Monday, July 11, 2005

The Christian Right and the antislavery movement

The New York Review of Books has recently published two articles on one of my favorite Civil War-related subjects, John Brown. Unfortunately, they haven't made either of them available free on their Web site.

But I'm going to post about the latest one anyway, because it explores some of the bad historical analogies that the Christian Right uses to justify anti-abortion militancy in particular.

In reviewing the new book Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America by Fergus Bordewich, George Fredrickson in "The Long Trek to Freedom", New York Review 07/14/05 issue, writes of John Brown:

There has long been controversy over whether or not he was excessively committed to violence. In Kansas in 1856 he presided over the murder [sic] of five proslavery settlers who neither owned slaves themselves nor were guilty of any known acts of violence against the antislavery settlers with whom they were competing for control of the territory. Recent discussions of Brown have raised the question whether he was a prototype of the modern "terrorist" driven to extreme actions by religious zealotry and by a belief that there was direct divine sanction for his deeds. In his recent biography of Brown, David S. Reynolds tries to distinguish Brown's kind of terrorism from that of modern suicide bombers and plane hijackers. Reynolds argues that Brown's methods can be justified by the need to challenge the need to challenge the enormous and exceptional evil of slavery, by the lack of other means of dealing with it, and by the better society that was envisioned as a result of taking violent action against it.

In his more general discussion, Bordewich compares the religiously inspired abolitionists involved in the more militant actions of the Underground Railroad with contemporary anti-abortion activists, who attack clinics and commit other illegal acts in response to a "higher law." He concedes that "uneasy questions" remain "about what happens when revealed religion collides with a secular society that shares neither its politics nor its reading of the Scriptures." But he concludes that the faith of the "deeply pious activists of the underground ... was also balanced by a generous idealism, and by an uncompromising devotion to the rights of others" that he suggests would be difficult to find among the more militant members of the contemporary anti-abortion movement. The implied argument here is that slavery was an obvious and flagrant denial of personal liberty, while the woman's "right to choose" might be considered an assertion of that liberty. Bordewich does not resolve the question of the legitimacy of violence and civil disobedience but by raising it he brings to his account the moral seriousness it deserves.
That latter paragraph is a bit lacking in its analytical perspective, but it poses a good question. One that calls for a common-sense reality check.


What did anti-slavery activists do and what risks did they run? In the South after 1832, antislavery agitation was nearly completely suppressed. Not even those free whites who opposed slavery - and there were some, though not nearly as many as neo-Confederate fantasists would have us believe - were allowed to agitate publicly. Where laws against inciting "servile rebellion" were insufficient to formally deal with such deviations from the standards of the higher civilization that slaveowners and their propagandists claim to have built, less formal methods of social ostracism, economic reprisal and direct violence were sufficient to make up the difference.

Even nonviolent antislavery activists in the free states were often targets of hostility and outright violence by proslavery mobs. The South did a profitable business in many cities of the North. And many Northerners not directly benefited from such business nevertheless viewed antislavery advocates as dangerous and subversive agitators. Even at times in as thoroughly Yankee a city as Boston. (The neo-Confederate crowd have their own pseudohistorical twist on this phenomenon, as well.) In one of the most notorious incidents, antislavery editor Elijah Lovejoy was killed by a mob in Alton, Illinois.

John Hope Franklin and Alfred Moss, Jr., describe the situation in From Slavery to Freedom (2000 [8th] edition):

Antislavery lecturers often found it difficult to rent halls in which to speak. Even if they succeeded, they could not be certain that their program would go off as planned, for many a meeting was broken up by mobs. Even women who supported the antislavery crusade were in danger of suffering insults and indignities. When Prudence Crandall, a Quaker teacher, admitted a black girl to her school in Canterbury, Connecticut, white patrons boycotted it. After she decided to open a school for black girls, with the aid of abolitionists like [William Lloyd] Garrison and Lewis Tappan, the citizens broke windows, insulted the teacher, and had her arrested for violating a state law that forbade the teaching of blacks who were not residents of the state. Abolitionists could expect little help or protection from the federal government. ...

