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Reclaiming a Positive Vision of Liberty

Mon, 15 Aug 2022 06:00:00 -0400

Over the past two and a half centuries, the word “liberty” has become talismanic in the West. At least two revolutions, the French and the American, were fought in its name, and it is ritualistically invoked by all sides in political debates, each one claiming ownership of it. But every attempt to define it runs into roadblocks. “The right to do as you please” won’t work, at least without serious qualification, since today we know all too well what some people have been pleased to do. In the nineteenth century, the philosopher John Stuart Mill famously refined the definition with his “harm principle.” The “only” reason, he wrote, for stopping someone from doing what he pleases “is to prevent harm to others.” But the harm principle has its own problems. What kind of harm? Physical? Emotional? Spiritual? Left alone, liberty can pull us into some dark doings.

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The Return of Booker T. Washington

Fri, 01 May 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Booker T. Washington and the Struggle Against White Supremacy
by david h. jackson jr.
palgrave macmillan, 260 pages, $58.46

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Someone’s Property

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Frederick Douglass: Race and the Rebirth of American Liberalism

by Peter C. Myers

University Press of Kansas, 265 pages, $34.95

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Manifesting Destiny

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0400

What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815“1848

by Daniel Walker Howe

Oxford University Press, 928 pages, $35

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A Religious People

Mon, 01 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0400

A Secular Faith: Why Christianity Favors the Separation of Church and State

by Daryl Hart

Ivan R. Dee, 288 pages, $26.95

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The Blue, the Gray, and the Bible

Wed, 01 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0400

The Civil War as a Theological Crisis
by Mark A. Noll
University of North Carolina Press, 216 pages, $29.95

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Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation

Tue, 01 Jun 2004 00:00:00 -0400

Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves. Or so I was taught in grade school. Later, of course, I became much more knowledgeable and sophisticated. I learned that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation applied only to areas in actual rebellion against the Union—places not in control of federal forces. I learned that William Seward, Lincoln’s own Secretary of State, had dismissed the Emancipation Proclamation as “a puff of wind . . . emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in bondage where we can set them free.” I read historian Richard Hofstadter’s famous observation that the Proclamation “had all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading” and “did not in fact free any slaves.”

Now, as the subtitle of his study of the Emancipation Proclamation suggests, Allen C. Guelzo seems ready to affirm that my boyhood understanding was right after all.

Guelzo lays out his case methodically in Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America , first showing us Lincoln’s underlying principles, then the way he applied them in the rapidly shifting landscape between 1861 and 1865. What was fixed and unalterable in Lincoln was his conviction that slavery was a grave moral evil that should be put “in the course of ultimate extinction.” This is platitudinous today (except in parts of Africa) but it certainly was not in antebellum America. Probably only a minority accepted the argument of slavery apologists such as George Fitzhugh and John C. Calhoun that slavery was a positive good, but a more common view was that slavery as a moral issue ought to be kept out of national public debate. In his famous 1858 debates with Lincoln, Stephen A. Douglas played to this view, charging that it was fatuous, if not mischievous, for Lincoln to drag this moral issue (he also called it a “religious” issue) into the national public arena: “I do not discuss the morals of the people of Missouri, but let them settle the matter for themselves.” Lincoln not only stuck to his position but put it at the very center of the debate. “The real issue in this controversy,” he said, is “the sentiment on the part of one class that looks upon the institution of slavery as a wrong , and another class that does not look upon it as a wrong.”

Throughout his public career, Lincoln never left any doubt about where he stood on the issue. In 1837, as a young Illinois legislator, he and another member denounced slavery as an institution “founded on injustice and bad policy.” In 1849, as a one-term congressman, he proposed abolishing it in the District of Columbia, and in 1854 he began publicly honing the moral case against slavery that he used against Douglas in 1858.

