The Debate Over Slavery

Antislavery and Proslavery Liberalism in Antebellum America

David F. Ericson

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9780814722633
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Bürgerrechte in der Politik

Frederick Douglass and George Fitzhugh disagreed on virtually every major issue of the day. On slavery, women's rights, and the preservation of the Union their opinions were diametrically opposed. Where Douglass thundered against the evils of slavery, Fitzhugh counted its many alleged blessings in ways that would make modern readers cringe. What then could the leading abolitionist of the day and the most prominent southern proslavery intellectual possibly have in common? According to David F. Ericson, the answer is as surprising as it is simple; liberalism.

In The Debate Over Slavery David F. Ericson makes the controversial argument that despite their many ostensible differences, most Northern abolitionists and Southern defenders of slavery shared many common commitments: to liberal principles; to the nation; to the nation's special mission in history; and to secular progress. He analyzes, side-by-side, pro and antislavery thinkers such as Lydia Marie Child, Frederick Douglass, Wendell Phillips, Thomas R. Dew, and James Fitzhugh to demonstrate the links between their very different ideas and to show how, operating from liberal principles, they came to such radically different conclusions. His raises disturbing questions about liberalism that historians, philosophers, and political scientists cannot afford to ignore.

Part I

1
The Liberal Consensus Thesis and Slavery

This book is a study of American antislavery and proslavery rhetoric spanning the years from 1832 to 1861.¹ Throughout, I assume that rhetoric mattered. Rhetoric mattered in this period of American history not because the antislavery and proslavery arguments themselves abolished the Southern institution of racial slavery or prevented the institution from being abolished without a civil war or because those arguments themselves caused the Civil War. Rather, rhetoric mattered because the particular forms that the antislavery and proslavery arguments took during the antebellum period significantly affected the course of events that led to disunion, civil war, and emancipation.

The antislavery and proslavery arguments unsettled the public mind into believing that the nation was a house divided against itself that could no longer stand. Perhaps a nation half free and half slave could have continued to exist indefinitely into the future if sectional antislavery and proslavery rhetoric had not been introduced. When this sectional rhetoric was introduced, however, it deepened the divisions within the nation and made it less likely that the country could continue to exist as it had in the past.

The consensually and progressively liberal nature of antislavery and proslavery rhetoric contributed to this outcome. Because the two sides appealed to similar ideas for such divergent ends, it became increasingly apparent that the differences between them were fundamental. Because the two sides applied liberal ideas to the particular circumstances of their own society with such diverse results, it became more and more difficult to dismiss the conflict between them as peripheral to the future of a nation conceived in liberty.

The Civil War was a case in which rhetoric mattered. It was also a case in which consensus mattered, though in a different way than it was “supposed to.” It was a case in which consensus exacerbated rather than tempered political conflict. Finally, it was a case in which liberal ideas mattered, making racial slavery vulnerable to attack and yet not foreclosing all avenues of defense.

Hartz and His Critics

In 1955, when he published The Liberal Tradition in America, Louis Hartz established a new consensus paradigm for understanding American political history.² He argued that American political history was best understood as the unfolding of a single, liberal tradition of political ideas, in contrast to the cyclical, conflictual model of history that Charles Beard and the other Progressive historians had favored.³

Since that time, Hartz’s “liberal consensus” thesis has not gone unchallenged. Indeed, some scholars have claimed that another paradigm shift in our understanding of American political history occurred in the 1970s, following the publication of such major works of republican revisionism as Bernard Bailyn’s Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Gordon Wood’s Creation of the American Republic, and J. G. A. Pocock’s Machiavellian Moment. According to these historians, American political history, at least into the 1780s, was best understood as the unfolding of a republican tradition of “civic virtue” instead of a liberal tradition of “atomistic freedom.”⁴

More recently, both historians and political scientists have favored a more philosophically synthetic approach, contending that American political history is best understood as the unfolding of not one tradition of political ideas but of many traditions. James Kloppenberg’s 1987 article “The Virtues of Liberalism: Christianity, Republicanism, and Ethics in Early American Political Discourse” advocated a “discursive pluralism” of liberal, republican, and Protestant ideas.⁵ Even more recently, Rogers Smith presented, in a variety of forums, a similar argument for “multiple traditions” of liberal, republican, and ascriptive ideas.⁶ Yet I believe that Hartz’s “liberal consensus” thesis, suitably modified, remains sound.

