The iniquities of the wicked ensnare them,and they are caught in the toils of their sin. (Proverbs 5:22)
I have actually heard people say that Juneteenth is a holiday for only one segment of the population. But what I can’t figure out is why we would not expect Black people to celebrate?
Obviously it’s a holiday for white people—or, let’s put it this way: it must be a time of celebration for those people who look back on the nineteenth-century American South and, because of their skin color, wonder whether, had they lived then and there, they would have been slave owners. Thank God we are no longer confronted with such sin! With all the potential for moral corruption around us in the 21st century, thank God he has removed that particular cause of depravity!
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When we think about American slavery one of the things we should think about is how the slave society dulled the moral sense of the slavemasters.
Slavery exerted a corrupting influence on the slavemasters.
I know that the slavemaster is not the first victim of slavery to which our mind turns, and you might think it’s silly—or worse than silly—to reflect on the evils of slavery for the enslaver. I get that. There’s an episode of Little House on the Prairiein which a boy is being abused by his alcoholic father. The men of Walnut Grove get together to talk about how to help the boy, and someone says (I think it’s Doc Baker) that they should probably try to help the father. Charles Ingles responds: “I don’t care about the father, I care only about the boy.” Do you understand why Charles feels that way? That’s the way a lot of people are going to feel about slavery: Who cares about the travails of the slavemaster?! We only care about the slaves!
There are a couple of reasons I want to think about the slavemasters.
* Had I been born 200 years ago, I would not have been one of the slaves.
* There were a lot of opponents of slavery in nineteenth-century America who wrote about the problems of slavery for slaveowners. In his first autobiography (1845), Frederick Douglass wrote about his master’s wife: “Slavery proved as injurious to her as it did to me” (ch. 7).
Sin hurts the sinner
As Augustine wrote in the Confessions (3.8.16) at the end of the fourth century, talking about people who know not God: “even when they sin against you, they act wickedly against their own souls. Their iniquity speaks falsehoods to them, whether by corrupting or perverting their own nature, which you created and ordained, or by making immoderate use of licit things, or by so burning with desire for illicit things that they use them contrary to nature” (trans. Williams 2019: 39).
“They act wickedly against their own souls.” That’s the theme I want to highlight in this essay, and mostly I’m going to do that by lining up quotations that demonstrate the point, quotations about the general idea—sin hurts the sinner—and then also about the specific instance under consideration here, slaveholding.
First, the general idea, and it’s one that Socrates mentioned in his final speech—before being sentenced to drink the hemlock—in reference to his accuser, Meletus (and Anytus): “I think he does himself a much greater injury by doing what he is doing now—killing a man unjustly” (Plato, Apology 30d; see the discussion by Emily Wilson, pp. 46–51).
The Proverbs are filled with this sort of reflection.
yet they lie in wait—to kill themselves!and set an ambush—for their own lives! (Proverbs 1:18)
Those who are kind reward themselves,but the cruel do themselves harm.The wicked earn no real gain,but those who sow righteousness get a true reward. (Proverbs 11:17–18)
As righteousness tendeth to life:so he that pursueth evil pursueth it to his own death. (Proverbs 11:19)
The deuterocanoical book of Wisdom, written just before the time of Jesus, mentions that “One is punished by the very things by which one sins” (Wisdom 11:16), and the other deuterocanonical wisdom book, this one called Sirach, says similarly: “One who sins does wrong to himself” (Sirach 19:4).
It was not just Jews and Christians who saw this truth; the pre-classical Greek poet Hesiod asserted: “A man contrives evil for himself when he contrives evil for someone else, and an evil plan is most evil for the planner” (Works and Days 265–66; trans. Most, pp. 108–9).
One more example, much more recent, written in America about 15 years before slavery was federally prohibited, but this example is not about slavery. It’s from the novel The Scarlet Letter (1850, ch. 14), in which a man named Roger Chillingworth has been wronged, and so he plots his revenge, and it turns out that the biggest victim of his revenge is himself. “In a word, old Roger Chillingworth was a striking evidence of man’s faculty of transforming himself into a devil, if he will only, for a reasonable space of time, undertake a devil’s office.”
A devil’s office
Slaveowning in the nineteenth-century American South was a devil’s office, and it turned humans into devils.
