American Exceptionalism: Land of Liberty, Foundation of Slavery - Part 12

Part 12 of this Series

Groton, Massachusetts, February 1963

“What happens to a dream deferred?”

- Langston Hughes

In February 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. spent two days at a boys boarding school in rural Massachusetts, where he had been invited to visit with the school’s 200 students and faculty. It was still relatively early in the 1960s civil rights movement, and on this issue the school was ahead of its time. Two years earlier, the first Freedom Riders (seven blacks and six whites) had boarded two Greyhound buses in Washington, D.C. and headed south. The farther they traveled into the Deep South, the more violent the resistance they met. Just outside Anniston, Alabama, Klansmen firebombed the bus, tried to keep the riders from getting off, and brutally beat them when they finally did. In the face of such horrendous violence and police collusion, James Farmer of CORE ended the campaign, but neither the violence would explode soon again. (Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the town’s citizens, a Monsanto plant had been poisoning their land and water since 1935.)

In February 1963, Selma’s “Bloody Sunday” was still two years away; Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman, who would be murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi in June 1964, were very much alive; as were Addie Mae Collins (age 14), Denise McNair (14), Carole Robertson (14), and Cynthia Wesley (11), who would die that September in the rubble of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church; Addie's sister Sarah still had both eyes.

On Saturday evening, when he spoke to the whole school, as well as members from the surrounding community, Martin Luther King had just turned 34. It was an extraordinary talk, filled with the sonorous cadences of the Baptist church into which Dr. King had been ordained. I was 18 years old, and I’d never heard anything like it. And I have never forgotten it. I learned later that the speech we had heard was an early version – a kind of rehearsal, really – of one he would give six months later on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

August 28th, 1963, Looking out from the Lincoln Memorial

He spoke to 250,000 people who had come for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. A little more than five years later, on the evening of April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. He was 39 years old.

American Exceptionalism: Land of Liberty, Foundation of Slavery - Part 11

Part 11 of a Series

Washington, D.C., 1963

“I have a dream.”

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Everyone at Gettysburg knew whom Lincoln meant by “our fathers” at the beginning of his talk; it was far less clear whom he meant by “the people” at its end. A century later, Martin Luther King, Jr. set out to clarify that. Looking out from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, across to the Washington Monument and the Capitol beyond, he did not speak of a city on a hill, but of 350 years of slavery and repression, of the enslaver’s whip and the terrorist’s rope. He reminded 250,000 freedom marchers how far short of its rhetoric America has always fallen.

Yet we remember his speech, not as “The American Nightmare,” but as “I Have a Dream” – and not just any dream, but “a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. . . a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’” It was still, as Langston Hughes wrote, “a dream deferred” – in King’s words, a “promissory note” on which America has defaulted. “Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’” We must not, however, “wallow in the valley of despair,” he told his listeners of all races and walks of life. We must build together a city on a hill.

This, it seems to me, is the core of American Exceptionalism – not that America is – or has ever been – exceptional, but that we strive to be; not that the American people are better than others, but that every so often someone comes along and says, “we can be better than this.” Despite what Lincoln said at Gettysburg, that “the world will little note nor long remember what we say here,” it is, in fact, the words that we remember, and it is our collective failure to live up to them that brought Lincoln to Gettysburg and King to the Lincoln Memorial. Neither man said, “This is not who we are,” a mantra that has acted for centuries as an absolution for our worst behavior. On the contrary, they said, this is who we are – but it is not who we have to be.

The powerful have long manipulated the concept of American Exceptionalism, insisting that it explains the superiority of this nation. But it is the outsiders – from Emma Lazarus’s “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” to Raphael Warnock’s 2021 Senatorial victory announcement in Georgia that “only in America is my story even possible” – who have most intensely believed in it . . . and who, on the strength of that belief, have given it its true meaning.

O, yes,

I say it plain

America never was America to me,

And yet I swear this oath —

America will be!

