"The queen of the south. As Ethiopia lies in a southerly direction
from Judea, I willingly concur with Josephus and other writers, who assert that
she was the queen of Ethiopia. In sacred history she is called the
queen of Sheba." (John Calvin, A Commentary
on the Harmony of the Gospels, Volume 2, pp. 70-71).
Happy Slaves
Douglas Wilson has become a prominent Christian apologist, and no
doubt the atheists with whom he interacts feel they have good reason to
build him up. Why such 'Reformed' luminaries as R. C. Sproul and John Piper also want to
build him up is less clear. This Reformed author wrote a book called 'Black and Tan'
in which he shares his enthusiasm for alcohol consumption and the
antebellum South, including its peculiar institution of chattel slavery. Wilson makes the case that the secessionist Southerners were the 'good
guys' in the Civil War, whereas the benighted North was simply evil.
This author believes that the South was right about the central issues
in the Civil War, even though the South, God's favorites, were punished
by an ungodly nation (the North) who were and remain God's enemies:
"And although the South was correct about the central
issues of that war, southern diehards must learn the hard lesson of
Habbakuk [sic], who had to accept that God can use an ungodly nation to
judge another nation which is 'not as bad' (Hab. 1:13)." (Douglas
Wilson, Black and Tan, Kindle location 1211).
Just as God used the wicked Assyrians to chastise Israel, God
used the wicked Northerners to punish the South for its minor
deflections from a purported Biblical paradigm of godly slavery: "'A
righteous God, for our sins towards Him, has permitted us to be
overthrown by our enemies and His.'" (quote of R. L. Dabney, Douglas
Wilson, Black and Tan, Kindle location 232). He fancies that he, today, is
fighting the same fight as the righteous Confederates did in their
day:
"The war was over the meaning of constitutional
government, the nature of federalism, the life of republics, and the
definition of civil liberty. . . .We cannot hope to fight the good
fight now while repudiating those who fought the same fight
earlier." (Douglas Wilson, Black and Tan, Kindle location 948).
With what weapons does our brave and valiant soldier fight? Not
with rapier or minie ball, but with alternative facts. He makes
stuff up. Did you know that blacks offered their "ardent support" to
the Confederacy? "The wave of patriotic fervor which swept the South
clearly included the black population. Across the South, blacks
frequently and publicly offered their whole-hearted service to the
cause of the Confederacy." (Douglas Wilson, Black and Tan, Kindle
location 905). I didn't either. The 'consensus trance' version of
history reports jubilant, newly liberated slaves greeting William
Tecumseh Sherman's forces as they marched to the sea, bringing with
them the jubilee. Who wouldn't welcome freedom? But the
neo-Confederates imagine they see a sliver of day-light, a chance to
avoid the charge of racism frequently levelled against them, if
African-American slaves were the biggest supporters of secession.
Moscow, Idaho slumbers, it would seem, under a bubble which allows,
not only the malleable future and present, but the past even, to
morph and transmute itself into wondrous and strange forms not
hitherto seen.
According to Wilson, the
Southern slave-owners won the Bible debate with the abolitionists,
because the "Christian defenders of antebellum slavery" "knew the
apostolic instructions precisely, had their exegesis in hand, and
consistently bested the abolitionists in debate." (Black and Tan,
Kindle location 305). He reiterates his verdict of victory: "Did the
Christian apologists for slavery in the antebellum South have the
advantage over the abolitionists when it came to their debates on
the subject of slavery? Again, there is no question: 'The
God-fearing southern people turned to the Bible to justify slavery,
and the Bible did not disappoint them.'" (Black and Tan, Kindle
location 850).
The book 'Black and Tan' incorporates in part an earlier pamphlet,
which Wilson wrote along with a collaborator, asserting that the
black slaves in the antebellum South were happy and content with their
lot. The original pamphlet, so I understand, was fairly clear-cut and
straight-forward in its thesis:
Douglas Wilson has never withdrawn nor renounced this viewpoint;
he has, however, hedged it round with pro forma disclaimers. Characteristically, most
of his surviving defense of the original thesis consists of venomous attacks on
those who do not subscribe to it. This vision of slavery is by no means a new or unfamiliar perspective; who
has not heard,
“Massa make de darkeys love him,
Cayse he was so kind;
Now, dey sadly weep above him,
Mourning cayse he leave dem behind.
I cannot work before tomorrow,
Cayse de tear-drop flow;
I try to drive away my sorrow,
Pickin' on de old banjo.
Down in de cornfield
Hear dat mournful sound;
All de darkeys am a-weeping,
Massa's in de cold, cold ground.”
('Massa's in de Cold Ground,' by Stephen
C. Foster).
It's a shame such a lilting, lovely tune is weighted down by
unspeakable lyrics. Usually I myself try to rescue Stephen
Foster by bowdlerization: say 'neighbors,' as in 'It's summer, the
neighbors are gay.' It's not clear how to salvage this one. The
argument runs, abolitionism is quite beside the point, because the
slaves enjoy their current status and do not wish to change it. Robert Lewis
Dabney, the great Southern defender of the Confederacy, whom Wilson
follows and champions, took this tack as well: "So, every
intelligent master defends his slaveholding because it was, in the
main, as preferable for the slave's interest as for his own."
(Robert Lewis Dabney, Defense of Virginia and the
South, Kindle location 3130). According to this thesis, the
slaves' irremediable lack of executive skills is made good by the
masters' wealth of such ability, to the benefit of both classes; it is a
mutually beneficial social division of labor that happens to run
right down the racial divide.
Sources were cited in the pamphlet in such a fashion as to suggest
the authors had consulted primary sources; when it was pointed out
they had not, instead of correcting the citations, they withdrew the
pamphlet. Though the pamphlet has been withdrawn, it remains the thesis
Douglas Wilson intends to defend, swamp it round as he may with muddy waters
of obfuscation. It ascribed to the institution of southern slavery the production of a "mutual intimacy
and harmony" between the races:
"Wilson's and Wilkins' booklet, published by Wilson's
'Canon Press' in Moscow, argues that southern slavery was not only
sanctioned by the Bible but, thanks to the patriarchal kindness of
their wise evangelical masters, a positive, happy, and pleasant
experience for the majority of southern blacks. Wilson and Wilkins
are quite specific about the many benefits of slavery for
African-Americans, and they conclude that southern slaves genuinely
appreciated those benefits and supported the system that provided
them. As such, they claim that 'slavery produced in the South a
genuine affection between the races that we believe we can say has
never existed in any nation before the War [the Civil War] or
since.' (p. 38). Their praise of the institution is almost unbounded
in places. 'There has never been,' they argue, 'a multi-racial
society that has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in
the history of the world.' (p. 24). ('The Late Unpleasantness in
Idaho: Southern Slavery and the Culture Wars,' by William L. Ramsey,
December 19, 2004, History News
Network).
While by no means unfamiliar, the 'happy slave' case strikes modern
readers as retrograde, in that an abundance of evidence survives, in the form of
diaries, autobiographies, and oral history transcripts, suggesting that
the slaves were only as content with their lot as one would expect
from people who, glancing around the plantation, noticed that they
were the only ones doing any work, but not the primary beneficiaries of
the work product. One would imagine they were about as happy as were
the Russian kulaks, upon demand from the Soviet Commissar that they
surrender their grain reserves, without compensation. This is the closest
analogue, nearer to our own times, of the Southern plantation system.
Antebellum slavery defenders themselves noticed the parallel: ". . .'we
slaveholders say you must recur to domestic slavery, the oldest, the
best, the most common form of Socialism'" (quoted in James M. McPherson,
The Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 196). People are human after
all, we can feel one another's pain, and so there likely were some Commissars who did not take all the
grain. Those who did left the farm families to perish from hunger, as indeed entire villages did in
that sad and starving land. However even the Commissars who did not take all
the grain were probably never described by the villagers, however
grateful they may have been to the man who permitted, for a time, their survival, as "kind," because what
is so kind about not stealing everything? That's not the right word.
People who work, but don't get paid, are not customarily a happy lot, and so it
is not difficult to believe the ex-slaves' own testimony that they
were not especially happy under the slave system. And it is to their own
testimony we should look, not that of the ever-imaginative Douglas
Wilson. A case in point is the story about the slave who used to go and pray
under the persimmon tree in slavery time, found on page 89 of Mules and
Men, a folklore compilation by Zora Neale Hurston: "He'd go up dere and pray to
God and beg Him to kill all de white folks. Ole Massa heard about it and
so de next day he got hisself a armload of sizeable rocks and went up
the 'simmon tree. . ." Sure enough, when "he began to pray and beg de Lawd
to kill all de white folks, Ole Massa let one of dese rocks fall" on his
head, knocking him down. "So when he got up he looked up and said:
'Lawd, I ast you to kill all the white folk,'" can't you tell a white man
from a black man?
When slavery first came to the European colonies established in
the New World, observers were understandably skeptical about the
institution, which had been suppressed domestically by Christian
Europe for religious and humanitarian motives. Wasn't it backward
and inefficient? Wasn't it likely to collapse under its own weight?
In fact it turned out to be a money-making dynamo, a cash generating
machine that was a wonder to behold. We do not tend to think of
agriculture as a way to get rich quick; the farmer who can keep his
head above water today is doing well. Invest in a few slaves, and
the equation changes. The venomous Southern racist Robert Lewis
Dabney, whom contemporary neo-Confederates adore, was able to set himself
up for life by brief participation in the slave economy. Being
able to coerce others' labor, for life, for the expenditure of a
relatively small sum, often borrowed, was an investment multiplier
like no other. While at first abolitionist voices were heard even in
the South, the sheer profit-making potential of this system where it
was allowed by public sentiment to catch on, came in time to silence
these voices, and the conflict became a sectional one. People who talk about
how a Southern slavery defender like Robert Lewis Dabney cannot be
blamed for his views, because he was a child of his times, are so
off base as to leave their hearers scratching their heads in
wonderment. Robert Lewis Dabney lived during the Golden Age of
abolitionist literature, at the very peak of the full flowering of
that prolific genre of anti-slavery pamphlets and novels. And he
read at least some of if. Few people today have read even a fraction
as much. Certainly Douglas Wilson has not. It is not because Dabney was a child of his times that he chose
the side he did.
Further evidence of trouble in paradise are the draconian
gun-control laws that were prevalent in the antebellum South. If you
love and trust someone, what is the problem with him possessing a
gun? Perhaps you would even be encouraged, thinking that now he can
protect you when the motorcycle gang roars into town. But the
Southern slave-owners were not encouraged when they thought about
their slaves obtaining firearms, rather they feared being murdered
in their beds. It was this atavistic fear that John Brown tapped
into when he raided the arsenal at Harper's Ferry. He intended to
distribute the looted weapons to Southern slaves. Now, if you
support the Second Amendment, what exactly is the problem with that?
The fact is, these people were perfectly well aware that their
slaves were not singing songs about how devoted they were to Old
Master and Missus, rather they harbored other thoughts. So the
'Happy Slaves' concept does not pass the reality test, and it is actually
ludicrous in the present day that anyone should still be trying to retail it.
I'm not black, and I can barely stand to read 'Black and Tan;' how
African Americans are expected to read through this book, without
wishing to physically assault its author, is a mystery to me, and
why Reformed congregations want to insult their (few) African
American members by lionizing the author, is a further mystery. Why
they then hold conferences lamenting how few African Americans
adhere to their tendency, leaves one in despair about the
capabilities of the human race.
It is stated on this page that Doug Wilson has recanted none
of his odious assertions in 'Black and Tan.' But is this so? He has
posted an entry on his blog, as of February 10, 2020, tagged under
'recantations.' Is it a true recantation, or another 'No Mas,' like his
apparent but not real backing-off from Federal Vision? Time will
tell. The reality is, Doug does not retract, he accumulates nuance.
Wilson deals with his detractors by story-telling. He
rewrites their expressed concerns into a narrative more to his liking;
he also massages his own stated positions into something a bit more
defensible. Thus a debate about whether, by Biblical standards, slavery
is right or wrong morphs into a dispute about. . .the
percentage of slave-owners who whipped their slaves, versus those who
did not. These latter are classed as 'benevolent,' though 'failure to
whip' is not a very high standard, and certainly not the Biblical
standard, which is six years and out.
The abolitionists were not seeking to reform slavery
but to abolish it. They knew of comparative degrees of cruelty within
the system: "Perhaps the mildest form of
the system of slavery is to be seen in the State of Kentucky. The
general prevalence of agricultural pursuits of a quiet and gradual
nature, not requiring those periodic seasons of hurry and pressure that
are called for in the business of more southern districts, makes the
task of the Negro a more healthful and reasonable one. . ." (Harriet
Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin, p. 3). But as Wilson's guiding light,
Robert Lewis Dabney explains, the system ultimately rests on the basis
of force; if the slave, unpaid, just sits on the ground, how to make him
work? So the reader should not be distracted by this continual accretion
of 'nuance.'
Racial Insensitivity
Some critics accuse Douglas Wilson of racial insensitivity.
Anthropologist Ruth Benedict defined 'racism,' back in 1940, as "an
unproved assumption of the biological and perpetual superiority of one
human group over another." The Southern racists who defended slavery in
the Civil War era did most unarguably believe in the biological and
perpetual superiority of one human group over another. He believes he
can resurrect their arguments and rehabilitate their society by
substituting the notion of cultural superiority for inherent biological
superiority. That racists believe in biological determinism follows
from the old definition, although contemporary antiracists have
redefined the term in a variety of ways. He insists he is not a racist. Indeed he dislikes racists
for their less than sleek and glossy appearance and manner of personal
presentation (he thinks they only have one tooth. . .like a narwhal, maybe?):
"'What is the most effective pick-up line at white supremacist
conventions?' 'I don't know, what is it?' 'Hey, nice tooth.'"
(Douglas Wilson, Black and Tan, Kindle location 1059).
Evidently there are social gradations even here. He agrees with his
neo-Confederate brethren, of course, on the central issue of the Civil
War:
"So I also take it as a given that the South was right
on all the essential constitutional and cultural issues surrounding
the war, and this is my reason for calling myself unreconstructed."
(Douglas Wilson, 'Black and Tan,' Kindle location 267).
His son wrote the forward to this book, for what reason I'm
not sure — to humanize his Dad, over against the Southern
Poverty Law Center, who think he ought to be watched? To appeal to that sliver of
the readership who finds it heart-warming that the father his
passed on his penchant for alcoholic beverages to the son? In
any event, the son explains that this used to be a "white
country":
“A once white country is no longer white,
having been broadened and strengthened by the victims of its white
fathers.”
(Nathan Wilson, Foreword, Black and Tan,
Kindle Location 39).
This makes the reader wonder: when was this ever a "white country"?
Thomas Jefferson's America probably had more real multi-culturalism
than we have today; the Native Americans, then a force to be reckoned with,
were still mostly pagan; the African-Americans, whose unwilling
importation ceased early in the nineteenth century, were as numerous
relative to other groups as they would ever be. The majority of this group
were originally pagan animists, though some were Muslims, as John Wesley
pointed out in his 'Thoughts on Slavery.' When, in 1939, the Daughters
of the American Revolution denied to opera singer Marian Anderson
the opportunity to sing at their Constitution Hall, many pointed out
the irony, that African-Americans were more, not less, likely than
others in our society to have had an ancestor present in this
country at the time of the Revolution. So why does young Wilson, who likes
peanut butter, thinks this used to be a white country?
