I'm responding on-list to an off-list query as to whether I was disagreeing with David Brion Davis's interpretation of Patrick Henry's 1773 letter about slavery, because a typo in my original statement led to the confusion and should be corrected, as it is below by the addition of UN. I think D B Davis is right on the money in his interpretation of the limits and accomplishments of Henry and the revolutionary generation in nudging the world into a transition from a hierarchical world in which slavery was an accepted commonplace thing to our modern world in which it is a recognized evil:
"Rakove's essay is especially helpful because it contrasts the
criticisms of slavery that were not UNcommon* in Jefferson's day (a social evil, impolitic, dangerous, etc.-- see for example David Brion Davis's treatment of Patrick Henry's 1773 letter about slavery in his Slavery in the Age of Revolution -- with the subsequent religious denunciation of slavery as "sinful" that undergirded the abolitionist campaigns of the 1830s-1860s -- and recast the debate into familiar moral terms that are widely held today."
(* Double-negative constructions should be another reason for humility, especially if a writer mis-types the second negative. My apologies.)
The Ranke quote, for those who wondered, is from a series of lectures he delivered in 1854 before his pupil and admirer Maixmilian II, king of Bavaria. Carefully considered, Ranke's point of view profoundly contradicts any of the dangerous interpretive systems (Hegelian, fascist, or Marxist) that tend to sacrifice one generation's health and integrity in the name of some ism's vision of the future (and carefully considered that profound reality ought to answer the worries expressed on the list because Ranke was German.)
Ranke was contesting the imposition of progressive or dialectic laws on human history, especially by Hegel and his adherents. Ranke denied that any generation was important "only [as] the stepping stone for what comes after." To the contrary, he "assert[ed that] every epoch is immediate to God and it worth does not reside at all in what emanates from it but rather in its own existence, its own identity." He goes on to say (and again the answer to Hegel and subsequent twists on Hegel is obvious) that history does not move "in a straight line but rather like a stream that determines its own course. I conceive the Godhead -- if I may risk that remark - since no time lies in front of It, as surveying all historical humanity in its totality and finding all equally valuable. The notion of the education of the human race has, to be sure, some truth in it. But before God all generations of humanity have the same rights; and the historian must also see matters in this light."
Ranke's lecture and his dialogue with Maximillian are printed in Alan Donagan and Barbara Donagan, Philosophy of History (NY & London, MacMillan 1965) pp.72-78. The marginal note I scrawled in my copy gives Ranke's German phrase as "jede Epocha standt im mittelbar zu Gott" - my source for that wording was my undergraduate mentor the late Nelson Peter Ross, whose superb seminar in historiography was required of all history majors at my college.
Jon Kukla
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Jon Kukla ....................... Executive Vice-President and CEO
1250 Red Hill Road ........ Patrick Henry Memorial Foundation
Brookneal, VA 24528 .... www.redhill.org .... 804 376-2044
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