If he felt so strongly about slavery, why didn’t he abolish it at once when he took office, instead of waiting two years and then abolishing it only in the areas of actual rebellion? Guelzo offers a number of reasons, including Lincoln’s modest view of presidential authority in civil affairs (as opposed to his plenary concept of “war powers”), and his concern that the Supreme Court of Roger Taney”author of the Dred Scott decision”would pounce on any presidential proclamation freeing slaves that was not very narrowly tailored. But the most persuasive reason Guelzo offers is that an immediate, sweeping proclamation would have cost Lincoln the support of the border states”and thus the Union. Seven slaveowning states had already seceded by the time Lincoln was sworn into office on March 4, 1861, and in April another four followed. Four slaveowning states, Missouri, Delaware, Maryland, and Kentucky, still remained in the Union, but Kentucky declared itself to be in a “position of strict neutrality” and two of the other three were very shaky. (Legislation affirming loyalty to the Union had passed in the Maryland legislature very narrowly, and in Missouri the governor and legislature were divided.) If these loyal, or semi-loyal, states ever heard that Lincoln was planning to free “their” slaves by decree, the game would have been up. Kentucky would have tipped first, Lincoln thought, then Missouri, and then Maryland, which bordered on the District of Columbia.

“These all against us, and the job on our hands is too large for us,” Lincoln said. “We would as well consent to separation at once, including the surrender of this capitol.” These were not imaginary fears. Already in Maryland, slaves were escaping into Union camps, and when their outraged Unionist owners showed up to demand their return under the Fugitive Slave Law, Union soldiers, “practicing a little of the abolition system,” as one complainant put it, rudely turned them away. If you are going to treat us like rebels, the Marylanders threatened, we might as well be rebels. The same complaints were surfacing in other loyal slaveholding states, and Lincoln was forced to assure Senator Garrett Davis of Kentucky that he would do nothing to threaten “the institutions or property” of any loyal state. “Professed Unionists,” Lincoln confessed, gave him “more trouble than rebels.”

Whatever his desires about the future of slavery, Lincoln had taken an oath on March 4, 1861, to “preserve, defend, and protect the Constitution of the United States.” By that day, seven slaveowning states of the Deep South had torn up the Constitution; in the next month another four would do the same. Lincoln’s “paramount” duty, he wrote to New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley, was to restore it. “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.”

Lincoln’s focus on saving the Union was in no way incompatible with his desire to end slavery. First of all, if the Union were not preserved, if the South were allowed to go its own way and do its own thing, all hopes for ending slavery in the foreseeable future would be ended. Second, Lincoln left open a radical option (“if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it”) while hinting at what he was then planning to do in his Emancipation Proclamation (“freeing some and leaving others alone”). Third, Lincoln had never given up the idea, which he had first broached in 1855, of voluntary and compensated emancipation. He brought it up again in the fall of 1861, hoping to make tiny Delaware a laboratory to demonstrate its success and encourage other states to try it, and in 1862 he persuaded Congress to pass legislation extending the offer to all loyal states, but even this voluntary proposal produced a storm of indignation over interference in “states’ rights.” Its Delaware sponsors dropped it when the votes weren’t there for final passage, and none of the other border states showed any interest in it. At his most cautious, then, Lincoln was still far ahead of most other white Americans in moving toward the abolition of slavery.

What Lincoln could do unilaterally, as he understood it, was to use his military power as commander-in-chief to deprive the rebels of the slaves they were using to grow their crops. Yet he wanted to give the rebel areas an opportunity to return to the Union on their own. On September 22, 1862, he issued a Preliminary Proclamation, setting a deadline of January 1, 1863, for a return to the Union. If the areas in rebellion failed to comply by that date, their slaves would be “thenceforward and forever free.” The armed services were ordered to protect and maintain “the freedom of such persons” and to do nothing to repress them “in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.” This last phrase set off a new uproar, even in the North, because it was viewed as an incitement to bloody slave rebellions. According to one Boston “moderate,” it would make the slaves think that they “should be made free by killing or poisoning their masters and mistresses.” In the Final Proclamation of January 1, 1863, Lincoln enjoined the slaves “to abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self-defense”; but this tacitly left open other means of self-liberation, including simply running away, which is what Lincoln hoped they would do.

The Final Proclamation made good on the ultimatum Lincoln had delivered in his Preliminary Proclamation one hundred days earlier: “I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States, and parts of States, are, and henceforward shall be, free; and that the Executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons.” The night before issuing it, Lincoln was getting last-minute telegraphic reports on the “parts of states” that had come under federal control. Referring to them, the Proclamation said, “These excepted parts are, for the present, left precisely as if this proclamation were not issued.” Hence Seward’s jibe about Lincoln’s “emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in bondage where we can set them free.” (An editorialist in the London Times compared it to “a Chinaman beating his two swords together to frighten his enemy.”)

