Eucatastrophe Reader

The American Dream: "Can I have a bite?”

Frozen River REVIEW

The following excerpt is from a short wikipedia biography of Florence Owens Thompson, mother of seven children in 1936 (ten eventually) and to many people, the face of the great Depression.

“In March 1936, after picking beets in the Imperial Valley, Florence Owens Thompson and her family were traveling on U.S. Highway 101 towards Watsonville, California "where they had hoped to find work in the lettuce fields of the Pajaro Valley." On the road, the car timing chain snapped and they coasted to a stop just inside a pea-picker's camp on Nipomo Mesa. They were shocked to find so many people camping there – as many as 2,500 to 3,500. A notice had been sent out for pickers, but the crops had been destroyed by freezing rain, leaving them without work or pay. Florence would relate in an interview years later, that when she cooked food for her children that day, little children appeared from the pea picker's camp asking, "Can I have a bite?”

While Jim Hill, her husband, and two of Thompson's sons took the radiator, which had also been damaged, to town for repair. Thompson and some of the children set up a temporary camp. As Thompson waited, Dorothea Lange, working for the Resettlement Administration, drove up and started taking photos of Florence and her family. Over 10 minutes she took 6 images.

While Thompson's identity was not known for over forty years after the photos were taken, the images became famous. The sixth image especially, which later became known as Migrant Mother, "has achieved near mythical status, symbolizing, if not defining, an entire era in [United States] history." Roy Stryker called Migrant Mother the "ultimate" photo of the Depression Era.

In an interview with CNN, Thompson's daughter, Katherine McIntosh, recalled how her mother was a "very strong lady", and "the backbone of our family". She said that "We never had a lot, but she always made sure we had something. She didn't eat sometimes, but she made sure us children ate. That's one thing she did do."

The film, Frozen River is something of a retelling of an old story; A story of two mothers trying to care for their families in the deep despair of economic crisis.  It is a story of a family being shoved off the cliff of the lower middle class into the bleak world of the lumpenproletariate in the stygian mist below it. It is a story of a woman who wants to work full time and provide for her family but who finds herself on the receiving end of corporate slavery at the “Yankee Dollar” where she has worked part-time, promised full time employment, for two years.

All it takes is a family catastrophe, in this case inflicted by a father’s gambling addiction, to send them over the edge into starvation or criminality or an unnecessary house fire.

For the shareholders of Yankee Dollar, it is another day of profits no doubt. But as the story unfolds, we see just how public and corporate policy eventually paves the way into one family’s disaster and a compromised national security.

Ray Eddy is a struggling mother trying to deal with the responsibility of two children after her husband has absconded with their family savings to gamble.  In tracking down her husband’s stolen car, she comes into contact with Lila Littlewolf, a Mohawk Indian smuggler living in a camper, struggling to support a one year old child she is no longer allowed to see. Over the course of the next few days, we see the desperation of Ray’s situation driving her, first as an unwilling accomplice, then as a reluctant accomplice, then as a guilty but willing accomplice, and finally, as an assertive and enterprising accomplice to crime.  

This is about life on the ragged edge of survival where inevitably, people grow tougher, meaner, and less punctilious about the law; where they surrender legality in the hopes of retaining dignity and humanity. Ray and Lilly smuggle some Chinese men over the frozen river into the U.S. for $1200. They return for more business and find themselves smuggling potential terrorists (a Pakistani family). A third trip winds up bringing them into an even seedier world of what looks to be some form of sex-slavery. They shoot people and are shot at. Ray’s pathetic little trailer is almost burned to the ground by her teenage son trying to thaw the pipes. She risks driving her car into the freezing waters of the St. Lawrence and winds up spending four months in jail. One senses her clinging with white knuckles to respectability and decency but the hardships of her situation, her desire to protect her children from the ramifications of those hardships, involve compromises.

What is this movie about? In my opinion, it is about the travesty of corporate policies that exploit people’s labor, driving them into wage-slavery, and eventually into crime. A society cannot pay the care-givers of children so little that those children are left eating pop-corn and Tang and expect that such people will not, at some point in time, break through the frayed edges of civil behavior to try and save their children from starvation. At this point, public economic policy (the free market allows companies like Yankee Dollar to hire people at an unlivable wage) is at odds with law enforcement policy and we begin creating the criminals that we must pay to defend against and prosecute.

All over the country today there are people like Ray Eddy and Lilly who see themselves dropping over the edge of sustainable life. More and more, people in the middle class that used to support these people with their philanthropy are unable to do so and support their own families.

I suspect that we all see it happening.

Question for Comment: What do you think about “Livable Wage” laws? Should people like Ray and Lily simply suffer from the decisions they have made in life (marrying poorly or not marrying at all for example)? Should they simply move? Look for better employment?

“We have a disease care system."

Escape Fire REVIEW

“We have a disease care system. It doesn’t want you to die and it doesn’t want you to get well. “

Escape Fire is an attempt to sketch out in broad terms what the goals of health-care reform should be in the coming years. The producers favor a return to medical treatments that do not involve playing whack-a-mole with symptoms. They favor the use of non-addictive methods for dealing with pain. They favor a reduction in the influence that for-profit medicine has on policy. They favor incentivizing health rather than incentivizing expensive treatment. They favor the subsidization of primary care physicians who dedicate themselves to educational work in the prevention of disease more than the subsidization of specialists who profit as people come in with more diseases. One interviewee explained that the American health-care system is a bit like someone being paid to mop the floor not wishing to turn off the faucet that gives them work. The producers favor a national effort dedicated to getting us all to eat better, exercise more, live rationally, and pursue balance rather than stress. They fear that the special interests involved would prefer that we continue making ourselves unhealthy and would prefer that we fund the purchase of “cures” or palliatives from them with Federal tax dollars.

I think I will stop typing now and go for a walk.

Question for Comment: If you had to pick between someone who would MAKE you live a healthier life or someone who would PAY for the health care that your unhealthy life required, which would you pick?

"He thought he saw in the same accident the wicked visited by destruction and the good called early to Heaven.”

Bridge of San Louis Rey by Thorton Wilder REVIEW

“The public for which masterpieces are intended is not on this earth.”

Click HERE to hear Thorton Wilder read the first pages of The Bridge of San Louis Rey.

"On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below."

Brother Juniper, who happened to be there that day, determines to use the calamity as a laboratory for proving the goodness and justice of God. “Surely,” Juniper thinks, “researching the lives of these five victims will uncover reasons why all of us suffer calamity at the hands of God.”

“By a series of coincidences so extraordinary that one almost suspects the presence of some Intention,” says Wilder in the introduction,

“this little red-haired Franciscan from Northern Italy happened to be in Peru converting the Indians and happened to witness the accident.”

And thus begins a story about someone who believes implicitly in the providence of God by a man who can only “almost suspect” such Providence. The great irony is that in the end, brother Juniper will be burned at the stake by the church he seeks to serve for trying to find evidence for that which the church asserts must simply be believed without it. And brother Juniper, as we read in the last chapter, spends his last evening on this earth awaiting his execution trying to uncover the meaning in his own calamity.

“He sat in his cell that last night trying to seek in his own life the pattern that had escaped him in five others.”

That is, he had not been able to ascertain why these five people had died and now he can't figure out what he had done to deserve the death he was facing. It did not make sense. One senses that Brother Juniper sees it as his job to convert people to faith. His study of the San Louis Rey bridge victims is to be a tool in pursuing conversions. But we do not get the sense that he grieves their loss or loves either the victims or his converts. To him, people are “specimens.” He is the sort that deals with people and loves ideas (I know such men all too well.)

“Anyone else would have said to himself with secret joy: 'Within ten minutes myself ... !' But it was another thought that visited Brother Juniper: 'Why did this happen to 'those five?' If there were any plan in the universe at all, if there were any pattern in a human life, surely it could be discovered mysteriously latent in those lives so suddenly cut off. Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan. And on that instant Brother Juniper made the resolve to inquire into the secret lives of those five persons, that moment falling through the air, and to surmise the reason of their taking off.”

“It seemed to Brother Juniper that it was high time for theology to take its place among the exact sciences and he had long intended putting it there. What he had lacked hitherto was a laboratory. Oh, there had never been any lack of specimens; any number of his charges had met calamity, — spiders had stung them; their lungs had been touched; their houses had burned down and things had happened to their children from which one averts the mind. But these occasions of human woe had never been quite fit for scientific examination. They had lacked what our good savants were later to call 'proper control.' The accidents had been dependent upon human error, for example, or had contained elements of probability. But this collapse of the bridge of San Luis Rey was a sheer Act of God. It afforded a perfect laboratory. Here at last one could surmrise His intentions in a pure state.”

“You and I can see that coming from anyone but Brother Juniper this plan would be the flower of a perfect skepticism. It resembled the effort of those presumptuous souls who wanted to walk on the pavements of Heaven and built the Tower of Babel to get there. But to our Franciscan there was no element of doubt in the experiment. He knew the answer. He merely wanted to prove it, historically, mathematically, to his converts, — poor obstinate converts, so slow to believe that their pains were inserted into their lives for their own good. People were always asking for good sound proofs; doubt springs eternal in the human breast, even in countries where the Inquisition can read your very thoughts in your eyes.”

Thorton Wilder’s Bridge of San Louis Rey is a novel about faith. But more, it is a novel about the greater importance of love. Indeed, one might sum up the theme by reference to Paul’s assertion in 2 Corinthians 13.

“And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”

We never get to actually see Brother Juniper’s conclusions. We are only told in the final chapter that he tried to make the case from all that he gathered on the lives of the dead that there was perfect justice in their deaths. “I shall spare you Brother Juniper's generalizations,” says the narrator,

“They are always with us. He thought he saw in the same accident the wicked visited by destruction and the good called early to Heaven.” 

But, according to the narrator, his account was in error. There was much that he, despite his years of researches, never knew. And there was much, not being omniscient, that he could have never known. The stories of the victim’s lives that the narrator gives us show us this. And the narrator says so explicitly. As omniscient as the narrator is, he confesses that not even he could use these lives as proof of some formula.

“Yet for all his diligence Brother Juniper never knew the central passion of Doña Maria’s life; nor of Uncle Pio’s, not even of Esteban’s. And I, who claim to know so much more, isn’t it possible that even I have missed the very spring within the spring?”

“The art of biography is more difficult than is generally supposed,” the author tells us. No human life ever perfectly demonstrates the application of a formula for perfect justice. If one reads the Hebrew books of Kings and Chronicles, one will find that even in the confines of one sacred text, the two historians differ as to why good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people. Time after time, the two writers look at the same events and see a different divine formula at work. As Wilder puts it in his novel,

“Some say we shall never know and that to gods we are like flies that the boys kill on a summer day, and some say, on the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God”

I suspect that the church’s beef with brother Juniper is his arrogant assumption that what the church teaches must be accepted by faith must needs be proven with evidence.

But I am wandering from my central theme. What is Thorton Wilder saying about faith and what is he saying about love? About faith, I think he is saying that the world as we will always experience it is too complicated, too mysterious, and too unknowable to ever hope that a scientific approach will ever lead us to existential conviction. “There are a hundred ways of wondering at circumstance,” Wilder tells us.

We will never see deep enough into what is or far enough into what will be or clearly enough into what was for us to make dependable inferences. Unlike the stage manager in Wilder’s play, Our Town, our sight is too limited for a scientific understanding of the metaphysical world. Double or triple our sacred peripheral vision and give us the power of a trustworthy narrator and we may well still be missing “the spring within the spring.” “The discrepancy between faith and the facts is greater than is generally assumed,” Wilder reminds us.

But love is a different matter. That we can see. That we can feel. It’s effects, we can study.

What we learn about the victims of the San Louis Rey bridge collapse is that they all loved and were loved. They all knew what it was to love someone who would not reciprocate in kind exactly. What we learn is that death could not stop that love, frustrated as it was, from changing the world. Marquesa De Montemayor loves her daughter in Spain who does not love her back. Estaban loves his brother who has just died. Uncle Pio loves Camilla Perichole who thinks that love is just a theatrical illusion. Pepita loves the abbess, Maria Del Pilar, who seems to care more for the future of her enterprise than Pepita herself. Don Jaime loves his mother who is willing to send him away to gain an aristocratic education.

What is interesting to me about these characters is that their faith can wax and wane, but their attachment to the people they love cannot seem to do so. "At times, after a day's frantic resort to such invocations, a revulsion would sweep over her,” we read of the Marquesa, “Nature is deaf. God is indifferent.” “He had lost that privilege of simple nature, the dissociation of love and pleasure,” we read of Estaban’s brother Manuel.

“Pleasure was no longer as simple as eating; it was being complicated by love. . . . When he said over to himself that she was beautiful and rich and fatiguingly witty and the Viceroy's mistress none of these attributes that made her less attainable had the power to quench his curious and tender excitement. So he leaned against the trees in the dark, his knuckles between his teeth, and listened to his loud heart-beats.”

“To Uncle Pio nothing else mattered,” we read of Uncle Pio’s affection for Camilla,

“What was there in the world more lovely than a beautiful woman doing justice to a Spanish masterpiece?”

Brother Juniper wants to divide the world into those who believe in purpose and those who do not. “Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan.” The sheep say “plan!” The goats say “accident!”