- Langston Hughes

If there is a greatness to – and a hope for – this country, it is in those words.

American Exceptionalism: Land of Liberty, Foundation of Slavery - Part 10

Part 10 of a Series

“Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed.” 

- Langston Hughes

Today’s post is an exchange with an old friend that got me thinking about both the substance of this series and how to make it more interactive. I have had several personal responses from readers that have challenged me to think more deeply and more clearly, and I’d like to create with this blog a thoughtful conversation as much as a monologue . . . although given the state of social media interactions, perhaps I should be careful what I wish for.

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“A point I was going to make the other day if we had more time to talk is that, in my mind, it is a mistake to characterize slavery as a distinctly American social phenomenon. It was for all practical purposes a universal phenomenon: This was driven home to me a couple of years ago when we were in Sicily and toured Syracuse. There, one of the most impactful sites we visited were the massive salt mines within the ancient city walls. Who inhabited the salt mines for hundreds of years? The ancient Greek inhabitants’ slaves from around the Mediterranean world.

“To note this is not to diminish the problematic legacy of slavery in the U.S. in all its current forms, but it argues against any particular blame of our ancestors for its existence on our shores. Similarly, our ancestors don’t deserve particular blame for American women not being allowed to vote until the 20th century. On both scores, we’ve evolved, and the content of that continuing evolution is the stuff of our eligibility to still be considered ‘exceptional.’

“I don’t buy the ‘Land of Liberty, Foundation of Slavery’ juxtaposition because it suggests that the latter is as significant as the substance and spirit of the former. Not close in my mind: It is the former which overcame the latter and which energizes the continuing effort to erase slavery’s legacy.”

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I agree that slavery and degradation have been around probably forever, and when you write of Syracuse, I think also of Sparta, whose treatment of its own people, the despised helots, seems cruel even by that city state’s gruesome standards.\

It is also true that North America received a small fraction of the total slave traffic. In the almost 350 years of the transatlantic slave trade, 12.5 million Africans were seized and put on ships. Almost two million died during the brutal “middle passage”. The vast majority of the survivors were shipped to the Caribbean and Brazil, with 5.5 million going to the latter alone; 388,000 were put ashore in North America. Yet on the eve of the Civil War, there were about 4 million slaves in the United States,

Still, I think several things set the United States apart:

• The creation of a potent theory of racial superiority to justify slavery. Racial prejudice and subjugation are hardly unique to us, but we created a complex legal and philosophical justification for it, one that “Dred Scott v. Sandford” sought to implant in the Constitution.

• The theory of racial inferiority went beyond justifying the subjugation of people; it defined them as subhuman. Slaves were property.

• In the years before the Civil War, the argument developed that slavery was not only good for white people, it was also beneficial for the slaves themselves. That argument is still alive, as Ron DeSantis recently demonstrated. (It is also a variant of the “White Man’s burden” European nations used to justify their empires.)

• What I didn’t learn in high school was the enormous profitability of the slave economy and its role as the foundation of the industrial revolution. “What distinguished the United States from virtually every other cotton-growing area in the world,” writes Sven Beckert in Empire of Cotton, “was the planters' command of nearly unlimited supplies of land, labor and capital, and their unparalleled political power. . . .It was on the back of cotton, and thus on the backs of slaves, that the U.S. economy ascended in the world."

• Interestingly, Utilitarianism, the dominant and democratizing philosophical school of the mid-19th century, which is often summarized (however inexactly) as  optimizing “the greatest good for the greatest number,” was adopted by apologists for slavery, who pointed to the immense wealth a relatively small number of slaves produced for the rest of the country.

• Nor did abolition and emancipation end the matter. Jim Crow laws, sharecropping measures, prison work gangs, segregation, intimidation, lynching, and more kept Blacks suppressed.

• In the end, though, I think that what made American slavery so different from slavery elsewhere is that it refuted the “self-evident” truths that had given birth to the nation.

