Slavery Was No "Moment"

Sometimes a single word speaks volumes.

A few days ago, I was reading one of those year-end, year's best movies lists in the local newspaper. One of the choices was "12 Years a Slave," director Steve McQueen's brutal filming of the true story of the freeman Solomon Northup, who was kidnapped and sold into slavery.

I had recently seen the film thought it was a stunning achievement, so I was glad to see it make the list. But I was struck by the way the author of the article described it:

"Superbly made, but harrowing and difficult-to-watch film about one of the darkest moments in American history."

I was with the writer until that word "moments."

A scene from "12 Years a Slave"

Slavery was not a "moment." It was an institution that lasted well over two hundred years. Would anyone call the Constitution a "moment" in American history? The question is self-evidently absurd, yet slavery existed in America longer than the Constitution has.

I don't mean to cast aspersions on the author. I'm confident, from the context, that he had no desire to minimize slavery. Yet he inadvertently did, with that one word. He took a horrific institution that afflicted the lives of millions of people over two-plus centuries and reduced it to a "moment."

Regardless of the intent, calling slavery a "moment" has the effect of dismissing it as a bizarre aberration--something to be noticed, for sure, but also to be discounted. Just a moment, that's all. None of us wishes to be judged by our worst moment, right?

This, unfortunately, is something we Americans do all too often. Even when we are seemingly trying our best to appreciate the centrality of slavery to American history, to see it in all of its dehumanizing horror, we have an uncanny knack for saying something that effectively undermines that intent and dismisses slavery as something less than it was.

McQueen's movie is easily the most unvarnished take on American slavery ever filmed. The author is right--it is incredibly difficult to watch. What's worse is that it is incredibly difficult for some of us to accept.  Even when we see it, even when we know that this story is true, we want to find some way to say, "yeah, but …"

There is no "but." Slavery was an evil, one this nation tolerated as "necessary" long after it proudly declared to the world that "all men are created equal." It is true that most of us have come a long way since the "positive good" and "necessary evil" characterizations of slavery of the antebellum period. And yet, when faced with slavery's awful truth, there is still something in too many of us that wants to relegate it to just a "moment" in our history.

Until all Americans appreciate this reality--slavery is as essential to the American story and as much a part of who we are as the Constitution--we will be falsely comforting ourselves that it was nothing but a moment.

Three-Fifths Understanding

The infamous three-fifths clause is back in the news.

The Twittersphere exploded last Wednesday when the GOP nominee for Lt. Governor of Virginia, E. W. Jackson, made this comment:

“Rev. [Charles Wallace] Smith must not have understood the 3/5ths clause was an anti-slavery amendment. Its purpose was to limit the voting power of slave-holding states.”

Jackson has made all sorts of interesting comments, so it is not surprising that some people put the worst possible interpretation on his remarks, suggesting that he was defending the clause. But Jackson was not entirely wrong.

E.W. Jackson

The clause is probably both one of the most well-known and most misunderstood clauses in the Constitution:

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.

In the popular mind, the clause has come to mean that the Constitution considered a slave to be three-fifths of a person, and in a metaphorical sense, that is true. That is not, however, what motivated the clause.

What was actually at issue here was how to deal with the reality that the new government would be a union of states, some of which had done away with slavery (or were in the process of doing so; most northern states did away with slavery gradually) and others which had large numbers of slaves. Since the new House of Representatives was to apportion representatives based on population, the framers needed to decide whether the slave population would be taken into account.

From a modern perspective, it seems simple: just add up the total number of people (or "Persons" in the Constitution's language). In this case (as in so many others for the next six decades), slavery took what should have been an easy question and made it a complicated one. In a legal sense, slaves were property, not "Persons." So northerners argued that they should not be counted for representation at all.

That's right: the anti-slavery portion of the country argued that slaves should not be three-fifths of a person, but zero-fifths of a person. To add to the absurdity, southerners--who otherwise insisted that slaves were not "Persons" any more than horses were--argued that in this instance, and this instance alone, slaves should be counted as whole Persons, equal to every white man, woman, and child.

Each section adopted the convenient argument which would enhance its political power. To get past the impasse, they compromised on three-fifths. So compared to the southern position, Jackson is correct: three-fifths is relatively anti-slavery in that it gave slave states less power in the House than they would have had if slaves were counted as whole Persons. Compared to the northern position, however, three-fifths can only be seen as pro-slavery, since it allowed white southerners to count 60% of their slaves as both Persons and property.

The important question, however, is not whether the three-fifths clause was pro- or anti-slavery. What matters is what this story tells us about the nature of compromise in the American political system.

How do we evaluate such a compromise? From today's perspective, most of us are understandably appalled, and shudder when someone fails to be.

For example, three months ago, James Wagner, the president of Emory, stepped into it. He called "the agreement to count three-fifths of the slave population for purposes of state representation in Congress" an example of "constitutional compromise" which he praised as one of the "[p]ragmatic half-victories [that] kept in view the higher aspiration of drawing the country more closely together."

He was pilloried for those comments, and was forced to issue this statement: "I do not consider slavery anything but heinous, repulsive, repugnant, and inhuman."

Wagner's mistake was not in praising compromise in general, but in holding up this compromise as an example to emulate.

