The Little Known History of Slavery, Part Two

Anachronistic Morality

Moral principles may be timeless but moral choices can be made only among the options actually available at particular times and places.

We cannot assume twenty-first century options, or even present-day knowledge, when judging decisions made in the 19th century. Nor can we assume that we have superior knowledge of the social realities of an earlier era that we never lived through, compared to the first-hand knowledge of those who confronted those realities daily and inescapably.

Moral Questions about slavery have been, almost exclusively, Western moral questions.. Non-Western societies had neither moral concerns about slavery nor, in most cases, the power to decide on the continuance or extinction of the institution for themselves during the era of European imperialism, when slavery was suppressed over most of the world by the West. Not only has the West's crucial role in the destruction of slavery around the world gone largely unnoticed, standards applied almost exclusively to the West have been used to condemn European and European offshoot societies for having once had slavery.

Even those Western leaders who sought to end slavery are condemned by critics today for not having done it sooner or faster. The dangers and constraints of their times have too often been either ignored or brushed aside as mere excuses, as if elected leaders operating under the constitutional law could simply decree whatever they felt was right.

-Thomas Sowell, excerpted from Black Rednecks and White Liberals
Previously, I pointed out Sowell's excellent book review on Professor Allen C. Guelzo's Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. Take the time to read the book review, if you haven't. It illustrates in a nutshell, how flawed it is to judge the past by today's standards of morality, without understanding the context and constraints of the times.

To be sure, our heroic forefathers and larger-than-life leaders were flawed human beings; but to label them as hypocrites for such things as speaking out against slavery while being slaveowners themselves, when slavery was a centuries old, worldwide institution, is to apply anachronistic morality.

Even those slaveholders with aversions to slavery in principle were constrained by a strong tradition of stewardship, in which the family inheritance was not theirs to dispose of in their own lifetime, but to pass on to others as it had been passed on to them. George Washington was one of those who had inherited slaves and, dying childless, freed his slaves in his will, effective on the death of his wife. His will also provided that slaves too old or too beset with "bodily infirmities" to take care of themselves should be taken care of by his estate, and that the children were to be "taught to read and write" and trained for "some useful occupation".

This is an important point to highlight, because some like Jefferson (who I shall focus on in Part Three) and Washington understood that simply freeing slaves without giving them the necessary tools and means to survive in society was more like abandonment than liberation. They did consider the possibility of sending freed slaves back to Africa. But the reality was, many of these slaves no longer had ties to Africa, either.

One concrete result of the back-to-Africa movement was the establishment of the colony of Liberia on the West African coast, to which freed American blacks were sent during the administration of James Monroe, for whom they named their capital Monrovia. These first settlers were decimated by African diseases to which they no longer had biological resistance- which was just one of the problems of trying to undo the past.

Frederick Douglass himself, refused the offer to be sent to Africa, seeing himself as an American.

[Washington's] estate in fact continued to pay for the support of some freed slaves for decades after his death, in accordance to his will.

The part of Washington's will dealing with slaves filled almost three pages, and the tone as well as the length of it showed his concerns.

The language of the will was written in very legalistic terms; but when it came to speaking about what was to become of his slaves, he spoke with the passionate command of issuing an executive decree: "I do hereby expressly forbid the sale...of any Slave I may die possessed of, under any pretext whatsoever."

"There is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for the abolition of it." Washington once said, in regards to slavery as a national issue. The moral question for him was easy; but how to carry it out with compassion and foresight planning was a complex matter. Only through legislation, did Washington see it as a realistic possibility to end the institution; and he said that the legislator who could achieve that, would get his vote.

During his public life, Washington was known to leave behind slaves he brought with him on his travels to the north, in effect, freeing them. His behavior as a slaveowner is also noted in Richard Brookhiser's Founding Father:

Beginning in the early 1770's, he rarely bought a slave and he would not sell one, unless the slave consented, which never happened. not selling slaves was an economic loss. Slave labor on a plantation with soil as poor as Mount Veronon brought in little or nothing...The only profit a man in his position would make was by selling slaves to states where agriculture was more flourishing. Washington would not. "I am principled against selling negroes as you would do cattle at a market..." From 1775 until his death, the slave population at Mount Vernon more than doubled.

Quoted passages taken from Thomas Sowell's Black Rednecks and White Liberals

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The Little Known History of Slavery, Part One