American Exceptionalism: Land of Liberty, Foundation of Slavery - Part 9

Part 9 of a Series

Gettysburg, 1863

“A new birth of Freedom”

- Abraham Lincoln

Four score and seven years after the Second Continental Congress issued its Declaration, Abraham Lincoln stood on a field outside Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, 140 miles almost due west of Philadelphia, and evoked that “new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” He had not come to tell his listeners how great America was, but to urge on them the “unfinished work” that was required to give “this nation . . . a new birth of freedom.” When he looked out across the battlefield, he saw, not a city on a hill, but a burial ground holding more than 3,500 graves, over a quarter of them unmarked.

The most deadly and destructive war in American history bore bloody witness to the Declaration’s tragic contradiction. And so, President Lincoln came to Gettysburg to venerate the dead and to encourage the living to persevere with the war. But Lincoln came also to affirm the dream. He spoke to a divided and exhausted nation – and he spoke to the world. We can be better than this, he said, despite more than two centuries of evidence to the contrary. We must rise above the carnage of this place, not only to honor those buried here but to ensure that they will not have died in vain.

As in so much of Lincoln’s writing, there is in this speech a tinge of sorrow, a sense, not so much of America’s accomplishments, as of her failure to live up to her possibilities. Here was an American politician standing on the battlefield where American troops had won the decisive battle of the war, not to fatuously proclaim his country’s greatness but to call on it to achieve the ideals on which it had been founded.

If there were any doubts about what those ideals encompassed – and why the war was fought – Lincoln made that clear less than four months later in his Second Inaugural Address. “These slaves [one eighth of the country’s total population] constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All know that this interest was somehow the cause of the war.”

The war was not fought over states’ rights under siege from the federal government, as many in this country still would have it, nor was it about an agrarian South trying to defend its way of life from an industrial North, nor about a culture of practical Yankees trying to subjugate a culture of romantic Cavaliers. The war was fought over slavery. And it would not – it could not – end until slavery was abolished forever.

At the outset of the war, Lincoln had said that the Union was fighting, not to end slavery but to halt its expansion. The war, as horrific as it had turned out to be for both sides, had changed that – not so much for Lincoln, who had believed it all along as for the nation – whom he told in his Second Inaugural that, “if God wills that it continue until the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”

Note: I’m grateful to my friend, David Yeats-Thomas, for this important corrective to Monday’s post: “Great series, Jamie. Would it be complicating your point to note that the 15th Amendment’s right to vote for all citizens still left half the population without the right to vote?”

American Exceptionalism: Land of Liberty, Foundation of Slavery - Part 8

Part 8 of a Series

Two Americas, 1860

“And the war came.”

- Abraham Lincoln

In a series focused on America’s four defining documents, it may seem odd to spend so much time on the contrasting views of Frederick Douglass and Roger Taney. But the 1850s ended with the Civil War, which was then, and remains today, the fundamental challenge, not just to the  legacy of American Exceptionalism, but to the survival of the nation itself. Douglass and Taney confronted the country’s elemental paradox: that we are a land of liberty built on a foundation of slavery. They read the same texts and admired the same authors. Both even argued that the founding fathers were great men and brave men who must be taken at their word. Yet they laid out two visions of American and its “peculiar institution” that were polar opposites.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” the founders had declared, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

That is so, said Frederick Douglass. Therefore, the slave must be a free man.

That is so, said Roger Taney. Therefore, the slave cannot be a man.

On one thing, though, Douglass and Taney agreed: there could be no compromise on this issue.

“The right of property in a slave,” wrote Taney, “is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution.”

“It is not light that is needed,” said Douglass, “but fire.”