But Guelzo gives us reason to believe that this was no empty gesture. He quotes a Union officer in Virginia who saw slaves running into his camp from as far away as North Carolina; this officer said they “know all about the Proclamation and they started on the belief in it.” Many slaves themselves later named the Proclamation as the instrument that motivated them to escape. “When the Proclamation was issued,” one told a congressional committee, that was when he decided to flee his master. Another said, “I have been a slave from my childhood up to the time I was set free by the emancipation proclamation.” In the summer of 1863, a Union officer noticed among “the negroes” a very different attitude from former times. He attributed it to the Proclamation: “a spirit of independence—a feeling they are no longer slaves.” It is hard to keep people in slavery when they no longer think of themselves as slaves.

There is much more about Lincoln in Guelzo’s book, including his promotion of the Thirteenth Amendment, his use of black troops in the war, and his support for at least selective black suffrage at its conclusion. Indeed, we probably learn more about Lincoln in this book than we need to, given its limited scope. Guelzo reprises his earlier speculations about Lincoln’s religiosity ( Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, 1999; reviewed in FT August 2000), portraying him as “a kind of secularized Calvinist” who feigned religiosity for political reasons until the summer of 1862, when the deepening crisis finally caused him to think seriously about God’s purposes. (For a different and better supported view, see Joseph R. Fornieri, Abraham Lincoln’s Political Faith , 2003). Even within its scope one finds some rhetorical overkill in a few places. In one passage, for example, Guelzo replies to Richard Hofstadter’s wisecrack about the Emancipation Proclamation having “all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading”—by defending bills of lading. Wisely, he consigns that to a footnote.

Nevertheless, Guelzo presents a well-documented account of a president who stretched his powers as far as the Constitution and the climate of the times permitted in order to set the nation on a course leading to what he had hoped for many years earlier: the “ultimate extinction” of slavery. I do not know whether that is still taught in our public schools. Guelzo makes a persuasive case that it should be.

George McKenna is Professor of Political Science at City College of New York and author of The Drama of Democracy (1994).

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A Conservative Innovator

Wed, 01 Oct 2003 00:00:00 -0400

Jonathan Edwards: A Life
by George M. Marsden
Yale University Press. 615 pp. $35

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The Puritan as Yankee: A Life of Horace Bushnell

Sat, 01 Feb 2003 00:00:00 -0500

The name of Horace Bushnell (1802-1876) was so well known in nineteenth-century America that when residents of Hartford, Connecticut, visited other cities they were often greeted with, “Do you know Horace Bushnell?” Bushnell, pastor of Hartford’s Congregational North Church from 1833 to 1859, was a towering figure in mainline Protestantism at a time when it played a central role in shaping American culture. Yet today, outside the field of American religious history, few Americans would recognize the name. This is not simply because Americans have lost track of their cultural heritage. Bushnell was a contemporary of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Parker, and Orestes Brownson, who, like Bushnell, were central figures in American religion, and those names still register at least some response.

Why has Bushnell become so obscure? In reading Robert Bruce Mullin’s biography of Bushnell, The Puritan as Yankee , we find some clues to an answer, and, more importantly, get a panoramic glimpse of American Protestantism during a period of rapid transition. Mullin’s is the latest of many Bushnell biographies since the first, by his daughter, Mary Bushnell Cheney, in 1880. Robert L. Edwards’ 1992 biography is perhaps the most readable of them, but Mullin’s serviceable prose does a better job of helping us see the unifying themes in Bushnell’s life and work.

His title sums up Mullin’s characterization of Bushnell’s lifetime project: to preserve Puritan core beliefs while reworking them to make them more palatable to the liberal heirs of Puritanism, particularly the Unitarians. A recurring trope in the book is Bushnell as Yankee “tinkerer.” The label applies quite literally to Bushnell, who held two U.S. patents on home heating devices, entered into contemporary debates on the best means of ship propulsion, and inspired the creation of Hartford’s city park (now Bushnell Park).

