Eucatastrophe Reader

“Nature always produces individuals. She never produces classes”

Hearts Beating for Liberty by Stacey M. Robertson REVIEW

Today’s class at Colgate was taught by Stacey Robertson and several colleagues and I had the delightful opportunity to go out to dinner with her and converse about it a bit. Hearts Beating for Liberty is a rather robustly researched look into the various ways that women in the American Northwest (Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, etc.) aided in the abolitionist cause. The book is organized somewhat topically, looking at how women set up anti-slavery societies in their states, supported the Liberty party (the pre-cursor to the Republican party), organized the free-produce movement to get women to buy slave-free products, organized conventions and craft fares (to raise money for the cause), created a lecture circuit, contributed their part to the underground railroad, and fought for women’s rights, among other things.

Clearly, women lived with a deeply embedded notion that they were born to play out their roles in the domestic sphere of life and few of these women challenged that expectation directly. They did however argue that the domestic lives of slave women and slave children was a concern that they would be unwomanly to ignore. So long as the political issue that they addressed was a domestic one, they argued that there was nothing unfeminine about pushing for public policy change. When criticized for “unsexing themselves” by their public activism, they shot back that it was Southern women who were losing their womanhood by the way that they allowed their men to separate families and molest their slaves. “Believing that women’s public and political activism was justified it was in defense of women” Robertson writes,

“– in this case to protect slave women’s sexual purity and their role as mothers – Liberty advocates encouraged women to employ their partisan movements.”

As one female abolitionist put it, “Let not the women be afraid of dabbling in politics so long as their sisters are imbruted by politics.”

What becomes clear is that literate women in an era of increasing newspaper circulation were being impacted by its inevitable influence. News of national politics was flooding the home and women were, like it or not, being politicized by it. It was impossible that they should gain access to news and perspectives of their world without wanting to affect it (“Women were being increasingly politicized through newspapers …” p. 47). Many men (and many women) worried that women would lose the distinctive elements of their womanhood if they thought about and argued about political issues (like abolition). Supporters of their activities argued that the change  would benefit both men and women “quickening the mind of the one and restraining the violence of the other” and “not everyone concurred with the self-appointed guardians of appropriate feminine behavior.” Facing stiff opposition to their increasing activism, they responded by charging northern men with the blame. “If a man would prove his own humanity by pleading the cause of the oppressed,” one women Robertson cites insisted, “there would be no need for women to diverge from her legitimate sphere.”

In short, women were having to take on men’s work for them because men were not stepping up and doing that work themselves. And if men would not protect the families of black people in the South, then Northern women were not about to sit around and watch them be negligent. Robertson notes that few of these men were appreciated and none of them were paid for their time and effort on par with their male counterparts. “Because women’s work was considered natural and mundane,” she writes, “it did not receive the same accolades that men’s more public and presumably risky work did. ….”

Ironically, as more and more women insisted that they would not purchase “slave-made” produce or products, they eventually wound up taking on the job of replacing them – usually work done without any pay at all. It is no wonder that women’s involvement in the abolitionist movement was a precursor to their involvement in the simultaneous women’s suffrage movement. The two were not entirely unconnected.  

This afternoon, I sat in the small plain real estate office of Garret Smith, perhaps the most powerful abolitionist in American history due to the fact that he bankrolled a good deal of the movement in its various forms. In that very room, he handed out money to people like Frederick Douglas, William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Tubman, Sojournor Truth, the Liberty Party, and maybe hundreds of fugitive slaves heading for Canada. I have decided that when I get some time, he is a character I would like to know more about.

Question for Comment: The abolition movement arose in a time when the roles of men and women with respect to public issues of national concern was shifting. Some felt that politics was a human activity, like war, that women were not suited for and that men were designed to do. The fact that the issue of slavery was intensely moral, spiritual, and domestic in its impact made it a logical area for women, who may have wished to engage in politics at many other levels, to make their entry into a previously exclusive aspect of modern life. The abolitionist, Lydia Maria Child once wrote that “nature always produces individuals. She never produces classes” implying that we should never assign roles to people as members of groups. What do you think of this assertion with respect to the place that men and women are “designed” to play in life?  

