A Journal of Political Thought and Statesmanship
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
VOLUME XVI, NUMBER 2, SPRING 2016 A Journal of Political Thought and Statesmanship Bradley C.S. R. Shep Watson: Melnick: Russell Kirk Ending Extreme Michael Poverty Nelson: Political Sex Allen C. Scandals Guelzo: Did the Angelo M. Slaves Free Codevilla: emselves? John Quincy Adams Robert K. Faulkner: James V. Heroes, Schall, S.J.: Old & Modern New Catholic ought Anthony Esolen: James W. e Iliad Ceaser: Scruton vs. Mark the Left Helprin: Defense Is Missing in Action A Publication of the Claremont Institute PRICE: $6.95 IN CANADA: $8.95 mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm Book Review by Allen C. Guelzo Up from Slavery The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States, by Ira Berlin. Harvard University Press, 240 pages, $22.95 Eighty-Eight Years: The Long Death of Slavery in the United States, 1777–1865, by Patrick Rael. University of Georgia Press, 400 pages, $89.95 (cloth), $32.95 (paper) elf-help has a long tradition in free-market narcissists like Robert Ringer in t is odd, however, to see over the American life. In its earliest form, Pu- his bestseller Looking Out for Number One last 25 years the emergence of a similar Sritan self-help manuals offered guid- (1977): “Life is like a giant pinspotter in a go- Ibrand of self-help in the midst of the his- ance to the spiritual pilgrim in detecting the liath’s bowling alley. Over the long haul, most tory of slave emancipation. We may think we signs of grace and whether one was on the people end up exactly where they deserve to know the outlines of emancipation’s history, path to heaven. The Enlightenment replaced be.” So the best advice is “work hard to look beginning with the long slough of slavery in the attainment of grace with the attainment after your own best interests. Leave others colonial America, then the rise of abolition of prosperity, but the titles that charted the to sort themselves out.” But we also get it in movements, and then finally the Civil War, new path to Mammon were still cast from the a more sophisticated form from Karl Marx. the Emancipation Proclamation, and the 13th original self-help mold. As the new American “The emancipation of the working class must Amendment. But this is the old history, and republic shuffled off its aristocratic British be the act of the working class itself,” he in- that history is now understood as a history connections, self-help took the form of books sisted. This is self-help fired by the determi- besotted with exactly the sort of cooperative of manners, teaching the American middle nation to remain free from any taint of the condescension that allows emancipation to class how to attain gentility by keeping up ap- impure. The Nazis, in just the same way, an- be a story of what white people did for black pearances. But the original impulse remained nounced that “the road to emancipation” for people. The implication of the old history is the same: you must find grace yourself, you Germany can only come from a “war of libera- that black people were passive; they accepted must acquire success yourself, you must ab- tion” which “draws together the consciously freedom from the hands of generous-spirited sorb gentility yourself. German members of every occupation and whites; and they are thereafter expected to tug There is, however, a darker tradition of self- rank.” Whether the struggle is a proletarian at their caps, express gratitude, and conform help, built not on the improvement of the self or an Aryan one, no assistance is welcomed to the expectations of white bourgeois society. but on the running down of others. This is from others, since such assistance could only Not incidentally, it was a Marxist, Her- what we get in a fairly unvarnished way from diminish the purity of the final result. bert Aptheker, and a convert to Marxism, Claremont Review of Books w Spring 2016 Page 45 A DISTINCTIVELY AMERICAN CONSERVATISM THE CLAREMONT INSTITUTE The founding ideas of equal natural rights, natural law, and limited constitutional government are seeds from which the American republic grew. Over the past century, Progressivism has undermined those principles and imperiled our republic. We must recover America’s intellectual heritage before we can succeed in restoring American self-government. The Claremont Institute educates the next generation of young conservatives in how the founders’ principles help to solve today’s problems. We then assist these rising thinkers and statesmen in their careers in state and national politics, in the courts, academia, the media, and conservative think tanks. These conservative leaders are our hope for a healthier America. Support The Claremont Institute Claremont.org/donate T ON INS M T I E T R U A T L E THE CLAREMONT INSTITUTE C