The Civil War nullified the Dred Scott decision, and the post war government quickly overturned it. The 13th amendment (1865) abolished slavery; the 14th amendment(1868) declared that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States . . . are citizens of the United States;” and the 15th amendment guaranteed the right to vote to all citizens, regardless of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

But Dred Scott’s most enduring legacy has proved far more difficult to overcome. For the decision is rooted in a doctrine of Black inferiority that continues to be embedded in far too much of our culture. Taney’s racism is overt, unapologetic, and pervasive. The Civil War and the new amendments could end slavery, make Black people citizens, and, at least theoretically, give them the right to vote. But no constitutional amendment could ever undo the damage of a decision that not only extolled slavery but wrote systemic racism into the Constitution itself.

In the end, Frederick Douglass left the most important legacy of all. As outsiders have done so often throughout our history – and as Martin Luther King, Jr. would do over a century later below the Lincoln Memorial – Douglass grounded his fiery condemnation of America firmly in America’s own principles. The Constitution, he argued, “interpreted as it ought to be interpreted . . . is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT.”

The Dred Scott decision called forth America’s most reprehensible demons. Frederick Douglass appealed to what Abraham Lincoln would later call “the better angels of our nature.”

American Exceptionalism: Land of Liberty, Foundation of Slavery - Part 7

Part 7 of a Series

Washington, D.C., 1857

“The Constitution of the United States recognizes slaves as property.”

- Roger B. Taney

We ended last time with Frederick Douglass’ syllogism on slavery:

• Every person thinks slavery is wrong for them.

• A slave is a person.

• Therefore, slavery is wrong for every person and must be abolished.

Enter, three years later, Roger B. Taney, Chief Justice of the United States, with a syllogism of his own:

• The Constitution protects a private property.

• A slave is not a person but an article of private property.

• Therefore, the Constitution protects, not the slave’s non-existent person, but the slaveowner’s property.

The case was Dred Scott v. Sandford. The plaintiff was an enslaved Black man who had been owned, bought, and sold for his entire life. Because he had lived for a time in a free state (Illinois) and a free territory (which later became the state of Wisconsin), Scott argued that he had in the process become a free man. He sued for his and his family’s freedom, and after years of legal meandering, including decisions in his favor, the case arrived at the Supreme Court.

The result was not just a fatal blow to the hopes of Dred Scott and his family, it was a disaster for all Black Americans and, indeed, for the whole nation.. Having proclaimed that a slave was not a man but another’s man’s property, Taney went on to declare that not only current slaves, but all descendants of slaves, were not persons before the law. “No one of that race had ever migrated to the United States voluntarily,” he wrote erroneously; “all of them had been brought here as articles of merchandise.” Consequently, no Black person, “whether they had become free or not,” can be a citizen of the United States or the state in which they reside.

For good measure, the court’s majority declared null and void any law that sought to limit a slaveholder’s absolute control over his property. It upheld the Fugitive Slave Law, which required that all escaped slaves be returned to their enslavers, regardless of where they had been captured. And it asserted that the Fifth Amendment – one so many people are pleading in Washington these days – forbids, in addition to self-incrimination, taking a person’s “life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Since slaves were property, Congress had no authority to limit slavery anywhere in the United States, including in its territories. In the opinion of this court, the sanctity of property was in no way modified by the fact that the article of merchandise happened to be physically, if not legally, a person.

Hailed by the Southern States, the Court’s 7-2 decision led directly to the Civil War three years later. Since then, Dred Scott v. Sandford has been widely considered the worst decision in the history of the Supreme Court. Recently, conservatives have disparaged it for legislating from the bench, in their eyes, the worst judicial sin of all.

But Taney does no such thing. Rather, he grounds his thinking firmly in both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and he notes that, although popular opinion on the slavery issue may have become more liberal over time, that is not a matter for the court. “The Constitution,” he wrote, “must be construed now as it was understood at the time of its adoption. Any other rule of construction would abrogate the judicial character of this court and make it the mere reflex of the popular opinion or passion of the day.”

If such reasoning sounds familiar, it should. For it’s precisely the narrow, strict-constructionist position favored by the current majority on today’s Supreme Court.