The Artesian Delta

Root and Branch by Graham Hodges REVIEW

The metaphor of an underground railroad implies that there are people needing to go from one place to another and that there is someone who understands where travelers are and where they need to go and thus builds a road for them … and then keeps it hidden for security. In some ways, Graham Hodges challenges the reader to think of the metaphor as misleading. In a sense, the abolition movement was much more than an “underground railroad.” I tend to see a more proper metaphor in the idea of an artesian delta.

Let me explain.

An artesian well is a well in which water is being forced up to the surface by pressures underneath. It is subterranean but it is also something that manifests itself on the surface. The underground railroad has often been seen as something that white people set up because they knew something that black slaves did not: namely, that it would be a good thing if they could live a free life. In reality, the driving force of abolition is more centered on the irrepressible desires and drives of the slaves themselves. Like an artesian well, it goes deeper into the human condition and the human  instinct than I think we are used to thinking. On the other hand, this desire was not secret or unexpressed. As one reads the history of this movement, one realizes that there was little that was actually “underground” about it. One might even argue that most of it was in plain sight.

The image of the delta appeals to me because it better encompasses the range of options that freedom-seeking slaves had before them. In the paradigm of the “underground railroad,” African American slaves are given two choices: Stay where you are in slavery or, conversely, get on this “train” the whites have established to get you to freedom in Canada.   In this view, your options are prescribed and binary. But in reality, there were multiple and varied expressions of resistance to slavery (the delta) that slaves could and did choose from. Some of them could not have been opened without white help and assistance. Many of them were totally the creation of black people (free and slave). What becomes obvious is that over the decades, those seeking freedom will creatively pursue new or modified avenues to it. Whites and blacks are constantly responding to one another’s aid or resistance with counter-maneuvers.

In geology, we refer to the structures at the mouths of large rivers as “alluvial fans.” Within those alluvial fans, you will see “deltaic lobes” - evidences of shifting primary channels creating new outlets and miniaturized alluvial fans. Mature deltas will have overlays of newer distributory networks atop previous ones, sometimes merely expanding options and sometimes leaving previous channels devoid of water.

In a similar way, the human instinct for freedom, for the opportunity to actualize potential (and I am thinking of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs here) expressed itself in a multitude of individualized ways over the decades. Certainly, there were white (and free black) people who established a somewhat flexible network of safe houses and routes, “staffed” by trusted people dedicated to getting escaping slaves from Georgia to Canada. But this was just one aspect of what I, for lack of a better metaphor, would call “the artesian delta” of abolition and emancipation.

In Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, Dr. Graham Russell Hodges tells the story of Creole and African Americans in just one locale. In the telling of that story, he mentions an entire panoply of responses to slavery in this greatest of American metropolises. He mentions that the early Dutch settlers tried to deny that there was such a thing as an African soul. And in response, the artesian well of the black soul responded in a veritable “delta” of freedom-for-the-soul seeking activities. The observant reader could fill several pages.

Both slaves and free blacks would often use the legal process to obtain their freedom or at least concessions with respect to its duration. They offered and struck deals. Some took their master’s to court (Dred Scott as a later example).  Sometimes they would murder their masters. Sometimes they might attempt to poison their masters (they were certainly accused of doing so). When given the chance, they fled their masters to join the British army during the Revolution, hoping thereby to gain their freedom. Conversely, some fought for the patriot side with the same end in mind. Some of those who fought for the British emigrated to Nova Scotia and from there to Sierra Leone or to Haiti to establish their own colonies or nation-states. Some escaped to Spanish held Florida. Some attached themselves to native tribes to their west. Some simply escaped and attempted to reconnect with their partners or offspring assuming identities as free blacks in eastern cities where they thought they could get away with it. Some took jobs as mariners and emancipated themselves into lives of sailing fugitives.

We find some slaves organizing insurrections (some violent) and we find some free blacks organizing themselves into “Committees of Vigilance” to give themselves and escaping brothers and sisters collective protection. Some organized into political parties to petition for more rights. Some organized entirely new denominations (Richard Allen and the African Methodist church). Some just organized new churches or new communities. Some moved into neighborhoods. Some organized themselves into gangs to better protect their liberties. Some created newspapers to better and more widely make their case for liberty and equality. Some formed organizations for the sole purpose of combatting white organizations that were dedicated to reversing their gains. Some even speculated on the possibilities for creating a black nation within a white nation.