“It was by dint of hearing a great many such sneers at faith that Brother Juniper became convinced that the world's time had come for proof, tabulated proof, of the conviction that was so bright and exciting within him.”

“When the pestilence visited his dear village of Puerto and carried off a large number of peasants, he secretly drew up a diagram of the characteristics of fifteen victims and fifteen survivors, the statistics of their value sub specie aeternitatis. Each soul was rated upon a basis of ten as regards its goodness, its diligence in religious observance, and its importance to its family group.”

Brother Juniper chops the world up into categories of faith. Uncle Pio divides the world into different categories.

“He divided the inhabitants of this world into two groups, into those who had loved and those who had not. It was a horrible aristocracy, apparently, for those who had no capacity for love (or rather for suffering in love) could not be said to be alive and certainly would not live again after their death. . . . He regarded love as a sort of cruel malady through which the elect are required to pass in their late youth and from which they emerge, pale and wrung, but ready for the business of living.”

After the funerals are over, the abbess undergoes a transformation whereby she no longer cares about the immortality of her institution so much as the quality of life of the souls she cares for. After the funeral, having lost her son and her uncle, Camilla Perichole visits the abbess.

"Mother, what shall I do? I am all alone. I have nothing in the world. I love them. What shall I do?"

The abbess explains to her that the great thing about love is that we can share it with anyone. We can, as the song puts it, “love the one we’re with.”

“One is willing to assume all kinds of penance, but do you know, my daughter, that in love -- I scarcely dare say it -- but in love our very mistakes don't seem to be able to last long.”

We do not need the person we failed to love to be there to receive it. We do not need the person we love to reciprocate it. It may not be within us to believe all the time but it is always within us to love someone who needs that love all the time.

It is with this thought that the novel closes.

“Even now,’ she thought, ‘almost no one remembers Esteban and Pepita, but myself. Camila alone remembers her Uncle Pio and her son; this woman, her mother. But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary of love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”

In the end, what the world needed, Wilder is saying, is not brother Juniper’s iron clad case that suffering is purposeful but the abbess’ inclination to love those that love us, that need our love, and that suffer without the love of someone.

“How absurd you are," Camilla Perichole had told her uncle Pio, in response to his confession of love for her,

"You said that as boys say it. You don't seem to learn as you grow older, Uncle Pio. There is no such thing as that kind of love and that kind of island. It is in the theater you find such things.”

Thanks to the collapse of the San Louis Rey bridge, by the end of the story, she will be making that same love a reality to the orphans of Lima. Who knows? Maybe that is why it broke or was broken.

Questions for Comment: Is it possible to express the love one feels for one person to another? Is it possible to take the love we might feel for someone who has died or who might as well have, and give it to others who may need it? Would you agree with Paul and Wilder that love is of greater importance than faith in life? Why?

Defending Slavery, Part I

Defending Slavery: Pro-Slavery Thought in the Old South by Paul Finkleman REVIEW PART ONE

In his introduction to pro-slavery thought in the Old South, Finkleman highlights the history and variety of pro-slavery arguments in the years before the Civil War. He notes how racial theories were used to convert a somewhat muted distaste for non-racially based system of slavery and servitude to a whole hearted support of race-based perpetual slavery. White Southernors came to see previous expressions of slave-based economic systems as evil and the wage-slavery of Northern urban centers as evil while elevating their own system to the place of a divinely sanctioned institution that worked, like the institution of marriage and the institution of the family, for the benefit of both the master and the subservient.

Among the various documents Finkleman presents, we find many overlapping lines of reason. We will read that slavery is an essential part of the economy. We will read that it is perfectly consistent with the founding ideas of civilized life and with the Constitution. We will read that it is completely consistent with the teachings of the Bible. We will read that slavery is a system based on solid scientific and psychological realities. We will read about its conformity to rules of justice and natural law and we will read about its physical, emotional, and spiritual benefits to both white citizen and black slave. We will find within these seventeen documents a veritable cornucopia of reasons to go out onto some open field in Gettysburg and shoot brainwashed Yankee abolitionist fanatics.

Let me say at the outset that it is not an easy book to wade through but doing so will be immensely profitable to my understanding of the period and my teaching of the subject of American slavery. Below is a brief summary of the various documents.

Politics, Economics, and Proslavery Thought

Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1787

Some would regard Jefferson as an early abolitionist simply because he thought slavery a moral evil (an evil only to be superseded by setting slaves free from his perspective).

“Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state, and thus save the expense of supplying, by importation of white settlers, the vacancies they will leave? Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.”

Jefferson goes on to describe all the various differences between white people and black people (going well beyond skin color) that make them socially incompatible. Among the hundred or so traits he describe can be found things like this:

“Their griefs are transient. Those numberless afflictions, which render it doubtful whether heaven has given life to us in mercy or in wrath, are less felt, and sooner forgotten with them. In general, their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection.”

His conclusion is that whether by nature or nurture, black people will always be inferior and though slavery may not thus be justified, emancipated slaves would have to be deported to keep the bloodlines of the superior white race pure and, as he puts it “beyond the reach of miture.”

“The blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind. It is not against experience to suppose, that different species of the same genus, or varieties of the same species, may possess different qualifications.”

John C. Calhoun, Speech in the U.S. Senate, 1837

John C. Calhoun was the most important pro-slavery politician in the years leading up to the Fugitive Slave law of 1850. In this speech before the U.S. Senate, he insists that South Carolina will lead the way in defending its rights to hold slaves. The Federal government has no right to touch the institution he argues, warning that the abolitionist control of the press, pulpit and education was going to bring about Civil War if not contained.

“But let me not be misunderstood as admitting, even by implication, that the existing relations between the two races in the slaveholding States is an evil — far otherwise ; I hold it to be a good, as it has thus far proved itself to be to both, and will continue to prove so if not disturbed by the fell spirit of abolition. ... I hold that in the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin, and distinguished by color, and other pnysical differences, as well as intellectual, are brought together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding States between the two, is, instead of an evil, a good — a positive good. I fearlessly assert that the existing relation between the two races in the South, against which these blind fanatics are waging war, forms the most solid and durable foundation on which to rear free and stable political institutions."

Edmund Ruffin, The Political Economy of Slavery, 1853

Edmund Ruffin maintains that history should dictate present and future policy. It is the age old argument of the conservative that what has been done should be master to what could be done.

“Slavery has existed from as early time as historical records furnish any information of the social and political condition of mankind. There was no country, in the most ancient time of its history, of which the people had made any considerable advances in industry or refinement, in which slavery had not been previously and long established, and in general use.”

Ruffin, by the way, is the sort of person to write in three-page long paragraphs and for that reason, he is not easy to follow. The fact that he is a card-carrying KKK sort does not help either.

“Yet, in all this long time, and among such great numbers of free negroes, everywhere protected in person and property, and in the facilities to acquire property — and in some of the Northern States, endowed with political, as well as civil rights and power, equal with the white citizens — still to this day, and with but few individual exceptions, the free negroes in every State of this Confederacy, are noted for ignorence, indolence, improvidence, and poverty — and very generally, also, for vicious habits, and numerous violations of the criminal laws.

“In all this long time of freedom, and with great facilities for improvement, there has not appeared among all these free negroes a single individual showing remarkable, or even more than ordinary, power of intellect — or any power of mind that would be deemed worth notice in any individual of the white race. Yet, in the Northern States, free schools are open to the children of the blacks as freely as to the whites — many have received collegiate education — and nothing but the immutable decree of God. fixing on them mental inferiority, has "prevented high grades of intellect and "of learning, being displayed in numerous cases. Further, the absence of industry is as general as the inferiority of mental powers. Some few free negroes are laborious, frugal, provident, and thrifty. A very few have acquired considerable amounts of property. But these rare qualities were not hereditary — and the children of these superior individuals would be as like as others to fall back to the ordinary condition of their class. In short, taken throughout, and with but few exceptions, the free negro class, in every part of this country, is a nuisance, and noted for ignorance, laziness, improvidence, and vicious habits.”

Thomas R. R. Cobb, Effects of Abolition in the United States, 1858

Thomas Cobb was a leader in setting up the Confederate Constitution when the South seceded from the Union. Cobb’s argument boils down to an analysis of how successful free blacks have been in Northern societies that allow them to function unenslaved. He insists that black people in the North are less healthy, less productive, less moral, and tend to become criminals.

“It may be truly said that the southern climate is more favorable to the health and longevity of the negro. But making due allowances in both cases for these causes, it is still true, that the negroes are less addicted to crime, and are more healthy and long-lived, in a state of slavery than of freedom.”

James Henry Hammond, The Mudsill Speech, 1858   

James Henry Hammond’s speech to the U.S. Senate is one that I have used on numerous occasions when trying to describe the rationale that Southerners used for promoting slavery. It seems to encompass a lot of arguments in a brief space. Hammond insists that ever society has a “mudsill” of laborers who must exist so that the society can produce its finer things.

“In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement. It constitutes the very mud-sill of society and of political government; and you might as well attempt to build a house in the air, as to build either the one or the other, except on this mud-sill. Fortunately for the South, she found a race adapted to that purpose to her hand. A race inferior to her own, but eminently qualified in temper, in vigor, in docility, in capacity to stand the climate, to answer all her purposes. We use them for our purpose, and call them slaves. We found them slaves by the common "consent of mankind," which, according to Cicero, "lex naturae est." The highest proof of what is Nature's law. We are old-fashioned at the South yet; slave is a word discarded now by "ears polite;" I will not characterize that class at the North by that term; but you have it; it is there; it is everywhere; it is eternal.

The Senator from New York said yesterday that the whole world had abolished slavery. Aye, the name, but not the thing; all the powers of the earth cannot abolish that. God only can do it when he repeals the fiat, "the poor ye always have with you;" for the man who lives by daily labor, and scarcely lives at that, and who has to put out his labor in the market, and take the best he can get for it; in short, your whole hireling class of manual laborers and "operatives," as you call them, are essentially slaves. The difference between us is, that our slaves are hired for life and well compensated; there is no starvation, no begging, no want of employment among our people, and not too much employment either. Yours are hired by the day, not cared for, and scantily compensated, which may be proved in the most painful manner, at any hour in any street in any of your large towns. Why, you meet more beggars in one day, in any single street of the city of New York, than you would meet in a lifetime in the whole South. We do not think that whites should be slaves either by law or necessity. Our slaves are black, of another and inferior race. The status in which we have placed them is an elevation. They are elevated from the condition in which God first created them, by being made our slaves. None of that race on the whole face of the globe can be compared with the slaves of the South. They are happy, content, unaspiring, and utterly incapable, from intellectual weakness, ever to give us any trouble by their aspirations. Yours are white, of your own race; you are brothers of one blood. They are your equals in natural endowment of intellect, and they feel galled by their degradation.

You have been making war upon us to our very hearthstones. How would you like for us to send lecturers and agitators north, to teach these people this, to aid in combining, and to lead them?”

Hammond insists that “Cotton is King” in this speech, asserting that a “war on cotton” would be suicidal for the Northern economy and thus calling the abolitionists bluff. He taunts them for their economic hypocrisy, opposing slavery but making money hand over fist off slavery’s cotton.

Alexander Stephens, The Cornerstone Speech, 1861

When Abraham Lincoln chose a vice presidential candidate in 1864, he chose a Southerner, Andrew Johnson, an attempt, no doubt, to retain some sense of “balance” on the ticket (What sort of radical abolitionist would pick a man like Johnson?). Similarly, in the South, the radical secessionist from Mississippi, Jefferson Davis was balanced with a Vice President who was known to be somewhat of a moderate and originally, an opponent of secession, Alexander Stephens. In this speech, Stephens “outs” the South and makes overt what everyone knows. The Civil War is not about State’s rights so much as it is about slavery. And for him, slavery is the “cornerstone” of Southern society. He is not ambiguous in his claims about it.

“But not to be tedious in enumerating the numerous changes for the better, allow me to allude to one other-though last, not least: the new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions-African slavery as it exists among us-the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson, in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split." He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution were, that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with; but the general opinion of the men of that day was, that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the Constitution, was the prevailing idea at the time. The Constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly used against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the idea of a Government built upon it-when the "storm came and the wind blew, it fell."

Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition. [Applause.] This, our new Government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science. It is so even amongst us. Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the North who still cling to these errors with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind; from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity. One of the most striking characteristics of insanity, in many instances, is, forming correct conclusions from fancied or erroneous premises; so with the anti-slavery fanatics: their conclusions are right if their premises are. They assume that the negro is equal, and hence conclude that he is entitled to equal privileges and rights, with the white man.... I recollect once of having heard a gentleman from one of the Northern States, of great power and ability, announce in the House of Representatives, with imposing effect, that we of the South would be compelled, ultimately, to yield upon this subject of slavery; that it was as impossible to war successfully against a principle in politics, as it was in physics or mechanics. That the principle would ultimately prevail. That we, in maintaining slavery as it exists with us, were warring against a principle-a principle founded in nature, the principle of the equality of man. The reply I made to him was, that upon his own grounds we should succeed, and that he and his associates in their crusade against our institutions would ultimately fail. The truth announced, that it was as impossible to war successfully against a principle in politics as well as in physics and mechanics, I admitted, but told him it was he and those acting with him who were warring against a principle. They were attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal.