But what most interests Mullin is the kind of doctrinal tinkering Bushnell did with the mainline Protestantism of his time and place. Orthodox Calvinists, who held to the central doctrines of Reformed Christianity—predestination, God’s inscrutability, man’s depravity—were battling the Unitarians, who rejected not only these hard and perhaps harsh inflections of Christian doctrine but also essential elements of orthodox Christian belief. Then there were evangelicals, Baptists and Methodists mainly, whose doctrines could be Calvinist or Arminian, but who were mainly distinguished by their emphasis on the “conversion experience,” the dramatic, emotional moment when the sinner becomes a Christian. Finally, there was a renewed interest in Anglicanism, renamed Episcopalianism, which was becoming fashionable among the upward-bound.

Bushnell had little use for Anglicanism, which he considered reactionary and un-American, but among other sects he hoped to find some common ground. Unfortunately for Bushnell, his way of seeking commonality was not appreciated by some prominent Congregationalists, who charged him with heresy. In 1849 he was tried before the Hartford Central Association of Ministers, and, though acquitted by an overwhelming majority, was all but shunned by other Congregationalist ministers in Connecticut, who wouldn’t let him preach at their churches. Only in his later years, when doctrinal differences no longer excited much passion among Congregationalists, was he readmitted to full fellowship.

What got him into trouble was a book he published at the beginning of 1849, God in Christ . In the book it was apparent that Bushnell’s method of bridging doctrinal differences was to denigrate all doctrine. Bushnell regarded “dogma” as the enemy of religion. It crept into Christianity by way of “Greek learning” (“Nothing met the Greek mind which was not doctrine”) and ossified it, turning it into a collection of sterile formulas and definitions. A person of true genius, Bushnell suggested, understands that definitions can never be hard and fast. Only an “uninspired, unfructifying logicker” insists on definitional precision and logical consistency.

Years earlier, Mullin notes, Bushnell had discovered the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and from that point, much of what he wrote paralleled the great Romantic poet’s dismissal of “reason” for a broader, faith-based “understanding.” By the end of God in Christ Bushnell was suggesting that religion can’t be presented “in the form of logic or in speculative propositions” because it is inherently “poetic, addressing itself to the imagination, in distinction from the understanding . . . a matter of feeling, addressing itself to the esthetic power in the soul.” Not that he wanted “to abolish all our platforms and articles, and embrace every person who pretends to be a disciple.” All he wanted was “to relax, in a gradual manner, the exact and literal interpretation of our standards; to lean more and more . . . towards the side of accommodation, or easy construction.”

To many of the orthodox, Bushnell’s “accommodation” and “easy construction” sounded very much like an anything-goes approach to theology, and despite his assurance that “‘unity of the Spirit’ will suffice, without any human formulas, to preserve the purity of the church,” his ecumenical project ended in failure. Mullin notes that “Unitarianism and orthodoxy were no closer now than they had been before, and the orthodox seemed even more divided than they had been.”

In terms of doctrine, Mullin’s characterization of Bushnell as a “Puritan” seems inappropriate. The original Puritans, the preachers and teachers of old New England, would never have dismissed doctrine as unimportant or “unfructifying.” The Puritans entered into very intense arguments over doctrine, convinced, as they were, that their very salvation depended on getting it right. Not one of them would ever characterize religion as primarily “a matter of feeling.” Jonathan Edwards, whom some consider to be an eighteenth-century Puritan, did have a place for “religious affections,” but Edwards argued his case systematically, combining Lockean epistemology and Pauline soteriology. We can agree or disagree with Edwards but at least we have an argument in front of us. With Bushnell we get what Mullin, after struggling at length to find some clarity in one of his treatises, ends up calling a “gospel of opaqueness.”

After his failed attempt at ecumenism, and in declining health, Bushnell embarked upon a series of restorative travels. He spent the winter of 1856-57 in California, where he enjoyed the climate but deplored the “barbarism” of the region. Whatever his doctrinal departures from orthodox Puritanism, there remained some psychological remnant of it in his temperament: he was horrified by lawlessness and disorder. Years earlier he had preached against “the law of the bowie knife” in the old Southwest; now, in his “Sermon for California,” he declared that Californians could either continue down the path of lawlessness or adopt a set of values that stressed community, education, law, and industry. “Like John Winthrop on the Arbella in Boston harbor 224 years earlier,” Mullin writes, “Bushnell offered a choice. Which would they follow?”