Some pursued freedom by attempting to buy themselves. Some pursued it by acquiring new skills that would allow them greater independence from direct control or greater income. Some pursued literacy in a variety of schools (and as in the case of Frederick Douglas, out on the street when school was closed to him). A few pursued slavery by moving themselves to other countries when they got the chance. Some pursued freedom by “pretending to be free” when they could get away with it. Some pursued freedom by wedging their foot in the door of it and holding out against the forces that tried to shut it. They resist segregation in churches and on street cars and ferries. They became college students in the North where they could. They became ministers where they were allowed (and sometimes where they weren’t). They returned to African religions in some cases. They tried to get white clergy to baptize them or legalize their marriages.

And there were darker expressions as well. We see slaves stealing from their masters in a passive aggressive assertion of self-ownership. We see acts of violence at times. We see some who may well have resorted to arson, burning down their masters’ barns at the height of a harvest season (obviously, this could not be proven). We see prostitution in the seedier parts of New York City. We see the irrepressible escapism of the ale-house and tavern and the “escape” into alcoholism. And we see some, giving up on all their other options, simply committing suicide as an ultimate “liberation.”

With each and every one of these deltaic “tributaries” (I can’t find the word for a single branch of an alluvial fan)we can see black slaves searching for freedom. We can see free blacks making attempts to open and keep the various channels functional. We can see white abolitionists helping. Similarly, we can see channels being actively repressed and cut off. Free blacks insist that they do not want to go to Liberia, white slave catchers prowl the cities and the borders looking for runaways for example, white Congressmen refuse to accept petitions of black “citizens”.

The picture, as Dr. Hodges clearly reveals is far more complex than an “underground railroad.” The pursuit of liberty and happiness is far more dynamic than the image of a railroad conveys (a railroad track is not a thing to be moved easily and if it is moved, it is moved with deliberation, whereas, a river delta is dynamic and fluid and constantly evolving in response to environmental changes. The movement that is often described as “the underground railroad” is far deeper and far more widely expressed and far more diverse than the metaphor that tries to contain it. Perhaps it is time to start rethinking its usefulness.

 What strikes me as I read more of this history is that the story of the freedom seeking slave experience is an essentially American experience. It is not a history of a different America than the white America my ancestor inhabited. For they too were struggling against forces, and seeking alternatives and dealing with repressions and accommodating themselves to resistances. This is a story, and an inspirational story at that, of the futility of trying to bury the human soul in concrete. This is a story that is well worth our telling in American history classes. We do a disservice to our lives if we try to over-simplify it.

Question for Comment: How does the desire to actualize the potential you were born with manifest itself in your own life. What forces seem to continually stand in your way?

“Why am I trying to become what I don’t want to be?”

Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller REVIEW

In 1666, Robert Horne wrote a glowing report of the benefits of relocating to the New World entitled, A Brief Description of the Province of Carolina.

“This Province lying so neer Virginia, and yet more Southward, enjoys the fertility and advantages thereof; and yet is so far distant, as to be freed from the inconstancy of the Weather, which is a great cause of the unhealthfulness thereof; also, being in the latitude of the Bermudas may expect the like healthfulness which it hath hitherto enjoy’d, and doubtless there is no Plantation that ever the English went upon, in all respects so good as this: for though Bermudas be wonderful healthy and fruitful, yet is it but a Prison to the Inhabitants, who are much streightned for want of room, and therefore many of them are come to Carolina, and more intend to follow.”

Horne goes on to explain all the reasons why the Carolinas should be the destination of choice for all those desirous of future success. He would not be the first or the last salesmen to pitch an “American Dream.”  For millions since, America has been “the land of opportunity.” I cannot write this without the song from Steven Spielberg’s American Tale running through my head “There are no cats in America and the streets are filled with cheese.”