It was the countenancing of violence by abolitionists that caused many law-abiding citizens to oppose them and rendered utterly hopeless their schemes to obtain government support. Convinced that slaveholders had the law of the land on their side, abolitionists resorted to the principle of a higher law, which they felt justified their circumventing or breaking the law. Garrison and his followers, although nonviolent, pointed out the inevitability of the violence of the Nat Turner insurrection. In 1839 Jabez Hammond of New York said that only force would end slavery and that military schools for blacks should be set up in Canada and Mexico. When slaves revolted aboard the Creole on a voyage from Hampton Roads to New Orleans, Representative Joshua Giddings not only opposed treating the slaves as common criminals but even praised them for seeking freedom. The House of Representatives, shocked by his open defiance of the law, censured Giddings. Forthwith he resigned, went home to Ohio, and was immediately returned to Congress by his antislavery constituency. The redoubtable Giddings later praised other blacks and whites for seeking to abolish slavery, and finally the House became accustomed to his tirades against the institution. By 1850 the philosophy of force was so integral a part of abolitionist doctrine that many viewed it as a movement toward anarchy.
Although the antislavery movement recognized the inevitability of violence to counter the genuine everyday violence of slavery, no notable figure in the abolitionist movement was advocating a violent insurrection against the US government or for servile insurrection." Nor was John Brown.

Brown's plan that was cut short by the failure of his raid on Harper's Ferry was to encourage limited armed resistance and the flight of slaves by setting up a network of resistance bases in the Upper South. It was the Slave Power, the slaveowning planters who controlled the governments of the Southern slave states, that advocated and put into practice a violent overthrow of the American Constitutional government. And that's no rhetorical posture to say that the Slave Power was simply to blame (which they certainly were!), but a description of what happened.

There were a number of turning points in the years 1850-1860. In 1850, a new Fugitive Slave Act became law, outraging many Northerners who weren't particularly sympathetic to the abolitionists. Among its provisions was a requirement that any male citizen in free states could compelled to take part in federal posses hunting for fugitive slaves from slave states. This imported a version of the Southern slave patrols, in which nonslaveowning whites were required to patrol for slaves violating their strict rules, to free states.

It was also plain by then that slavery was in many ways a lawless institution. There were official legal limits on what punishments could be inflicted on a slave. But it was rare indeed for a white person to be punished for any kind of torture or even murder to be inflicted on a slave. And there was no doubt that slavery involved very real cruelty to millions of real live human beings.

In the Kansas crisis in which Brown fought as a guerrilla for the antislavery side, Stephen Douglas' proslavery notion of "popular sovereignty" was put into practice. That was the nominally democratic idea that voters in Kansas could decide whether it would be slave or free. The slaveowners, especially those in Missouri, sent settlers into Kansas Territory in large numbers to insure that it became a slave state. What happened in Kansas was a small-scale guerrilla war, with both sides intending to counter the other by force. The grim fact is, whether it fits a pretty picture of American history or not, is that if the antislavery forces like Brown and his men had not been willing to use force and to use it effectively, they would have been driven out, defeated or killed by the proslavery group. Despite massive fraud by the proslavery side, Kansas was eventually admitted as a free state.

In 1857, the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision - which antiabortionists liken to Roe v. Wade - effectively eliminated the power of Congress to restrict slavery in the territories. And free states residents feared, with good reason, that the Slave Power intended to use the proslavery Supreme Court to eventually nullify antislavery laws in the free states. In the context of the time, this effectively removed the chances of resolving the slavery dispute without large-scale violence, though most Northern abolitionists and the new Republican Party tried hard to work out such a nonviolent method.

It seems to me that the Christian Right uses the antislavery example for a couple reasons. One is that in American history and popular sentiment, the pro-democracy, antislavery movement looks much more benign than the Slave Power and the Confederacy. Since most antislavery activists claimed Christian religious for their antislavery views, this fits nicely with the Christian Right's position on abortion today - as long as you ignore the fact that the far more violent slaveowners and the proslavery advocates also claimed divine sanction from the Christian God for their actions and their "peculiar institution" of slavery.