Living in a slave society himself, Augustine recognized the dangers of sin, and the madness of ignoring the perils of, for instance, hating an enemy. “As if there were any greater danger from a human enemy than from the very hatred that one feels toward him! As if one did more serious harm to someone else by persecuting him than to one’s own heart by stoking one’s hostility!” (Confessions 1.18.29).
In a work written after the American Revolutionary War but before the drafting of the US Constitution, Thomas Jefferson had diagnosed this problem.
There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people [i.e., white Americans] produced by the existence of slavery among us. The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. (Notes on the State of Virginia, 1785, Query 18)
Jefferson goes on to continue describing how easy it is for the slavemaster to abuse his slave and thus train his child to do the same. The child who is
thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances. And with what execration should the statesman be loaded, who permitting one half the citizens thus to trample on the rights of the other, transforms those into despots, and these into enemies, destroys the morals of the one part, and the amor patriae of the other.
These are amazing sentences from Jefferson in 1785, and with the benefit of hindsight of another nearly two and half centuries of American history, they are tragic. Jefferson’s discussion continues for a few more sentences, and those sentences are well worth reading in this book—his only published book—easily accessible online. But note in the last sentence quoted above that he imagines that with all the harm to the slave entailed in the practice of American slavery, he observes that it is the slavemasters who are turned into immoral despots. You might imagine what the author of the Declaration of Independence thought about immoral despots.
In an 1847 letter, Francis Wayland, an opponent of slavery, quotes this passage from Jefferson and adds the comment a bit later: “It is in accordance with the general law, that those who enslave the bodies of others, become in turn the slaves of their own passions” (see here, pp. 119–20).
The English writer Charles Dickens, visiting America in 1842, published a series of Notes, near the end of which he describes the logical outcome of the training of a slavemaster (text here, near the end of ch. 17):
Do we not know that the man who has been born and bred among its [= slavery’s] wrongs; who has seen in his childhood husbands obliged at the word of command to flog their wives; women, indecently compelled to hold up their own garments that men might lay the heavier stripes on their legs, driven and harried by brutal overseers in their time of travail, and becoming mothers on the field of toil, under the very lash itself; who has read in youth, and seen his virgin sisters read, descriptions of runaway men and women, and their disfigured persons [as Dickens had quoted earlier in his chapter], which could not be published elsewhere, of so much stock upon a farm, or at a show of beasts;—do we not know that that man, whenever his wrath is kindled up, will be a brutal savage?
According to Jefferson, enslaving another person renders you an immoral despot. Yes, I know, he himself was a slavemaster, and among his slaves were some of his own biological children. That does not make his observation wrong; I think it gives a powerful illustration of it. According to Dickens, the slavemaster trains himself to become a brutal savage. According to the historian Douglas Foster (p. 55), it is for this reason that Alexander Campbell, the nineteenth-century religious reformer in Virginia, opposed slavery.
What I’m saying is, I’m glad I won’t have to stand before God and answer questions about my record as a slavemaster.
But we can continue. We have heard from some white people, including a slaveowner, Jefferson, but now we turn to some slaves, or some former (runaway) slaves. (Douglass was still legally a slave when he published his autobiography, as his freedom was not purchased until 1846.)
Going back to the first autobiography of Frederick Douglass, who escaped from bondage when he was about age 20, he includes some descriptions of the moral corruption that enslavement wrought on his enslavers. When he was a young boy, he met with a kind woman, the wife of his master, who had not grown up around slaves and so at first treated little Frederick well, like a fellow human being. Such treatment did not last.
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. (ch. 6)
Who said that about how power corrupts?
At first, this kind mistress taught young Douglass to read, before she realized that it was against the law to educate a slave.
It is due, however, to my mistress to say of her, that she did not adopt this course of treatment immediately [= preventing him from learning]. She at first lacked the depravity indispensable to shutting me up in mental darkness. It was at least necessary for her to have some training in the exercise of irresponsible power, to make her equal to the task of treating me as though I were a brute. (ch. 7)
“She at first lacked the depravity.” Would that she had never acquired it!
Another escaped slave, this one a female named Harriet Jacobs, wrote in her autobiography of 1861 about her former owner and his wife. (All of the following quotations from Jacobs’ book are from ch. 9.)
Had it not been for slavery, he would have been a better man, and his wife a happier woman.
And again.
I can testify, from my own experience and observation, that slavery is a curse to the whites as well as to the blacks.