Many Governments have been founded upon the principles of certain classes; but the classes thus enslaved, were of the same race, and in violation of the laws of nature. Our system commits no such violation of nature's laws. The negro by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, [note: A reference to Genesis, 9:20-27, which was used as a justification for slavery] is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system. The architect, in the construction of buildings, lays the foundation with the proper material-the granite-then comes the brick or the marble. The substratum of our society is made of the material fitted by nature for it, and by experience we know that it is the best, not only for the superior but for the inferior race, that it should be so. It is, indeed, in conformity with the Creator. It is not for us to inquire into the wisdom of His ordinances or to question them. For His own purposes He has made one race to differ from another, as He has made "one star to differ from another in glory."

. . . Our Confederacy is founded upon principles in strict conformity with these laws. This stone which was rejected by the first builders "is become the chief stone of the corner" in our new edifice.”

Clearly, the Southern Confederacy was to be based on a racial theory in direct opposition to the one that suggested that “all men were created equal.” 

Religion and Slavery

Reverend A.T. Holmes, The Duties of Christian Masters, 1851

Having been raised in a religious tradition heavily reliant on Biblical justifications for moral and social positions, Finkleman’s section of religious justifications is a veritable minefield of disturbing rhetoric. In the four documents he supplies, we find just how rich the Bible was as a source of pro-slavery views. Reverend Holmes uses a passage from the book of Job to charge Southern masters with their religious duty towards slaves. Masters are to be their slaves’ friends, their protectors, their guides, and their teachers (though he does not suggest that slaves should be taught to read). For Reverend Holmes, masters who are thus benefactors of their slaves well-being can expect to be greeted in heaven with their reward and the gratitude of Christ: “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.” 

DeBows Review, Slavery and the Bible, 1850

It is pretty difficult to contradict what DeBows’ review is arguing here. God had many an opportunity in the Bible to be an abolitionist and appears to have declined.

“We think we can show, that the Bible teaches clearly and conclusively that the holding of slaves is right; and if so, no deduction from general principles can make it wrong, if that book is true.

"Abraham, the chosen servant of God, had his bond servants, whose condition was similar to, or worse than, that of our slaves. He considered them as his property, to be bought and sold as any other property which he owned. In Genesis xvii, 13, 23, 27, we are told that God commanded Abraham to circumcise all his bond-servants, bought with his money, and that Abraham obeyed God’s commandment on this same day. In Genesis xx, 14, we are told that Abimelech took sheep and oxen, and men servants and women servants, and gave them to Abraham. In chapter xii, verse 14, we are told that Abraham possessed sheep and oxen, and he asses, and men servants and maid servants, and she asses, and camels. Also, in Genesis xxvi, 14, Isaac is said to have had possessions of flocks and herds, and a great store of servants. In other places in Genesis, they are spoken of, but always as property.”

“God, instead of teaching Abraham, his chosen servant, that it was immoral to use and buy his slaves, demanded from him the performance of certain things, which required that the relation of master and slave should be kept up, not only during Abraham’s time, but in all future ages. And when the angel of the Lord interfered between Sarai and Hagar, it was to cause the slave to submit to punishment inflicted by her mistress. Under like circumstances, our slaves are persuaded to go to Canada.”

The argument lays out in implicit detail how frequently the issue of slavery arises in the Old and New Testaments and how pervasively, the moral teaching of those documents leans towards the establishment of a morally responsible system of slave-owning.

“Now, had the holding of slaves been a crime, Paul’s duty to Philemon would have required him to instruct Philemon, that he had no rights over Onesimus, but that the attempt to hold him in servitude was criminal; and his duty to Onesimus would have been, in such case, to send him to some foreign free country, whereby he might have escaped from oppression. But Paul sent him back. Our northern friends think that they manage these matters better than Paul did.

We find, then, that both the Old and New Testaments speak of slavery—that they do not condemn the relation, but, on the contrary, expressly allow it or create it; and they give commands and exhortations, which are based upon its legality and propriety. It can not, then, be wrong.

What we have written is founded solely upon the Bible, and can have no force, unless it is taken for truth. If that book is of divine origin, the holding of slaves is right: as that which God has permitted, recognized and commanded, cannot be inconsistent with his will.”

Abolitionist arguments are, essentially, according to this treatise, theologically unsound.

Protestant Episcopal Convention of South Carolina, Duty of Clergymen in Relation to the Marriage of Slaves, 1859

In 1859, as Chief Justice Roger Tanney was articulating his position that black people, free or black, had no civil rights, the Episcopal Church of South Carolina was wrestling with the thorny issue of slave marriages in the church. The question was about the freedom of ministers to marry black slaves who had been involuntarily separated from their previous spouses. The council concluded that Christian masters should not allow married slaves to be separated. But, if irreligious masters or impious Christian masters were to so separate married slave couples, ministers should, in the opinion of the council, regard former spouses as having died. “If masters separated slave marriages, they would be held accountable to God for the misdeed but to require persons thus separated “to remain unmarried, would involve consequences injurious to themselves, and detrimental to the best interests of our social system.”

Really, it is sort of astounding to me to see how whole denominations could actually find Biblical guidelines for maintaining a sense of Biblical order within an institution like this.

Thornton Stringfellow, The Bible Argument: Or, Slavery in the Light of Divine Revelation, 1860

First of all, how cool is a name like “Thornton Stringfellow”?

This is another classic argument (by a Baptist minister no less) of making God the author the of moral codes by an appeal to moral codes that God does not seem to object to in Biblical history.

“[Slavery] is branded by one portion of the people, who take their rule of moral rectitude from the Scriptures, as a great sin; nay the greatest of sins that exist in the nation. And they hold the obligation to exterminate it, to be paramount to all others.

If slavery be thus sinful, it behooves all Christians who are involved in the sin, to repent in dust and ashes, and wash their hands of it, without consulting with flesh and blood....

I propose, therefore, to examine the sacred volume briefly, and if I am not greatly mistaken, I shall be able to make it appear that the institution of slavery has received, in the first place,

1st. The sanction of the Almighty in the Patriarchal age.

2d. That it was incorporated into the only National Constitution which ever emanated from God.

3d. That its legality was recognized, and its relative duties regulated, by Jesus Christ in his kingdom; and

4th. That is full of mercy....

[The abolitionists'] hostility must be transferred from us to God, who established slavery by law in that kingdom over which he condescended to preside; and to Jesus, who recognized it as a relationship established in Israel by his Father, and in the Roman government by men, which he bound his followers to obey and honor.”

Stringfellow takes the story of Abraham and Hagar in the book of Genesis as a case in point. In that story, Hagar, the slave woman, runs away and God comes to her and orders her back.

“The divine oracles inform us, that the angel of God found this runaway bond-woman in the wilderness; and if God had commissioned this angel to improve this opportunity of teaching the world how much he abhorred slavery, he took a bad plan to accomplish it. For, instead of repeating a homily upon doing to others as we "would they should do unto us," and heaping reproach upon Sarah, as a hypocrite, and Abraham as a tyrant, and giving Hagar direction how she might get into Egypt, from whence (according to Abolitionism) she had been unrighteously sold into bondage, the angel addressed her as "Hagar, Sarah's maid," Gen, xvi: 1, 9; (thereby recognizing the relation of master and slave,) "and asks her, "whither wilt thou go?" and she said "I flee from the face of my mistress," Quite a wonder she honored Sarah so much as to call her mistress; but she knew nothing of abolition, and God by his angel did not become her teacher.

        We have now arrived at what may be called an abuse of the institution, in which one person is the property of another, and under their control, and subject to their authority without their consent; and if the Bible be the book, which proposes to furnish the ease which leaves it without doubt that God abhors the institution, here we are to look for it. What, therefore, is the doctrine in relation to slavery, in a case in which a rigid exercise of its arbitrary authority is called forth upon a helpless female; who might use a strong plea for protection, upon the ground of being the master's wife. In the face of this case, which is hedged around with aggravations as if God designed by it to awaken all the sympathy and all the abhorrence of that portion of mankind, who claim to have more mercy than God himself-- but I say, in view of this strong case, what is the doctrine taught? Is it that God abhors the institution of slavery; that it is a reproach to good men; that the evils of the institution can no longer be winked at among saints; that Abraham's character must not be transmitted to posterity, with this stain upon it; that Sarah must no longer be allowed to live a stranger to the abhorrence God has for such conduct as she has been guilty of to this poor helpless female? I say, what is the doctrine taught? Is it so plain that it can be easily understood? and does God teach that she is a bond-woman or slave, and that she is to recognize Sarah as her mistress, and not her equal--that she must return and submit herself unreservedly to Sarah's authority? Judge for yourself, reader, by the angel's answer: "And the angel of the Lord said unto her, Return unto thy mistress, and submit thyself under her hands."--Gen. xvi: 9.”

Clearly, to the Southern Baptists, God was not an abolitionist.

[To be continued]

Defending Slavery - Part II

Defending Slavery: Pro-Slavery Thought in the Old South by Paul Finkleman REVIEW PART TWO

[continued from the previous]

The Law in Defense of Slavery:

In this section of Finkleman’s anthology of sources on Southern slavery, we look at legal arguments supporting the “peculiar institution.”

North Carolina Supreme Court, State v. Mann (Opinion of Thomas Ruffin), 1829

In State v. Mann, a white man had been convicted of shooting a female slave that he had leased from the slave’s owner. The lower court had determined that so injuring the “property” of another owner was a crime. In this decision, the North Carolina Supreme court reversed that decision, insisting that as difficult as the case was, the courts had to protect the fundamental right of masters to discipline slaves (the slave in this case had been shot while running away to escape a beating.) Justice Ruffin dislikes the conclusion he must draw but he sees no alternative:

“But in the actual condition of things, it must be so. There is no remedy. This discipline belongs to the state of slavery. They cannot be disunited, without abrogating at once the rights of the master, and absolving the slave from his subjection. It constitutes the curse of slavery to both the bond and free portions of our population. But it is inherent in the relation of master and slave.

… That there may be particular instances of cruelty and deliberate barbarity, where, in conscience the law might properly interfere, is most probable. The difficulty is to determine, where a Court may properly begin. Merely in the abstract it may well be asked, which power of the master accords with right. The answer will probably sweep away all of them. But we cannot look at the matter in that light. The truth is, that we are forbidden to enter upon a train of general reasoning on the subject. We cannot allow the right of the master to be brought into discussion in the Courts of Justice. The slave, to remain a slave, must be made sensible, that there is no appeal from his master; that his power is in no instance, usurped; but is conferred by the laws of man at least, if not by the law of God. The danger would be great indeed, if the tribunals of justice should be called on to graduate the punishment appropriate to every temper, and every dereliction of menial duty.

. . . I repeat, that I would gladly have avoided this ungrateful question. But being brought to it, the Court is compelled to declare, that while slavery exists amongst us in its present state, or until it shall seem fit to the Legislature to interpose express enactments to the contrary, it will be the imperative duty of the Judges to recognize the full dominion of the owner over the slave, except where the exercise of it is forbidden by statute. And this we do upon the ground, that this dominion is essential to the value of slaves as property, to the security of the master, and the public tranquility, greatly dependent upon their subordination; and in fine, as most effectually securing the general protection and comfort of the slaves themselves.”

For the benefit of the master, the society, and the slave, slaves must know that their masters can shoot them for running away from a flogging. That was the bottom line in North Carolina.

U.S. Supreme Court, Dred Scott v. Sandford (Opinion of Roger B. Taney), 1857

Most students of American history will be exposed to the Dred Scott case and its ramification for the onset of the Civil War. Dred Scott was a slave who had been brought to a free State and sued to retain his freedom. In an attempt to end the conflict over slavery, Justice Tanney made it clear in his decision that no black man in America, whether slave or free, had standing as a citizen. Technically, they had no constitutionally guaranteed rights that a “white man was bound to respect.”

" . . . We think they [people of African ancestry] are . . . not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word "citizens" in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States. . . ."

Tanney’s argument is that the framers of the Constitution of the United States did not include slaves in their definition of “people” (certainly, Jefferson had not and he wrote the Declaration). His is an essentially conservative argument. Because black people had not been regarded as citizens, they need not be and perhaps should not be so regarded. Not until the constitution was change to explicitly include them anyway.

Thomas R. R. Cobb, What Is Slavery, and Its Foundation in the Natural Law, 1858

Thomas Cobb, I might note, died at the battle of Fredericksburg defending his ideas. His argument is, what Finkleman calls, “the highpoint of the defense of slavery.” In this piece, he does not simply argue that slavery is an unfortunate consequence of black “inferiority.” He goes on to argue that it is a positive good for them.

“The German student, immersed for years amid the ponderous tomes of some university library, finds nothing in his voluntary imprisonment uncongenial to his nature. But the American Indian submitting to the same fate, would do violence to the law of his nature, because his pursuit tends nothing to the great end of his existence, the greatest happiness of which he is susceptible.  And hence slavery may be utterly inconsistent with the law of nature when applied to one race of men, and yet be perfectly consistent with the nature of others.