Can it be these people agree with Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, who determined in
the Dred Scott case that, whatever a black man might be, whether
free or slave, he could never be a citizen, because that population
were "beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate
with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so
far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound
to respect?" From time to time Southern defenders of slavery, aware
that their society was nominally Christian, sought to find a place for
their peculiar institution within the confines of the Bible, and indeed
even within the Mosaic legislation, which required Hebrew slaves to be
freed at the Sabbatical year. They latched onto the permission to hold
foreign slaves. Moses was only commissioned to legislate for Israel, not
for the whole world, and in certain areas like lending money, the usages
of the children of Israel were allowed to default to those in force in
the larger world. And so we discover that the Southern slaves were
foreigners. Were they really? By what logic or standard? By the time of
the Civil War the vast majority of these people were native born. Could they
be heathen? Most were baptized Christians. Why were they perpetually aliens, rather than
citizens like similarly circumstances European migrants? Is there anyone
who does not know the answer, as it pertains to American history?
In case you are wondering how African-American citizens
come to be classed by Southern defenders of slavery as foreigners, no matter what their
country of residence or birth, while white persons identically
circumstanced are citizens beyond question, Justice Taney gives your
answer, and it is not pretty. It is of course racist, having to do with the
biological and perpetual superiority of one human group over another. Douglas Wilson
despises above all things the fourteenth amendment to the United States
Constitution, which was enacted to prevent the Southern States from
depriving the newly liberated slaves of their civil rights. By Justice
Taney's logic, blacks must
be foreigners perpetually, and only whites can be citizens. In other words, only whites can be Israelites, to
find any point of entry into the Mosaic system. Evidently African Americans are just here the way piping plovers are
here, not like residents, and certainly not like citizens. But even piping plovers are where they are. By the time of the Civil War, most African-Americans
were native born, and so how the Wilsons can imagine our nation was
at the time a "white country" defies analysis.
What is this once "white country"? It is a country of the mind, and I think this is
what people mean by 'racial insensitivity:' no African-American
would ever talk about this country being a once "white country." It
sounds like these folks don't get out much, and don't talk to very
many African-Americans.
Douglas Wilson gets accused of racism a lot, a charge which he
meets head-on, as he does all criticism, by accusing other people,
not party to the conversation, of racism and various other kinds of malfeasance.
According to him, the abolitionists were racist,— "Not only was the historical practice of slavery all bound up with racism, so was abolitionism,"
('Black and Tan,' Kindle location 1266); in his eyes the North was
if anything more racist than the South. This is not historically defensible,
but it is his way of taking racism off the table as an accusation against
the Southern slavers. He does seem to understand
that racism is sinful and deeply unbiblical, which leaves the reader
wondering when he proceeds to minimize and down-play this fault upon
finding it in his heroes. When racism is the issue, he leaps onto the Bible bus;
on this topic, he simply appropriates the abolitionists' familiar
Bible arguments, without attribution, and gives them his endorsement:
"And so we as Christians, and especially as American
Christians, must denounce as a matter of biblical principle every
form of racism, racial animosity, or racial vainglory. God created
man in His own image and has made from one blood all the nations of
the earth (Acts 17:26)." (Douglas Wilson, Black and Tan, Kindle
location 503).
But then he falls off when it comes to slavery, because he is
pro-slavery, this despite the fact that, unlike his atheist
fellow-travelers in this matter, he is aware of Bible institutions like
the Sabbatical Year and the Jubilee. If he understands that racism is
unbiblical, then why is he eager to commend the testimony of Southern
slavers he freely acknowledges are racists, when the Bible says, "Woe
unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for
light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for
bitter!" (Isaiah 5:20). He insists the Southern slavers' arguments against
abolition are determinative, even though these same arguments are
not only shot through with racism, but are in fact premised upon racism. If we subtract the connective tissue holding the
classic pro-slavery arguments together, which is racism,
which he concedes is unbiblical, we are left with a pile of dust.
Nevertheless, as far as he is concerned, the slavers won the
debate; he calls "their exegesis on slavery" "solid and compelling." ('Black
and Tan,' Kindle location 1278). This wildly illogical conclusion leaves the reader wondering whether
he actually means what he says when he condemns racism, or whether we
are in the realm of code words and dog whistles. Some people find the Golden
Rule a sufficient rebuttal to slavery. Dabney did not, because blacks
were like children, better off under the tutelage of those wiser and
better than they, i.e., the white folks:
"The whole reasoning of the Abolitionists proceeds on
the absurd idea, that any caprice or vain desire we might entertain
towards our fellowman, if we were in his place, and he in ours, must
be the rule of our conduct towards him, whether the desire would be
in itself right or not. This absurdity has been illustrated by a
thousand instances. On this rule, a parent who, were he a child
again, would be wayward and self-indulgent, commits a clear sin in
restraining or punishing the waywardness of his child, for this is
doing the opposite of what he would wish were he again the child.
. .In a word, whatever ill-regulated desire we are conscious of
having, or of being likely to have, in reversed circumstances, that
desire we are bound to make the rule of our action in granting the
parallel caprice of any other man, be he bore, beggar, highwayman,
or what not. On this understanding, the Golden Rule would become
anything but golden; it would be a rule of iniquity; for instead of
making impartial equity our regulating principle, it would make the
accidents of man's criminal caprice the law of his acts. It would
become every man's duty to enable all other men to do whatever his
own sinful heart, mutatis mutandis, might prompt." (Dabney, Robert Lewis. Dabney's Defense of Virginia and the South, Annotated.
(Kindle Locations 2330-2340). Booker House Publishing,
Incorporated.).
Is this the reasoning Wilson finds solid and compelling? That
black slaves want freedom, but this is a childish caprice, because
they are really better off under the wise governance of the
plantation owner, and thus the Golden Rule does not apply? He
expresses great indignation when people conclude, from his
admiration for Dabney, that he must be a racist himself. Why, hasn't
he expressly condemned racism! But there is nothing to Dabney's
arguments for slavery's beneficial character but racism; just as the
Cheshire Cat deprived of his smile fades away to nothing, so a
renovated Dabney cleansed of his racism disappears from view. Dabney
believes that black folk are incapable of freedom: "They will not
see that, as it may be strictly moral to punish one who is guilty
because of his guilt, and yet suffering is not intrinsic good in
itself; so it may be perfectly righteous to hold a class in bondage,
which is incapable of freedom, and yet it may be true still that
bondage is not a good in itself." (Dabney, Robert Lewis. Dabney's
Defense of Virginia and the South, Annotated. (Kindle Locations
2466-2468). Booker House Publishing, Incorporated). Does Wilson
agree that blacks are "incapable of freedom," and thus that slavery
is a blessing to them, or if not, why does he find the argument
compelling?
Dabney paints a bright and cheery picture of happy slaves
enjoying the protection of devoted, paternalistic masters, before
the nasty Yankees came and ruined it all; he finds his sunshine partly by
making things up, partly by failing to find any problem in
situations like inequality before the law: "The reply is that the
penal code of Virginia was properly made different in the case of
the whites and the blacks, because of the lower moral tone of the
latter." (Robert Lewis Dabney, Defense of Virginia and the South,
Kindle location 2613). Wilson shares Dabney's affection for the
ante-bellum South, and his inability to see blemishes evident to
outsiders, but is this continuous slander against the African slaves
really a compelling argument in its defense? If not, where is the "solid and
compelling" case he claims that Dabney makes, that slavery is a
beneficent institution? Subtract the racism, and there is no case at all.
Dabney and Wilson's story-telling does not correct purported
distortions of the abolitionists, as they claim, but creates a fantasy-land that never
was. Dabney and Wilson perceive some occult connection between
Christianity and feudalism, failing to notice that Moses' law
criminalized this system of land tenure. Moses wanted the land in the
possession of the free farmer, which is the opposite of what they want:
"That the land shall be owned by the very persons who
cultivate it, is an exceptional condition of things, resulting, to
some extent in New England, from a very peculiar history, origin and
condition of society, and not destined to continue general even
there. It is as true of hireling as of slave States, that the
tendency of civilized institutions is, and ever has been, and ever
will be, generally, to collect the lands in larger properties, in
the hands of a richer class than that which actually tills them." (Dabney, Robert Lewis. Dabney's Defense of Virginia and the South,
Annotated. (Kindle Locations 3800-3804). Booker House Publishing,
Incorporated.)
Does Moses, legislating at the command of God, allow land to
accumulate in the hands of the wealthy, i.e., to join field to field?
He does not:
Wherever these people get this stuff, it is not from the Bible.
Under Moses, the farmer owns the land he tills. This is not "an
exceptional condition of things"; it is what is lawful. Joining
field to field is what is unlawful. You can believe the Bible, or
not; it's a free country. But to pretend there is some natural
connection between feudalism and Christianity, requires not only
nailing the book to the altar, but nailing it shut.
Mr. Wilson repeatedly tries to establish a connection in
the reader's mind between Christian abolitionism and scientific
Darwinian racism. In reality there is no nexus there. However his own hero, Dabney, seems
to be tending in that direction: "But while we believe that 'God
made of one blood all nations of men to dwell under the whole
heavens,' we know that the African has become, according to a
well-known law of natural history, by the manifold influences of the
ages, a different, fixed species of the race, separated from the
white man by traits bodily, mental and moral, almost as rigid and
permanent as those of genus." (Dabney, Robert Lewis. Dabney's
Defense of Virginia and the South, Annotated. (Kindle Locations
4214-4216). Booker House Publishing, Incorporated.) What
abolitionist ever believed that black and white were "different,
fixed species"?
'North' and 'South' are geographic terms, not
ideological ones, but in the history of America they evolved into states of
mind, one benign, the other evil. In what region did eugenic ideology achieve its greatest
popular penetration? 'Social Darwinism' was the policy arm of
evolutionary racism; this was the policy perspective which wanted to
withhold assistance from the poor, lest they breed. In what region of
the country did this set of policy objectives find its greatest success
and acceptance? In what part of the country was the policy of
sterilizing feeble-minded women (which in practice meant poor, black
women; they were rarely given an IQ test) enshrined in law, and actually
applied to large numbers of helpless, indigent women who often were not
even told what was being done to them? He says, "In the nineteenth
century when Darwin first made his appearance, no one had any problem
with the racist implications of his theory." (Douglas Wilson, 'Black and
Tan,' Kindle location 418). Who is the "no one" who had no problem with
racism? Not the North, which did not generally adopt these racist,
eugenic measures; surely it must be the South, which did generally adopt
them:
The level and magnitude of illogic that insists on blaming the adversary for what
your own side is actually, and demonstrably, guilty of, takes one's
breath away. But this is normal for this author. Some people, when they
encounter a difference of opinion, proceed as they have been taught and
run down the Socratic questions, or whatever check list they may have
been given. They use tools of logical analysis to uncover the root of the conflict,
so as not to waste time hacking away at the luxuriant overgrowth. But this is not the
thought-world which our author inhabits. When plutonium contamination was
found in a sandwich in Karen Silkwood's refrigerator, her employer
accused her of deliberately pilfering the material. Extreme precautions
were taken at the plant to avoid workers coming into contact with
plutonium; they handled the material only with lead-lined rubber gloves,
in specially lined boxes; never did an employee's hand touch plutonium.
That stuff can kill you! Likewise there is a way of 'handling' ideas
whereby your hands are never soiled nor seared by contact with the ideas
themselves: they are dangerous! Handling them may cause cancer! You form
your lead-lined gloves by piling up adjectives around the ideas
themselves, and this insulating layer renders them safe to handle. And so
the whole matter of evaluating ideas comes to rest upon aesthetics; a
'thinker' like Douglas Wilson chooses the pile of adjectives he likes
best, and for some reason the adjectives he likes best are 'feudal,'
'paternalistic,' etc. In one fell swoop, we have eliminated logic in
favor of literary criticism.
In some bizarre way, he finds a connection
between feudalism and Christianity. Perhaps this comes from one of his
leading lights, G. K. Chesterton, a Roman Catholic who was nostalgic for
the Middle Ages. His other influences, like H. L. Mencken and P. G.
Wodehouse, are even further away from evangelical Christianity. H.
L. Mencken is a fatuous drunken atheist who believed
that third world peoples do not know anything about the father's
role in reproduction: "The mother was the head of the family. Her
relationship to her children was known to all, but the relationship
of their father, for long ages, was not so much as suspected; as we
have seen, it is not suspected by many savage tribes to this day."
(H. L. Mencken, Treatise on the Gods, Kindle location 926).
How much connection was there really between medieval feudalism
and Christianity? In the low security environment that followed the
collapse of the Western empire, barbarian hordes, no longer held in
check, swept through, plundering everything that wasn't nailed down, and a
lot that was, like the land, which these half-savage petty chieftains distributed to
their retainers. By what right did they seize the land? By right of
conquest! What has any of this got to do with Christianity? Nothing.
What was the relationship between these outlandish, barbaric military elites
and the rightful, lawful owners of the land? They seized it from the
rightful, lawful owners. The reason why small, hereditary military
elites ended up owning all the land in Europe is because they stole
it, fair and square. What has this got to do with Christianity? Not
a thing. One is reminded of the scene in a Mae West movie where the
sales clerk exclaims, upon noticing Ms. West's showy diamond ring,
'Goodness! Will you look at the size of that diamond!' and Ms. West replies,
'Goodness had nothing to do with it, honey.' The inability of the declining
Western empire to defend itself had a lot to do with it, and so the Lombards were able to take over Italy, the Visigoths Spain, and the
Vandals Northern Africa. In some cases these invading barbarian
hordes were not even all that numerous, but the devolution of
imperial authority had left political power laying in the street. How many Vandals
does it take to steal the real estate in Northern Africa?
80,000:
"The creation of the Vandal kingdom had been one of the
most extraordinary feats of the time of the great migrations, and
must be attributed entirely to the personal energy of their
long-lived king. His tribe was one of the least numerous of the many
wandering hordes which had trespassed within the bounds of the
empire, no more than 80,000 souls, men, women, and children all
counted, when they first invaded Africa. That such a small army
should have overrun a province a thousand miles long, and should
have become the terror of the whole seaboard of the Western Empire
was the triumph of Gaiseric’s ability. . .He confiscated all the
large estates of the great African landowners, and turned them into
royal domains, worked by his bailiffs. Of the smaller estates,
tilled by the provincials who owned them, he made two parts; those
in the province of Africa proper and the best of those beyond it,
were appropriated and made into military fiefs for his Teutonic
followers. These sortes Vandalorum, as they were called, were
hereditary and free from all manner of taxation." (Oman, Charles. The Dark Ages 476-918 A.D. (pp. 12-13). Augustine Books. Kindle
Edition.)