Two Issues of Interpretation

One of the issues distinguishing Hartz’s consensus or single-tradition approach and his critics’ multiple-traditions approach is methodological.⁷ What are the relative merits for us, as social scientists, of using single-factor, as opposed to multiple-factor, analyses? A second issue is more empirical. Did historical actors strategically use ideas from various traditions of political ideas to serve an array of ulterior motives, regardless of the lack of coherence among those ideas, or did they seek and achieve some (or even a considerable degree of) coherence among the political ideas they used?

Obviously, there is no one right answer to the methodological issue. Whether a single-factor or -tradition approach is superior to a multiple-factor or -traditions approach depends on the phenomenon in question.⁸ In effect, Hartz argued that a single-tradition approach was superior for understanding American political history from the Revolutionary War to the McCarthy era, whereas a multiple-traditions approach was superior for understanding European political history over the same time period.⁹ His critics disagreed, stating that a multiple-traditions approach was also superior for understanding American political history during that time period. In effect, they claimed to be able to explain more “variance” (to use the factor-analysis term) in American political history using several different traditions of political ideas—liberal, republican, Protestant, and/or ascriptive–than they could using only one, liberal, tradition.

Hartz’s critics were undoubtedly right about their ability to explain more variance in American political history by using several different traditions of political ideas than by using only one tradition. That superiority of a multiple-traditions approach, however, does not settle the methodological issue because we can explain more variance in a phenomenon without necessarily understanding it any better. In fact, it may well be the case that we understand American political history less well using a multiple-traditions approach than we do using a single-tradition approach.

Consider the following logic: If we can explain more variance in a phenomenon using three factors than we can using one factor, then presumably we can explain more variance in the phenomenon using more than three factors than we can using just three factors. If we were to add together all the intellectual traditions that scholars have used to explain the variance in American political history, we would have a very long list indeed, and presumably we could explain (almost) all the variance in American political history.¹⁰ Yet no scholar would ever use all those traditions as explanatory factors because he or she would soon reach the point of diminishing returns. Instead of dissipating “the fog of history,” he or she would be merely recreating it. Hence we, as social scientists, are admonished by the law of parsimony to simplify our explanations of social phenomena as much as possible on the premise that the simpler the explanation of a phenomenon is, the better we will understand it.

This superiority of a single-tradition approach also does not settle the methodological issue, because by using only one explanatory factor we may oversimplify our explanation of a phenomenon and thus distort rather than improve our understanding of it. In terms of understanding American political history, then, the issue is settled neither by claiming that we gain “greater descriptive and explanatory power” by using a multiple-traditions approach nor by claiming that we can “drive a wedge of rationality” through American political history by using a single-tradition approach.¹¹ Instead, the issue is settled ultimately by the results. Frankly, I find Hartz’s results much more compelling than those of his critics. The multiple-traditions approach may offer a more accurate picture of bits and pieces of American political history, but it offers a very obscure picture of the whole. Although Hartz’s critics are suspicious of any metanarrative of American political history, they fail to explain the ebb and flow of the liberal, republican, Protestant, and/or ascriptive ideas that they would substitute for his metanarrative. As I see it, the multiple-traditions approach commits its practitioners to explaining not only why the mix between these different sets of political ideas took the particular form it did during any one historical epoch but also why that mix changed over time. Those tasks, however, remain unfulfilled.

The second issue that arises in evaluating the relative merits of the single-tradition or consensus approach and the multiple-traditions approach to American political history is intellectual coherence. This issue has both an intrapersonal and an interpersonal dimension.

On the intrapersonal level, the question is how much particular historical actors sought and achieved intellectual coherence. This question is, of course, empirical, with some actors seeking and achieving more coherence than others did. The consensus approach is superior to the multiple-traditions approach on this level because it is more open to the possibility of such coherence.

Scholars who use a multiple-traditions approach cannot seem to avoid treating historical actors as sieves of disembodied intellectual traditions. The image they present is of intellectual traditions, now hypostatized, channeling the ideas of historical actors into certain well-worn patterns of thought. Multiple-traditions scholars substantially, if not completely, reduce the agency of historical actors in synthesizing the ideas they have “inherited” from these various traditions into more or less coherent bodies of political thought. In practice, these scholars never seem to reach the political thought of any particular historical actor.¹²