In Death of a Salesman, Willie Loman is a seller of that American dream. The irony and the tragedy of his life however is that he cannot look at his own experience and see anything that would back up the veracity of his claims. When he pitches the American dream, he is pitching a product that he knows, from his own life, to be unreal and ethereal. Nothing that he promises can be found to be demonstrated in his own personal account of life in America. His unflagging belief in his own message is based solely on the successes of others – others with abilities, character qualities, and inexplicable luck that he does not have. His heroes are successes with traits he cannot match. Willie Loman is not lucky. He is not focused. He is not even good at his job. Note how often in the play he contradicts his own sales pitches. Willie Loman does not even really want the life or work he has chosen. HE despises New York where he has chosen to live. By temperament, he would prefer to be a farmer. But the glitter of money and success as defined by others has so clouded his brain that he chooses to spend his life doing what other people did to make money, not what he would have wanted to do if money and status were no object.

Willie admires David Singlman, a salesman who makes his living without leaving his hotel room and garners mourners in the hundreds when he dies but Willie does not have Singleman’s panache’ (I have no doubt that Arthur Miller chose the name “Singleman” for a reason). Willie admires his brother Ben who walks into the jungle and wrests his fortune from some sort of Alaska gold rush but Willie does not have Ben’s guts or his luck. Willie even comes to admire his neighbor, Charlie who has the good sense to pursue his business with ethical consistency but Willie is not capable of Charlie’s tenacity. (Charlie’s son, Bernard turns out to be a success because he focuses on a career that suits him and works to become qualified to do it.)

The fact is that Willie chose his career as a salesman because someone else succeeded at it. He did not choose a career because it was a good fit for him. Throughout the play, Willie drifts in and out of his job – always wanting the pay – never caring for the work itself. It is no wonder that he does not succeed at what he does. There is nothing about it that is organic to his interests.

In Willie Loman’s American dream, success is something promised to anyone who wants it, so long as they know how to sell themselves and this is what he tries to do to succeed as a saleman; to sell himself before he knows himself. The great tragedy of the play is that this is what he tries to teach his sons to do: to sell themselves without knowing themselves. His son Biff is in his mid-thirties and he is still trying to figure himself out. “To suffer fifty weeks of the year for a two week vacation, when all you really desire is to be outdoors, with your shirt off” he moans to his brother,

“Why am I trying to become what I don’t want to be?”

“I don’t know what I am supposed to want.”

“I don’t know what the hell I’m working for” his brother concurs. What their father has taught them is how to sell themselves as products. What he has not taught them is how to know what that product is. Willie Loman’s America is a somewhat Machiavellian utopia where good looks and charm and the ability to make an impression are the guarantees of a lucrative outcome. A person does not have to have a soul, just a persona. “A man can end with diamonds here on the basis of being liked” he says.

“The man who makes an appearance in the business world, the man who creates personal interest, is the man who gets ahead. Be liked and you will never want.”

You don’t need to have character or brains or education or intelligence or ideas or a work ethic or talent or even a product worth buying. You don’t need to “train yourself for anything” (as Bernard does. You don’t need to know what you are actually good at or what you have a natural inclination to do. You don’t need values or honesty or self-awareness or integrity. You just need to pretend to be someone else. “Personality always wins the day,” he asserts. All you need is confidence and the ability to project an aura of success. “Therefore it is unnecessary for a prince to have all the good qualities I have enumerated,” Machiavelli wrote in the 14^th Century, “but it is very necessary to appear to have them.” Machiavelli is Willie Loman’s patron saint.

His tragedy is that he has grown old living out someone else’s life in the pursuit of someone else’s dreams. His tragedy is that Willie Loman lived and died, never being Willie Loman. He was a good man as his wife Linda attests. But he was never his own man. “He had the wrong dreams” Biff says at his father’s pathetic funeral. “He never knew who he was.” The double tragedy is that he has raised his sons to do the same. One can look at the colossal failure of Willie Loman’s life and try to find some cause-and-effect relationship between who he was and why he does not succeed. God knows, when Willie himself tries to explain his failure, he can only attribute it to his weight, his conversational ability, or to his clothes. But his son Biff understands. Willie Loman failed because Willie Loman never knew Willie Loman well enough to be Willie Loman.

Notice how many times that Willie contradicts himself. It is as if, in having no core self, he re-invents himself moment by moment.

“I’m the New England man. I’m vital in New England.”

“I’m very well liked in Hartford. You know the trouble is Linda people don’t seem to take to me.”