W S E E H Recovering the American Idea H T O U L R D T T H E S E mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm W.E.B. Du Bois, who first questioned the sources on slavery’s end in Freedom: A Docu- Pedro Marques, whose The Sounds of Silence: Great White Emancipator history of slavery’s mentary History of Emancipation (1982, 1985, Nineteenth-Century Portugal and the Abolition end in the 1930s and attributed emancipa- 1990, 1993). He is, nevertheless, a true believ- of the Slave Trade in 2006 set off an unholy tion instead to what Du Bois called a “general er in the self-emancipation thesis. Emancipa- scurry amongst the self-emancipationists. strike” staged by the slaves. In this scenario, tion, he begins cautiously, “was not so much a Marques, who surveyed a vast sample of enslaved blacks seized the opportunity of the proclamation as a movement; not so much an slave revolts throughout the New World, Civil War’s outbreak as the requisite moment occasion as a complex history with multiple concluded that slave revolts were essentially of “crisis” to sabotage the internal economy players and narratives.” Opened up, however, self-centered—that is, they were conducted of the Confederacy and eventually bring it what Berlin means by this complexity is that by slaves seeking freedom for themselves (but face-down in the dust. It is the story, Du Bois not for others) who frequently organized wrote, of “how the black worker won the war • “primacy” in the story of emancipation be- “maroon” colonies which held slaves them- by a general strike which transferred his labor longs to “black people, free and slave,” with- selves. More recently, in her essay “Dodging from the Confederate planter to the North- out whose “resistance to captivity…there Rebellion: Politics and Gender in the Berbice ern invader, in whose army lines workers be- could be no movement against slavery.” Slave Uprising of 1763,” (American Historical gan to be organized as a new labor force.” • The aim of the slaves was freedom, not just Review, February 2016), Marjoleine Kars has But this “self-emancipation thesis” did not amelioration, and slaves were conscious examined slave rebels in Dutch Guyana and achieve popular status until the work of Vin- political actors striving toward the politi- discovered that large portions of the slave cent Harding and Barbara J. Fields (the lat- cal goal of freedom. population “struggled to dodge all combat- ter through her appearances in Ken Burns’s • Once emancipated, they “not only raised ants, whether the Dutch, their Amerindian documentary series The Civil War in 1990). the question of their post-emancipation allies, or the rebels.” Far from challenging Self-emancipation now became more than standing,” but “answered it as well” with the legitimacy of slavery as an institution, just work-stoppages. Slaves used the disrup- the demand for equality as well as freedom. Marques’s and Kars’s insurgents were simply tions of the war to subtract themselves entire- • Undoing slavery required violence, and looking out for their own interests, and were ly from the Confederacy by fleeing to Union could not have been accomplished in any perfectly willing to cut deals with whites, military lines, by becoming the Union Army’s other, less bloody, fashion. whether those deals helped any other slaves logistical corps, and by eventually exerting so or not. This was self-help of a decidedly un- much pressure on the Lincoln Administra- Thus, in Berlin’s brief survey of emancipa- revolutionary sort (although it could be just tion that the president was forced to issue an tion, slaves undermined slavery by their own as violent) and neither these revolts nor up- emancipation proclamation and throw open initiative, and did so by revolutionary violence, risings on slave ships in the notorious Middle army recruitment to blacks. At its zenith, covering a full spectrum from simple flight Passage had any larger impact on slavery. To self-emancipation has come to mean that the to armed resistance. In the first case, Berlin the contrary, says Marques, slaves actually started “the war themselves” claims, “by the middle years of the nineteenth rather than “simply waiting for either the century the slave South was leaking like a The main concern of slaves who achieved Lord or the Yankees to give them freedom,” sieve,” at a rate of 1,000 to 5,000 fugitives a individual freedom by escape or rebel- until “[b]y 1863, there was a full-blown inner year between 1830 and 1860. In the second, lion was not to free other slaves, and civil war going on within the South.” Indeed, Berlin believes that slave revolts created “a they often ended up creating a social agrees Steven Hahn in Lincoln’s Proclamation guerrilla war against slavery,” turning the an- structure that involved the enslavement (2009), “the slaves’ rebellion in the South..