The unfortunate Northern Africans were liberated from this barbarian scourge, but
not for any prolonged length of time; the dark night of Islam would
ultimately close in on them. Perhaps Mr. Wilson can explain what
Christianity had to do with any of this. One might object, with Ms.
West, that Christianity had nothing to do with it, because
Christianity discourages stealing. You know something funny about
the 'right of conquest'? If someone claims to own something by the
'right of conquest,' and you hit him over the head and seize it from
him, then you now own it by the same exact right as he did. Another
way of saying 'the right of conquest' is 'the law of the jungle.'
What feudalism has got to do with Christianity is an impenetrable
mystery.
What Saith the Scripture?
By definition, the neo-Confederates are disloyal, seditious, and
unpatriotic. History must admit, with weeping, that treason happened, but
woe to those who celebrate and glorify treason. The worst thing about this man is the way he keeps spitting upon
the graves of the brave Union dead, and upon the American flag. To clean up
the mess, the custodians of every tidy
little New England cemetery had better get out the cleaning buckets:
"On a thousand small-town New England greens,
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic."
(For the Union Dead, by Robert Lowell).
After this man gets done spray-painting his hateful graffiti and
strewing trash around, they are going to need a clean-up job. To be
sure, when God listened to the cries of African-Americans held in
bitter bondage in the South and determined to act, he used imperfect
men as His instruments; what other kind of men are ever available? We must
never forget the terrible cost at which the liberty of the bond-servant
was bought:
"We had three million slaves in this country, and before
they could be set free, half a million men had to lay down their
lives. The choicest of the nation marched to their graves before our
slaves gained their deliverance." (Dwight L. Moody, A Life for
Christ, Kindle location 1114).
But the second worst thing is the way he keeps propagandizing in favor of the
claim that the Bible does, really and truly, support slavery, just
like the atheists say. The crux of the dispute is his claim that
the abolitionist interpretation of the Bible failed, blown
away by the far superior Southern slave-owners' rival interpretation, which he
admits was founded upon racism, which he admits is unbiblical. There is an
evident synergy here between this author and his atheist friends; both
agree the Bible sanctions slavery, the atheist because he wants to
discredit the Bible, Douglas Wilson because he wants to vindicate the
Southern slave-owners. But is this true? Did the
abolitionist interpretation really fail, or did it prevail amongst those open to
persuasion, and with very good reason?:
The Bible contains various types of material; an entire law code
is embedded in the Old Testament; there is also moral exhortation and
practical advice. Wilson tosses it all into the same hopper, unable
to differentiate any of it; it's all "law" to him. This reflects a
tendency already noticeable in Rousas John Rushdoony, the founder of
theonomy. This author assumes that, not only did Moses intend to
write, and did write, a code of civil legislation, but every
subsequent Bible author also intended to do, and did do, exactly the
same thing. He explicitly states his erroneous procedure: "But the Bible
from start to finish is concerned about law, because God's every
word is a binding word: it has authority." (Rousas
J. Rushdoony, Institutes of Biblical Law, Volume 2, Kindle location
13700, Section 159, Let His Enemies Tremble.) The result is a hybrid civil code that never was, a
modified Mosaic law with hyper-liberal divorce provisions:
"Jesus, by making the inclusive term fornication the
valid grounds for divorce, thereby made adultery, nicest, and other
offenses that once led to divorce by death now grounds for divorce
by bills of divorce. That this was recognized to be the case in the
church appears in 1 Corinthians 5:1-5, where, in the cast of incest,
the death penalty was mandatory (Lev. 20:11), but Paul instead
required excommunication, a spiritual surrender to death and Satan.
. .Had the death penalty still been mandatory, Paul would have
referred to it, but, while seeing the sin as a spiritual death, he
does not see any legal ground for anything other than separation or
excommunication. Paul spoke with authority. . ." (Rousas John Rushdoony, Institutes of Biblical Law, Volume I, Commandment VII,
12. Divorce, Kindle location 11675).
Paul did indeed speak with the authority of the Holy Ghost, but
not with civil authority to order an execution in Corinth, Greece. When a private person orders a hit, that's called murder, and the convert Paul was no murderer. When they enforce church discipline, churches do not apply the
death penalty, not because they have modified the penalties provided
by law, but because, as private, voluntary associations, they lack
capital jurisdiction. The state jealously guards the sword, and
would, if it could, exercise a total monopoly on the use of force.
Paul, no more than the Rabbis, urges believers to form themselves
into lynch mobs in defiance of the state monopoly on violence. As a
private citizen, he had no capacity to issue a verdict of execution!
Wilson has inherited this blooming, buzzing confusion, he didn't
start it. Even where there is some vague realization of a difference in
context, Rushdoony's solution is to mash it all together and produce
a hybrid, a civil law which did not come down from Sinai, and was
indeed never seen upon the earth until he invented it. Wilson's inability to distinguish basic legal categories
descends from his teacher.
According to Wilson, it would be "wicked" if Christian folk, noticing themselves having
come into the majority, were to say, 'You know, let's amend our
local ordinances respecting slavery, to more closely conform to
Moses' legislation on the matter.' Think I'm kidding?: "As far as
the apostle was concerned, nothing can be plainer than the fact that
it Christian could simultaneously be it slave owner and a member in
good standing in a Christian church. . .But if our churches had
existed in the antebellum South, and a godly slave owner who treated
his slaves with kindness sought membership, I could not refuse him
without seeking to be holier- than Christ. Such a desire would be
wicked, and this wickedness was at the heart of the radical
abolitionist dogma." (Douglas Wilson. Black & Tan: A Collection of
Essays and Excursions on Slavery, Culture War, and Scripture in
America (Kindle Locations 667-672).)
In other words, the only legislation permissible in this, or any
other, area could never go beyond the usages common in the pagan Roman world,— for which Moses was not commissioned to legislate,—
because it is 'wicked' to establish any laws on which a randomly
selected church-goer of the first century might find himself on the
south side. You cannot legislate against 'insider trading,' because
no apostle ever suggested insider traders should be subject to
church discipline. To be sure, sick people belong in a hospital, and
sinners belong in church, but what reason is there in suggesting
that you cannot legislate against polluting water resources, because
no New Testament writer ever suggested polluters should be subject
to church discipline? And why exactly should they? This is daffy,
cultic reasoning, which jumbles and confuses two different
realms, civil legislation and church discipline. This is quite
characteristic of these 'Reformed' authors, for whom the coupling
'sin' versus 'innocence,' is indistinguishable from 'lawful' versus
'unlawful.' That the law may look to desiderata of public good
unrelated to who will spend eternity in glory and who will mourn in
fire, they have no vocabulary to express.
Once a member of our church got into a dispute with the Code
Enforcement Officer, who threatened to fine him five hundred dollars
a day, every day, for as long as he allowed the conditions the Code
Enforcement Officer considered as contrary to code to continue. We
prayed about it, but we did not even think of expelling him. The
reason was not that we disputed the right of the municipality to
formulate, and enforce, building codes. Nor were we even tripped up
by the fact that the building code in one municipality may allow
what is expressly forbidden in the neighboring one. It's just that
the municipalities can enforce their own ordinances if they want to,
it's got nothing to do with the church. One can always pray for a
conflict to be resolved, without making oneself a party to the
conflict. The building codes do not determine who gets to heaven;
whoever thought they did? These are different realms. Not to say
there isn't a foundation in 'equity' for building codes in Moses'
legislation on parapets; buildings must be made safe. But the church
is in receipt of no special revelation on this topic.
It's not only this author who cannot make any distinction
between 'lawful versus unlawful' and 'sinful versus innocent.'
Anyone who has ever attended church in the Wesleyan tradition, like
a Pentecostal church, has heard stories about the efforts of the
newly saved to make restitution for misdeeds committed before
salvation. Wesley defined 'restitution' as an element of repentance:
"Now, repentance is not one work alone, but is, as it
were, a collection of many others: For in its compass the following
works are comprehended: — (1.) Sorrow on account of
sin: (2.) Humiliation under the hand of God: (3.) Hatred to
sin: (4.) Confession of sin: (5.) Ardent supplication of the
divine mercy: (6.) The love of God: (7.) Ceasing from sin:
(8.) Firm purpose of new obedience: (9.) Restitution of
ill-gotten goods: (10.) Forgiving our neighbor his transgressions
against us: (11.) Works of beneficence, or almsgiving."
(John Wesley, Collected Works, Volume 7, Page 504, Sermon CXXXIV, True
Christianity Defended).
Who that attends a church in the Wesleyan tradition has not heard
lengthy tales about someone who years ago worked as a maid in a
summer resort, and purloined several silver spoons, and once their
soul caught fire upon hearing the gospel set about searching for a
successor entity to the big hotel, which long ago went out of
business owing to changing tastes in leisure travel, to whom
restitution might be made. Some of these stories go on and on.
Are they are altogether alien to the Calvinist tradition? Some
exponents of this tradition seem to consider it blasphemous for a new
Christian to apologize to anyone at all, other than God. Thus
Douglas Wilson finds ready defenders to uphold his mocking of
African-Americans who expect him to apologize for his misguided writings. The Reformed cadre
expound this principle, "You can't make sin go away by making people
pay something other than the blood of Jesus." (Douglas Wilson, CrossPolitic
Live at NSA, A Discussion on Church and Race, with
Douglas Wilson and Voddie Bauckham, 57:51-57:58), which is a way of
doing church without ever having to say you're sorry. But restitution is
a Biblical principle after all, as even the unwilling must
acknowledge: "Restitution is God's appointed way of justice. . .In
effect, we deny the cross of Christ if we fail to see how essential
restitution is to all of life. Man can never make restitution to
God; this only God the Son can do and has done. Man can and must
make restitution to man." (Rousas J. Rushdoony, Institutes of
Biblical Law, Volume 2, Kindle location 4416, The Inheritance of
Freedom).
Certainly in any given instance where reparations are
demanded, one can argue the justice and propriety of the claim; but
to argue, as these people do, that restitution is anti-gospel as a
matter of principle, is strange indeed. If the Tutsi population of
Rwanda demands reparations from the Hutu majority government, they
really think the Bible is against that? When Jimmy Carter was President,
the United States government began making payments of $20,000 to
surviving Japanese-Americans interned in camps during World War II.
There is something wrong with that? In the instance under
discussion, of reparations for African-American slavery, I agree
with them that no such sums are owed, but not because no
compensation is ever owed by one Christian to another. Enunciating such a
'Biblical principle' makes nonsense out of the whole discussion. The
U.S. government is not the appropriate counter-party against which to
make such demands, among other reasons because the U.S. government did not enslave this
population, nor even draft the slave codes governing their status;
nor did the U.S. government ever stand in the way of states like
Vermont and Pennsylvania which abolished slavery immediately after
independence.
His latest stroke of genius is to tell people not to wear
face-masks, which has nothing directly to do with African slavery, but,
given the differential in the case fatality rate, will likely reduce
the complaining population:
The atheists, who are his biggest fans, have found in Mr. Wilson
a 'useful idiot,' one suspects, because he repeats their loudest
claim against the Bible, that it is pro-slavery: "But you're
cherry picking the good parts. Explain to me how
a book that is written by God, who is perfect, there's so much —
it's pro-slavery, pro-polygamy, it's homophobic. God in the Old
Testament is a psychotic mass murderer — I mean, there's so many
things in it." (Atheist Bill Maher, quoted in My Christianity Daily,
'Talk Show Host and Panel Bash Bible: God is a 'Psychotic Mass
Murderer,' July 31, 2013, Christian News Network.) Leaving out the modern,
nonsense word 'homophobic,'— the names of the phobias are
formed from the Greek, and 'homophobia' means 'fear of the same
[...],'— we are left with the accusation that the Bible is
"pro-slavery" and "pro-polygamy."
The Bible makes its points by telling stories. We hear, in the
Bible, about Joseph, unjustly sold into slavery, and the children of
Israel groaning under Egyptian captivity. What we don't hear is the
slave-owner's perspective. Thus God cannot be assumed to have infinite
patience for hearing that viewpoint. It would be different if the
liberation of Israel from slavery in Egypt were not one of the
central points about which the whole construction pivots:
"It was necessary also as a preparation for the later
history of Israel, when the Lord God would bring them out from their
house of bondage by His outstretched arm, and with signs and
wonders. As this grand event was to form the foundation and
beginning of the history of Israel as a nation, so the
servitude and the low estate which preceded it were typical, and
that not only of the whole history of Israel, but of the Church
itself, and of every individual believer also, whom God delivers
from spiritual bondage by His mighty grace."
(Edersheim,
Alfred. Bible History: Old Testament: Books One Through
Four (The Works of Alfred Edersheim Book 4) (Kindle Locations
2690-2694). www.DelmarvaPublications.com.)
To this oft-heard atheist accusation, 'The Bible is pro-slavery,' Douglas Wilson's
rejoinder is, 'You're right.' But they are not right. The most that can be
conceded to this entire crew is that, while the Bible is undeniably
anti-slavery, God's perspective on this institution is not presented
in the immediate programmatic political dimension they demand. The Lord left the
political work to be accomplished by His followers. The atheists leave the impression that
the Bible falls into the same literary category as the platform planks put out by the
political parties every four years. But this is, if not a category error, at least a misapplication of
the Dewey decimal system, because the Bible is a book which proclaims the gospel of Jesus
Christ, not a set of finite, secular policy demands. Nevertheless, the gospel does indeed have
political consequences.
Is it true, as our author claims, that the abolitionists
hated the word of God: "It is simply the recognition that on the
slavery issue the drums of war were being beaten by the
abolitionists, who were in turn driven by a zealous hatred of the
word of God." (Douglas Wilson, Black and Tan, Kindle location
602),— or were they the ones who wanted to follow the word of God, and studied
it diligently to find out how to do that?:
People are expected to believe John Wesley was a free-thinker?
Wilson is reviving the mythology of the South's victimization: "The idea
that the South as a region had been crucified by a materially
superior but spiritually degenerate North became one platform of the
white myth of the Lost Cause. Southern loyalists repeated it into
the twentieth century." (Richard W. Fox, Jesus in America, Kindle
location 3916), with all the willingness to defame and falsify that this
agenda requires.
According to the atheists, the Southern slavers read the Bible
'literally,' while their abolitionist opponents read it, how?— spiritually?
In historical reality, some defenders of Southern race-based
slavery contended that blacks were not even human beings: "In
The History of Jamaica (1774) Edward Long developed the outrageous
argument that in the Creator's 'series or progression from a lump of
dirt to a perfect man,' African negroes were inferior to human
beings. 'When we reflect on. . .their dissimilarity to the rest of
mankind, must we not conclude that they are a different species of
the same genus?'" (quoted from Edward Long, The History of
Jamaica, pp. 351-356, in Issues Facing Christians Today, John R. W.
Stott and John Wyatt, pp. 271-272). This is patently unbiblical,—
the Bible teaches we are all children of Adam and Eve,— so Wilson
flips it, making the Northern abolitionists to argue in favor of
polygenesis and the Southern slavers to defend Biblical monogenesis.