“Call out the name Willy Loman and see what happens, Big Shot!”

“They don’t know me any more.”

“I am known”

"Greatest thing in the world for him was to bum around.

“Biff is a lazy bum.”

“There’s one thing about Biff. He’s not lazy.”

Willie complains to his wife that he is always being contradicted. But he does not even realize just how often he contradicts himself.  Clearly, to be successful as a salesman, a person has to have integrity. They have to be the sort of people that others trust. And nothing about Willie Loman would give you reason to trust him when even the people closest to him know what an absolute fraud he is. He is not a man that “fifty people in New York would stake.” How can a salesman sell a product when he cannot seem to sell it to himself? Charlie is right when he observes that Willie Loman has never grown up. He has never, to use another word, integrated. He is sixty three years old and he still feels “kind of temporary” about himself.

“If a man is building something, he must be on the right track, musn’t he?” Willie asks his brother Ben in one of his intrusions of memory. That really is the question that Arthur Miller is asking Americans about their “dream” in this play, isn’t it? If you build a house on foundations that are not real, what chance is there that your work will last? Does it matter how beautiful the tiles in the bathroom are or how many years the shingles are rated to last? Does it matter that you have the finest China in the cupboards or a chandelier by Tiffany in the great hall? If you build your life on some sort of hoped-for reality, does it really matter how much work you put into it? “Everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand,” Jesus said in the conclusions of His Sermon on the Mount,

“The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.”

The life and death of the salesman, Willie Loman, is just a case in point. And this is why “Attention. Attention must finally be paid to such a person.” And this is why we should all probably take Biff’s advice when he suggests to his father that he stop listening to his own propaganda and then “take his phony dream” and “burn it before something happens?” Illusions about life – about who and what we are – are dangerous things.

Question for Comment: Speculating on why it is that Biff has not made anything of his life, his brother Happy suggests that it is a consequence of not being attuned to what other people want. “The trouble with you in business,” Hap says, “is that you never tried to please people.” There is a certain irony to this statement because, as we discover later, the primary reason that Biff can’t “take hold of some kind of life” is that he has always been too eager to build his life on someone else’s dream for him (namely his father). He has always been too eager to please someone else.  

In a 1968 interview, Arthur Miller talked about the man that he modeled Willie Loman on. He was, said Miller, “a man whose fantasy was always overreaching his real outline.” “I've always been aware of that kind of an agony,” he continued in the same interview,

“of someone who has some driving, implacable wish in him which never goes away, which he can never block out. And it broods over him, it makes him happy sometimes or it makes him suicidal, but it never leaves him. Any hero whom we even begin to think of as tragic is obsessed, whether it's Lear or Hamlet or the women in the Greek plays."
– “Arthur Miller: An Interview,” The Paris Review, Summer 1966

Willie Loman’s curse is to be obsessed with someone else’s (therefore, the wrong) dream. Do you remember a time in your life when you said to yourself, “This is who I am, so this is what I am going to do with my life”? When? How has your life worked out as a result?

Of Tsunamis and Torah Study

The Impossible REVIEW

“We took care of each other.”

According to Ovadia Yousef,  the former Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel, Tsunamis are the result of not enough Torah study in the world. Sometimes I wish I had that sort of knowledge. But I don’t.  

First of all, let me just say that there is some justifications for some of the criticism of this movie and its treatment of one family among the tens of thousands that were impacted by the Tsunami that hit Thailand in 2004. I am sure that it is difficult for thousands of people to watch as one family is saved when theirs wasn’t. Still, in the end, the story of Abraham is interesting because of the tens of thousands of infertile couples who make the birth of a child to a woman at Sarah’s age a miracle . . . and the story of a family that fate manages to keep together in spite of a tragedy like this is somewhat the same. It is what makes a person cry to watch it. It reminds you that your own dreams of reunification are similarly dim but not impossible.

The Impossible provides something of an arch type. Few of us (particularly here in Vermont) will ever have our families decimated and scattered by a Tsunami. But all of us have felt the power of a disruptive force dividing brothers and sisters or husbands and wives or parents and children and making them aliens to one another. I think it “impossible” to watch this film without seeing it as a parable of sorts -  a metaphor - for all families that have been separated and that have a wish to heal themselves in some final tearful reunion. Sometimes, we must separate because being together is killing us. But none of us can wish for separation as a positive good.

