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Jeremy J. Tewell - A Self-Evident Lie: Southern Slavery and the Threat to American Freedom

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A Self-Evident Lie: Southern Slavery and the Threat to American Freedom: summary, description and annotation

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A Self-Evident Lie explores and underscores the fear and complex meaning of slavery to northerners before the Civil War. Many northerners asked: If slavery was the beneficent and paternalistic institution that southerners claimed, could it not be applied with equal morality to whites as well as blacks? Republicans repeatedly expressed concern that proslavery arguments were not inherently racial. Irrespective of race, anyone could fall victim to the argument that they were inferior, that they would be better off enslaved, that their enslavement served the interests of society, or that their subjugation was justified by history and religion.

In trenchant and graceful prose, Jeremy Tewell argues that some Republicans, most notably Abraham Lincoln, held that the only effective safeguard of individual liberty was universal liberty, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence. As long as Americans believed that all men were endowed with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, everyones liberty would be self-evident, regardless of circumstance.

Conversely, the justifications meant to exclude a segment of society from the rights of man worked to destroy the self-evidence of those very rights. Therefore, by failing to repudiate slavery--thus rejecting the universality of human liberty--northerners made themselves vulnerable to proslavery rationales, especially when they happened to occupy a position of political, social, or economic weakness. Black skin had been stigmatized as a badge of servitude, but there was nothing to guarantee that white skin would always serve as an unimpeachable badge of freedom.

This was a major theme in Lincolns campaign against Stephen A. Douglas and was a key argument against the use of popular sovereignty as the method for determining slaverys status in the territories. According to Tewell, Lincolns greatest challenge was to convince northern audiences that simple indifference to slavery was itself inimical to the liberty of whites.

A Self-Evident Lie will intrigue anyone interested in issues related to Lincoln, slavery and antislavery, the Civil War, and American intellectual history.

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A SELF-EVIDENT LIEAMERICAN ABOLITIONISM AND ANTISLAVERY John David Smith - photo 1
A SELF-EVIDENT LIE
AMERICAN ABOLITIONISM AND ANTISLAVERY
John David Smith, series editor
The Imperfect Revolution: Anthony Burns and the Landscape of Race in Antebellum America
GORDON S. BARKER
A Self-Evident Lie: Southern Slavery and the Threat to American Freedom
JEREMY J. TEWELL
2013 by The Kent State University Press Kent Ohio 44242 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED - photo 2
2013 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
ISBN 978-1-60635-145-1
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information for this title is available at the Library of Congress.
17 16 15 14 13 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments
Nearly fourteen years have passed since the subject of this book began to develop in my mind. In that time, many gracious and thoughtful individuals have helped to improve the ideas contained in these pages. The encouragement I received at Pittsburg State University was more than a young historian could hope for. More recently, the outstanding doctoral program at Oklahoma State University provided me with the skills (not to mention the funding) necessary to complete this project.
I owe a particular debt of gratitude to James L. Huston for his inestimable assistance in the evolution and clarification of my central thesis. I would also like to thank John David Smith, editor of the American Abolitionism and Antislavery Series, and Joyce Harrison of Kent State University Press for their advice and support. Sarah E. Lookadoo (who is as good a friend as she is a writer) read the manuscript multiple times and bolstered my efforts with her considerable enthusiasm.
Special thanks are also due to my parents, John and Jean. They never failed to humor my love of history. Finally, I would be remiss if I did not express my gratitude to my feline friendsRicky, Buddy, Peggy, and Rodneyfor alleviating the occasional bouts of stress that accompany a life of historical research.
Picture 3 INTRODUCTION Picture 4
The Badge of Freedom?
Three months before his death, Benjamin Franklin stepped into the public spotlight for the final time. Although he had once published ads for slave sales, and had even owned a slave couple himself, beginning in the 1750s Franklin had gradually turned against the institution. As president of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, Franklin presented a formal petition to Congress in February 1790, denouncing both the slave trade and slavery itself. Mankind are all formed by the same Almighty Being, it declared, alike objects of his care, and equally designed for the enjoyment of happiness. Therefore, Congress had a solemn duty to grant liberty to those unhappy men who alone in this land of freedom are degraded into perpetual bondage.
Only fourteen years earlier, Americans had announced to the world that all men are created equal. Franklins reputation as an architect of that revolution was second only to George Washingtons. Nevertheless, southern congressmen displayed unveiled contempt for Franklin and his petition. Senator Pierce Butler of South Carolina castigated the societys plan as a willful violation of the Constitution. In the House of Representatives, James Jackson of Georgia and William Loughton Smith of South Carolina suggested that the eighty-four-year-old Franklin was no longer in his right mind. Jackson was particularly vehement in his defense of slavery, insisting on the floor of the House that the institution was divinely sanctioned and economically vital to the southern economy.
As he had done in the past, Franklin decided to take his case to the public in the form of an anonymous parody. On March 23, 1790, a public
Indeed, the Africans rationales for white slavery clearly presaged those invoked by Jackson and other Southerners in favor of black slavery:
If we forbear to make slaves of their people, who in this hot climate are to cultivate our lands? And is there not more compassion and favor due to us as Mussulmen than to these Christian dogs?... Who is to indemnify the masters for their loss?... And if we set our slaves free, what is to be done with them?... Must we maintain them as beggars in our streets, or suffer our properties to be the prey of their pillage? For men accustomed to slavery will not work for a livelihood when not compelled. And what is there so pitiable in their present condition? Were they not slaves in their own countries? They have only exchanged one slavery for another and I may say a better; for here they are brought into a land where the sun of Islamism gives forth its light, and shines in full splendor, and they have an opportunity of making themselves acquainted with the true doctrine, and thereby saving their immortal souls. [They are] too ignorant to establish a good government. While serving us, we take care to provide them with everything, and they are treated with humanity. The laborers in their own country are, as I am well informed, worse fed, lodged, and clothed.... Here their lives are in safety.
As for those religious mad bigots with their silly petitions, it was pure foolishness to argue that slavery was disallowed by the Alcoran! Were not the two precepts Masters, treat your slaves with kindness; Slaves, serve your masters with cheerfulness and fidelity ample evidence to the contrary? It was well known, explained the African, that God had given the world to his faithful Mussulmen, who are to enjoy it of right as fast as they conquer it.
The stability and happiness of the nation could not be sacrificed simply to appease the demands of a few fanatics. Such was the determination of the Divan of Algiers, which, according to Franklin, rejected the antislavery memorial. Following suit, Congress announced that it lacked the authority to act on Franklins petition. Franklin did not live to see the cotton boom and the consequent entrenchment of slavery in southern life. Little did he know that Congressman Jacksons proslavery apology would become commonplace in the South during the first half of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, Franklins last public letter anticipated an important, and underappreciated, facet of the antislavery argument.
Picture 5
The thesis of this book is that Northerners feared slavery, in part, because the rationales for black servitude were not inherently racial, and therefore posed a threat to the liberty of all Americans, irrespective of color. Southerners invoked five interrelated rationales in their defense of African slavery: race, moral and mental inferiority, the good of the slave, the good of society, and the lessons of history. Yet many of these rationales had been used in the past (as Franklin illustrated), and could be used in the future, to oppress people of any race. Northerners often expressed concern that proslavery arguments were subject to the mutable prejudices and economic motives of those who made them. Anyone could fall victim to the argument that they were inferior, that they would be better off enslaved, that their enslavement served the interests of society, or that their subjugation was justified by history and religion. Preparing for his debates with Stephen A. Douglas in 1858, Abraham Lincoln wrote a neatly synthesized passage that highlighted the dangerous arbitrariness of proslavery justifications:
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