Wilson quotes with approval, "'The religiously orthodox Old South,
in contradistinction to the religiously liberal Northeast, stood on
its prejudice in favor of a literal reading of the Bible's account
of the monogenesis of the human race. . .' So I do believe that in
the broad sense the War Between the States could be described as
a religious war." (Douglas Wilson, 'Black and Tan,' Kindle location
1301). In reality there were never lacking defenders of Southern slavery who believed in polygenesis, like Josiah Nott, born to a prominent South Carolina family in 1804, founder of the University of Alabama School of Medicine. He was an agnostic who denied that the Biblical account of creation applied to non-whites. He was an admirer of the arch-racist Arthur de Gobineau, from whom Hitler took inspiration, who also denied the universal validity of the Genesis account.
"Dr. Josiah C. Nott of Mobile, Alabama, came to the rescue in the
American Journal of Medical Science in 1843. In 'The Mulatto — A
Hybrid,' the distinguished surgeon contended that biracial women were
'bad breeders,' because they were the product of 'two distinct
species,' the same way the mule was 'from the horse and the ass.'"
(Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, Chapter 14, p. 9 of
34).
The fiction he presents is that it was only those heathenish
Northerners who were the polygenesists. There were Northern
polygenesists, like Louis Agassiz, and before there were formal,
scientific polygenesists, there were informal ones, wherever there
was slavery, even in the North. Speaking of Rhode Island, before
independence and abolition of slavery there, Bishop Berkeley accuses
the planters of this perversion of Biblical truth: ". . .together
with an irrational contempt of the Blacks, as creatures of another
species. . ." (Bishop Berkeley, quoted in Charles
Colcock Jones, The Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the
United States, p. 19). So were there Southern polygenesists,
both assumptive and scientific. The reality is that his own mainstay, Robert Lewis Dabney, has this
to say on that very topic: "But while we believe that 'God made of
one blood all nations of men to dwell under the whole heavens,' we
know that the African has become, according to a well-known law of
natural history, by the manifold influences of the ages, a
different, fixed species of the race, separated from the white man
by traits bodily, mental and moral, almost as rigid and permanent as
those of genus." (Dabney, Robert Lewis. Dabney's Defense of Virginia
and the South, Annotated. (Kindle Locations 4214-4216). Booker House
Publishing, Incorporated.). His own north star, Dabney, seems to be
saying here that monogenesis was correct at the beginning, but given
the inevitable evolution of species, black folk have by now become
an entirely different species!
What can you say to this willingness to
make stuff up: to conjure up, out of vapor, 40,000 black Confederate
soldiers, to put words in Dabney's mouth which directly contradict
those coming up the other way? This man is not honestly mistaken.
There is nothing honest about him. He likes to posture and preen in front of
the mirror. He cannot see why he cannot be a writer in the Southern
agrarian tradition: "I wrote to McKenzie once that 'there really is
a Southern intellectual 'paradigm, and I am in it.'" (Douglas
Wilson. Black & Tan: A Collection of Essays and Excursions on
Slavery, Culture War, and Scripture in America (Kindle Locations
1373-1374).), even though he is not a Southerner,— though he spent
part of his childhood in Maryland, which is not really a Southern
state,— and he is not a farmer. But since this is all a matter of
striking poses before the mirror, why can't he be whatever he wants
to be? Isn't this all just make-believe, like a youth playing
'Guitar Hero'? He is firmly convinced that his intellectual autobiography
must be fascinating: how could any one's reaction conceivably be
anything but 'isn't he brilliant'? When the reaction from his
readers comes back as thumbs down, he lets out a bellow of wounded
vanity.
Were the abolitionists, or their detractors, disposed to make a literal or spiritual
reading of scripture? Let's take an example. On the subject of fugitive slaves,
God's word says, what?— literally and exactly,
“You shall not give back to his master the slave who has escaped from his master to you.
He may dwell with you in your midst, in the place which he chooses within one of your gates, where it seems best to him; you shall not oppress him.”
(Deuteronomy 23:15-16).
God's word says, literally and exactly, not to return him. And so
the Northern abolitionists said, in response to the slavers'
demands, shall we follow God, or man? We cannot return the fugitive
slave. What did the slavers care what the Bible said? They wanted
him back. And this pattern recurs over and over again. In fact, Mr.
Wilson, not being altogether illiterate, is aware of some of these provisions of the Mosaic law; so
what is his solution to the dilemma? He claims that nineteenth
century America was a pagan country, and so it doesn't matter that
they weren't following the law of Moses! "The Bible teaches that a man may be a faithful Christian and a slave owner in a pagan slave system."
(Douglas Wilson. Black & Tan: A Collection of Essays and Excursions on Slavery, Culture War, and Scripture in America (Kindle Locations 662-663).)
The London Baptist Confession of Faith enjoins Christians, whom it
acknowledges are not directly bound by the Mosaic civil legislation,
nonetheless to respect that law as a standard of "equity": "To them also he gave sundry judicial laws, which expired together with the state of that people, not obliging any now by virtue of that institution; their general equity only being of moral use."
(London Baptist Confession of Faith, 1689, Chapter 19). The "equity" of
freeing slaves every Sabbatical year, this purported theonomist tosses
in the trash bin, preferring a sentimental ideal of happy slaves in a
sunny, albeit pagan, South. Non-pagan readers may enjoy discovering the truth in this matter; this external site maintains a treasure trove of abolitionist
literature:
Test Case
Douglas Wilson proposes a test case, to prove the abolitionists wrong, of a contemporary slaver
presenting himself for membership in a church:
"Suppose a man presented himself for membership in your
church. . .And if he is refused membership, then what are you going
to do when he (his name was Philemon) goes back and tells the
apostle Paul what you did to him?" (Douglas Wilson, Black and Tan,
Kindle location 561).
To this author, as to N. T. Wright, church membership is hugely
important, and essentially substitutes for salvation. There is a little bit of a 'cheat' in this test case, because the time stream starts slip-sliding away
in the middle of it for some reason. For the sake of clarity, let us
hold that constant, please. Now, what should you do when a man comes
to your church and applies for membership; and when you start
chatting with him and ask him what he does for a living, he explains
that he has a shipping container full of Indonesian ladies he has
smuggled into the country, who are busily sewing garments, for no
wages, and they are forbidden to leave the locked shipping
container? Such cases actually happen, though thankfully not often.
What do you do? You call the cops, of course. What possible
scriptural justification can you find for doing such a thing; how dare you defy Peter and Paul, who
said nothing about calling the cops on Philemon and his peers?
Because Christians are to be good citizens, and slavery is against
the law: "For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to evil. Do
you want to be unafraid of the authority? Do what is good, and you
will have praise from the same." (Romans 13:3).
And why is slavery illegal? Because this is a democratic
republic, and the people, whose Christian consciences were formed in
part by study of Moses' law, made it so. Moses freed the slaves, at the
Sabbatical and the Jubilee; realizing this, Christian folk might
understandably be nervous that defying God's law, by not ever freeing
those unlawfully and unwillingly kidnapped from Africa, might bring down
a curse. Wilson's luminary Dabney is hostile
to democracy: "And both the French and the Yankee Jacobins, deriving
from it an impious deification of the will of the mob which happens to
be the larger, as the supreme law, have reduced their theory to practice
in the most violent, ruthless, and mischievous oppressions ever
perpetrated on civilized communities." (Robert Lewis Dabney, Defense of
Virginia and the South, Kindle location 3031). Wilson shares this hostility:
"God was to be toppled, and a new god, the god demos, was to be honored in His place."
(Douglas Wilson, The Case for Classical Christian Education, p. 31); "'.
. .the government schools were a rebellious idea from the start.' The
nature of this rebellion was democracy— the rule of demos, the
people." (Douglas Wilson, The Case for Classical Christian Education, p.
34). Proponents of democracy are idolaters, in short, and he looks forward to
the day when "that fundamental faith [in democracy] is rattled and
abandoned in repentance." (ibid. p. 36). The
anti-democracy zealots of Moscow, Idaho
do not disguise their hostility, not only to democracy, but to the basic
freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights: Doug Wilson's family-owned
vanity press has published a book calling on the government to
re-criminalize heresy, heresy defined, presumably, by themselves, the
heretics:
But hating the world as it is does not make
it otherwise. In the debate over American slavery, the abolitionists had
tradition on their side, because it had been a long time since any
Christian European had been sold as a slave. Playing the race
card confused the issue for a time, though it ultimately got corrected,
and not by his side. So after all the excitement
dies down and the cops and immigration agents stop swarming around
the place, you visit the man in prison and explain that your church
has a vibrant prison outreach.
John Brown's Body
Reformed author Douglas Wilson, at the outset of his book 'Black
and Tan' telegraphs his paradigm for changing the debate. Since his
earlier claims that slavery was benign did not set people's heads to
nodding, he wants now to claim that a social movement, abolitionism,
the vast majority of whose adherents were scrupulously non-violent
and committed to lawful transformation through the democratic
political process, was actually a campaign of violent terrorism. How
do you do that? By making the one violent man representative of the
whole:
“Suppose Christians two hundred years
from now are being embarrassed with stories about the old evil
days when their twisted twentieth-century Christian ancestors blew
up abortion clinics, shot abortion doctors, mailed anthrax to
abortion clinics, etc. 'That's all they ever did, day in and day
out,' the instructor said calmly, finishing his lecture. Now the
Bible condemns all these murderous activities, and it is not
necessary for our future brother to reject this slander of us and
our peaceful pro-life activities in order for him to stand for the
abstract truth that the Bible condemns murder.”
(Douglas Wilson, Black and Tan,
Kindle Location 81).
See how it's done. He has seen it done, he knows how to do it,
and he intends to proceed with it. Just as one killer, Paul Hill,
shoves aside a whole populace of law-abiding pro-lifers, so one
killer, John Brown, will be made into the face of abolitionism. Predictably,
mainstream politicians disavowed Brown's abortive guerrilla war:
"Even though Brown 'agreed with us in thinking slavery wrong,' said
Lincoln,' that cannot excuse violence, bloodshed, and treason.'"
(James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 212). Those
abolitionists whose views were altogether based on the Bible
followed Jesus in preferring non-violence. It's not
like there was no precedent for escalation, nor readily
available slogan: "The name of peace is sweet, the thing itself is
most salutary. But between peace and slavery there is a wide
difference. Peace is liberty in tranquillity; slavery is the worst
of all evils, — to be repelled, if need be, not only by war, but
even by death." (Cicero, Marcus Tullius. Delphi Complete Works of
Cicero (Illustrated) (Delphi Ancient Classics) (Kindle Locations
27874-27875). Second Philippic, Section 113.) But it's not the
New Testament way of proceeding. . .and so he will pretend it's what
American abolitionism was all about:
“At the same time, because the gospel
of Christ necessarily brings liberty to captives, it should also
be obvious that the spread of the gospel over time necessarily
subverts the institution of slavery generally. But this gradual
subversion would have been reformational and gradual and not
revolutionary and bloodthirsty, as radical abolitionism was.”
(Douglas Wilson, Black and Tan,
Kindle Location 567).
Now you see, children, how we transform the debate, not like it's honest or fair or anything.
But in truth, the debate between the Southern slavers and the
abolitionists was not over the mode, timing and method by which abolition
was to be achieved, but whether there was to be any such thing at
all. Wilson's guiding light on slavery, Southern racist Robert Lewis Dabney,
looked down time's alley before that nasty Civil War and saw a
bright future unfolding: "Thus did African slavery among us solve
this hard problem; and place before us a hopeful prospect of a long
career of freedom and stability." (Robert Lewis Dabney, Defense of
Virginia and the South, Kindle location 3595).
No amount of slaver violence and terrorism,— and there was plenty
enough of that, in the years leading up to the Civil War, for
instance in the struggles over slavery in territories such as
Kansas,— can discredit the slavery cause, but one act of terrorism
discredits all of abolitionism. ". .
.[Senator] Atchinson was confident of their ability to give
free soilers the same treatment in Kansas. 'We are organizing,' he
told Jefferson Davis. 'We will be compelled to shoot, burn & hang,
but the thing will soon be over.'" (James M. McPherson, Battle Cry
of Freedom, p. 146). Why not carry one set of weights in your bag? Acts of
terror and violence committed by Southerners who share his love for
slavery, he passes over in silence. One atypical act by an
abolitionist, he makes central to his case.
What is this but shrill, tinny special pleading?
Certainly for Christians violence can never be any other than a last
resort. John Brown, rejected by all at the time of his raid on
Harper's Ferry,— neither did the slave rise up in Spartacus
rebellion, nor did the abolitionist rally to his cause,— was
recognized posthumously as a sort of prophet, the one man who had
understood Southern intransigence, and realized that only when
Northern armies of liberation swept through the South and pried the
key to the slave's chains from the cold, dead hand of the Southern
slaver would abolition be accomplished. That, tragically, is just
how it happened. Would it have happened otherwise? As his friend
Frederick Douglass said, "They could kill him, but they could not
answer him." (John Brown: An Address at the 14th Anniversary of Storer College). The recalcitrant Southern racists
had no intention of freeing the slaves, nor was it happening, either visibly or invisibly.
If any slaves were being freed, it was only at a glacial pace, and
as Wilson's guiding light, Southern racist Robert Lewis Dabney,
malevolently observes, a freed slave in the American Southland was
"still debarred as much as ever from social equality by his color
and caste. . ." (Robert Lewis Dabney, Defense of Virginia and the
South, Kindle location 1901).
Looked at objectively, was Robert Lewis Dabney a Christian
gentleman, as Wilson fulsomely rhapsodizes, or no more honest and ethical
than would be expected for a slave-owner and a Confederate officer?
The latter. In his defense of the south, he boxes the compass and
rounds the bases: he responds to all critics of slavery, both
secular and religious. But some abolitionists were aiming their
complaints against slavery almost from opposite sides of the arena. Some
approached the subject with legal and political concerns, others, of
course, cared about the Bible above all else, some were
sentimentalists. . .and then there were the economists. No less than
Adam Smith thought that slavery was a bad system, because inefficient:
"The experience of all ages and nations, I believe, demonstrates that the work done by slaves, though it appears to cost only their maintenance, is in the end the dearest of any. A person who can acquire no property can have no other interest but to eat as much and to
labor as little as possible. Whatever work he does beyond what is sufficient to purchase his own maintenance, can be squeezed out of him by violence only, and not by any interest of his own." (Adam Smith. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Kindle Locations 6046-6049), Book 3, Chapter 2).
The reader of Dabney is regretfully familiar with his affirmative
case for slavery, which is that Africans are lazy, shiftless, and
disinclined to work, and that therefore they and society benefit
when others are placed in superintendence over them, willing or not. And this
condition is not remediable, it is hereditary, he claims, making
these toxic and disgusting allegations over and over again. Wilson
frets that Dabney should have consulted with him before defending
antebellum slavery; he would have counseled him to make the case for
cultural inferiority, not racial inferiority. Why picking cotton in
the fields would have remedied this presumed cultural inferiority,
in a legal atmosphere where teaching blacks to read and write was
often criminalized, is unclear. Even friends of the peculiar institution were obliged to admit the fact: "Shall we speak of access to the Scriptures? The statutes of our respective slave States forbid all knowledge of letters to the Negroes; and where the statutes do not custom does."
