All--

I want to piggy back on the recent comment by Hank Trent, which I think deserves emphasis.  Talking about the emotional nuances in the relationships between slave-owners and slaves, he writes:

"That is no excuse for slavery of course, but instead I think it shows how
humans always are capable of compartmentalizing their feelings, and that
social conventions and pressure can make ordinary people do things that
seem obviously evil only in retrospect."

I think when we teach about evil in the past (and surely chattel slavery as practiced in Virginia and elsewhere merits the strongest moral condemnation), and when we think about it, we often err to demonize the people who committed this kind of evil in the past.  I think it is very tempting to do that, but that when we do, we risk cutting ourselves off from moral reflection in the present.

A useful analogy is the recent book by Daniel Goldhagen, HITLER"S WILLING EXECUTIONERS, which demonstrates that the evils of the holocaust in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s was not satanic, but rather human.  We can not understand the evil of the Holocaust if we segregate a demonic figure--Hitler--and lay the blame on his transcendent wickedness.  Rather, the greater challenge is to identify what had to be so about German culture and experience to lead so many ordinary, regular, human people to be willing to engage in the awfulness of the killing.  What had to be so for that culture and that people to become so morally blind?

Thus, for all of its brilliance--and I recommend the book to anyone who cares about these things--I think Drew Gilpen Faust's biography of James Henry Hammond ultimately points us in the wrong direction.  It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Hammond was a vile human being--a man whose moral compass was so badly damaged that he verged on being a sociopath.  Reading about him verges on the pornographic--he fascinates us for the degree to which he so clearly is not at all like the people we know and admire.

A much more telling biographical study--and one that to my mind gets us closer to understanding the humanity of the relationship between owner and slave--is Rhys Isaac's biography of Landon Carter.  Unlike Hammond, Carter devoted serious attention to understanding himself as a moral agent, and to developing properly considered ethical relationships with others around him, including his slaves.  And yet, as Isaac shows, even a man with all of the advantages that Carter enjoyed--education, religion, wealth, privilege--a man possessed of a good mind and a sincere desire to live his life ethically--even a man like that nonetheless failed miserably.  If the best of us can fail in a situation like that, then that tells us something about the way in which, as Trent notes, social conventions and the deep assumptions that under gird them can distort out self-understanding.

Slavery was wicked in part because it permeated the assumptions of those societies in which is was institutionalized, and corrupted the humanity of even the very best men and women in those societies.  And moreover, as the work of Ira Berlin and the scholars associated with the Freedom and Southern Society project have amply demonstrated--once those assumptions became ingrained and entrenched, the simple act of emancipation could not uproot them.  So the wickedness of slavery continued to influence ideas and behavior in many parts of our country, long after 1865.

One of the reasons we engage in history is as moral reflection.  And at its best, good history invites us to turn our attention to our own selves and our own lives.  When we demonize actors in the past, and turn their crimes into actions that are transcendent, there is no moral lesson for us in the present.  After all, I know that I am not a Hitler, and not a sociopath--surely not I would have pulled the trigger to execute kneeling men and women and children and thrust their dying bodies into the burial trenches.  And surely not I would have owned slaves.  But when we know that ordinary men did pull those triggers, and when we know that the vast majority of ordinary men (and women) who owned slaves were people just like me, then the questions become more complex--and our reflection on them has the chance to become self-reflection.

All best wishes,
Kevin
___________________________
Kevin R. Hardwick
Associate Professor
Department of History, MSC 8001
James Madison University
Harrisonburg, Virginia 22807
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