorities today, they like to claim the civil rights movement and the antebellum antislavery movements as their models. It's more of a sneer than anything else.

The quotation from Bordewich in Fredrickson's review seems to recognize that this comparison is as phony as the WMDs in Iraq because most antiabortionists don't show great passion for the freedom, opportunities or general well-being of living, breathing human beings that they profess to have for fetuses at the state in which they are incapable of living except as a part of the mother's body. Also, it takes a whole series of assumptions to make a fetus into a human being. Despite the attempts of some Slave Power propagandists to claim that blacks were biologically inferior to whites, everyone knew very well that they were human beings.

It's also the case that outside of the slave states of the United States and some countries of Latin America, slavery had been abolished as an institution and was rejected as wrong and fundamentally unacceptable by most other countries. Antislavery activists may have been a minority in the US prior to the Civil War. But they also were taking a position that was the same as the generally accepted position of most of what Americans then saw as the civilized world. It is simply not the case that any such consensus exists in the world on abortion.

Even in the United States, it wasn't until about a century ago that laws against abortion began appearing, because the surgical technique just wasn't possible until then. And even then, the motivation for banning it was not because the fetuses were considered as the same as living, breathing humans. It was because the procedure was so risky for the pregnant woman.

But the comparison is also ridiculous because of the nature of the opposition. As described above, antislavery agitators often risked reputation, life and limb to oppose slavery, especially in the South. An antislavery white Southerner in practice either had to keep his or her mouth shut on the subject or move to a free state. And they were dealing with a federal government increasingly dominated by the Slave Power.

What do antiabortion activists do? The campaign for restrictions on abortion, they teach against abortion as being wrong both in the churches and in the "public square" from which they routinely claim they are being excluded, they fight cases in the courts. All of which they are perfectly free to do in every state of the Union. They don't have to risk their livelihood, much less their lives or physical safety to do any of that.

And, instead of facing angry mobs, they, well, they demonstrate against mostly young women at abortion clinics coming for a medical procedure that most of them would prefer not to have. They even get away with setting up abortion-advice services that deliberately lie to clients about the risks of abortion, something ethically bankrupt and legally borderline (or should be). They may stalk employees of abortion clinics and try to create hostility against them in their home communities.

How much guts or fortitude does any of this take? Even in civil-disobedience actions, such as blockading an abortion clinic, what antiabortion demonstrators in the United States ever faced anything remotely comparable to what Bull Conner's police dished out to civil rights demonstrators in Alabama in the 1960s? Good grief, the comparison is just silly.

It's true that some of the more extreme and violent antiabortion fanatics, like those who bomb abortion clinics or murder doctors who perform abortions, are taking some personal risks. But again, how do you compare bombing an abortion clinic to Elijah Lovejoy facing hostile mobs? How is murdering an unarmed doctor in a sneak attack remotely comparable to John Brown fighting it out with Captain Robert E. Lee's federal troops at Harper's Ferry?

In the excerpt above, Frederickson says:

[Bordewich] concedes that "uneasy questions" remain "about what happens when revealed religion collides with a secular society that shares neither its politics nor its reading of the Scriptures."

I guess if you take it to that level of abstraction, there might be some abstract "uneasy questions." But looking at what actually went on the abolition movement with what today's antiabortionists actually do, I don't feel the least bit "uneasy" about saying the comparison is bogus.

Tags: abolitionism, abortion, christian right, john brown