(Jones, Charles Colcock. The Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the United States (1842) (p. 81). Kindle Edition.)
Okay, say the professional
economists, reading slave-owner complaints that four slaves are needed to
do the work of one free laborer: slaves are inefficient workers, we get that. Therefore,
slavery is a bad system. Because the lash is after all a poor
motivator, a better system of organizing labor must be found. So say
the 'liberal' economists. Not so fast, interjects Dabney! Why, the
Africans are such willing workers they don't even need supervision:
"But in the South, nothing was more common than to see estates
farmed by the faithful slaves, for widows, orphans, professional
men, or non-resident proprietors, without any other superintendence
than an occasional visit. Now, all this is at an end."
(Robert Lewis
Dabney, Defense of Virginia and the South, Kindle location 3838).
Does he notice, or care, that his present representation that the
African workers did not require any supervision at all, entirely
contradicts his entire pro-slavery argument? We learn now, that not a word
of it was true? He answers as the
exigencies of the moment require; he hates the northern economists
just as much as he hates the northern abolitionists, and so
everything they say is false, even if pointing that out requires him to toss his
own pro-slavery case in the dumpster. Not to worry, Douglas Wilson can fish
it out of the dumpster, steam clean and dry it, and market it to a
new generation of neo-Confederates, the scary, unsmiling young men who
follow him.
Economic historians Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman,
in their 'Time on the Cross,' kicked over the rock from under which
the neo-Confederates scampered. While avoiding tendentious
over-statement of their case, the useful points they make should not
be overlooked. As noted, there were various streams in anti-slavery
thought; some concerned citizens only asked, 'What saith the
scriptures?', whereas others concentrated on political and legal
paradigms. Then there was the argument centering around economic
efficiency. The economic argument against slavery, again, makes some valid points, but should
not be overplayed, as it often is, into an anodyne expectation that the slavery system, owing to its inefficiency,
is ever and anon just on the verge of crumbling under its own weight and disappearing. When did this happen in the
Roman empire? The free farmers of Italy found themselves in competition, from early on, with huge factory
farms worked by slaves. It was these sturdy citizen-soldiers who built the empire, but they found it
difficult to compete with large-scale operators whose work force had been acquired for little or nothing,
and who were maintained on the barest sustenance. Economies of scale and unlimited access to credit
tipped the scales in favor of the aristocrat owners, as did a political system that catered to their needs.
So long as the political will existed, the community fought back with land reform, but once the will
flagged, the small farmer became an endangered species.
Almost all observers who were around when slavery was a
living system report that slave labor is less efficient than free labor, and there is no good reason for
modern revisionists, who will never see a plantation in operation, to 'correct' their perception. Human nature would be,
not better, but worse, if the lash were after all the most convincing motivator. These same observers also
report the system as wildly profitable to the proprietors, though not to the community, which must
watch helplessly as wages fall when people are brought in who will work for nothing,
who indeed have no choice in the matter. The uniformity of observers'
description of the 'slave-character' is striking, from antiquity to the twilight of the system in the 1860's.
No one is paying Africans any compliment to represent them as more servile and cringing than Teutons or
Celts; they reacted to slavery, with its brutal and dehumanizing indignities and extortionate demand for
unrecompensed labor, just the same way as did everyone else, with the same stubborn recalcitrance and resistance
that marks out a free man. The New Testament does show a better way;
however, apostolic strictures for slaves to maximize productivity
even in the absence of any positive incentive, were likely in
practice 'counsels of perfection,' not universally nor perfectly
observed.
This valid and worthwhile observation became, in time, hardened
and exaggerated into a prediction, that slavery, because of its
inefficiency, would lose the competition with the free market and
fade away. Karl Marx would later make a name for himself by taking
this oft-repeated, whimsical prediction of slavery's demise and
applying it to capitalism instead. The fact is, it never happened
nor ever would have happened, absent external political pressure. While individual effort was not and could not be maximized
under the slavery system, the slave-drivers had their ways of
compensating: for instance, labor force participation ran close to
100 percent, as it never does in a free society. In the North, the
little children went to school. What a waste, cried the
slave-drivers! In the South, they worked out in the fields just as
soon as they were able to hold a hoe in their small hands. In the
North, the social compact between men and women in farming
communities mostly left hard physical labor in the fields to the
men, and inside work to the women; not so in the South. So the
slave-drivers, in the end, were able to 'coax' back some of the lost
productivity into their cruel and amoral system. And labor that
costs next to nothing can tolerate a little inefficiency.
In sum, the economic argument against slavery, while correctly
pointing out coercion is not the optimal way of organizing the labor
force, falls very far short of proving that slavery's collapse was
inevitable or imminent at the time of the Civil War. If Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation had
not come down, which Wilson despises, nor the following thirteenth
amendment, which he also despises, nor the fourteenth amendment,
which he despises even more, there is no reason to expect slavery
would have come to halt at the time it did, rather than on his
preferred schedule, according to which it would perhaps still be
with us. The economic argument has turned into a drug, a soporific,
which prevents people from seeing the hard truth, that the
victorious Union armies ended slavery, no one else. The system never
collapsed under its own weight. Fogel and
Engerman should be thanked for pointing this out. Christians should come
to terms with it, and acknowledge that, if you're pro-Confederate,
you're pro-slavery.
Whosoever Will
Douglas Wilson is a Reformed pastor, who has by no means been ostracized by his peers
over his unorthodox understanding of antebellum slavery,— unorthodox by the standards of the secular world, at any rate, and one would hope by the
standards of the Christian fold, outside of the Calvinist hot-house. He is well
within the Calvinist mainstream, a respected brother and esteemed
teacher, which makes you wonder. Calvinism holds that God's freedom
cannot be preserved and vindicated, unless only God is free. Some contemporary
Calvinists do not believe there is any human freedom at all, even for
regenerate persons to make morally indifferent choices such as whether to wear the blue socks
or the brown socks. This was not John Calvin's original doctrine,
but a subsequent development therefrom. Karl Marx found himself obliged to
deny that he was a Marxist; it is not uncommon for later
adherents of a particular teaching to erect a hedge around it, as seems to
have happened here. Against this doctrine are various Bible testimonies that
ascribe 'grace failures' to human agency:
“Will they fall and not rise? Will one turn away and not return?
Why has this people slidden back, Jerusalem, in a perpetual backsliding? They hold fast to deceit,
they refuse to return.” (Jeremiah 8:4-5).
Do they refuse to return, as it says, or has God refused to return them, and this verse is empty mockery? Who is willing, and who is not willing?:
One place where you see the influence of Calvinism on Douglas
Wilson's role model, Robert Lewis Dabney, is on the question of
minimalism or under-achievement. Calvinists vigorously deny the
charge of antinomianism sometimes levelled against them. However,
under no other system will you see this type of ethical reasoning,
whether on the topic of slavery or any other: unless you can prove
Biblically that all slave-owners go to hell, which of course you
cannot, then slave-owning is okay. What about God's will as
expressed in His law, in His hatred of oppression, His desire to
break the captive's yoke? They have a tendency to defend a kind of
aggressive slacking as a consequence of their system, not to mention
Dabney's category of racial 'inherited sinfulness,' unknown to other
schools of interpretation: not our common inheritance from Adam, but rather
an invidious distinction between differing people-groups. The imperative to do the bare minimum we can get
away with is simply not understood by other schools of thought.
In fairness to Calvinism, some Calvinists perceive their school
of though as uniquely incompatible with slavery and oppression:
"If Calvinism places our entire human life immediately
before God, then it follows that all men or women, rich or poor,
weak or strong, dull or talented, as creatures of God, and as lost
sinners, have no claim whatsoever to lord over one another, and that
we stand as equals before God, and consequently equal as man to
man. . .Hence Calvinism condemns not merely all open slavery and
systems of caste, but also all covert slavery of woman and of the
poor; it is opposed to all hierarchy among men. . ." (Abraham Kuyper,
Six Lectures Delivered in the Theological Seminary at Princeton, pp.
25-26).
On one point it is strange that Calvinism, with its
teaching of Total Depravity, should testify on behalf of allowing
one (totally depraved) man to hold total, uncontested, absolute
dominion over another (totally depraved) man. Is this really such a
good idea? Granville Sharp, in his treatise against slavery, brings
up the frequently heard claim that Christianity is incompatible with
slavery: "The honorable Mr. Justice Barrington (in his observations
on the more ancient statutes, p. 280.) mentions a notion originally
inculcated by Wycliff and his followers, which began to prevail so
early as the time of the great lawyer Fitzherbert, 'OF ITS BEING
CONTRARY TO THE PRINCIPLES OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION, THAT ANY ONE
SHOULD BE A SLAVE,' and from hence, (says he) 'in more modern times,
Slavery hath been supposed to be inconsistent with the common law,
which is said to be founded on Christianity.'" (Granville
Sharp, A Representation of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of
Tolerating Slavery in England, pp. 161-162).
In his discussion of this point, Granville Sharp mentions, not only
that slavery is inconsistent with charity, but also that it assigns
immense power to "worldly minded men":
"For mankind in general, howsoever religious they may
esteem themselves, are not so perfect as to be safely entrusted with
absolute power. Avarice, choler, lust, revenge, caprice, and all
other human infirmities, according to the different dispositions of
men, will too frequently enslave the master himself, as as to render
him entirely unfit to be entrusted with an absolute power over
others." (Granville Sharp, A Representation of the Injustice
and Dangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery in England, pp. 162-163).
So on this one point, of entrusting one man with total dominion over
another, it does tend to run against the current of Calvinism to advance
full speed ahead, although no less a Calvinist than Robert Lewis Dabney
responds to the self-evident problem of evil and malevolent slave-owners
with a shrug of the shoulders. On other points, however, it may be there
is synergy.
Robert Lewis Dabney was not stupid, and he realized that the
popular pro-slavery arguments heard before the Civil War: that
'black skin'='the mark of Cain,' for example, were good for
nothing but to give giggling fits to Northern abolitionists. And so
he razed that structure and built again from the ground up. One
might wonder at his timing: what is the need for a defense of
slavery, first published after the war, when slavery was gone, other
than to provide a rationale for the deprivation of civil liberties
of the newly-liberated slaves? Much of his 'Defense of Virginia'
consists of hacking through the thicket of abolitionist anti-slavery
argumentation, but the pro-slavery part rests upon a novel but purportedly
'Biblical' concept: that the black race is cursed, that God has no
intention of saving these people, and that society must think in
terms of control and damage limitation when dealing with this
population. It is unsurprising, given this framework, that the man
was skeptical when hearing testimonies from African-American
Christians. But this new and improved argument, while it is not as
silly as prior pro-slavery arguments, cuts its target constituency
right down the middle. What Methodist or 'Free-Will' Baptist is
likely to sit still while hearing that God does not intend to save a
certain population? They will fidget and protest, 'But if they
repent, God will surely accept them; God has never said 'nay' to the
repentant sinner.' This is a pro-slavery 'Bible argument' only for
Calvinists, and not even all of those.
One of the underlying failures of Biblical
interpretation that undergirds Calvinism is over this very issue: is
God for the slave, or for the slave-owner? Recall that the central narrative
of the Old Testament is the liberation of the Hebrew slaves from bondage
in Egypt. Who is God for: the Hebrew, or the Egyptian? The Calvinist says, God
says He is for the slave, but of course, like the rest of us, He is
really more impressed by the slave-owner; therefore His election of
the slave is only intended to demonstrate His arbitrary power. Some people
continually fail to see the main point, ever looking instead for some
loop-hole, anomaly or exception. This author calls to mind an imprisoned
man seated before a massive cement wall. He squints: why, there are
little cracks in the cement wall! Perhaps I can take my spoon and work
at these cracks; surely the wall-builder would not have left them there,
if he did not really want me to undermine this useless wall! But the
wall is, after all, the main point; sometimes it is helpful to notice
the obvious. That God is for the burdened Hebrew slave and against the
mighty, powerful and wealthy Egyptian is another point; God leans to hear the cry of the oppressed, not the
blurted self-satisfaction of the oppressor. They
have turned the Bible inside-out, yet they're convinced they're doing an
excellent job of explicating God's will; they are teachers in their own
eyes. Is 'Reformed' doctrine biblical, either in its original form as John
Calvin propounded it, or in the form in which it is held today by its
modern-day salesmen?:
“But you do not have His word abiding in you, because whom He sent, Him you do not believe.
You search the Scriptures, for in them you think you have eternal life; and these are they which testify of Me. But you are not willing to come to Me that you may have life.”
Douglas Wilson is no voice crying in the wilderness; he has a
community, and a supportive community at that. It's a mystery to me
why he does not find himself on the outside looking in, a scary and
disreputable cult leader from whom people sidle away. But that is far from the case, he is a
respected and beloved leader in the 'Reformed' community. The system's founder is John Calvin, who created a structure of
admirable internal consistency, which however is not altogether
scriptural:
They say that consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, and
no one can accuse our author of being in bondage to any such nagging
little demon.
Casus Belli
On the one hand, the Civil War was not about slavery:
"We have been told many times that the war was over
slavery, but in my view it was actually over the biblical meaning of
constitutional government." (Douglas Wilson, Black and Tan, Kindle
location 581).
Nevertheless, even though the Civil War was not fought over
slavery, the abolitionists, who had no other issue than slavery, are
responsible for six hundred thousand lives:
“One goal of this small essay is to
show that if this impression is largely false, then the
instructions laid down in the New Testament for Christians in
slave-holding societies were applicable straight across—and
those instructions did not include a war which would kill over
600,000 men.”
(Douglas Wilson, Black and Tan,
Kindle Location 535).
Inasmuch as the known Civil War was not over slavery, was there
some other not known Civil War, this one started by abolitionists
firing on Fort Sumter, which actually was about slavery, in which
case it would be rational and to the point to say, "Jesus Christ
really is the ultimate Jubilee. But this is not accomplished through
revolutionary means, through the bloodletting of social cataclysm."
(Douglas Wilson, Black and Tan, Kindle location 591). Who is he
chiding here? There was no abolitionist war, according to him,
therefore no abolitionist revolution.
The reader who consults
neo-Confederate web-sites will find this to be a constant, the Civil
War was always about something other than slavery: tariffs, economic
exploitation, good government, or whatever. Our author is no exception
(in some moods):
"The war was over the meaning of constitutional
government, the nature of federalism, the life of republics, and the
definition of civic liberty." (Douglas Wilson, Black and Tan, Kindle
location 949).
But then, suppress it how you will, the truth comes bubbling up,
and it turns out that the abolitionists, who qua abolitionists take
no common or distinctive position on federalism, constitutionalism, tariffs, or
the like, are responsible for the loss of 600,000 human lives. Where does
our author's hero, slavery apologist Robert Lewis Dabney, stand on this
issue?
"Then the North, having ceased to find its own interest
in the slave trade and slavery, changed its ground, and began to
cast about, merely from a desire of sectional power in the
confederacy, for means to destroy the institution. It is unnecessary
to argue that the whole free-soil controversy, and the war which
grew out of it, were really designed by them to destroy slavery in
the States: for they themselves, in the pride of success, have long
ceased to conceal that fact." (Robert Lewis Dabney, Defense of
Virginia and the South, Kindle location 4178).