I went looking for thoughts on separation and here are some of the thought provoking perspectives I found:

“Lots of things can be fixed. Things can be fixed. But many times, relationships between people cannot be fixed, because they should not be fixed. You're aboard a ship setting sail, and the other person has joined the inland circus, or is boarding a different ship, and you just can't be with each other anymore. Because you shouldn't be.” - C. Joybell C.

“She fit her head under his chin, and he could feel her weight settle into him. He held her tight and words spilled out of him without prior composition. And this time he made no effort to clamp them off. He told her about the first time he had looked on the back of her neck as she sat in the church pew. Of the feeling that had never let go of him since. He talked to her of the great waste of years between then and now. A long time gone. And it was pointless, he said, to think how those years could have been put to better use, for he could hardly have put them to worse. There was no recovering them now. You could grieve endlessly for the loss of time and the damage done therein. For the dead, and for your own lost self. But what the wisdom of the ages says is that we do well not to grieve on and on. And those old ones knew a thing or two and had some truth to tell, Inman said, for you can grieve your heart out and in the end you are still where you are. All your grief hasn't changed a thing. What you have lost will not be returned to you. It will always be lost. You're left with only your scars to mark the void. All you can choose to do is go on or not. But if you go on, it's knowing you carry your scars with you. Nevertheless, over all those wasted years, he had held in his mind the wish to kiss her on the back of her neck, and now he had done it. There was a redemption of some kind, he believed, in such complete fulfillment of a desire so long deferred.” – Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

“God sometimes removes a person from your life for your protection. Don't run after them.” – Rick Warren

“There is love in holding and there is love in letting go.” –Elizabeth Berg, The Year of Pleasures

“And oh, Claudia, Claudilla, ask me to do something -something that I can do. Do not ask me to forget you or to be indifferent to you. Do not ask me to have no interest in how you pass your time. But if we are separated, set me a task, something that will be a daily link with you.” – Thorton Wilder, The Ides of March

“You cannot force things apart that are bound at the heart.” – Ashley Lorenza

I suppose one could say that some kinds of family love cannot be separated indefinitely. Not even by Tsunamis.

Henry: But you know, you know, the most scary bit for me?

Thomas: When the water hit?

Henry: No. After that, when I came up, I was on my own. That was the scariest part. And when I saw the two of you clinging to the tree, I didn't feel so scared anymore. I knew I wasn't on my own. You see?

Question for Comment: Are stories of family reunions after separation difficult when you live with the sort of separation that can never be anything but permanent? Why or why not?

"A short life worth living and emulating"

David Ruggles by Graham Hodges REVIEW

In his 1832 annual message to the state of Georgia, Governor Wilson Lumpkin asserted the need to treat the Cherokee Indians of his state with justice even as the state pursued a policy that would evict the Cherokee from their ancestral lands. “It is due to the character of the State,” Lumpkin said in that speech,

“that this dependent people should be protected by laws as liberal as may be consistent with their moral and intellectual condition. To afford them such protection and to extend to them suitable privileges, without endangering the rights of our own citizens, will require the most careful deliberation and prudent forecast.”

The Cherokee would have to leave, but not without some rights (i.e. the right to be relocated instead of wiped out.) Forty years later, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Bradley ruled in Bradwell v. Illinois  that the male leaders of the State of Illinois had the prerogative to decide whether or not the right to pursue a career as a lawyer was something a woman could be permitted to do. In that 1873 decision, he wrote,

“The humane movements of modern society, which have for their object the multiplication of avenues for woman's advancement, and of occupations adapted to her condition and sex, have my heartiest concurrence. But I am not prepared to say that it is one of her fundamental rights and privileges to be admitted into every office and position, including those which require highly special qualifications and demanding special responsibilities. In the nature of things it is not every citizen of every age, sex, and condition that is qualified for every calling and position. It is the prerogative of the legislator to prescribe regulations founded on nature, reason, and experience for the due admission of qualified persons to professions and callings demanding special skill and confidence. This fairly belongs to the police power of the State; and, in my opinion, in view of the peculiar characteristics, destiny, and mission of woman, it is within the province of the legislature to ordain what offices, positions, and callings shall be filled and discharged by men, and shall receive the benefit of those energies and responsibilities, and that decision and firmness which are presumed to predominate in the sterner sex.”