The California trip seemed to mark a turning point in Bushnell’s life. Over the next decade his passion for order and moral authority began moving him in an increasingly conservative direction. He hated slavery but was put off by the “indiscriminate raving” of abolitionists. He entertained dreams of gradual emancipation (prompting Mullin to sarcasm: “It required no revolution or sacrifice, just a bit of tinkering”). When the Civil War came, Bushnell became an ardent supporter of Lincoln, but on the basis of a rather different social philosophy. For Lincoln, the Declaration of Independence was America’s grand moral charter, but Bushnell regarded it as a dangerously abstract document whose logical outcome was John C. Calhoun’s doctrine of nullification.

By the war’s end he had begun to envisage the nation in organic terms, emphasizing the importance of loyalty and “public devotion.” Bushnell’s accommodationist, “easy” brand of Christianity, which seemed so controversially liberal in his 1849 book, was now pretty tame stuff. The cultural changes that had swept over liberal Protestantism in the 1860s, which included the influences of Darwin and the German “historical” schools, recalibrated the scale of “right” to “left” among the heirs of Puritanism. The center had moved left, and the left, represented by Unitarianism, had moved to a point where it was no longer Christian in any particular sense.

Bushnell’s theology, which once pushed the envelope of liberal Protestantism, no longer created much controversy. In any case, what worried him most now was not “dogma” but the increasing egalitarianism of American society, or at least certain forms of it. One of his last books was entitled Women’s Suffrage: The Reform Against Nature . Bushnell favored women’s higher education and participation in professions such as medicine and law (though he insisted that a woman should not be a trial lawyer because “she is not wicked enough”). But only the abstract individualism of the Enlightenment—the same doctrine that he had earlier attributed to Jefferson and Calhoun—could have led anyone to think that a woman, born for nurturing and love, could belong in the vulgar world of politics.

At his death Bushnell was remembered not for these cranky social views but for his contribution to the liberalization of American Protestantism. His early attempt to tinker with orthodoxy just enough to get it in line with liberalism was now more or less irrelevant. The liberalism of 1849 had moved too far by 1876 to be reconciled with any kind of orthodoxy. So it was largely for his negative work of discrediting the latter for which he was hailed. Mullin regards Bushnell as something of a pioneer “who opened the wilderness, but left few lasting physical marks,” leaving it for later generations to “replace the rude cabins and mud trails . . . with fine buildings and great highways.”

It is an odd simile, and not very flattering. People who dedicate their lives to preaching and writing generally hope to leave behind more than “rude cabins and mud trails.” As for those later “fine buildings” of liberal Protestantism, where are they now? “Great highways,” indeed, there were, but people travel highways to arrive someplace. Where did liberal Protestantism go, and did it ever arrive?

Whether or not these questions can ever be answered, they do suggest an answer to the question I posed at the beginning: Why is it that we are more likely to recognize the names of Emerson, Parker, and Brownson than that of Bushnell? One of the reasons we remember Emerson and Parker is that they finally arrived: they converted from Christianity into a pantheistic religion of “nature.” So, in the opposite direction, did Brownson when he converted from Transcendentalism to Catholicism. But Bushnell rode the mainstream, even a little ahead of it at first, until, in the end, it moved too fast for him. The pioneer was left in the wilderness.

George McKenna is Professor of Political Science at City College of New York and coeditor of Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Controversial Political Issues (2003).

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While God Is Marching On: The Religious World of Civil War Soldiers

Sat, 01 Dec 2001 00:00:00 -0500

In the preface to While God Is Marching On , Steven E. Woodworth, an associate professor of history at Texas Christian University, recalls that Ken and Ric Burns’ 1990 documentary on the Civil War quoted freely from the letters of Civil War soldiers without revealing the frequent expressions of religious faith that ran through them. Nor, Woodworth claims, have the Burns brothers been alone in leaving out this vital part of the soldiers’ lives: “Even in a field as widely studied as the Civil War, religion has been the subject of relatively few books.” The omission is all the more remarkable since the Civil War broke out during a period of grassroots religious revivals”one beginning in 1857, the other in 1863“64”that influenced many of the men who served in the war. Woodworth’s book, based on extensive research of letters, diaries, and memoirs of Union and Confederate troops, is meant to fill that historiographical void”which it does admirably, if in some ways selectively.

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