According to Jacobs, when the white daughters learn that their own fathers have fathered children with their slave women, children who are now their own slaves, these daughters themselves select a slave man and bear its child.
In such cases the infant is smothered, or sent where it is never seen by any who know its history. But if the white parent is the father, instead of the mother, the offspring are unblushingly reared for the market. If they are girls, I have indicated plainly enough what will be their inevitable destiny.
Jacobs says about the effects of slaveholding:
It makes white fathers cruel and sensual; the sons violent and licentious; it contaminates the daughters, and makes the wives wretched. … Yet few slaveholders seem to be aware of the widespread moral ruin occasioned by this wicked system. Their talk is of blighted cotton crops—not of the blight on their children’s souls.
She says, if you go to a southern plantation and call yourself “a negro trader”: “Then there will be no concealment; and you will see and hear things that will seem to you impossible among human beings with immortal souls.”
I believe her. And I believe Lord Acton; that’s the guy who said that famous statement that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. I have witnessed the corrupting influence of power and money. And I believe the Lord, who told the apostle Paul: “my strength is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9).
Sin hurts the sinner. Enslaving someone turns you into a savage brute and an immoral despot and trains you in depravity.
Ought I not to celebrate the eradication of this particular evil?
A divine office?
Or, maybe not. What if we’re looking at this all wrong? Maybe enslaving others is good for you, good for your soul. Maybe it provides training not in depravity but righteousness. After all, having children to care for is good for you; helps you be unselfish. That’s an argument I’ve made before and would make again. I’ve experienced it. So … shouldn’t it be the same with enslaving others. Are slavemasters sorta like parents, and the slaves sorta like children?
I feel like I’ve got a lot of work to do to convince you of this, and it’s going to be difficult, because I find the idea ludicrous.
But not everyone has found it ludicrous. Some pro-slavery apologists in the nineteenth-century American South made this very argument.
For example, William Harper, a South Carolinian, in 1835 wrote that enslaving others improves one’s moral character, just like parenting children.
He who has been accustomed not only to command, but to protect others; to provide for their wants and relieve their distresses, will, if his nature be not unusually perverse, acquire an habitual and humane interest in the objects of his care. (text here, pp. 13–14)
Whereas Thomas Jefferson (in his Notes, Query 18, part of which I quoted earlier) and others had alleged that enslaving others makes one lazy (Jefferson: “For in a warm climate, no man will labour for himself who can make another labour for him”), Harper rejects this idea (pp. 14–15).
Can Harper be right? Perhaps there is a superficial plausibility to his argument.
Whether or not we should agree with Harper, I submit, is made clearer by his other statement in the same speech saying that we should recognize that the claim that all people are made equal is an exaggeration. (I quoted this statement from Harper in an essay I wrote on slavery in the New Testament, which you can find here; for the quote, see p. 85. Alexander Campbell also mocked this idea from Jefferson in the conclusion to his article “Slavery and the Fugitive Slave Law—No. II,” Millennial Harbinger (1851): 247–52.)
To return again to Jefferson and that Query 18 in his Notes on the State of Virginia, published 9 years after the Declaration, he does not seem to think he was exaggerating when he wrote about the self-evident nature of the claim that “all men are created equal.” In his Notes of 1785, he wonders: “And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath?” Since Jefferson has been talking about slaves, when he now says that “these liberties are of the gift of God”—a phrase that reminds us of the Declaration of Independence—he is obviously including the slaves in this evaluation. He goes on to express foreboding about what God will do to America for the sin of slavery. He was prescient.
No; rather, a devil’s office
Harper was wrong, obviously wrong, absurdly wrong. The best one can say for Harper is that he is hopelessly, willfully naive, wrong perhaps in a similar way to Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “The White Man’s Burden.” (See Jonah Goldberg’s comments here.)
We best return to Frederick Douglass, this time to his Fourth of July oration from 1852—note the year; the 13th Amendment is still thirteen years away; the Civil War is still almost a decade away. And the economic system of slavery is more than ever entrenched in the southern United States. During the course of this speech, Douglass again finds reason to discourse on the dangers of slavery to the slaveholder.
