Confederate "Heritage" Month 2022, April 25: Slavery and the founding principles of the US

Sean Wilentz reminds us of the key role that slavery played in the development of what we know by names such as Western culture and European values: "A fixture and force in Western culture, time out of mind, slavery, and more specifically racial slavery, had been essential to the European settlement of the New World ever since the Portuguese pioneered the plantation system with enslaved African labor in the sixteenth century." (American Slavery and ‘the Relentless Unforeseen’ New York Review blog 11/19/2019)

Wilentz gives us a brief intellectual history of the strain of European thought that developed a critique of modern slavery, an important step in the development of democracy, personal freedom, and social justice.

But he also reminds us that simple historic narratives of democratic progress can easily obscure important aspects of how such progress as took place actually did happen, i.e., by people fighting for it. He summarizes a liberal version of this narrative that is true as far as it goes:

The historian Bernard Bailyn has offered one influential version of this view in his description of how the Revolution unleashed a “contagion of liberty.” Slavery, although a central part of American society, hardly encapsulated the ideals of the Declaration of Independence; it contradicted them, for reasons later explained by no less of an authority than Abraham Lincoln. The American Revolution may not have overthrown the institution of slavery but its egalitarian principles were at least implicitly antislavery. The anomaly became more glaring over the succeeding two generations when, in yet another unfolding of the unforeseen, American slavery did not die out as most expected but expanded, turning the American South into the most dynamic and ambitious slavery regime in the world. Still, when Emancipation arrived, it did so as a vindication and affirmation of America’s founding principles, the “new birth of freedom” that Lincoln pronounced at Gettysburg in 1863. It confounded the claims of those reactionary proslavery apologists who belittled Thomas Jefferson as a cunning dissembler and who regarded the Declaration’s assertion of self-evident equality as, in the words of one Indiana senator from 1854, “nothing more than a self-evident lie.” [my emphasis]

Part of the process of creating a nation is creating narratives that function as myths, i.e., more-or-less sacred events and principles and heroic achievements that are taken as valid and shared by a large portion of the people. And in the United States, where we still operate under a constitution that became effective in 1789, readings of historical events and previous interpretations of them over 200 years ago can even have significant implications for court rulings.

American reactionaries and "reactionary radicalized conservatives" (a term Austrian political scientists Natascha Strobl uses to describe figures like most of the Republicans currently in Congress) are very suspicious of critical thinking about history. As evidence by their ridiculous jihad against their bogeyman version of "critical race theory."

Wilentz describes the limitation of the Bailyn view this way:

One problem with this familiar view is that it obscures how new, how radical, antislavery politics were during the revolutionary era, and how, for many patriots, American slavery and American freedom were perfectly compatible. ...

These proslavery Americans and apologists for slavery and their progeny were no less products of the American founding than the early abolitionists inspired by Woolman and Benezet or the conflicted enlightened Virginians like Jefferson. Plantation slavery grew stupendously in the United States after the Revolution, generating a well-organized slave power that long dominated national politics. Slavery’s defeat was not inevitable. Nor, obviously, did white supremacy die with slavery. Over the century and a half since slavery’s abolition, the racist Americanism of Charles Pinckney and Roger Brooke Taney has survived and flourished in new forms, along with dominating social and political structures that uphold it. Far from vanquished, it has morphed and resurged in ways expected and unexpected, from the bloody overthrow of Reconstruction to the menacing rise of Donald J. Trump. [my emphasis]