No one, north or south, looks good in this story. No one. The practical business of creating a framework for government brought the Constitutional Convention face-to-face with a fundamentally moral question, one whose very existence exposed the essential, inescapable immorality of slavery: is a slave a Person or property?

Faced with a stark moral choice, the framers side-stepped it and reframed it as merely a practical matter. They split the difference. They compromised.

Today, we rightly recoil from the immorality of this compromise. But this instance should not deceive us into rejecting all compromise.

The American political system is built for compromise. It breaks down when faced with moral questions that do not lend themselves to compromise solutions. That is why the federal government today is in danger of becoming utterly dysfunctional: the GOP has seemingly decided that virtually all compromise is ignoble surrender.

There are times when compromise truly is ignoble. The three-fifths clause seems like one. Today we rightly recoil at the idea that slaves were considered three-fifths of a Person.

But given the two proposals, which one would you choose? Would the north's zero-fifths option have been preferable moral ground? Would the south's blatantly hypocritical stand--that for purposes of political power, slaves were whole Persons, but under state law they were mere property--have been morally satisfying?

No, there was no good moral ground on which to stand. So pervasive was the moral corruption caused by the evil of slavery that it left no good political choices. Everything was tainted by it. The only truly moral choice would have been to abolish it completely and immediately, and few white American leaders took that idea seriously in the late 1780s. And the nation made that choice only after the political system broke down completely and the country descended into civil war.

Most of the decisions government makes, however, don't involve basic moral principles. They engage practical questions, ones where splitting the difference makes good sense. Ideologues who insist on treating every disagreement as one over principles threaten to disrupt the political system and render it as useless on all questions as it once proved on the issue of slavery.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX)

Perhaps the distinguishing characteristic of the Tea Party movement is this reflex to raise every decision to that moral level. The demagogue de jour, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, does this as well as anyone. Recently, he has refused to let Senate and House conferees meet to decide on a budget because he is convinced it will lead to a deal to raise the debt limit. Cruz casts this (and virtually every legislative issue) as a matter of "fighting to defend liberty, ... fighting to defend the Constitution."

This is absurd. There is no moral (or immoral) answer to whether (or how much) to raise the debt ceiling.

Political maturity requires knowing the difference between matters of principle and matters of utility. By casting nearly everything as the former rather than the latter, the Tea Party members of Congress show that they lack the most basic judgment needed to govern effectively. And as long as saner members of Congress appease them, they risk making the national legislature utterly unworkable.

Tortured Defense

Andrew Sullivan dissects former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen's disreputable attempt to square his support for torture with Catholic moral teaching better than I could ever dream of doing. While reading it, however, something nagged at me: this sounds familiar. I couldn't put my finger on it until reading Mark Shea's post on the same subject, when he said that Dick Cheney is "pressing hard to defend the use of torture as a positive good." That was it--"positive good"--the same phrase that defenders of slavery used in the decades before the Civil War.

There are at least two distinct eras in the American defense of slavery. In the age of the founders, slavery was largely defended as a "necessary evil." Jefferson in 1820 famously wrote that slavery is like having "a wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let go." But he did not seek to defend slavery on any other than practical grounds: "Justice is on one scale, and self-preservation in the other." In general, the attitude was that if slavery did not exist, they would not now choose to adopt it, but given its existence, the price of its destruction was too high.

By the 1830s, with slavery under attack by abolitionists as an inherent moral evil, the defenders of slavery took on a new tact: the positive good argument. It was impossible to defend slavery from the moral arguments of its critics while admitting it was an evil. That, they believed, would doom slavery. Instead it must be defended as a good thing.

The foremost proponent of the "positive good" theory was John C. Calhoun of South Carolina. In a speech to the Senate in 1837, Calhoun forthrightly stated that he did not believe slavery to be "an evil--far otherwise, I hold it to be a good.... a positive good." By that, Calhoun explicitly meant it was good for the slave. Under slavery, he said "so much is left to the share of the laborer and so little extracted from him."

The defense of torture since 9/11 has undergone a similar evolution. Back in 2003, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz argued that torture could be justified in extreme cases--the so-called "ticking time bomb" scenario. But in such situations he called for "a torture warrant, which puts a heavy burden on the government to demonstrate by factual evidence the necessity to administer this horrible, horrible technique of torture." Under certain extreme circumstances, Dershowitz argued, torture can be a necessary evil that may prevent something worse. Self-preservation requires it.

Seven years later, people like Marc Thiessen are, as Calhoun did with slavery, taking it a step further: torture is good for the prisoner being tortured. He asserts that Abu Zubaydah, who was subjected to waterboarding over 80 times, "thanked his interrogators for waterboarding him" and told them: "you must do this for all the brothers." This, Thiessen claims, is because the jihadist mentality is that, having resisted until "he has reached his limit," someone subjected to torture is released from the "moral burden" of continued resistance and can talk without shame. In other words, we're doing the jihadists a favor by torturing them. It is good for them. (It is worth noting that by tacitly admitting that waterboarding pushes people to their "limit," Thiessen by implication admits it is in fact torture.)

This attempt to portray torture as anything but an intrinsic evil is uncannily like Calhoun's defense of slavery. And like that earlier effort, future generations will see it for what it is: morally bankrupt.