Fellow-citizens! I will not enlarge further on your national inconsistencies. The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretence, and your christianity as a lie. It destroys your moral power abroad[;] it corrupts your politicians at home. It saps the foundation of religion; it makes your name a hissing, and a bye-word to a mocking earth. It is the antagonistic force in your government, the only thing that seriously disturbs and endangers your Union. It fetters your progress; it is the enemy of improvement, the deadly foe of education; it fosters pride; it breeds insolence; it promotes vice; it shelters crime; it is a curse to the earth that supports it; and yet, you cling to it, as if it were the sheet anchor of all your hopes. Oh! be warned! be warned! a horrible reptile is coiled up in your nation’s bosom; the venomous creature is nursing at the tender breast of your youthful republic; for the love of God, tear away, and fling from you the hideous monster, and let the weight of twenty millions, crush and destroy it forever!
A century later, some Black civil rights activists recognized the same dynamic at play in their day. See, for instance, the famous 1965 debate at Cambridge between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley.
At the 24:20 mark, James Baldwin comments: “Now I suggest, that of all the terrible things that can happen to a human being, that is one of the worst”—in reference to poor white people glorying in their whiteness. “I suggest that what has happened to white southerners is in some ways after all much worse than what has happened to Negroes there.” He immediately brings up Sheriff Clark in Selma, Alabama, who is the subject of his comment at the 25:20 mark. “Something awful must have happened to a human being to be able to put a cattle prod against a woman’s breasts, for example. What happens to the woman is ghastly; what happens to the man who does it is in some ways much, much worse.”
Also in 1965, The Autobiography of Malcolm X was published, unfortunately posthumously, which contains this comment.
But I want to tell you something. This pattern, this “system” that the white man created, of teaching Negroes to hide the truth from him behind a façade of grinning, ‘yessir-bossing,” foot-shuffling and head-scratching—that system has done the American white man more harm than an invading army would do to him. (from the chapter “Icarus,” p. 279)
I think he’s right, and so does Wendell Berry, who excerpted that comment from Malcolm X and used it as the first epigraph in his 1970 book The Hidden Wound, a short book that explores the effects of slavery and racism on Berry’s own family. (See this commemorative essay on the book.)
What would I have done?
Had I lived in the early 1800s in the same town I live now (Florence, Alabama), what temptations to depravity would I face? Of course, not all white people owned slaves; some were opposed to the peculiar institution, some just couldn’t afford it. Not rich enough to become a savage brute. What a blessing!
In his Letter from a Birmingham JailMartin Luther King asserted that “I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time [of Hitler], I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers.” I agree with him: King would have acted in that way. His life proves it.
I am less confident about myself.
The epistle of James in the New Testament instructs readers to rejoice in the trials they face (James 1:2). Perhaps we should also be thankful for trials we haven’t faced.
Sometimes you’ll hear people say that they would love to have been alive to see Jesus teach on the mountainside or multiply the fish and loaves. Peter witnessed the Transfiguration; and Peter denied Jesus three times.
Would you like to have witnessed Jesus ride into town on a donkey? Would you like to have been one of the crowd shouting, “Hosanna to the coming king”? Would you like to have been in the temple, seeing Jesus answer questions, shutting up his opponents? That same crowd gathered at the governor’s house on Friday morning. The trial they then faced is described in Mark 15:6–14. They ended up calling for the crucifixion of their Creator. Absurd but true. Pilate was surprised at the crowd.
I’m glad that when I stand before God I won’t have to answer questions about what I did on that Good Friday. Most of the players did not acquit themselves well.
We should be thankful for the trials we don’t face.
I recognize that these examples ought to drive us to wonder about the trials we do face, and how we are handling them. Those are good questions to ask, but they are not the point of this reflection. Here I am thinking about a trial I have not faced.
Sin sometimes sneaks up on you—like Peter
Sin sometimes overwhelms you—like the crowd before Pilate. Sin dulls your senses. That’s what Frederick Douglass described in his Fourth of July oration.
In a speech given two decades later, celebrating the Emancipation Proclamation, Douglass announced: “We are all liberated by this proclamation. Everybody is liberated. The white man is liberated, the black man is liberated….” (“The Proclamation and a Negro Army,” March 1863, at p. 307 of The Portable Frederick Douglass).
The two and a half centuries of American slavery provided plenty of evidence for “man’s faculty of transforming himself into a devil, if he will only, for a reasonable space of time, undertake a devil’s office.” Many people were overwhelmed by this sin, captured by it, corrupted.
Juneteenth reminds me to rejoice that I was not among them.
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