Like Lumpkin, Bradley regarded it a genuine extension of beneficence on the part of white men to give any consideration to a powerless sub-population (Cherokee or women). Equality of rights were not for Cherokees or women to insist upon and to do so betrayed a certain lack of etiquette, even gratitude for the fraction of rights that white men offered.

It is this belief of Wilson Lumpkin’s that the white men that controlled the United States and the State of Georgia had a legitimate power to reduce or eliminate a minority’s rights if they so wished - or to remove a population of people to some other place out of the body politic - that so concerned free black men like David Ruggles, living at a time when the American Colonization Society wanted to take free black men like him and resettle them from New York to Africa.

Ruggles was just one articulate voice among many in antebellum America who understood that rights were contestable things and, if not contested, potentially non-existent things. Ruggles was not the first to take a stand for total equality. One can look back to the argument that Lemuel Haynes (black Revolutionary War soldier and later, Vermont pastor) made in 1776 as soon as he read the Declaration of Independence.

“Liberty, and freedom, is an innate principle, which is unmovebly placed in the human species; and to see a man aspire after it, is not enigmatical, seeing he acts no ways incompatible with his own nature; consequently, he that would infringe upon a man's liberty may reasonably expect to meet with opposition, seeing the defendant cannot comply to non-resistance, unless he counter-acts the very laws of nature.

Liberty is a jewel which was handed down to man from the cabinet of heaven, and is coaeval with his existence. And as it proceed from the supreme legislature of the universe, so it is he which hath a sole right to take it away; therefore, he that would take away a man's liberty assumes a prerogative that belongs to another, and acts out of his own domain.”

. . . And the main proposition, which I intend for some brief illustration is this, namely, That an African, or, in other terms, that a Negro may justly challenge, and has an undeniable right to his liberty: Consequently, the practice of slave-keeping, which so much abounds in this land is illicit.”

From Lemuel Haynes, "Liberty Further Extended" (1776)

Ruggles would echo Lemuel Haynes’ argument and up the anti by living consistently with it every day of his life, not in slave-free Vermont but in slave contested New York City.

Someone once described integrity as someone who is not a fraction (integrity comes from the word integer). A person has integrity if what they think, what they say, what they feel, what they do and who they are all come from the same place. David Ruggles is a good example of that trait. He only lived to be 39 but as Dr. Graham Hodges has argued in this biography,

“At the close of short, powerful life, David Ruggles had a key role in the transformation of American abolitionism by emphasizing an aggressive, confrontational style. Broken in body by the struggle, he reinvented himself as a Hydropathical physician while maintaining the battle against slavery. . . .

Ruggles pushed hard against the boundaries of contemporary anti-slavery. His courageous actions against the daily indignities of slavery and it's infernal accomplice, Northern racial prejudice, crystallized methods of the movement against them. Again, although he did not invent it, Ruggles raised assistance to fugitive slaves and confrontation against kidnappers and the illegal slave trade to a much higher public profile. . . .

In his voluminous writings, Ruggles demonstrated a powerful sense of equality with whites, especially antagonistic ones. Demonstrating immense courage, Ruggles served as an example of black masculinity and was far in advance of other black abolitionists in his attention to women's rights. His life was brief, but his example of cogent intellectualism remains powerful to us today. Self-sacrifice and direct confrontation with evil made his short life worth living and emulating.

When David Ruggles saw the formation of a society to send black people “back” to Africa (most had never seen it), he helped to organize a counter organization. When Ruggles saw slave catchers in New York, he published their names. When Ruggles met fugitive slaves (like Frederick Douglas), he hid them and helped them find employment under different names. When Ruggles saw pamphlets that demeaned the equality of black people, he wrote pamphlets to counter them. When he saw propagandists for slavery or for colonization fear mongering with assertions that abolition was a prelude to amalgamation, Ruggles countered that such fears were ridiculous and unfounded. “Ruggles contended that bias against mixed race marriage was all about public opinion” writes Hodges. "Nature teaches no such repugnance" Ruggles insisted.