Hmmm. . .the Civil War was a clever Northern plot to destroy slavery. Some
Christians espouse pacifism, Biblically and consistently; our
author, whose heroes are Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee, is not one
of them. Only in the case of slavery does he insist on the necessity of pacifism.
. .for the other side! Hmmm. . .what's that von Clausewitz said, “The
conqueror is always a lover of peace; he would prefer to take over our
country unopposed.” Wouldn't it have been more helpful to preach
pacifism to the men who fired on Fort Sumter? It is not clear why people
he dislikes have to be pacifists, while people he likes are free to
celebrate their glorious military tradition; there is a certain
asymmetry here. Our author does not understand the Sermon on the Mount's
protocol of non-resistance to evil; to him, if there is no command to
resist at arms, then there is no evil. This is partly why he imagines there
must be a 'Biblical' form of slavery; it is as if someone hearing, in the
Sermon on the Mount, that one should hand over to the expropriator the
cloak as well as the coat, should say, 'Aha! There is a Biblical form of
stealing!'
Truly no historian could deny that the Civil War was fought over,
among other things, the right of American states to secede from the federal union. But
it was not fought over this right in a vacuum. Suppose passers-by
should tackle a man, shot-gun in hand, chasing his wife down the
street while yelling, 'I'm going to kill you!' These 'gun-grabbers'
grab his gun away and sit on him until the cops come. In a sense the
fight was over the right to bear arms, but not only over that. We
cannot be sure of the actual position of these Good Samaritans vis-a-vis
the Second Amendment, because the real-life conflict was not over
the right to 'open carry' in a vacuum, but over the right to bear
arms if it is evident you intend to shoot somebody, right here and
now. As the signing statements of the Southern states at the time of
secession made clear, they wished to secede from the union in order
to keep millions of human beings in perpetual bondage. For such a
nefarious and unbiblical purpose, most in the North perceived no right to secede.
Gratitude
In a like vein, our author is "grateful" slavery is over and done
with:
"I am profoundly grateful that chattel slavery no longer
exists in our nation." (Douglas Wilson, Black and Tan, Kindle
location 589).
He is profoundly grateful that it's gone, though he wants it understood that the people
who got rid of it are moral monsters. If Southern slavery was really so
wonderful as he says, why isn't nostalgia called for rather than gratitude for
its demise? Put on your hip boots before you wade through this morass of contradictory impulses interspersed
with publishable denials. Our author keeps circling around the ideas, clear
at their source in the original pamphlet, returning, one might almost
say, like a dog to its vomit, convinced that if he can just 'frame' them
properly, others will see what he sees. He cannot stop whining that people are not
nice to him, though what he and his collaborator, with the
'Anglo-Celtic'-centric 'League of the South,' are proposing is
treason, and nobody has to be nice to traitors.
It is difficult to fathom the depths of shamelessness and dishonor from which this man is looking up
at us, from which a man would venture to slander brave men who died for freedom, a value of which he has no
conception, and who are not here to defend themselves against his
raucous taunts. This self-indulgent, confessional book does not display any tendency
toward clear thinking or sound logic. He wants to trace his roots;
but when he does so, the current propels him towards slave-owning
Southerners. (Or does it? He is guru-in-residence for a small
neo-Confederate cult in Idaho; why Idaho? Last time I checked a map,
this state was north of the Mason-Dixon line. He explains, in his
book, that he grew up in Maryland, which has at least this much in
common with Idaho, that it was not one of the Confederate states.) The
Southern slave-owners must, therefore, after all and in spite of
everything, have been good people, because he is a good person and
they are his people; his narcissism will allow no other conclusion. The reader cannot remain aboard for the
journey, because who, after all, has any reason to believe our author is a
good person?
Revisionism
The book 'Black and Tan' is a multi-layered journey through time,
with the earliest content being the unapologetically pro-slavery
pamphlet (his half of it, at any rate) that started the controversy.
Words have meanings, and this pamphlet is not very difficult to decode;
it is frankly pro-slavery. When a writer comes to believe he spoke in
error, he is always free to retract; but this our arrogant author will
never do. Instead, he envelops and encases the material in an opaque
sheath of confused, garbled 'explanations' that seem intended only to
conceal the original, perfectly clear intent. Just as the Soviet
revisionists used to air-brush Trotsky out of the photographs spoiled by his
smiling visage, so here, a minimalist project, an improved
method of eliminating slavery, is substituted for the original unabashed
defense of slavery. You cannot introduce
retroactive 'context' in this way, simply by including the original
material in an anthology; yet he and the little gang who follow him on the
internet attack all who quote the original pamphlet, a stand-alone
publication, without adding, or rather substituting, the later revisions
and clarifications, for quoting 'out of context.'
This author, who recommends the pagan warrior Sun
Tzu on the matter of truth-telling, often seems to want to
conceal rather than clarify. For example, he, like his mentor Robert
Lewis Dabney, is willing to condemn certain aspects of slavery, namely
the "attendant evils": "It is obvious that in a fallen world, an
institution like slavery will be accompanied by many attendant evils."
(Douglas Wilson, 'Black and Tan,' Kindle location 559). Wilson, numbering himself among
those who "so strongly identify" with Dabney, (Kindle location 1359),
cannot really be distinguished from Dabney on this point. For both,
their willingness to decry these "attendant evils" represents only
a partial, strictly limited, and circumscribed critique of certain
aspects of slavery, not any global condemnation of the institution. They
are willing to condemn incidental
circumstances, like the habit certain slave-owners fell into, of using
their slaves as a harem. Slavery they think benign, the 'attendant evils'
deplorable; they imagine these evils might have been reformed, though in
actual history they were not. These, in their mind, were blemishes upon an
otherwise blameless and attractive institution. Yet some readers, driven by confirmation bias
mainly, prefer to 'hear' Mr. Wilson issuing a categorical condemnation of
slavery when he condemns the "attendant evils"; instead of correcting this error, he, and his rambunctious
crowd of internet followers, encourage it, indeed seem to want to make it
mandatory.
Secret Plan
Readers getting on in years may recall that Richard M. Nixon won
election to the presidency in part by claiming he had a secret plan
to end the war in Vietnam. This plan was so secret, no one ever
found out what it was! The war dragged on for years. Likewise, our
intrepid author has a secret plan to free the slaves, without the
loss of 600,000 lives. Thus his critics want to kill 600,000 people! Alas, the secret plan turns out to be no more
and no less than a Confederate victory in the Civil War. Let's say
the Union had simply given up, cried 'Uncle' in this war the South started,
some time prior to hitting the 600,000-life mark, then,
according to our author, slavery would have painlessly withered away
of its own accord, much as the Marxists talk of the withering away
of the state.
This wonderful prospect is a deus ex machina, because
no such natural tendency was visible in process of occurring. His proposed
wondrously irenic Confederate victory is no road-map for a better
emancipation, but rather no emancipation at all. The
viciously racist slave-owners known to history (Gosh, isn't it a shame they
were racists; racism is bad, don't you know) are to be transformed
into benevolent Christian gentlemen; how does this happen? The pagan
Roman slave looked upward, not to a glass ceiling, but at an achievable
if arduous climb, a career path; he could escape slavery, become a client
to his master as patron, and ultimately live as a free man. The
slave trapped in race-based Southern slavery had no such expectation
of upward mobility; manumissions were few, and in many cases even
discouraged by civil law. Sprinkle pixie dust, and slavery ends as
if by magic? It wasn't happening; it is sheer fantasy.
Universal Law
The reader who inspects Douglas Wilson's (bizarrely respectful) Wikipedia profile
will discover that he is a theonomist. While it's certainly true you
can't believe everything you read on the web, this designation
evidently has some merit. . .some of the time. The theonomists believe Moses' law was
intended as universal legislation binding on all persons in all
places at all times. However, not even the Jews believe that all
provisions of the law are binding on Israel at all times and in all
places, because why otherwise is it said, 'When you come into the
land"? Mohammed ibn Abdallah, the unlettered Arabian 'prophet,'
complained that when the Jews of Medina read out the law to him,
they blocked a portion with a finger. I would suspect this was to
avoid explaining what is in reality a very complicated situation.
Jews
in the diaspora observe some but not all of Moses' legislation. This
is not simply because the civil authorities of the places where they
reside claim a monopoly on the use of force; in seventh century
Arabia there was no central government enforcing law and order.
As there was no civil authority above the level of the tribe, the Jews of
Medina could have punished (Jewish) adulterers with stoning if they so chose.
No one would have arrested them for murder. However, they did not so
choose, probably for complicated reasons including the fact there was no
Sanhedrin sitting, Moses' designated appellate court for capital cases. With no Sanhedrin, there can be no lawful capital
verdict.
Whether Douglas Wilson is still even a nominal theonomist I
couldn't say; he has been boosting author Stephen Wolfe, who
writes,
“The civil law of the Mosaic law did not in itself foreshadow Christ
and so did not undergo a change as to their righteousness—they are, in other words,
not deadly. But they are dead; they are 'no longer living in such a way as to
obligate,' says Junius. He continues, speaking of civil law in general:
'In circumstances it undergoes as many changes as possible, and varies according to time,
place, person, deeds, modes, causes, and supports—in the past, the present, or the future—as
well as in public and private matters.' In other words, whether
any civil law is good depends on circumstances, which requires
the discernment and prudence of man. Calvin writes, '[E]ach
nation has been left at liberty to enact the laws which it
judges as beneficial.' Nothing about this disparages the Mosaic
law—a law of God. It is a perfect example of law. But it is not
a universal body of law.” (Wolfe, Stephen.
The Case for Christian Nationalism (pp. 267-268).)
This is the traditional view of the matter and there's no objection
to find with it, other than that it contradicts all prior cult doctrine
on this point.
The church conference in Acts 15 refused to obligate Christians
to follow the Mosaic law in all respects, including its civil, social,
economic and political enactments; however, Christians do understand that the
Bible, inspired of God, incorporates within its covers a proposal
for a model, exemplary commonwealth, albeit one from long ago. While Christians are not bound
directly to Moses' polity, any majority Christian
society that legislates for itself institutions markedly less just than those of
Moses has got a lot of explaining to do, as Ricky used to tell Lucy, because God
is still a God of justice, just as He was under the Old Testament. In some
cases, King Jesus' direct commands come into play; but Jesus never
rescinded the Sabbatical or the Jubilee. The
people of the American Southland lived as a democratically
self-governing polity (though the slaves of course were
disenfranchised); the laws they lived under were the laws they
themselves chose to live under, their legislation was not imposed from outside.
They had slavery so long as they wanted it, not one second longer. They said
they were Christians.
There is a little-bitty problem with slavery as practiced in the
American Southland versus the Mosaic law: namely, it is altogether
illegal. Persons held in bondage must be liberated every seventh
year. This recurrent Sabbatical year occurs on a fixed, not a relative, schedule,
and so a Hebrew man or woman can only be held in a condition of involuntary servitude for a period of up to six years:
Uh-oh, there's trouble down on the plantation! There is no provision in Moses' law for
permanent, life-long involuntary servitude, although those pagan idolaters who
are so attached to pagan idolatry that they refuse to renounce it,
even understanding that renouncing idolatry will win them their
freedom within six years, may have to wait as long as forty-nine
years for their liberty. Incidentally, King Jesus legislated on
this very question of 'Who is the neighbor.' His verdict is not favorable to
the racialist, as even John Calvin realized: "To make any person
our neighbor, therefore, it is enough that he be, a man; for it is
not in our power to blot out our common nature. . .But here, as I have said,
the chief design is to show that the neighborhood, which lays us under
obligation to mutual offices of kindness, is not confined to friends or
relatives, but extends to the whole human race." (John Calvin,
Commentary on a Harmony of the Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, Volume 3, p. 43). So what is the theonomist who wishes to
excuse Southern slavery to do, realizing that it is simply illegal? Or are
we to adopt the Mosaic legislation, which we are not obligated to do,
but then class ourselves as foreigners? Hallelujah, we're not under law, we're under grace!:
"A common confusion blurs an important distinction
between Hebrew slavery— i.e. slavery in a nation covenanted
with God, with laws received from His hand— and the slavery that
is seen in the pages of the New Testament. In the former, we see
how God's laws govern and regulate the practice of slavery in a
nation called by His name and covenanted with Him. In the latter,
we see God's laws as they teach His people how to live within a
culture having ungodly laws concerning slavery."
(Douglas Wilson, Black and Tan, Kindle location 633).
Wilson's mentor, the racist Confederate Robert Lewis Dabney, is far
more astute than his student, realizing that if you want to retain
slavery, you will just have to send Moses packing: ". . .and he [God] also
gave, by the intervention of Moses, various religious and civil laws,
which were peculiar to the Jews, and were never intended to be observed
after the resurrection of Jesus Christ." (Robert Lewis Dabney, Defense
of Virginia and the South, Kindle location 1364). In fact, it's infinitely
worse than that; not only are these laws of release in no way relevant
to the church, the Israel of God, but the mere mention of bondage in the
language of these laws constitutes an absolute and unbounded permission
for slavery, forever! It is impossible to wrap one's mind around such
tap-dancing sophistry: these laws don't apply to us, and not only that but
they give the Southern slave-owner unquestioned permission to hold
non-foreigners in perpetual bondage! He states very plausibly, "Doubtless,
the standard which they had in view, in commanding masters to 'render to
their servants those things which are just and equal,' was the Mosaic
law." (Robert Lewis Dabney, Defense of Virginia and the South, Kindle
location 1864). Doubtless, indeed; but he has no intention of advising
anyone to observe the Mosaic law, with its time limit for servitude of
six years; he immediately explains that the slave-owner has "a right to
the slave's labor for life," (Robert Lewis Dabney, Defense of Virginia
and the South, Kindle location 1864), which is quite simply not what
Moses said. This is not an honest effort to understand the Bible.
If we allow Moses' law code to remain relevant, even if only as exemplary, 'model'
legislation, then slavery is out, for any term greater than six years.
Because the Sabbatical and Jubilee cycle is fixed, not relative, the
maximum term allowable in servitude is six years; someone who falls into
that condition one year before the year of release, spends only one year
in that condition. Of course the only way an innocent Hebrew can have fallen into
this condition is if other things Moses commanded,— redeeming
captives, assisting the indigent,— did not happen, whether as a result
of hard times or recalcitrance. Moses' law requires that these people be
liberated, not that they ever have been enslaved; Moses was a great
liberator, like Solon of Athens or Abraham Lincoln. (It takes a special
attitude to conclude from Moses' command to liberate slaves that, "The
relation then, must be innocent in itself" (Robert Lewis Dabney, Defense
of Virginia and the South, Kindle location 1405); as if divorce, also
permitted, must be "innocent in itself"!) So why were there any Africans
remaining in bondage past the year 1806, if the 'Anglo-Celtic' inhabitants
of the South were, as they say, Christians, who look to God's word for instruction in how they are
to live?