The contrasting image that consensus scholars present is of historical actors actively participating in a process of seeking and achieving some degree of intellectual coherence or ideological constraint among their inherited ideas.¹³ These scholars presume that some constraint exists among the ideas of particular actors, that some of their ideas are primary to others, and that those primary ideas provide a nucleus into which other, more secondary or tertiary ideas are synthesized to form more or less coherent bodies of political thought. Thus (re)formulated, the consensus view is that for most political actors throughout American history, one type of ideas provided this constraint and was primary to other types of ideas. The liberal consensus view is that liberal ideas provided this constraint and were primary to nonliberal ideas, whether they were republican, Protestant, ascriptive, or some other type.¹⁴

Scholars who use a consensus approach argue, therefore, not only that most individual actors throughout American history sought and achieved (within some range) ideological constraint among their political ideas but also that they did so in the same general way. The interpersonal claim seems more problematic than the intrapersonal one.¹⁵ Perhaps the multiple-traditions approach is superior on the interpersonal level in reflecting the undeniable diversity that existed in the political ideas of individual actors throughout American history. How diverse those ideas really were is an empirical question, but it is also a matter of evaluating the results. On the interpersonal level, I again find Hartz’s results much more compelling than those of his critics. To me, an analysis of American political history in terms of a liberal consensus that powerfully (though not hegemonically) discouraged the expression of nonmainstream, nonliberal ideas fits the data better than does an analysis of American political history in terms of individual actors (almost) indiscriminately picking and choosing from a smorgasbord of ideas and traditions. In addition, Hartz’s critics face the formidable tasks of explaining why individual actors made the intellectual choices they did as well as why those choices might have changed over time.

Slavery as a Test Case

The superiority of the consensus approach cannot be settled by fiat, by Hartz, me, or anyone else. It must be tested. Accordingly, in this book, I test the “liberal consensus” thesis against its toughest case: the antebellum debate over the justice, expediency, and ultimate fate of the Southern institution of racial slavery. The historiographical significance of this case, however, was not the only reason that I chose it. I chose it also because of the continuing importance of issues of race to American politics and how those issues are rooted in the antebellum debate over the fate of Southern slavery. The United States never really solved the slavery issue; rather, the issue was “solved” for it on the battlefield. This resolution meant that all the wrenching decisions that had to be made about transforming a racially inegalitarian society into a racially egalitarian one were made, if they were made at all, after, not before, Southern slavery was abolished.¹⁶ Those decisions were then imposed on a militarily defeated and increasingly recalcitrant South by Northern politicians, as if the North had not been implicated in the prior situation and already had become the racially egalitarian society that its Republican leaders somewhat halfheartedly, and ultimately unsuccessfully, tried to force the South to become. But this modus operandi may have been the only way that such decisions could have been made. The South, after all, was not prepared to make them on its own, and the North, at least, had abolished racial slavery. Nonetheless, the way that those decisions were made guaranteed that they would be made incompletely. As a result, the nation remains racially divided.¹⁷

But there has been progress. Few Americans today would publicly defend such extreme forms of racial inequality as racial slavery. Many Americans did during the antebellum period. The key historiographical question is in what way the antebellum defenders of slavery were committed to liberal ideas and were as committed to those ideas as were the abolitionists who attacked the institution, and as are Americans today who (perhaps wrongly) no longer feel any need to attack it. If any group in American history fits the illiberal or ascriptive mode, it was the defenders of slavery in the antebellum South. The antebellum debate over the fate of the institution is indeed a tough case for the “liberal consensus” thesis, especially on the proslavery side.¹⁸

In fact, it is such a tough case that Hartz himself did not interpret the proslavery movement in liberal terms. Instead, he saw the antebellum South as undergoing a “reactionary Enlightenment” in the course of defending its institution of racial slavery.¹⁹ For the antebellum period, therefore, Hartz implicitly adopted a multiple-traditions approach, with the antislavery movement firmly in the liberal camp and the proslavery movement somewhat less firmly in the illiberal camp.²⁰ He then reasserted his “liberal consensus” thesis by showing how a putatively illiberal proslavery movement was vanquished completely, both militarily and ideologically, during the Civil War and Reconstruction.²¹

Especially because the movement had a much more lasting impact than he claimed that it did, I believe that Hartz undersold his own thesis when interpreting the proslavery movement.²² Accordingly, I believe that both the antislavery and proslavery movements were fundamentally liberal in nature, that liberal ideas were primary for both sides and other, nonliberal, ideas were secondary and tertiary, and that both major antislavery figures and major proslavery figures attempted to achieve coherence on liberal ideas and were more or less successful in doing so. I then would not deny the illiberal elements that other scholars, including Hartz himself, emphasize in pro...