"Again. We must be careful to distinguish between the state of nature and the law of nature. Many things are contrary to the state of nature, which are not contrary to the law of nature. A celebrated Scotch commentator applies this distinction clearly and philosophically to the subject of slavery: "It is indeed contrary to the state of nature, by which all men were equal and free; but it is not repugnant to the law of nature, which does not command men to remain in their native freedom, nor forbid the preserving persons at the expense of their liberty,"

"In this view, is Negro Slavery consistent with the Law of Nature? We confine the inquiry to negro slavery, because, upon the principles already established, it is undoubtedly true, that the enslavement by one man or one race, of another man or another race, physically, intellectually, and morally, their equals, is contrary to the law of nature, because it promotes not their happiness, and tends not to their perfection. Much of the confusion upon this subject has arisen from a failure to notice this very palpable distinction."

". . . But we recognize in the negro a man, endowed with reason, will, and accountability, and in order to justify his subjection we must inquire of his intellectual and moral nature, and must be satisfied that its development is thereby promoted. If this be true, if the physical, intellectual, and moral development of the African race are promoted by a state of slavery, and their happiness secured to a greater extent than if left at liberty, then their enslavement is consistent with the law of nature, and violative of none of its provisions. Is the negro's own happiness thereby best promoted? Is he therein most useful to his fellow man ? Is he thereby more surely led to the discharge of his duty to God? These, as we have seen, are the great objects of the law of nature, "God, our neighbor, and ourselves."

". . . Carlyle places this question in an eccentric but plain view, addressing himself to the emancipated negroes of the West Indies: " You are not slaves now ! nor do I wish, if it can be avoided, to see you slaves again ; but  decidedly you will have to be servants to those who are born wiser than you, that are born lords of you ; servants to the whites if they are (as what mortal man can doubt they are ?) born wiser than you. That, you may depend on it, my obscure black friends, is and was always the law of the world for you and for all men to be servants, the more foolish of us to the more wise Heaven's laws are not repealable by earth, however earth may try?"

Racial Theory and Slavery

The last portion of Finkleman’s anthology is probably the most painful because it is the realm of argument that has been most pervasive – extending in influence long after slaves were emancipated and slavery abolished. These documents are going to carry over well into Reconstruction and beyond in their effects.

Samuel Cartwright, Report on the Diseases of and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race, 1851

I can hardly bring myself to use up bandwidth on this guy’s pseudo-scientific ideas. I have no doubt that many a Cletus, Beuford, or Jedidiah Jackson headed off to the battlefields of the Civil War with this baloney in his saddlebag.

“They always prefer the same kind of government, which we call slavery but which is actually an improvement on the government of their forfathers . . . The reason for this is found in unalterable physiological laws. . . . there is both wisdom, mercy and justice in the decree dooming him to be servant of servants, as the decree is in conformity to his nature. Anatomy and physiology have been interrogated, and the response is, that the Ethiopian, or Canaanite, is unfitted, from his organization and the physiological laws predicated on that organization, for the responsible duties of a free man, but, like the child, is only fitted for a state of dependence and subordination. . . . A knowledge of the great primary truth, that the negro is a slave by nature, and can never be happy, industrious, moral or religious, in any other condition than the one he was intended to fill, is of great importance to the theologian, the statesman, and to all those who are at heart seeking to promote his temporal and future welfare.”

You get the idea. Cartwright goes on to claim that the desire of slaves to run away is actually a disease of the mind (he calls it Drapetomania – or, runaway crazy). Obviously if a person’s greatest happiness is to be found in enslavement, the desire to run away from it must be a pathology. The disease, says Cartwright, is generally caused by white people who try to convince black people that they are equal. Freedom, says Dr. Cartwright, is actually poison to a slave’s happiness.

William J. Grayson, The Hireling and the Slave, 1854

The Hireling and the Slave is a long poem that disses all the more influential abolitionists (particularly Harriet Beecher Stowe) and eulogizes the “good fortune” that has resulted from the Afrian slave trade. IT reminds me somewhat of Rudyard Kippling’s White Man’s Burden.

George Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South, 1854, and Cannibals All! 1857

By the mid to late 1850’s, the defenses of slavery are getting more and more overtly racist in their nature. Adult slaves are like children IT would be the epitome of heartless to abandon them to the scary world of free life. “We need never have white slaves in the South because we have black ones,” he says.

“If ever the abolitionists succeed in thoroughly imbuing the world with their doctrines and opinions, all religion, all government, all order will be slowly but surely subverted and destroyed.

He joins the refrain of those who have argued above that “the slaves’ liberty is a curse to himself and a greater curse to the society around him.”

Josiah C. Nott, Instincts of Races, 1866

In this last document, Josiah Nott argues, after the war is over, that the South’s position with respect to its African American populations was the correct one (thus demonstrating just how much the Civil War accomplished)

“Is it not a law of nature, that every permanent animal form carries a moral of its own, which cannot be obliterated, changed, or transferred to another, so long as the physique stands? Can any reflecting man doubt that the instincts of the bulldog, greyhound, pointer, or hound, are inseparable from its anatomical structure; or believe that one can be educated to perform the duties of another? … It being conceded then that the physique of the races of men is permanent through the ages past and to come, the next question to be examined is the permanence of the moral which has accompanied each type in by-gone ages.”

For Nott, “no human power can change the fiat of the Almighty.”

“He brought the races of men and of animals into existence. He gave them moral and physical laws, and all the powers of the Freedman’s Bureau or gates of hell cannot prevail against them.”

You can see why Ophrah Winfrey says that “excellence is the best deterrence to racism.” Dennis Leary says that racism is not born so much as taught. His evidence? His one year old son only hates one thing; naps.

Question for Comment: According to Richard Lapchick, the NBA in 2011 was composed of 83 percent non-white players, including 78 percent black, four percent Latino, and one percent Asian; 17 percent of the players were white. Something like 65% of NFL players are African American. 8.5% of major league baseball players are black (down from 17% in 1990). 27% of MLB players now are Hispanic. There are six African American CEO’s of Fortune 500 companies in the U.S. (less than 1%). Forbes says that there are six black billionaires. According to Wikipedia, in 2008 the breakdown for adults under correctional control was as follows: one out of 18 men, one in 89 women, one in 11 African-Americans (9.2 percent), one in 27 Latinos (3.7 percent), and one in 45 Caucasians (2.2 percent).

Men are five times more likely to go to jail than women. Black people are four times more likely to be incarcerated than white people. Can these statistics be used to prove or disprove racial stereotypes of the pre-Civil War era? Can anything be proven about the relationship between race and ability other than that it has been used to keep people from being allowed to acheive their potential?

“The true story of a false prophet”

Kumare REIEW

Kumare tells the story of a man pretending to be a guru to people looking for one. Thus, this movie is about the intentional deception of real people. For that reason, for me, it was difficult to watch and almost impossible to finish. As convincing as Vikram Gandhi is in explaining his good intentions (personally I think he makes those good intentions up half-way through the film because he knows he will not be able to extricate himself from his rather heinous imposture and make a movie otherwise), I don’t think he understands just how damaging it can be to a person to be deceived, particularly with respect to the deeper things in life.

In this documentary, Vikram takes upon himself the identity of an Indian guru, dispensing wisdom that he does not believe through a character that is entirely fictional. In doing so, he elicits empathetic and intimate responses from those who connect (and connect deeply, they believe) with his alter-ego, Kumare. Vikram has a premise that people could benefit from a fake guru just as much as a real one. If he is proved right, his “truth” (the teaching of Kumare if you will) will simply be that we all can be a guru and should stop looking for our inner guru in others. This is his hypothesis essentially – that all spiritualties are essentially placebos that work because they are believed rather than are believed because they work. I grant that it is an interesting experiment in the abstract. But if you have ever been the lab-rat in someone else’s experiment, you know that for some of his followers, the revelation that he is not, and never was, a guru from some Indian village – that he is really an American born film-maker from New Jersey will no doubt be shattering. I suspect that not a few of them will need some serious psychotherapy subsequent to their finding out that they were deeply duped.

I suspect that the whole guru-follower relationship is a demonstration of the way that we humans tend to project our needs out into our universes. We need, therefore someone else must be a fulfillment of that need. In meeting a person willing to absorb the projection, who is willing to dishonestly pretend that they are what we need, we become attached to that projection that we have embedded, with their permission, into them. At some point in time in life we need to cure ourselves of this habit and for many of us, the cure is surgically deep, profoundly wounding, and anguishingly painful (I invented an adjective there). One can tell from the last scene of the film that a number of Kumare’s devotees experienced a profound betrayal. Personally, I think the impact was deeper than the film makers let on.

In my experience, the real damage that is done when we put our trust in someone and discover that they were “doing some experiment” is not that we can no longer trust anyone. It is that we can no longer trust ourselves to know who is trustworthy. We do not come away from a betrayal saying “no one can be trusted.” We know that there are people who can be. We come away saying “I can’t be trusted to know who can be trusted.” And that is the harm that Vikram (a.k.a. Kumare) inflicts on people. Still, two thirds of his followers seem to trust him subsequent to his “unveiling.” And maybe, that sort of trust is what made them so inclined to follow him in the first place.

Just the other day, someone accused me of being dishonest . . . of pretending to be someone I was not (years ago). I have been thinking about it and quite honestly, I disagreed. I think people do change and so long as they tell you when they do (painful as that may be) – so long as they tell you before you make irrevocable commitments, I am not sure that we have a right to condemn them (or ourselves). As for Kumare, I think it was unfair of him to show this film or to make money from it. I understand that it is likely to inspire good conversations about spirituality and trust, but it was fundamentally wrong to make fools of sincere people – to document them as they opened their hearts – knowing that they were doing so as a consequence of an active intentional deception. I know that the makers of the movie believe that they have done good work (see interview) but personally, I think they should donate the profits to the therapy of the people they may have injured.

Question for Comment: Should a person ever pretend to be what another person needs?

"Each soul must depend wholly on itself.”

Elizabeth Cady Stanton: “The Solitude of Self” and “Address to the New York State Legislature, 1860.”

In an 1887 speech before the U.S. Senate,  Missouri Democrat George G. Vest articulated rather classical arguments against granting women the right to vote. Here, in a few paragraphs, is the essence of that argument:

“For my part I want when I go to my home—when I turn from the arena where man contends with man for what we call the prizes of this paltry world—I want to go back, not to be received in the masculine embrace of some female ward politician, but to the earnest, loving look and touch of a true woman. I want to go back to the jurisdiction of the wife, the mother; and instead of a lecture upon finance or the tariff, or upon the construction of the Constitution, I want those blessed, loving details of domestic life and domestic love. . . .

I speak now respecting women as a sex. I believe that they are better than men, but I do not believe they are adapted to the political work of this world. I do not believe that the Great Intelligence ever intended them to invade the sphere of work given to men, tearing down and destroying all the best influences for which God has intended them.

The great evil in this country to-day is in emotional suffrage. The great danger to-day is in excitable suffrage. If the voters of this country could think always coolly, and if they could deliberate, if they could go by judgment and not by passion, our institutions would survive forever, eternal as the foundations of the continent itself; but massed together, subject to the excitements of mobs and of these terrible political contests that come upon us from year to year under the autonomy of our Government, what would be the result if suffrage were given to the women of the United States?

Women are essentially emotional. It is no disparagement to them they are so. It is no more insulting to say that women are emotional than to say that they are delicately constructed physically and unfitted to become soldiers or workmen under the sterner, harder pursuits of life.

What we want in this country is to avoid emotional suffrage, and what we need is to put more logic into public affairs and less feeling. There are spheres in which feeling should be paramount. There are kingdoms in which the heart should reign supreme. That kingdom belongs to woman. The realm of sentiment, the realm of love, the realm of the gentler and the holier and kindlier attributes that make the name of wife, mother, and sister next to that of God himself.

I would not, and I say it deliberately, degrade woman by giving her the right of suffrage. I mean the word in its full signification, because I believe that woman as she is to-day, the queen of the home and of hearts, is above the political collisions of this world, and should always be kept above them. . . .

It is said that the suffrage is to be given to enlarge the sphere of woman’s influence. Mr. President, it would destroy her influence. It would take her down from that pedestal where she is today, influencing as a mother the minds of her offspring, influencing by her gentle and kindly caress the action of her husband toward the good and pure.”

Source: Senator George G. Vest (Democrat, Missouri), Congressional Record, 48th Congress, 2d Session (25 January 1887): 986. Reprinted in Aileen S. Kraditor, ed., Up From the Pedestal: Selected Writings in the History of American Feminism (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1968), 194–196.

This is what Elizabeth Cady Stanton was up against when she began the women’s rights movement in Seneca Falls, NY. I would like to take a moment to analyze the arguments she uses in two of her most widely read speeches. The essence of the argument in “The Solitude of Self” is that human beings are essentially solitary entities in this world. Each person is a unit and must needs experience life as one. A woman is, as Stanton puts it, “an imaginary Robinson Crusoe, with her woman, Friday, on a solitary island. Her rights under such circumstances are to use all her faculties for her own safety and happiness.”