One can find no point where Ruggles was willing to relent his original position. When he was required to sit in the black section of a ferry or streetcar, he resisted being moved. When he saw arguments in favor of prejudice in society, he started his own newspaper to contest the assertion. On November 21, 1835, we are told, Ruggles and other friends of human rights organized the fabled New York Committee of Vigilance and dedicated themselves to protecting the city’s black population from the slaveocracy. When he saw a fugitive slave in need of legal help, he raised money to provide it. When he saw discriminatory laws passed, he resisted them. When Ruggles came to understand that certain products sold in New York were tainted with the sin of slavery, he opened a store and sold “free-produce.” Hodges writes,

“He also publicized abolitionist sentiments in the advertisements, proclaiming that "the sugars above mentioned are free sugars – they are manufactured by free people not by slaves." Ruggles’ alliance with the free produce movement had several effects. For one thing, it brought him into contact with white and black women who were against slavery and for whom purchasing free produce goods was a conscious moral choice, especially in a city with abundant food for sale."

Graham Hodges insists that people like David Ruggles played a role in the abolition movement larger than their position in the history books has given them. “Until recently, historians of the abolitionist movement have over emphasized the efforts and achievements of white activists,” Hodges writes,

“This slanted historiography has resulted in a partial historical amnesia about the contributions of African-American anti-slavery.”

His opposition to slavery and discrimination made no exceptions. On the issue of black rights, he out Garrisoned William Lloyd Garrison by insisting on confrontational violence if necessary. “To effect a mighty revolution such as the general abolition of slavery,” Ruggles argued,

“requires agents, and funds, and time, and influence. ... But while we long and labor for the accomplishment of this noble cause, let us not lose sight of the minor evils, which tend in the aggregate to make up that monstrous system of inequality; Let us in every case of oppression and wrong, inflicted on our brethren, prove our sincerity, by alleviating their sufferings, affording them protection, giving them counsel, and thus in our individual spheres of action, prove ourselves practical abolitionists.

Some abolitionists were “all hat and no cowboy.” Not so David Ruggles. For his entire but short life, he thought globally and acted locally to make his belief a reality: Human rights were not the gifts of white men to be appreciated when doled out in half-measures. They were possessions owned by all and worthy of defending with one’s own life.

“Ruggles’ dispute marked a significant transition in the anti-slavery movement. As one who was visibly active in direct struggle against the agents of slavery in the nation's largest city, Ruggles took a strong stance in favor of personal resistance to enslavement. As a core part of his practical abolitionism, personal resistance made common sense to ordinary people, especially those beset by villainous kidnappers.”

David Ruggles died a decade before John Brown but he certainly would have understood him.

Question for Comment: Recently, the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), making it unconstitutional for the Federal government to treat a couple that a State regards as married as unmarried. Justice Alito in his dissent, argued that the Supreme Court has been lured into assuming powers that he believes more properly belong to the people's legislatures. Alito writes:

“What Windsor and the United States seek, therefore, is not the protection of a deeply rooted right but the recognition of a very new right, and they seek this innovation not from a legislative body elected by the people, but from unelected judges. Faced with such a request, judges have cause for both caution and humility.”

In the mid 19^th Century, there were many who hoped that the Supreme Court could remove the need for the American people to continue contentiously debating the rights of black people. Justice Tanney tried to comply with their wishes by ruling in Dred Scott that current or former slaves and their descendants had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

Naturally, one might compare the Windsor case and the Dred Scott case by asking if same-sex partners have any rights which heterosexual couples are bound to respect. If, as I suspect, you believe that all rights have their source in God or they are not rights … If you believe that no rights can be granted by a state that were not formerly granted by God … and if you believe that books like Leviticus can be used to accurately plumb the answer to what rights God would or would not grant, then the question is hardly debatable. But if you believe that God grants people who can suffer the right not to, or if you believe that the state has the power and divine permission to grant some rights regardless of the disposition that God holds towards them, or if you believe that Leviticus might not be the best determinant of God’s present position on a social issue (we do not exclude people with leprosy from our communities for example), then the question is also hardly debatable.

I wonder if it is possible to be David Ruggles consistent on either side of this question? I wonder which side is easier to defend consistently?