Learning from Wilson that the South labored under "ungodly" laws, the reader must be left wondering
how the democratically governed (though the slaves were disenfranchised) South came to be bound under ungodly laws,
when our author keeps trying to pretend that those worldly cavaliers
were actually evangelical Christians, which they were not but their
descendants might become. In historical fact, their way out of their
Biblical dilemma was to propose that 'Hebrew'='Anglo-Saxon,' whereas
'African' was to equate to, not 'Hebrew,' nor even to resident alien,
but to 'Canaanite.' Both of these American population sub-groups, the
'Anglo-Celtics' as they now style themselves and the 'African-Americans,'
had arrived in the country at about the same time, and both groups consisted overwhelmingly of baptized
Christians. Because further importation of slaves had early on been
banned, African-Americans, as of the time of the Civil War, were more
likely to be native-born than were European-Americans; by virtue of what are
they to be classed as 'foreigners'? The reader who
hopes to understand our author's antipathy to the fourteenth amendment
may begin by realizing that that amendment says all persons born in the
United States are citizens, versus the infamous Dred Scott decision
which declared no African, not even a free man, was ever a citizen: "All
persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the
jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state
wherein they reside." (Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,
Section 1.). These 'Canaanites' were not found in the land, under God's
judgment of expulsion and death; rather ships traversed the sea to a
distant land, to import these people, precisely so that they could be
mistreated. And how did they come to be identified as 'Canaanites' in
the first place?
The 'Bible arguments' which have been advanced on this score over the years,
like 'black skin = mark of Cain,' range from the unconvincing to the
preposterous. Our author knows this, and will not venture to
repeat the frighteningly racist arguments which are the only known route
by which to arrive at the sought-after destination, no doubt because these
arguments are also absurd; and yet he will pretend that the Southern racists won the debate against the Northern
abolitionists, even if he does not dare to repeat, in detail, their
'winning' arguments. One might expect those champions who conducted the
'winning' side of the argument to run a victory lap around the track, or
do a little victory dance in the end-zone, with their victorious
arguments held high above their heads. But these are 'winning' arguments
which dare not speak their name. He will not repeat them, nor will the
atheists, if they even know what they are.
Judgment
Out of one side of his mouth, our author says perfectly
acceptable things about slavery: that God judged the South for this
sin, etc. Out of the other side of his mouth, he says deplorable
things: that the slaves were happy and content (so what was all that fuss
about 'fugitive slaves,' if they would gladly have chosen to stay?) He pops
up, shouts something provocative, then crouches back down where, level with
the terrain, he cannot be targeted, and pretends to deplore all the things other people deplore. This
vaudeville act rapidly grows old.
It may be objected: but this tome, 'Black and Tan,' is 'shovel-ware,' how consistent do
you expect it to be? These are essays written at different times from
different perspectives, not a unified composition. True, but he
should not have shovelled this mess into the public's face. This man's
robust self-esteem leaves him astonished that the authorities ever issued his critics a driver's
license: "As I have read editorials, letters to the editor, and
heard outrageous statements made by people who actually have
drivers' licenses. . ." (Douglas Wilson, Black and Tan, Kindle
location 981). This Great Oz runs his own little kingdom up in
Idaho, and he can't be bothered to edit his material, which astonishes him
by its brilliance, for consistency, for uniformity of voice or of viewpoint.
Neighborhood of Boston
They used to say that the Unitarians believed in the Fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of
man, and the neighborhood of Boston. This is a good laugh
line, because Unitarianism was to a considerable extent a regional phenomenon; just as
Mormons are more prevalent in the author's Idaho than they
are here in Maine, Unitarians are more prevalent in the
Northeast than elsewhere. And this is the center-piece of his
efforts to demonize the North:
“In the early nineteenth century, the
intellectual leadership of the North apostatized from their
previous cultural commitment to the Christian faith. In my view,
the watershed event in this regard was the capture of Harvard by
the Unitarians in 1805. . .By the time of the war, the
intellectual leadership of the South was conservative, orthodox,
and Christian. In contrast, the leadership of the North was
radical and Unitarian.”
(Douglas Wilson, Black and Tan,
Kindle Location 598).
Now this is it for this author, this is the content of the garbage bags he is
scattering around in the Union cemeteries, hoping the stench will
drive away those who have come to leave flower garlands: they
were Unitarians. Were they, really? How prevalent was this departure
from the Christian faith in the North at the time of the Civil War?
"In 1835 there were slightly over fifteen million Americans. . .The
next biggest Protestant group was the Presbyterians, with about two
million adherents (three hundred thousand members). At that time there
were about eight hundred thousand American Catholics and fewer than two
hundred thousand Unitarians." (Richard W. Fox, Jesus in America, Kindle
location 2698). To judge by the prevalence of these faiths in 1965, the date of my 'Handbook of Denominations in the United States,' by
Frank S. Mead, the Unitarians are still not in the
same league with the heavy hitters: "There are 164,474 members in 1,094 churches."
(This was after the Unitarians, hoping to stave off further
membership declines, had already merged with the Universalists). The
Congregational churches, in some ways the mother denomination of an
unwelcome Unitarian brood, and a big factor in New England, tallies
up as follows: "As of 1959, there were 1,419,171 members and 5,500
churches in the Congregational Christian Churches. . ." (pp.
221-222). How about the American Baptist Convention (these are the
non-slave-owning Baptists): "There are 6,276 churches and 1,559,103
members. . ." (p. 36). These two denominations, both big in New
England, have already outnumbered the Unitarians by eighteen to one,
and we haven't even begun to count the Methodists, to say nothing of
the Episcopalians and the Roman Catholics!
The Unitarians are a small group, admittedly more prevalent in
New England than elsewhere, but there was never a time when they were in
a position to dominate the Union army. While this world has never seen a
military battalion, on the ground, staffed by angels, nor was the Union
army so populated, there has never yet been an armed force on the march in
pursuit of a nobler or more magnificent goal than the Union host in the Civil
War. Initially, the North's war aims were simply the restoration of
the status quo ante: a slave-owning South re-attached to a
free North, a paltry and meager war-aim if ever there was one, which
incidentally gives the lie to all efforts to recast the Civil War as a
'war of northern aggression.' What aggressor has ever been willing to
grant peace on the condition of restoration of the status quo? But as the shades of the cut and blasted Union dead
crowded together in the hundreds of thousands, there was no answer
to give them but emancipation, and thereupon the Northern forces
became a liberating army such as the world had never hitherto seen.
No thinking, feeling Christian need apologize for what these gallant
Christian gentlemen did; it was our nation's finest hour.
If you go into a Unitarian Universalist church in the present
day, you are more likely to encounter a self-professed atheist than
anyone who will admit to being, or even aspiring to be, a Christian.
However, when they started out, they were claiming the high road;
they asserted it was they themselves who were the Bible-believers,
not the others. On matters of practical morality like slavery,
Unitarian or Quaker Bible research is not necessarily bad, careless,
or to be rejected out of hand; however, say it is so, leave the
discussion to those abolitionists who are undoubted trinitarians.
Fine: "It can be demonstrated absolutely, that slavery is unlawful,
and ought to be repented of, and given up, like any other sin."
(Charles G. Finney, Lectures to Professing Christians, Lecture 3, p.
44, Heritage Library).
Slavery. “What! shall men be suffered to commit one of
the most God-dishonoring and most heaven-daring sins on earth,
and not be reproved? It is a sin against which all men should
bear testimony, and lift up their voice like a trumpet, till this
giant iniquity is banished from the land and from the world."
(Charles G. Finney, Lectures to Professing Christians, Lecture 4,
p. 56, Heritage Library)
“At the south, they have got
themselves into a great rage because we at the north are trying
to convince them of the wickedness of slavery. And they say it
is none of our business, that slavery is a matter peculiarly
their own, and they will not suffer anybody else to interfere
with them, and they require us to let them alone, and will not
even allow us to talk about the subject. And they want our
northern legislatures to pass laws forbidding us to rebuke
our southern neighbors for their sin in holding men in slavery.
God forbid that we should be silent. Jehovah himself has
commanded us to rebuke our neighbor in any wise, let the
consequences be as they may. And we will rebuke them, though all
hell should rise up against it.
“Are we to hold our peace
and be partakers in the sin of slavery, by connivance, as we
have been? God forbid. We will speak of it, and bear our
testimony against it, and pray over it, and complain of it to
God and man. Heaven shall know, and the world shall know, and
hell shall know, that ye protest against the sin, and will
continue to rebuke it, till it is broken up. God Almighty says,
'Thou shalt in any wise rebuke thy neighbor,' and we must do
it.” (Charles G. Finney, Lectures to Professing Christians, Lecture
4, pp. 58-59, Heritage Library)
What, after all, is the point of pretending it is only Unitarians who
oppose slavery? That is counter-factual, and he knows it is counter-factual.
His whole strategy may be compared to the measures taken in protecting
military aircraft against missiles; they throw out chaff, little bits of
reflective stuff, to confuse the targeting mechanism. The Bible says, "Whoso diggeth a pit shall fall therein: and he
that rolleth a stone, it will return upon him." (Proverbs 26:27).
Our author has sought to smear the North's war effort by pointing
out that, although the vast majority of Northern Christians were not
Unitarians, the Unitarians were a less tiny minority in the North
than in the South, and indeed even aggregated in some places, making
some academic establishments into little forts for their viewpoint. The funny thing is, our author, according to his own account,
claims a heritage from the Southern agrarians. The main man for these folks is Thomas
Jefferson, the third president of the United States. Moreover, Thomas
Jefferson is prominently quoted on the 'League of the South' web-site. And Thomas
Jefferson was of what religious affiliation? You guessed it!—
Unitarian! This man mocked the Trinity as a three-headed idol. This man is,
naturally enough, one of Wilson's idols, whose whole effort to smear the
North is premised upon his identification of the North with
Unitarianism, a small sect which did have a foot-hold in that region. It turns out that Jefferson is one of
his main guys: "I am a paleo-conservative. In my views on politics,
government, social order, I have been affected in a thoroughly jumbled
way by. . .T. S. Eliot. . .Thomas Jefferson. . .and Robert E. Lee."
('Black and Tan,' Kindle location 1378). Follow that logic: the North is
evil because some small number of Northerners were Unitarians, and for
that matter, while we're on the subject, lets march in lock-step behind the
Unitarians, our natural leaders. He himself champions one of that small sect's
shining stars. I don't know if there has ever been a more incoherent
thinker who has attracted a following as a Christian apologist.
Our author has discovered that the Civil War was a religious war:
"So I do believe that in the broad sense the War Between the States
could be described as a religious war." (Douglas Wilson, Black and
Tan, Kindle location 1303),— merely because some in the North
were theologically 'liberal.' After the 'League of the South'
progresses from talk to overt action, will we be forced to conclude
that whatever police action Janet Napolitano felt the need to take
was a 'religious war' against Unitarianism? After all these
characters do like to quote Thomas Jefferson. Evidently there are good Unitarians, and then there are bad
Unitarians:
There is good reason for believing that Thomas Jefferson held to the view that the various
races of man were not of common descent, contrary to the Bible's testimony.
Jefferson was fairly contemptuous of the Bible, although he esteemed
the moral teachings of Jesus of Nazareth:
"According to [William] Linn, Jefferson held '. . .the
opinion. . .that they [Indians] are a different race of man
originally created and placed in America; contrary to the sacred
history that all mankind have descended from a single pair.'"
(William Throckmorton and Michael Coulter, Getting Jefferson Right: Fact Checking
Claims about our Third President, page 92).
The French Revolution
In recent years, the South has polled as a the more religious
part of our country, in part because of the presence there in large
numbers of those people whose testimony against slavery Douglas
Wilson refuses to accept, the African-Americans. The Northeast, by
contrast, shows up as the less religious part of the country: when
asked how often they pray, how often they read the Bible, and how
important their religion is in their daily lives, their testimony is
wan and lackluster. Upon closer examination, much of the reason for
this is the presence in the Northeast of a disproportionately large
number of Roman Catholics, whose lack of enthusiasm for their faith
tradition anomalously does not trigger desire for departure. People in the
Northeast are not necessarily globally or generally 'secular,' but this is,
at present, the less religious part of the country.
It would be ahistorical and anachronistic to project back into
the past this current pattern. Certainly when we go back to the
beginning, and compare the Pilgrim landing at Plymouth Rock with the
commercial Jamestown colony, the North was not the more secular part
of the country at that time. The Jamestown colonists were not trying
to found a city on the hill, and it's not like the moral tone of the
continent was not already low enough, without importing a cannibal
into the country to lower it still further! Our author wants to
'back-date' the South's current relative religiosity back into the
nineteenth century. He helpfully explains that the North's crusade
against slavery in the Civil War was not only very much like the atheistic French
Revolution, but was actually the very same thing:
“We have experienced our equivalent
of the French Revolution, and it was a revolution that ended at
Appomattox: 'Nor can we rely upon any evidence from the United
states of America. The real revolution in that country was not
what is called the Revolution in the history books, but is a
consequence of the Civil War.'”
(Douglas Wilson, Black and Tan,
Kindle Location 273).
Who ever suspected that Francis Asbury was a Jacobin? It is normal,
in present-day 'Reformed' circles, to respond in disputation, not to
what people have actually ever said, but to their presumed 'world-view,'
which is assigned to them more or less at random. Evidently this
tendency goes all the way back to Robert Lewis Dabney, because Wilson is
following his guiding light, Dabney, in
his expectation that there must have been a guillotine set up on
every village green in New England. Dabney traces the
abolitionists' conviction that all men are "mechanically equal in
rights" to the Jacobins:
"Your true abolitionist is then, of course, a
Red-Republican, a Jacobin. Is not this strikingly illustrated by the
fact, that the first wholesale abolition in the world was that
enacted for the French colonies by the frantic democrats of the
'Reign of Terror?'" (Robert Lewis Dabney, Defense of Virginia and
the South, Kindle location 3140).
Why, no, as it happens, this tangible historical claim is no more accurate than usual.
The first wholesale abolition in the world took place when Moses led the
children of Israel out of Egypt, and an entire people who had been held
in bondage were set free by God, a celebrated Abolitionist. Subsequent
abolitions were scheduled every seven and forty-nine years, though they
did not always take place as scheduled. Another took place in the Middle Ages
when Christian communities decided slavery was not really very
Christian. Setting slaves free is not altogether a Judaeo-Christian
thing; several pagans, including Solon and the Emperor Nero in his
dealings with the Greeks, also set free sizeable numbers of persons, though without striking
or intending to strike at the root of this widespread institution. According
to the (not very reliable) 'Letter of Aristeas,' King Ptolemy II Philadelphus
had the honor of being a pagan emancipator of the large population of
Jewish slaves then resident in Egypt, who had been carried there captive by
his father,
"'Wherefore since it is
acknowledged that we are accustomed to render justice to all men and
especially to those who are unfairly in a condition of servitude, and
since we strive to deal fairly with all men according to the demands of
justice and piety, we have decreed, in reference to the persons of the
Jews who are in any condition of bondage in any part of our dominion,
that those who possess them shall receive the stipulated sum of money
and set them at liberty and that no man shall show any tardiness in
discharging his obligations.'" (Copy of Ptolemy's emancipation decree,
Letter of Aristeas, 24).