“The strongest reason for giving woman all the opportunities for higher education, for the full development of her faculties, her forces of mind and body; for giving her the most enlarged freedom of thought and action; a complete emancipation from all forms of bondage, of custom, dependence, superstition; from all the crippling influences of fear—is the solitude and personal responsibility of her own individual life. The strongest reason why we ask for woman a voice in the government under which she lives; in the religion she is asked to believe; equality in social life, where she is the chief factor; a place in the trades and professions, where she may earn her bread, is because of her birthright to self-sovereignty; because, as an individual, she must rely on herself. No matter how much women prefer to lean, to be protected and supported, nor how much men desire to have them do so, they must make the voyage of life alone, and for safety in an emergency, they must know something of the laws of navigation. To guide our own craft, we must be captain, pilot, engineer; with chart and compass to stand at the wheel; to watch the winds and waves, and know when to take in the sail, and to read the signs in the firmament over all. It matters not whether the solitary voyager is man or woman; nature, having endowed them equally, leaves them to their own skill and judgment in the hour of danger, and, if not equal to the occasion, alike they perish.”

Because we all live in “the solitude of self” throughout most of our lives, we need to have the freedom to pursue our own interests untrammeled by the will of others. Because only we know how we can best contribute to the society we live in, we must be left free to develop ourselves in the way that we know we can contribute best. Since we go through life alone, it is the “height of cruelty” to not empower each person to do so to the best of their ability.

“Inasmuch, then, as woman shares equally the joys and sorrows of time and eternity, is it not the height of presumption in man to propose to represent her at the ballot box and the throne of grace, to do her voting in the state, her praying in the church, and to assume the position of high priest at the family altar?”

Stanton is unrelenting in her refrain. We are alone. We must be empowered to act as individuals. We cannot depend on others to swim for us when we are washed overboard. We must be able to save ourselves.

“The talk of sheltering woman from the fierce storms of life is the sheerest mockery, for they beat on her from every point of the compass, just as they do on man, and with more fatal results, for he has been trained to protect himself, to resist, and to conquer. Such are the facts in human experience, the responsibilities of individual sovereignty. Rich and poor, intelligent and ignorant, wise and foolish, virtuous and vicious, man and woman; it is ever the same, each soul must depend wholly on itself.”

“Whatever may be said of man’s protecting power in ordinary conditions, amid all the terrible disasters by land and sea, in the supreme moments of danger, alone woman must ever meet the horrors of the situation. The Angel of Death even makes no royal pathway for her. Man’s love and sympathy enter only into the sunshine of our lives. In that solemn solitude of self, that links us with the immeasurable and the eternal, each soul lives alone forever.”

“. . . Such is individual life. Who, I ask you, can take, dare take on himself the rights, the duties, the responsibilities of another human soul?”

In Stanton’s speech to the New York State Legislature in 1854, she confronts the male dominated assembly with the fact that “times are a’changin.”

“The tyrant, Custom, has been summoned before the bar of Common Sense. His Majesty no longer awes the multitude -- his sceptre is broken -- his crown is trampled in the dust -- the sentence of death is pronounced upon him. All nations, ranks and classes have, in turn, questioned and repudiated his authority; and now), that the monster is chained and caged, timid woman, on tiptoe, comes to look him in the facet and to demand of her brave sires and sons, who have struck stout blows for liberty, if, in this change of dynasty, she, too, shall find relief.”

Still, six years later, she returns to ask again, pointing out to them that by asking for rights for women, she is not asking to reduce the supply that men have attained. “There is a kind of nervous unrest always manifested by those in power,” she says,

“whenever new claims are started by those out of their own immediate class. The philosophy of this is very plain. They imagine that if the rights of this new class be granted, they must, of necessity, sacrifice something of what they already possess. They cannot divest themselves of the idea that rights are very much like lands, stocks, bonds and mortgages, and that if every new claimant be satisfied, the supply of human rights must in time run low. You might as well carp at the birth of every child, lest there should not be enough air left to inflate your lungs; at the success of every scholar, for fear that your draughts at the fountain of knowledge, could not be so long and deep; at the glory of every hero, lest there be no glory left for you.”

Just as it would be impossible to shoot the black stripes of a zebra and keep the white stripes healthy, so also it is impossible to empower men and not women and expect that men will be better off.

“In Paradise, man and woman were placed together, and so they must ever be. They must sink or rise together. If man is low and wretched and vile, woman cannot escape the contagion, and any atmosphere that is unfit for woman to breathe, is not fit for man.”

“But women need men to protect them,” say the men of power. “Only because you keep making them weak,” Stanton replies.

“There has been a great deal written and said about protection. We, as a class, are tired of one kind of protection, that which leaves us everything to do, to dare and to suffer, and strips us of all means for its accomplishment.”

I can see a lot of fodder for a lot of class discussions here.

Question for Comment: Do men want self-sufficient women? Do women want protective men?

“You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.”

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas REVIEW

“You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.”

There is a famous passage in the biography of Harriet Tubman that Sarah Bradford wrote in 1886 that speaks to Harriet’s belief in divine Providence.

 "And so as I lay so sick on my bed, from Christmas till March, I was always praying for poor ole master. 'Pears like I didn't do nothing but pray for ole master. 'Oh, Lord, convert ole master;' 'Oh, dear Lord, change dat man's heart, and make him a Christian.' And all the time he was bringing men to look at me, and dey stood there saying what dey would give, and what dey would take, and all I could say was, 'Oh, Lord, convert ole master.' Den I heard dat as soon as I was able to move I was to be sent with my brudders, in the chain-gang to de far South. Then I changed my prayer, and I said, 'Lord, if you ain't never going to change dat man's heart, kill him, Lord, and take him out of de way, so he won't do no more mischief.' Next ting I heard ole master was dead; and he died just as he had lived, a wicked, bad man. Oh, den it 'peared like I would give de world full of silver and gold, if I had it, to bring dat pore soul back, I would give myself; I would give eberyting ! But he was gone, I couldn't pray for him no more."

Harriet Tubman clearly believed that God was working with her to free slaves and end the system of slavery. Similarly, Frederick Douglas’ most important conversion moments involve theological beliefs about God and the divine will with respect to slavery. “I may be deemed superstitious, and even egotistical, in regarding this event as a special interposition of divine Providence in my favor,” says Douglas,

“But I should be false to the earliest sentiments of my soul, if I suppressed the opinion. I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and incur my own abhorrence. From my earliest recollection, I date the entertainment of a deep conviction that slavery would not always be able to hold me within its foul embrace; and in the darkest hours of my career in slavery, this living word of faith and spirit of hope departed not from me, but remained like ministering angels to cheer me through the gloom. This good spirit was from God, and to him I offer thanksgiving and praise.”

Douglas’ liberation is an outworking of the maxim “Can’t kills and can cures” because it is the faith that tries that unlocks the storehouses of divine aid. Douglas’ narrative asserts first and foremost that the divine wind is at the back of freedom. But secondly, it asserts that men who believe so, must take a stand and fight to make it so. In his famous fight with the slave-breaker, Mr. Covey, Douglas argues that one must act on beliefs to break their hold. Slavery, he holds, is not a condition of servitude so much as a condition of mind that passivism creates. “This battle with Mr. Covey was the turning-point in my career as a slave” he writes,

“It rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of my own manhood. It recalled the departed self-confidence, and inspired me again with a determination to be free. The gratification afforded by the triumph was a full compensation for whatever else might follow, even death itself. He only can understand the deep satisfaction which I experienced, who has himself repelled by force the bloody arm of slavery. I felt as I never felt before. It was a glorious resurrection, from the tomb of slavery, to the heaven of freedom. My long-crushed spirit rose, cowardice departed, bold defiance took its place; and I now resolved that, however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact.”

Two other propositions keep recurring in the narrative to take the reader by surprise. The first is that religion of the Southern variety is no friend to slavery and the second is that slavery as a system is a direct attack on the quality of life that white owners so hope that slavery will improve. Slavery, says Douglas, makes wretched people of slave-holders and religion cannot save them from that fate if they continue in it.

“My new mistress proved to be all she appeared when I first met her at the door, — a woman of the kindest heart and finest feelings. She had never had a slave under her control previously to myself, and prior to her marriage she had been dependent upon her own industry for a living. She was by trade a weaver; and by constant application to her business, she had been in a good degree preserved from the blighting and dehumanizing effects of slavery.”

“But, alas! this kind heart had but a short time to remain such. The fatal poison of irresponsible power was already in her hands, and soon commenced its infernal work. That cheerful eye, under the influence of slavery, soon became red with rage; that voice, made all of sweet accord, changed to one of harsh and horrid discord; and that angelic face gave place to that of a demon.”

“Slavery proved as injurious to her as it did to me. When I went there, she was a pious, warm, and tender-hearted woman. There was no sorrow or suffering for which she had not a tear. She had bread for the hungry, clothes for the naked, and comfort for every mourner that came within her reach. Slavery soon proved its ability to divest her of these heavenly qualities. Under its influence, the tender heart became stone, and the lamblike disposition gave way to one of tiger-like fierceness. The first step in her downward course was in her ceasing to instruct me. She now commenced to practise her husband's precepts. She finally became even more violent in her opposition than her husband himself.”

“Bad as all slaveholders are, we seldom meet one destitute of every element of character commanding respect. My master was one of this rare sort. I do not know of one single noble act ever performed by him. The leading trait in his character was meanness; and if there were any other element in his nature, it was made subject to this. He was mean; and, like most other mean men, he lacked the ability to conceal his meanness.”

“In August, 1832, my master attended a Methodist camp-meeting held in the Bay-side, Talbot county, and there experienced religion. I indulged a faint hope that his conversion would lead him to emancipate his slaves, and that, if he did not do this, it would, at any rate, make him more kind and humane. I was disappointed in both these respects. It neither made him to be humane to his slaves, nor to emancipate them. If it had any effect on his character, it made him more cruel and hateful in all his ways; for I believe him to have been a much worse man after his conversion than before.”

“I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the south is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes, — a justifier of the most appalling barbarity, — a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds, — and a dark shelter under, which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection. Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me. For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them the meanest and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others. It was my unhappy lot not only to belong to a religious slaveholder, but to live in a community of such religionists.”

“Mr. Hopkins was even worse than Mr. Weeden. His chief boast was his ability to manage slaves. The peculiar feature of his government was that of whipping slaves in advance of deserving it. He always managed to have one or more of his slaves to whip every Monday morning. He did this to alarm their fears, and strike terror into those who escaped. His plan was to whip for the smallest offences, to prevent the commission of large ones. Mr. Hopkins could always find some excuse for whipping a slave. It would astonish one, unaccustomed to a slaveholding life, to see with what wonderful ease a slaveholder can find things, of which to make occasion to whip a slave. A mere look, word, or motion, — a mistake, accident, or want of power, — are all matters for which a slave may be whipped at any time. Does a slave look dissatisfied? It is said, he has the devil in him, and it must be whipped out. Does he speak loudly when spoken to by his master? Then he is getting high-minded, and should be taken down a button-hole lower. Does he forget to pull off his hat at the approach of a white person? Then he is wanting in reverence, and should be whipped for it. Does he ever venture to vindicate his conduct, when censured for it? Then he is guilty of impudence, — one of the greatest crimes of which a slave can be guilty. Does he ever venture to suggest a different mode of doing things from that pointed out by his master? He is indeed presumptuous, and getting above himself; and nothing less than a flogging will do for him. Does he, while ploughing, break a plough, — or, while hoeing, break a hoe? It is owing to his carelessness, and for it a slave must always be whipped. Mr. Hopkins could always find something of this sort to justify the use of the lash, and he seldom failed to embrace such opportunities. There was not a man in the whole county, with whom the slaves who had the getting their own home, would not prefer to live, rather than with this Rev. Mr. Hopkins. And yet there was not a man any where round, who made higher professions of religion, or was more active in revivals, — more attentive to the class, love-feast, prayer and preaching meetings, or more devotional in his family, — that prayed earlier, later, louder, and longer, — than this same reverend slave-driver, Rigby Hopkins.”

In the Spring of 1862, Union forces began to win some decisively important victories in the South (fortifications along the Mississippi River and the city of New Orleans for example). Many confederate clerics began to suspect that these reversals were caused by divine disapproval of Southern slavery – not in principle but in practice. “In other words, they blamed the fall of New Orleans on the excesses of slave owners — though never on slavery itself,” says Thom Bassett in a New York Times article about Southern beliefs about Providence,

“For example, even while he was convinced God ultimately would vindicate the Confederacy, the influential Baptist minister Isaac Taylor Tichenor spoke for many Southerners when he addressed the Alabama General Assembly in 1863. “We have failed to discharge our duties to our slaves,” he charged. “Marriage is a divine institution, and yet marriage exists among our slaves dependent upon the will of the master,” leaving God’s command perversely “subject to the passion, avarice, or caprice of their owners.”

Similarly, the theologian and college president John Leadley Dagg saw Confederate setbacks as “fatherly chastisements, designed for our profit.” Nevertheless, he was insistent during the war that the failure to protect slave marriages “is only part of the general evil. We have not labored, in every possible way, to promote the welfare, for time and eternity of our slave population, as of dependent and helpless immortals whom God has placed in our power and in our mercy.”

“A year after the war ended Dagg would insist that the Confederacy’s defeat was due to white Southerners’ failure to take proper care of their black charges. The war was “a scourge of God,” according to Bishop John McGill of Richmond, Va., inflicted on the Confederacy for its failure to respect slave marriages and protect slave families.”