Another reason is that the core of the Christian Right are the direct political and ideological heirs of the Southern segregationists of the 1950s and 1960s. There are exceptions, of course. But segregationist and fundamentalists are often obsessive about trying to turn the arguments of their victims around on them. "The whites aren't mistreating the Negroes," they argued in the segregation days. "It's the Yankees and the civil rights outside agitators who are turning the contented Southern Negroes against us white folks and discriminating and promoting prejudice against the (white) South." Although the Christian Right is strikingly unsympathetic to the priorities of civil rights advocates or programs of special interests to minorities today, they like to claim the civil rights movement and the antebellum antislavery movements as their models. It's more of a sneer than anything else.

The quotation from Bordewich in Fredrickson's review seems to recognize that this comparison is as phony as the WMDs in Iraq because most antiabortionists don't show great passion for the freedom, opportunities or general well-being of living, breathing human beings that they profess to have for fetuses at the state in which they are incapable of living except as a part of the mother's body. Also, it takes a whole series of assumptions to make a fetus into a human being. Despite the attempts of some Slave Power propagandists to claim that blacks were biologically inferior to whites, everyone knew very well that they were human beings.

It's also the case that outside of the slave states of the United States and some countries of Latin America, slavery had been abolished as an institution and was rejected as wrong and fundamentally unacceptable by most other countries. Antislavery activists may have been a minority in the US prior to the Civil War. But they also were taking a position that was the same as the generally accepted position of most of what Americans then saw as the civilized world. It is simply not the case that any such consensus exists in the world on abortion.

Even in the United States, it wasn't until about a century ago that laws against abortion began appearing, because the surgical technique just wasn't possible until then. And even then, the motivation for banning it was not because the fetuses were considered as the same as living, breathing humans. It was because the procedure was so risky for the pregnant woman.

But the comparison is also ridiculous because of the nature of the opposition. As described above, antislavery agitators often risked reputation, life and limb to oppose slavery, especially in the South. An antislavery white Southerner in practice either had to keep his or her mouth shut on the subject or move to a free state. And they were dealing with a federal government increasingly dominated by the Slave Power.

What do antiabortion activists do? The campaign for restrictions on abortion, they teach against abortion as being wrong both in the churches and in the "public square" from which they routinely claim they are being excluded, they fight cases in the courts. All of which they are perfectly free to do in every state of the Union. They don't have to risk their livelihood, much less their lives or physical safety to do any of that.

And, instead of facing angry mobs, they, well, they demonstrate against mostly young women at abortion clinics coming for a medical procedure that most of them would prefer not to have. They even get away with setting up abortion-advice services that deliberately lie to clients about the risks of abortion, something ethically bankrupt and legally borderline (or should be). They may stalk employees of abortion clinics and try to create hostility against them in their home communities.

How much guts or fortitude does any of this take? Even in civil-disobedience actions, such as blockading an abortion clinic, what antiabortion demonstrators in the United States ever faced anything remotely comparable to what Bull Conner's police dished out to civil rights demonstrators in Alabama in the 1960s? Good grief, the comparison is just silly.

It's true that some of the more extreme and violent antiabortion fanatics, like those who bomb abortion clinics or murder doctors who perform abortions, are taking some personal risks. But again, how do you compare bombing an abortion clinic to Elijah Lovejoy facing hostile mobs? How is murdering an unarmed doctor in a sneak attack remotely comparable to John Brown fighting it out with Captain Robert E. Lee's federal troops at Harper's Ferry?

In the excerpt above, Frederickson says:

[Bordewich] concedes that "uneasy questions" remain "about what happens when revealed religion collides with a secular society that shares neither its politics nor its reading of the Scriptures."
I guess if you take it to that level of abstraction, there might be some abstract "uneasy questions." But looking at what actually went on the abolition movement with what today's antiabortionists actually do, I don't feel the least bit "uneasy" about saying the comparison is bogus.
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