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/27/the-south-the-war-and-christian-slavery/

Frederick Douglas’s narrative makes the case that improving the lives of the slave would not have helped. For Douglas, reform of the system would have proven counter-productive. “I have observed this in my experience of slavery,” he says,

“ — that whenever my condition was improved, instead of its increasing my contentment, it only increased my desire to be free, and set me to thinking of plans to gain my freedom. I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason. He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery; he must be made to feel that slavery is right; and he can be brought to that only when he ceases to be a man.”

For him, slavery requires a repression of mind and repression of the mind is a form of torture. Denying a person the ability to think – to learn – to develop their minds – is akin to denying them food, air, water, or sleep or love. It makes them want to kill themselves.  In the passage below, he describes the effect that reading abolitionist arguments had on him.

“The moral which I gained from the dialogue was the power of truth over the conscience of even a slaveholder. What I got from Sheridan was a bold denunciation of slavery, and a powerful vindication of human rights. The reading of these documents enabled me to utter my thoughts, and to meet the arguments brought forward to sustain slavery; but while they relieved me of one difficulty, they brought on another even more painful than the one of which I was relieved. The more I read, the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers. I could regard them in no other light than a band of successful robbers, who had left their homes, and gone to Africa, and stolen us from our homes, and in a strange land reduced us to slavery. I loathed them as being the meanest as well as the most wicked of men. As I read and contemplated the subject, behold! that very discontentment which Master Hugh had predicted would follow my learning to read had already come, to torment and sting my soul to unutterable anguish. As I writhed under it, I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing. It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy. It opened my eyes to the horrible pit, but to no ladder upon which to get out.

In moments of agony, I envied my fellow-slaves for their stupidity. I have often wished myself a beast. I preferred the condition of the meanest reptile to my own. Any thing, no matter what, to get rid of thinking! It was this everlasting thinking of my condition that tormented me. There was no getting rid of it. It was pressed upon me by every object within sight or hearing, animate or inanimate. The silver trump of freedom had roused my soul to eternal wakefulness. Freedom now appeared, to disappear no more forever. It was heard in every sound, and seen in everything. It was ever present to torment me with a sense of my wretched condition. I saw nothing without seeing it, I heard nothing without hearing it, and felt nothing without feeling it. It looked from every star, it smiled in every calm, breathed in every wind, and moved in every storm.

I often found myself regretting my own existence, and wishing myself dead; and but for the hope of being free, I have no doubt but that I should have killed myself, or done something for which I should have been killed.”

Never was he more discontent than when he was within sight of freedom. Standing by the Chesapeake and viewing ship sails on the horizon one day, he exclaimed,

“O that I were free! O, that I were on one of your gallant decks, and under your protecting wing! Alas! betwixt me and you, the turbid waters roll. Go on, go on. O that I could also go! Could I but swim! If I could fly! O, why was I born a man, of whom to make a brute! The glad ship is gone; she hides in the dim distance. I am left in the hottest hell of unending slavery. O God, save me! God, deliver me! Let me be free! Is there any God? Why am I a slave? I will run away. I will not stand it. Get caught, or get clear, I'll try it. I had as well die with ague as the fever. I have only one life to lose. I had as well be killed running as die standing.”

It is my opinion that Frederick Douglas’ strong mind gave him the ability to cope with the hardships of slavery. It is only when he realizes that his capacity for coping has limits that he determines that he must escape. In this sense, the slave-breaker, Mr. Covey was a crucial catalyst in his eventual attempt. “Mr. Covey succeeded in breaking me,” he says,

“I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute!”

It is here that he realizes that he is not strong enough to stay in slavery and remain a man. He realizes that slavery has the power to kill his belief in his own humanity and thus, he must leave it behind. Staying in the system and struggling with it will no longer “work.” Ironically, in that sense, he shares much in common with the first pilgrims who concluded the same about staying in England. They could not become who they were becoming and stay in that place.

There are many passages of Douglas’ autobiography that should be standard reading for American schoolchildren. I am particularly fond of his account of his decision to learn to read and thus I will close with it.

“Very soon after I went to live with Mr. and Mrs. Auld, she very kindly commenced to teach me the A, B, C. After I had learned this, she assisted me in learning to spell words of three or four letters. Just at this point of my progress, Mr. Auld found out what was going on, and at once forbade Mrs. Auld to instruct me further, telling her, among other things, that it was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read. To use his own words, further, he said, "If you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell. A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master — to do as he is told to do. Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world. Now," said he, "if you teach that nigger (speaking of myself) how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master. As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy." These words sank deep into my heart, stirred up sentiments within that lay slumbering, and called into existence an entirely new train of thought. It was a new and special revelation, explaining dark and mysterious things, with which my youthful understanding had struggled, but struggled in vain. I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty — to wit, the white man's power to enslave the black man. It was a grand achievement, and I prized it highly. From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom. It was just what I wanted, and I got it at a time when I the least expected it. Whilst I was saddened by the thought of losing the aid of my kind mistress, I was gladdened by the invaluable instruction which, by the merest accident, I had gained from my master. Though conscious of the difficulty of learning without a teacher, I set out with high hope, and a fixed purpose, at whatever cost of trouble, to learn how to read. The very decided manner with which he spoke, and strove to impress his wife with the evil consequences of giving me instruction, served to convince me that he was deeply sensible of the truths he was uttering. It gave me the best assurance that I might rely with the utmost confidence on the results which, he said, would flow from teaching me to read. What he most dreaded, that I most desired. What he most loved, that I most hated. That which to him was a great evil, to be carefully shunned, was to me a great good, to be diligently sought; and the argument which he so warmly urged, against my learning to read, only served to inspire me with a desire and determination to learn. In learning to read, I owe almost as much to the bitter opposition of my master, as to the kindly aid of my mistress. I acknowledge the benefit of both.”

Question for Comment: Have you ever been in a system, or a job, or a relationship, or a status that you found you could no longer cope with? Or that you found was destroying you? How did you get out? Have you ever had to leave a place to become who you were becoming?  

'Speak unto the children of Israel that they go forward.'

Half a Century by Jane Gray Swisshelm REVIEW

Jane Gray Swisshelm was an abolitionist and women’s rights advocate who demonstrates just how far into discrimination a human being can carry a battle if they determine to take the restraints off the throttle of their initiative. She was born in 1815 and as a child, remembers a minister of a church refusing to serve communion to “all slave-holders and horse thieves and other dishonest persons.” As a 15 year old, she used to canvas the neighborhood collecting names for anti-slavery petitions. She remembers meeting a variety of arguments at the doors: “Niggers have no souls”; “The Jews had slaves”; “Noah cursed Canaan” and she developed a personal response to each of them. Responses that would serve her well later in life.

Jane married at the age of 19 or 20 and clearly, though her husband was, she says, almost always gentle and caring (evidence suggests that he could be a real jerk), he was never capable of the heights of imagination and mind that she often occupied. Soon after marriage, she discovered that she had a gift for and a love of painting. She began to experience some portion of the frustration that slaves must have felt in never being able to actualize their potential. “Not only once did I do this,” she says of her constant wandering from maternal duties,

“but again and again, the fire went out or the bread ran over in the pans, while I painted and dreamed. My conscience began to trouble me. Housekeeping was "woman's sphere," although I had never then heard the words, for no woman had gotten out of it, to be hounded back; but I knew my place, and scorned to leave it. I tried to think I could paint without neglect of duty. It did not occur to me that painting was a duty for a married woman! Had the passion seized me before marriage, no other love could have come between me and art; but I felt that it was too late, as my life was already devoted to another object—housekeeping.

It was a hard struggle. I tried to compromise, but experience soon deprived me of that hope, for to paint was to be oblivious of all other things. In my doubt, I met one of those newspaper paragraphs with which men are wont to pelt women into subjection: "A man does not marry an artist, but a housekeeper." This fitted my case, and my doom was sealed.

I put away my brushes; resolutely crucified my divine gift, and while it hung writhing on the cross, spent my best years and powers cooking cabbage. "A servant of servants shall she be," must have been spoken of women, not negroes.”

She began to feel the pain of restricted achievement.

“Is that Christianity which has so long said to one-half of the race, "Thou shalt not use any gift of the Creator, if it be not approved by thy brother; and unto man, not God, thou shalt ever turn and ask, 'What wilt thou have me to do?'"

She looked to her husband for permission to pursue her transcendentalist “path” and the support to do it. She looked to him for companionship and found an intellectual lethargy that required her to back off her own passion for personal growth. “It was not only my art-love which must be sacrificed to my duty as a wife,” she writes,

“but my literary tastes must go with it. "The husband is the head of the wife." To be head, he must be superior. An uncultivated husband could not be the superior of a cultivated wife. I knew from the first that his education had been limited, but thought the defect would be easily remedied as he had good abilities, but I discovered he had no love for books. His spiritual guides derided human learning and depended on inspiration. My knowledge stood in the way of my salvation, and I must be that odious thing—a superior wife—or stop my progress, for to be and appear were the same thing. I must be the mate of the man I had chosen; and if he would not come to my level, I must go to his. So I gave up study, and for years did not read one page in any book save the Bible. My religions convictions I could not change, but all other differences should disappear.

One begins to understand why Jane Swisshelm could later feel a deep and irrepressible empathy for those in bondage – “mudsills” she calls the slaves and their northern cousins the wage-laborers in reference to James Henry Hammond’s speech in the Senate - because society expected less of them than they had to give. At the age of 23, Jane’s husband decided to move to Louisville, Kentucky. She records a number of reminiscences that only confirmed her in her abolitionist dispositions. “Passing a crowded church on a Sabbath afternoon,” she writes,

“I stepped in, when the preacher was descanting on the power of religion, and, in illustration, he told of two wicked young men in that state, who were drinking and gambling on Sunday morning, when one said:

"I can lick the religion out of any nigger."

The other would bet one hundred dollars that he had a nigger out of whom the religion could not be licked. The bet was taken and they adjourned to a yard. This unique nigger was summoned, and proved to be a poor old man. His master informed him he had a bet on him, and the other party commanded him to "curse Jesus?" on pain of being flogged until he did. The old saint dropped on his knees before his master, and plead for mercy, saying:

"Massa! Massa! I cannot curse Jesus! Jesus die for me! He die for you,
Massa. I no curse him; I no curse Jesus!"

The master began to repent. In babyhood he had ridden on those old bowed shoulders, then stalwart and firm, and he proposed to draw the bet, but the other wanted sport and would win the money. Oh! the horrible details that that preacher gave of that day's sport, of the lashings, and faintings, and revivals, with washes of strong brine, the prayers for mercy, and the recurring moan!

"I no curse Jesus, Massa! I no curse Jesus; Jesus die for me, Massa; I die for Jesus?"

As the sun went down Jesus took him, and his merciful master had sold a worthless nigger for one hundred dollars. But, the only point which the preacher made, was that one in favor of religion. When it could so support a nigger, what might it not do for one of the superior race?"

Have I mentioned yet that Jane Swisshelm had a “dark gift” for satire? She tried to start a school for black children by pretending that some of their mothers were her slaves but local thugs threatened to burn her house down if she continued it. She took up making corsets and was soon out-earning her husband. The whole situation depressed her. No matter how she tried, she always seemed to be out-performing him and yet she constantly felt she was falling short of creating the sort of life she knew she could create. “I was tired, thinking of all the sacrifices I had made to be my husband's housekeeper and keep myself in woman's sphere,” she confesses,

“and here was the outcome! I was degrading him from his position of bread-winner. If it was my duty to keep his house, it must be his to find me a house to keep, and this life must end. I would go with him to the poorest cabin, but he must be the head of the matrimonial firm. He should not be my business assistant. I would not be captain with him for lieutenant. How to extricate myself I did not see, but extricated I would be.

We needed a servant. A Kentucky "gentleman," full six feet three, with broad shoulders and heavy black whiskers, came to say: "I have a woman I can let you have! A good cook, good washah and ionah, fust rate housekeepah! I'll let you have ah for two hundred dollahs a yeah; but I'll tell you honest, you'll have to hosswhipah youahself about twice a week, for that wife of youahs could nevah do anything with ah."

While he talked I looked. His suit was of the finest black broadcloth, satin vest, a pompous display of chain, seals, studs and rings, his beaver on the back of his head, his thumbs in the arms of his vest, and feet spread like the Collossus of Rhodes.

This new use for Pennsylvania muscle seemed to strike my husband as infinitely amusing, for he burst out laughing, and informed the "gentleman" that he did not follow the profession of whipping women, and must decline his offer. But I wanted to be back on free soil, out of an atmosphere which killed all manhood, and furnished women-whippers as a substitute for men.”

At the age of 24, Jane had a crisis of faith, forced upon her by circumstance. She received a letter that her mother was dreadfully ill in Pittsburgh. She expressed an intention to go. Her husband denied her request, quoting passages from Ephesians about the need for wives to submit to their husbands. She faced a dilemma. This is how she resolved it.

“While he continued his comments, I buried my head in pillows, saying, "Lord what wilt thou have me to do?"

Milton epitomized Paul when he made Eve say to Adam, "Be God thy law, thou mine;" but was that the mind and will of God? Had he transferred his claim to the obedience of half the human family? Was every husband God to his wife? Would wives appear in the general judgment at all, or if they did, would they hand in a schedule of marital commands?

If the passage meant anything it meant this: One might as well try to be, and not to be, at the same time, as own allegiance to God and the same allegiance to man. I was either God's subject or I was not. If I was not, I owed him no obedience. Christ as head of the church was her absolute lawgiver, and thus saith the Lord, was all she dare demand. Was I to obey my husband in that way? If so, I had no business with the moral law or any other law, save his commands. Christian England had taken this view, and enacted that a wife should not be punished for any crime committed by command, or in presence of her husband, "because, being altogether subject to him, she had no will of her own;" but this position was soon abandoned, and this passage stamped as spurious. Every Christian church had so stamped it, for all encouraged wives to join their communion with or without the consent of their husbands. Thousands of female martyrs had sealed their testimony with their blood, opposing the authority of their husbands, and had been honored by the church. As for me, I must take that passage alone for my Bible, or expunge it.

Then and there I cast it from me forever, as being no part of divine law, and thus unconsciously took the first step in breaking through a faith in plenary inspiration.

I next turned to the book in general for guidance: "Wives, obey your husbands;" "Children obey your parents;" "Honor thy father and thy mother." What a labyrinth of irreconcilable contradictions! God, in nature, spoke with no uncertain sound, "Go home to your mother," and my choice was made while my husband talked.

I said that if he did not see about a boat I would. When he told me that he had a legal right to detain me, and would exercise it, I assured him the attempt would be as dangerous as useless, for I was going to Pittsburg.”

She arrived to find her mother suffering and in great need of her and months of watching her mom suffer drove the wedge between her and faith even deeper.

“I read to her comforting passages of Scripture, and said prayers which carried her soul up to the throne, and fell back on mine in showers of dust and ashes. A great black atheism had fallen on me. There was no justice on earth, no mercy in heaven.”

Her mom died. Her husband sued her mother’s estate for the wages that he felt he was entitled to as a consequence of his wife being away giving care to her. “He felt himself wronged and became angry,” she writes, “but had one remedy.”

“Being the owner of my person and services, he had a right to wages for the time spent in nursing mother, and would file his claim against her executors.”

Can you imagine?! Swisshelm grows cynical about life; politics, marriage, religion. Everything others told her God wanted seemed counter-intuitive to her. “That meeting-house [in Kentucky]which I had been helping to build by entertaining its builders and aiding them about subscriptions,” she writes,

“it and they were a part of a great man-thieving machine. I had been false to every principle of justice; had been decorating parlors when I should have been tearing down prisons! I, helping Black Gagites [people who believed that polite people should not talk about abolition] build a church! . . . What was Peter’s denial compared to mine?”

It is here that Jane Gray Swisshelm stopped trying to restrain herself. Using her intials so that her writing could be mistaken for a man’s, she begins using her formidable talents as a wordsmith to write for an abolitionist press.

“James G. Birney was the presidential candidate of the "Liberty Party" in 1844, as he had been in '40. During the campaign I wrote under my initials for The Spirit of Liberty, and exposing the weak part of an argument soon came to be my recognized forte. For using my initials I had two reasons—my dislike and dread of publicity and the fear of embarrassing the Liberty Party with the sex question. Abolitionists were men of sharp angles. Organizing them was like binding crooked sticks in a bundle, and one of the questions which divided them was the right of women to take any prominent part in public affairs.”

Soon, she found that her writing had a bite to it and the slaveocracy who read it began to feel, bleed, and dislike it. She knew that if she continued, she would no longer be able to hide behind her initials because of the clear potential for libel suits. And it is here that she experienced another shift in her perception of herself and her place in the world. I will let her tell the story.

“For years there had ran through my head the words, "Open thy mouth for the dumb, plead the cause of the poor and needy." The streams sang them, the winds shrieked them, and now a trumpet sounded them, but the words could not mean more than talking in private. I would not, could not, believe they meant more, for the Bible in which I read them bid me be silent. My husband wanted me to lecture as did Abbey Kelley, but I thought this would surely be wrong. The church had silenced me so effectuately, that even now all my sense of the great need of words could not induce me to attempt it; but if I could "plead the cause" through the press, I must write. Even this was dreadful, as I must use my own name, for my articles would certainly be libelous. If I wrote at all, I must throw myself headlong into the great political maelstrom, and would of course be swallowed up like a fishing-boat in the great Norway horror which decorated our school geographies; for no woman had ever done such a thing, and I could never again hold up my head under the burden of shame and disgrace which would be heaped upon me. But what matter? I had no children to dishonor; all save one who had ever loved me were dead, and she no longer needed me, and if the Lord wanted some one to throw into that gulf, no one could be better spared than I.”

“Damn the torpedoes. Full speed ahead.” And that is how Jane Gray Swisshelm entered a life of journalism and publishing. “I do not remember whom I attacked first,” she says,

“But from first to last my articles were as direct and personal as Nathan's reproof to David. Of slavery in the abstract I knew nothing. There was no abstraction in tying Martha to a whipping-post and scourging her for mourning the loss of her children. The old Kentucky saint who bore the torture of lash and brine all that bright Sabbath day, rather than "curse Jesus," knew nothing of the abstraction of slavery, or the finespun theories of politeness which covered the most revolting crimes with pretty words. This great nation was engaged in the pusillanimous work of beating poor little Mexico—a giant whipping a cripple. Every man who went to the war, or induced others to go, I held as the principal in the whole list of crimes of which slavery was the synonym. Each one seemed to stand before me, his innermost soul laid bare, and his idiosyncrasy I was sure to strike with sarcasm, ridicule solemn denunciations, old truths from Bible and history and the opinions of good men. I had a reckless abandon, for had I not thrown myself into the breach to die there, and would I not sell my life at its full value?

My style I caught from my crude, rural surroundings, and was familiar to the unlearned, and I was not surprised to find the letters eagerly read. The Journal announced them the day before publication, the newsboys cried them, and papers called attention to them, some by daring to indorse, but more by abusing Mr. Riddle for publishing such unpatriotic and "incendiary rant." In quoting the strong points, a venal press was constrained to "scatter the living coals of truth."

. . . No western Pennsylvania woman had ever broken out of woman's sphere. All lived in the very centre of that sacred enclosure, making fires by which, husbands, brothers and sons sat reading the news; each one knowing that she had a soul, because the preacher who made his bread and butter by saving it had been careful to inform her of its existence as preliminary to her knowledge of the indispensable nature of his services. But the men whom I ridiculed and attacked knew the hand which, held the mirror up to nature, and also knew they had a legal remedy, and that to their fines and imprisonment I was as indifferent as to their opinions.”

It is hard not to be impressed with Jane’s fundamental courage once she allows herself to be herself. Her writing betrays a marvelous combination of intelligence, talent, and ferocity.

“The social ostracism I had expected when I stepped into the political arena, proved to be Bunyan lions [a Bunyon Lion is a lion that looks like it will eat you but turns out to be chained when you walk in front of it.] Instead of shame there came such a crop of glory that I thought of pulling down my barns and building greater, that I might have somewhere to store my new goods.”

Clearly, Jane Gray Swisshelm opted to begin pursuing abolition at a time when many people in the country, horrified that the American army was being used to extend slavery into Mexico, were ready to be so led to oppose such a war. They wanted someone to savage pro-slavery policies and she gave them what they wanted but were too cowed to say out loud themselves. Her successes emboldened her and, in short time, she realized that the owner of the paper for which she wrote was reaping the profits of her talent. She opted to begin working on her own paper. To that end, she would have to work in an office with a single man who would do the printing. This, she knew, was unheard of.

It is another transitional moment in the history of Jane Swisshelm and of American women:

“He had pushed his chair back from his desk, and sat regarding me in utter amazement while I stated the case, then said:

"What do you mean? Are you insane? What does your husband say?"

I said my husband approved, the matter was all arranged, I would use my own estate, and if I lost it, it was nobody's affair.

He begged me to take time to think, to send my husband to him, to consult my friends. Told me my project was ruinous, that I would lose every dollar I put into it, and begged, entreated me to take time; but all to no purpose, when a bright idea came to him.

"You would have to furnish a desk for yourself, you see there is but one in this room, and there is no other place for you. You could not conduct a paper and stay at home, but must spend a good deal of time here!"

Then I suddenly saw the appalling prospect thus politely presented. I had never heard of any woman save Mary Kingston working in an office. Her father, a prominent lawyer, had employed her as his clerk, when his office was in their dwelling, and the situation was remarkable and very painful; and here was I, looking not more than twenty, proposing to come into the office of the handsome stranger who sat bending over his desk that he might not see me blush for the unwomanly intent.

Mr. Riddle was esteemed one of the most elegant and polished gentlemen in the city, with fine physique and fascinating manners. He was a man of the world, and his prominence had caused his name to become the target for many an evil report in the bitter personal conflicts of political life. I looked the facts squarely in the face and thought:

"I have been publicly asserting the right of woman to earn a living as book-keepers, clerks, sales-women, and now shall I shrink for fear of a danger any one must meet in doing as I advised? This is my Red Sea. It can be no more terrible than the one which confronted Israel. Duty lies on the other side, and I am going over! 'Speak unto the children of Israel that they go forward.' The crimson waves of scandal, the white foam of gossip, shall part before me and heap themselves up as walls on either hand."

So rapidly did this reflection pass through my mind, or so absorbed was
I with it, that there had been no awkward pause when I replied:

"I will get a desk, shall be sorry to be in your way, but there is plenty of room and I can be quiet."

He seemed greatly relieved, and said cheerfully:

"Oh yes, there is plenty of room, I can have my desk moved forward and take down the shutters, when there will be plenty of light. Heretofore you have been Jove thundering from a cloud, but if you will come down to dwell with mortals we must make a place for you."

Taking down the shutters meant exposing the whole interior of the room to view, from a very public street; and after he had exhausted every plea for time to get ready, he engaged to have the first copy of the Visiter printed on the day I had set.”

Odd, that co-ed workplaces are simply normative today, isn’t it?

In the ensuing pages, Jane demonstrates how careful she was to avoid any behavior that might compromise herself or her partner in scandal. “When a woman starts out in the world on a mission, secular or religious, she should leave her feminine charms at home.” She asserts,

One day Mr. Riddle said:

"I wish you had been here yesterday. Robert Watson called. He wanted to congratulate us on the relations we have for so long maintained. We have never spoken of it, but you must have known the risk of coming here. He has seen it, says he has watched you closely, and you are an exception to all known law, or the harbinger of a new era in human progress."

… and so she was. Her paper roared into the public discourse with a vengeance. She went after any and every party that did not follow an abolitionist trajectory.

“It was quite an insignificant looking sheet, but no sooner did the American eagle catch sight of it, than he swooned and fell off his perch. Democratic roosters straightened out their necks and ran screaming with terror. Whig coons scampered up trees and barked furiously. The world was falling and every one had "heard it, saw it, and felt it."

It appeared that on some inauspicious morning each one of three-fourths of the secular editors from Maine to Georgia had gone to his office suspecting nothing, when from some corner of his exchange list there sprang upon him such a horror as he had little thought to see.

A woman had started a political paper! A woman! Could he believe his eyes? A woman! Instantly he sprang to his feet and clutched his pantaloons, shouted to the assistant editor, when he, too, read and grasped frantically at his cassimeres, called to the reporters and pressmen and typos and devils, who all rushed in, heard the news, seized their nether garments and joined the general chorus, "My breeches! oh, my breeches!" Here was a woman resolved to steal their pantaloons, their trousers, and when these were gone they might cry "Ye have taken away my gods, and what have I more?" The imminence of the peril called for prompt action, and with one accord they shouted, "On to the breach, in defense of our breeches! Repel the invader or fill the trenches with our noble dead."

"That woman shall not have my pantaloons," cried the editor of the big city daily; "nor my pantaloons" said the editor of the dignified weekly; "nor my pantaloons," said he who issued manifestos but once a month; "nor mine," "nor mine," "nor mine," chimed in the small fry of the country towns.

Even the religious press could not get past the tailor shop, and "pantaloons" was the watchword all along the line. George D. Prentiss took up the cry, and gave the world a two-third column leader on it, stating explicitly, "She is a man in all but the pantaloons." I wrote to him asking a copy of the article, but received no answer, when I replied in rhyme to suit his case:

     Perhaps you have been busy
     Horsewhipping Sal or Lizzie,
     Stealing some poor man's baby,
     Selling its mother, may-be.
     You say—and you are witty—
     That I—and, tis a pity—
     Of manhood lack but dress;
     But you lack manliness,
     A body clean and new,
     A soul within it, too.
     Nature must change her plan
     Ere you can be a man.

This turned the tide of battle. One editor said, "Brother George, beware of sister Jane." Another, "Prentiss has found his match." He made no reply, and it was not long until I thought the pantaloon argument was dropped forever.

She’s hilarious. And unrelenting. Time forbids me from going into the way that she continues to break boundaries, growing ever stronger and more confident in her voice. She takes on Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and would have taken on Ghengis Khan and Tamerlane if the need to do so arose. She is an eighteenth century Woodward and Bernstein. But she bemoans the fact that he success led many others, though lacking her gifts, to throw their bonnets into the ring.

“By the pecks of letters I had been receiving, I had learned that there were thousands of women with grievances, and no power to state them or to discriminate between those which could be reached by law and those purely personal; and that the love of privacy with which the whole sex was accredited was a mistake, since most of my correspondents literally agonized to get before the public. Publicity! publicity! was the persistent demand. To meet the demand, small papers, owned and edited by women, sprang up all over the land, and like Jonah's gourd, perished in a night. Ruskin says to be noble is to be known, and at that period there was a great demand on the part of women for their full allowance of nobility; but not one in a hundred thought of merit as a means of reaching it. No use waiting to learn to put two consecutive sentences together in any connected form, or for an idea or the power of expressing it. One woman was printing her productions, and why should not all the rest do likewise? They had so long followed some leader like a flock of sheep, that now they would rush through the first gap into newspaperdom.”

“ . . Against such head winds, it was hard for my poor little craft to make progress in asserting the right of women to influence great public questions.”

Despite her own story, with respect to women, she was a “gradual emancipationist. “The policy of the Visiter in regard to Woman's Rights, was to ‘go easy,’ except in the case of those slave-women, who had no rights,” she says,

“For others, gain an advance when you could. Educate girls with boys, develop their brains, and take away legal disabilities little by little, as experience should show was wise; but never dream of their doing the world's hard work, either mental or physical; and Heaven defend them from going into all the trades.”

“Women should not weaken their cause by impracticable demands. Make no claim which could not be won in a reasonable time. Take one step at a time, get a good foothold in it and advance carefully. Suffrage in municipal elections for property holders who could read, and had never been connected with crime, was the place to strike for the ballot. Say nothing about suffrage elsewhere until it proved successful here.”

It is a strategy that Booker T. Washington would apply to African-Americans after emancipation.

By the time Swisshelm was 42 and a Washington journalist of national renoun, her ability to maintain cordial relations with her husband was frayed. She describes the demise of her marriage in chapter 34. “I had lived over twenty years without the legal right to be alone one hour” she says,

“--to have the exclusive use of one foot of space--to receive an unopened letter, or to preserve a line of manuscript ‘From sharp and sly inspection.’”

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, a Pennsylvania court decided that a husband had a right to open and read any communication addressed to his wife. Living as I did, under this law I had burned the private journal kept in girlhood, and the letters received from my brother, mother, sister and other friends, to preserve their contents from the comments of the farm laborers and female help, who, by common custom, must eat at our table and take part in our conversation. At the office I had received, read and burned, without answer, letters from some of the most prominent men and women of the era; letters which would be valuable history to-day; have, therefore, no private papers, and write this history, except a few public dates, entirely from memory.

Into the mists some rays of light penetrated, and by them I saw that the marriage contract by which I was bound, was that one which I had made and which secured my liberty of conscience and voice in choosing a home.

The fraud by which church, and state substituted that bond made for Saxon swine-herds, who ate boar's heads, lived in unchinked houses and wore brass collars, in the days when Alfred the Great was king, was such as would vitiate any other contract, and must annul even that of marriage; but, granting that it was binding, it must bind both parties, and had been broken by the party of the other part through failure to comply with its requirements.

Our marriage had been a mistake, productive of mutual injury; but for one, it was not too late to repair the wrong. He, a man in the prime of life, with unspotted reputation, living without labor, on the income of a patrimonial estate, to which he had made large additions, could easily find a help-mate for him; one who could pad matrimonial fetters with those devices by which husbands are managed. My desertion would leave him free to make a new choice, and I could more easily earn a living alone.

The much-coveted and long-delayed birth of a living child appeared to have barred my appeal to this last resort, but the mother's right to the custody of her infant is one I would defend to the taking of life.

Those who had argued against her entering a trade and earning her own living had, perhaps, been right. Her work in the abolitionist movement had accustomed her to believing in liberty and she could no longer sacrifice it in her marriage. Still, it makes one profoundly sad to listen to her describe its ending.

“My husband, mine no more, came upon the boat while she lay at the wharf, held baby on his knee and wept over her; when the last bell rang, he bade me good-bye; carried her to the gangway, held her to the last moment, then placed her in my arms, sprang ashore and hurried up the wharf. He would, I think, have carried her off, but that he knew she would break his heart crying for mother before I could get to her.”

Jane heads off to the pine woods of Minnesota where her life just gets even more interesting. I will just say that it involves newspapers, frontier violence, abolitionism, riots, guns, mahem, and a career spent speaking truth to power. My blog post has grown long enough though so, you will just have to go read the rest yourself.  

“Across the body of the prostrate slave lay the road to wealth,” says Jane Gray Swisshelm, “and many good men had shut their eyes and stepped over.” In Minnesota, she would put her life and principles on the line to open those eyes. Read chapter XXXVI: THE MINNESOTA DICTATOR and following if what has been said above intrigues you.

Through it all, Jane Swisshelm “became as popular as if she were about to be hanged,” she says. It’s a good story, one that will eventually end in emancipation for slaves and equal rights for women.

Question for Comment: Robert Frost writes,

Out walking in the frozen swamp one gray day,
I paused and said, 'I will turn back from here.
No, I will go on farther—and we shall see.'

What are the moments at which your life pivots and you had a choice to break through into some new way of thinking or being … or not? Are you due for another one soon?

"Till you kill him."

Border Wars by Stanley Harold REVIEW

Let me just say that before reading Border Wars, I did not know just how pervasive and unrelenting the violence between North and South was before the Civil War. The power of the book’s argument is to be found in the density of the evidentiary over-supply. Saying that John Brown invaded the South is like saying that Babe Ruth hit home runs. It is not an incorrect statement but it leaves out many other batters and many other hits. If I were to try and convey the density of the material, I would have to recreate the book itself because it supplies a torrent of anecdotal material. One might argue that though there were more battles after the Civil War started, there was more fighting before it started. I wonder if my drawing together a fictitious composite of the kinds of violence would suffice to give an accurate picture.

Imagine for a moment that there is a slave owner in Kentucky or Maryland or Virginia who, wishing to counter the abolitionist impulses of nearby Ohio, comes down violently on any insolence in his slaves. Fearing that they might read abolitionist literature, he denies them any opportunity to read and overtly supports the mobbing of abolitionists and the violent removal of any abolitionist presses or distribution of abolitionist literature. His repression inspires a slave to escape with the help of a Northern abolitionist from Ohio. Knowing that success will breed emulation, the owner hires a bounty hunter to cross the Ohio River to get his slave back. The attempt involves a forced entry into a white man’s home and a forcible abduction of the fugitive. It may even lead to a gunfight in which several people are wounded. Safely back in Kentucky however, the slave awaits a counterstrike on the part of some of the abolitionist friends of the original “slave –stealer.” They enter Kentucky and break said slave out of jail, making their way back to Ohio with a posse in hot pursuit. Within a few days, the Kentucky owner has filed for extradition and a Ohio sheriff makes arrests of both slave and accomplices. He is threatened by a mob that takes exception to his working for “the other side.” He fears for his life.

The trial is set for a certain day and a sympathetic judge drops the charges against the white abolitionist. The Kentucky “gang” vows to get their own revenge. The judge does however award the slave to the owner but as soon as the verdict is heard, a crowd of white and black abolitionists surrounds the “victim” and mobs the claimants. They return to Kentucky licking their wounds but vowing revenge. A warrant is issued in Kentucky for violation of Kentucky laws about slave stealing and a larger posse heads out to show the Ohio scoundrels a little Kentucky justice. This of course, involves bullets, shot guns, dirks, and pistols. Reports in rabid news outlets on both sides portray the other side as scum; Their own side as patriotic. Both sides vow death before dishonor.

Once in Ohio, they now have to worry about permanent slave catchers who have been hired. They also must contend with the new Fugitive Slave Act which makes it a crime for anyone in Ohio to help them. Free blacks on the Ohio side form a Committee of Vigilance to protect themselves and their families from abduction. They are sworn to use violence to so protect themselves if they must. Many opt to head North to Canada, leaving the torn relationships behind.  Some of them decide that they must head back into slave country to rescue family or friends before they it is too late. Larger and more dangerous incursions are planned that will lead to greater chance for escalating violence. Kentucky begins to feel its sovereignty invaded and its laws disregarded. They begin to draft and raise border guards, equipping them for tighter security; A move Ohio abolitionists counter with greater support. Ohioans, formerly neutral, begin to despise Southerners coming over the border and taking justice into their own hands. They resent slave catchers using their courts to violate their morals.

Back in Kentucky, things on the plantation are getting more and more  and more tense. The master, understanding that his valuable slave property is now more likely to get up and walk away, determines to sell a few of his slaves to a dealer who will bring them south where the prices are higher, the need greater, and the risk of slave escape less. Formerly sedate slaves become restless and even dangerous as they contemplate the fact that they may likely be separated from their families and removed from the hope of escape forever.  They begin to plot for a more general escape, stealing (or making) weapons that they can use when the time comes to strike. One slave, unwilling to wait, strikes out on his own and steals his wife and child from a nearby plantation, absconding with some money and a horse as well. Soon after his disappearance, the larger group absconds, meeting a patrol out looking for the first runaway. A gun fight ensues and several white slave catchers are wounded or killed as are several slaves. A few escape to the other side and are pursued. The slave is wanted for stealing a horse as well as himself. Ohioans are inclined to think that he is owed the horse but many Ohioans begin to fear an excess amount of free blacks in their community taking their jobs. They get up a “gang” to counter the one that always seems to show up at the court-house to deny their Kentucky relatives justice. They tire of watching Federal law flouted in the North just as Northerners tire of seeing State law flouted in the North. A Southerner states “I am open for hostility.” A Northern town raises money for ammunition and better weaponry. An Ohio abolitionist fortifies his house. A Kentucky abolitionist buys a cannon to protect his house.

Southern Border States begin to wonder if the country splits apart if they should stick with the North to guarantee their slaves will be protected under the Fugitive slave law or if they should secede because they see it rarely enforced. Everyone is on pins and needles unsure of what will happen next. Abolitionists publish articles suggesting that a slave has every right to kill a master who pursues him. Anti-Abolitionists publish articles saying that abolitionists who come into Southern border-states can expect to be hung. More and more frequently, Northerners are given the opportunity to meet and work with formerly abused slaves. They begin to feel former slave-masters need a thrashing.

Meanwhile, out in Missouri, slave owners fear that if Kansas becomes a free state, they will be unable to maintain slavery in the state any more (having free States on three sides). They begin to assemble a possie to terrorize free-soilers and dissuade New Englanders from coming to Kansas. A few radical abolitionists return the terror in kind. “Disputes, violence, bloodshed and rescues” ensue. Militias are called up. Bayonets are drawn. Axes are used to break down doors. States send sheriffs into other states to kidnap kidnappers and the people who kidnap kidnappers. Both assert that the law is on their side and resort to lawlessness when the law does not comply. Even abolitionists in the South call abolitionists in the North “a horde of radical incendiaries.” Slavery and anti-slavery are described as “runaway prairie fires.” Blood is spilt. Bodies are found drowned in the rivers. “The horrors of servile war” loom over the border States. Post offices are mobbed in the South to keep abolitionist presses from supplying customers. Courthouses are mobbed in the North to deny pro-slavery claimants from winning their cases. Moralists are called “deluded criminals.” Quakers are reviled. A “horde of pirates invest both banks of the Ohio” hoping to help a slave escape or return the same for money. Sometimes both. Barns of slave-helpers are burned. Children are lured from the shore and resold into the Deep South by unscrupulous thugs. Whites suspected of giving abolitionist lectures can be tarred and feathered in some towns. Rocks and bricks fly. Laws get stricter. Penalties get harsher. Brutality becomes normalized.

“I am free to say that if there be a crime for which I would hang a citizen in our State, it is that of aiding a slaveholder,” says one Ohioan. “If you still thirst for bloodshed and violence, the same blade that repelled the assaults of assassin sons, once more in self-defense is ready to drink the blood of the hireling horde of psychophants and outlaws of the assassin sire of assassins,” says Cassius Clay in his newspaper, The True American. “The hemp is ready for your neck. Your life cannot be spared. Plenty thirst for your blood.”

God forbid that these people should have gotten their hands on Prohibition Era Tommy guns instead of their Bowie knives because the streets and rivers would have run red with the carnage. Harold tells us of carriages riddled with bullet holes. And all the while, John Brown simmers in a stew of righteous vengeance. Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God,” the masses chant. People begin to refuse to pay taxes. Slaves kill themselves, in one case, their own children, in order to avoid being recaptured.

A U.S. Senator is caned almost to death on the floor of the Senate. Slave owners feel gratified to see it happen. Guns are renamed “Beecher’s Bibles.” Tiny armies march in Kansas, guerillas plunder. Towns are sacked. Hostages are taken. Slave stealers are regarded as car thieves might today. Slave owners are regarded as pedophiles all. All the while, the feeling grows that the North needs to take the war to the citadel of Southern slave power. “Suppose there was an awful big snake down there on the floor,” says Harriet Tubman,

“He bites you. Folks all scared, because you may die. You send for doctor to cut the bite; but the snake rolled up there, and while doctor is doing it, he bites you again. The doctor cuts out that bite; but while he’s doing it, the snake springs up and bites you again, and so he keeps doing it, till you kill him. That’s what Master Lincoln ought to know.

All in all, it is an ugly, violent, messy, frightening place and time to live in American (or any) history.

Question for Comment: Have you ever felt on the verge of violence?