Long years later the American states of the North, whose colonial legislatures had
been unable to act on slavery while under the veto power of King George III,
liberated their slaves, out of Christian impulses not felt by their Southern
brethren. The South was, at the time, by far the least democratic segment of
the country, explaining Dabney's hostility to a political system most
Americans perceive as native to their homeland. When the Neo-Confederates
tell you that the Southern people voted for secession, explain to them
that the one-third of the Southern population who were African-American
were never allowed to vote for anything, nor were low-income whites
welcomed at the polls; a deliberate network of barriers, such as the
poll tax, was erected to prevent them. R. L. Dabney explains why; the object
is to avoid "moneyless votes." (Kindle 3163), which will lead to ruin.
He explains that the original constitution of Virginia did not establish
a democracy, but "a liberal, aristocratic republic. None could vote save
the owners of land in fee-simple. . ." (Dabney,
Defense, Kindle 3228). At the time of the Civil War, the
South was not the religious part of our country, and it most
emphatically was not the democratic, small-d, section. Both these
concerns are sometimes retrojected back into the antebellum South by
modern sentimentalists. The wealthy, slave-owning
planters, through their representatives, voted for secession, because it
served their interests. Why are there still, to this day, people defending
this as if it were meritorious?
The time-line in this effort at establishing a historical causal
link is not exactly laser sharp, because as white supremacist
Abraham Lincoln noted in his 'Gettysburg Address,' it was "four
score and seven years ago" that the American experiment began,
"dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal"; do
the math, that's before the Jacobins. Neither was the spirit
animating the American Revolution at all on a wavelength with the
bloody and vindictive French Revolution. By their fruits you shall
know them:
Certainly one can imagine, in a parallel universe, that there
might have been a Civil War like that; after all, it's true to an extent that Haiti's slave
rebellion was inspired by the French Revolution, though the guardians of the
Republic were far from being of one mind as to how to respond. When I
was a child, though I grew up in an irreligious environment and did
not become a Christian until I was in my twenties, as I recall they
were always making us sing 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic,'
separation of church and state be damned. Certainly no child can
understand the country he or she is living in without singing that
song. Personally it never made me think about the French Revolution,
though what it makes him think of, I can't say. I imagine he must
hate it. Whether those patriotic Americans who reside in his
community cannot help themselves from humming it as he goes by, I
can't say; Lord knows I would. As a child I found the lyrics frankly
perplexing, though it is a rousing song and it certainly makes you want
to march out there and free the slaves:
Again, as with this author's atheist friends, there is a certain
synergy here between different groups who want to make similar
claims, mostly on a wish fulfillment basis. Those modern academics
who strongly identify with the European enlightenment but can't
make heads nor tails out of 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic' might
be tempted to rewrite history so that the abolitionists were
inspired by the Enlightenment rather than by the Bible. Our author
will eagerly agree with them, because he hates the abolitionists,
and only cares about what the Bible says long enough to skirt around
it. The actual history, which is by no means shameful nor
discreditable to the Bible, gets left in the dust by both parties of
fellow travellers.
Just as Douglas Wilson claim that, in the American Civil War, the
North was fighting for godless atheism and the triumph of the French
revolution, he also claims that the South was fighting to preserve
Christian civilization. What, pray tell, was the Confederates'
concept of Christian civilization and its demands? What did they think they were doing?:
When God heard the cries of the children of Israel and led them out of bitter bondage in
Egypt, He instructed them to spoil their Egyptian slave-masters:
“And I will give this people favor in the sight of the Egyptians; and it shall be, when you go, that you shall not go empty-handed.
But every woman shall ask of her neighbor, namely, of her who dwells near her house, articles of silver, articles of gold, and clothing; and you shall put them on your sons and on your daughters. So you shall plunder the Egyptians.”
(Exodus 3:21-22).
“Now the children of Israel had
done according to the word of Moses, and they had asked from the
Egyptians articles of silver, articles of gold, and clothing.
And the Lord had given the people favor in the sight of the
Egyptians, so that they granted them what they requested. Thus
they plundered the Egyptians.” (Exodus 12:35-36).
Now one might almost complain that the children of Israel have not mastered
the hierarchical and patriarchal concept that Douglas Wilson finds at the heart of Bible slavery,
because here they are just blatantly taking Massa's stuff. But God
says this is justice:
“Then He said to Abram: 'Know certainly that your descendants will be strangers in a land that is not theirs, and will serve them, and they will afflict them four hundred years.
And also the nation whom they serve I will judge; afterward they shall come out with great possessions.'”
(Genesis 15:13-14).
Nothing bothers some angry white men more than the concept of
reparations, but don't tell that to God. God is committed to justice,
including compensation, and made it happen:
"So they, being now driven out of the land and
pursued, coming at last to a proper notion of their own nobility and
worth, ventured upon a deed of daring such as became the free to
dare, as men who were not forgetful of the iniquitous plots that had
been laid against them; for they carried off abundant booty, which
they themselves collected, by means of the hatred in which they were
held, and some of it they carried themselves, submitting to heavy
burdens, and some they placed upon their beasts of burden, not in
order to gratify any love of money, or, as any usurer might say,
because they coveted their neighbors' goods. (How should they do
so?) But, first of all, because they were thus receiving the
necessary wages from those whom they had served for so long a time;
and, secondly, because they had a right to afflict those at whose
hands they had suffered wrong with afflictions slighter than, and by
no means equal to, what they had endured.
"For how can the deprivation of money and treasures be equivalent to the
loss of liberty? on behalf of which those who are in possession of their
senses dare not only to cast away all their property, but even to venture
their lives? So they now prospered in both particulars: whether in that
they received wages as if in price, which they now exacted from unwilling
paymasters, who for a long period had not paid them at all; and, also,
as if they were at war, they looked upon it as fitting to carry off the
treasures of the enemy, according to the laws of conquerors; for it was
the Egyptians who had set the example of acts of injustice, having, as
I said before, enslaved foreigners and suppliants, as if they had been
prisoners taken in war. And so they now, when an opportunity offered, avenged
themselves without any preparation of arms, justice itself holding a shield
over them, and stretching forth its hand to help them." (Philo Judaeus, A
Treatise on the Life of Moses, Book I, Chapter XXV).
Please realize, I'm not in favor of the contemporary reparations
movement, which does not represent justice but rather an arbitrary
assignment of blame. But their railing against the principle is
pointless, given that God has himself endorsed that approach in the
past.
The challenge facing the pro-slavery Bible expositor is to find some way of
identifying a part of the American public with Israel,— the
people they used to call 'Anglo-Saxons;' to judge from contemporary
neo-Confederate and White Supremacist web-sites, the preferred term
nowadays is 'Anglo-Celtic,'— and a part, those of African heritage, most of
them by the time of the Civil War native-born, with Canaan and other
enemies of Israel. In place of the Pledge's 'one nation under God,
indivisible,' the racist expositor must sunder the united people into at least two
sub-populations, one favored and one disfavored; indeed, in reality, these
people had in view an elaborate apartheid layer-cake, with
'Anglo-Celtics' on top the pile, persons of non-Anglo European
heritage beneath them, all the way down to persons of African
heritage at rock-bottom. Now there is no mention of any 'Anglo-Celtic'
people in the Bible, much less any special signs of favor; the Ethiopians are mentioned, without any note
of animosity. How are you going to do it? Don't ask Douglas Wilson,
he remains mum; though he surely knows what all the old answers are,
and he assures us the Old South won the slavery debate by using
the old answers, he also fancies himself a 'scholar,' if you please, and is not going
to repeat them in public. 'British Israelitism' is one popular
model; this identifies the British people as the lost tribes of
Israel, because 'Brit-Ish' means 'man of the covenant,' get it?
Never mind it's the wrong language and the wrong part of speech.
He's not going to say this in public, because he will just be
laughed at; but what is he going to say, to make those old
pro-slavery arguments take wing and fly anew?:
This author is fond of consequentialist arguments of the 'slippery
slope' variety. Consequentialism, also known as utilitarianism, was
exhaustively defined by cradle atheist John Stuart Mill, although it has
ancient antecedents. This ethical theory says, to know what is good and
what is bad, we must look at the consequences of various actions and
ideas; those which have bad consequences are bad, those which have good
consequences are virtuous. This ethical theory appeals to modern
atheists like Sam Harris, who see in it a magic box which can produce
ethical maxims without any command of God. However it has its
limitations. Is it actually possible for a good thing to have bad consequences? Let's see.
Our author explains that the Northern victory in the Civil War
was evil because it led to the adoption of the fourteenth amendment
guaranteeing equal protection under the laws, which had the effect
of binding the states under the Bill of Rights. The framers of this
amendment did not intend to legalize abortion, but intended rather
to secure the liberty of the newly-freed slaves against any
state efforts to downgrade their citizenship status. Many years
after the Civil War, the Supreme Court took it upon themselves in
Roe v. Wade to de-criminalize abortion, finding a constitutional
right to abortion not readily discernible by most readers of that document. It is
certainly true that without the fourteenth amendment, this Supreme
Court decision could not have struck down abortion laws in all fifty
states. Does it therefore follow that the Union victory in the Civil
War was an unmitigated evil?
To offer an analogy: the reader of Celsus' On Medicine is struck
by the boldness of the ancient surgeons, who were willing to give
just about anything a try; one must imagine they lost a lot of
patients. In some cases their audacity extended even to surgical
abortion, though Celsus does not mention the procedure. However
abortion in antiquity was not without its risks; as an antiseptic, honey is not
in a league with carbolic acid. Joseph Lister, a Christian,
developed aseptic methods of surgery in the nineteenth century,
including hand-washing, sterilizing surgical instruments, scrubbing
down the surgical theater, etc. These inventive techniques reduced
post-surgery mortality greatly; one did not hear so often, 'the
operation was a success, but the patient died.' One consequence of
Lister's reforms is that surgical abortion, which existed in
antiquity but was not widely practiced, became feasible as a
commercial product offered to the masses. Unless your doctor is
Kermit Gosnell, you will not likely suffer harm from obtaining an
abortion; the baby, of course, will die. Do we therefore conclude,
aseptic surgery is an evil? Of course not, aseptic surgery is a good, though it did, in time,
by meandering and circuitous routes, lead to an evil result.
Among other problems, this way of determining good and evil suffers
from the defect of an arbitrary start point. The Civil War led to an
increase in federal power (true); but secession led to the Civil War; no
secession, no Civil War. Therefore secession was evil. Moreover, slavery led
to secession. Therefore slavery is evil! This is where we came in.
The right balance between the power of the federal government and
that of the states is a subject of legitimate controversy. When
Richard Nixon proposed a federal war on crime, many liberals
objected that crime was, for the most part, strictly a local matter,—
when you call the cops and complain that your purse was stolen, the
person who responds is likely an employee of the municipality. These
liberals mistrusted Nixon's motives, and so they did not want to see
the power to determine goals, standards, and guidelines turned over to
the federal government rather than retained by the states, counties and municipalities.
When George W. Bush imposed national standards on education, some people
protested that control over the educational system had always been
vested in local elected school boards, not in Washington. Certainly
a responsible citizen can argue that the balance has shifted too
far; but to follow this meandering trail of cause and effect back to
the source and say it was evil for the Union army to free the slaves
because this would lead many years later to the possibility of a bad
Supreme Court decision, though the slaves' emancipation by no means
required any such decision to be rendered, is really too
hypothetical and indirect. This is not how we determine good and ill.
The correct way: the Bible condemns slavery, therefore it is bad;
therefore, get rid of it.
Douglas Wilson's collaborator in 'Southern Slavery as It Was,' and
fellow Presbyterian minister, Steven Wilkins, is reportedly one the founders of the 'League of the South.'
Douglas Wilson is not and was not a member, however, according to his own testimony,
the reason for this is not owing to any fundamental disagreement with
the objectives of this organization, but rather because they are too
optimistic. What is the League all about? They want to protect the
"Anglo-Celtic" population of the South against any and all threats,
whether real, perceived or imaginary:
I'm not sure when or why these groups dropped 'Anglo-Saxon,'
which you used to hear from the old Ku Klux Klan, and went over to
'Anglo-Celtic;' did they finally decide Irish-Americans are okay,
which they didn't used to think? These people envisioned American society as a
hierarchical layer-cake with a sub-portion of the population, those of Anglo-Saxon heritage, perched
atop the heap, those of Irish and Italian heritage down lower, the Polish side of my own family down lower still, then
you slide on down to Americans of Oriental or Hispanic origin, and down at rock-bottom are the African-Americans.
Those of us, white or black, who do not want to end up as
second-class citizens in our own country might want to beware of
this organization, which is not in favor of secession immediately
(for legal reasons?), though that is their ultimate goal.
The actual Southern slave-owners whose moral vindication is Mr.
Wilson's pole star were racists. They never sought any race-neutral
defense of slavery, because their view-point was not race neutral.
When Mr. Wilson leaps to their defense by providing a moral
rationale for slavery based not on racism but on cultural
inferiority, then we have already hopped the tracks from actual
history into the science fiction 'history' of alternative universes. Yet
their moral innocence must at all costs be upheld, even if it means
subtracting all the views they actually held, and substituting
altogether different ones. Who, then, is being defended, other than
hypothetical people who never actually existed?
Birds of a Feather
The late Senator Joe McCarthy used to say, 'Birds of a feather flock together.'
The Commies he was hunting indignantly objected that the U.S.
Constitution protects freedom of association, as indeed it does.
The government cannot ever conduct a drag-net operation, rounding
up all the members of the Communist party, nor can anyone seeking
the overthrow of the U.S. Government ever be sent up the river on
no better evidence than guilt by association, to the tremendous
relief no doubt of this crew.
However, Tail-gunner Joe had a point, in a way: if you are not a
Commie, why are all your friends Commies? If you are actually a
Rotarian, how come you don't hang with a Rotarian crowd? If it walks like a
duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, can it be anything but a duck? Our author
responds indignantly, with outraged innocence, in all apparent sincerity, when anyone accuses
him of racism. Then he flings in the reader's face a venomous snake
named Robert Lewis Dabney as the very model of a Christian pastor.
For this man, race hatred is what oxygen is to other people. We
learn from him that blacks are an "alien and savage race" (Robert
Lewis Dabney, Defense of Virginia and the South, Kindle location
687). The generation after the Revolution "deprecated the slave trade,
because it was peopling their soil so largely with an inferior and
savage race, incapable of union, instead of with civilized Englishmen."
(Robert Lewis Dabney, Defense of Virginia and the South, Kindle location
641). He explains that ". . .the civilized master uses his authority against and over
that of the semi-civilized, or savage parent, to train the slave child
to habits of decency, industry, intelligence, and virtue, which his
degraded natural guardians are unable or unwilling to inculcate. . ."
(Robert Lewis Dabney, Defense of Virginia and the South, Kindle location
2772) (that's why it's okay for slave-masters to separate slave
families), etc., ad nauseam. It is distinctly difficult to find
evidence of the "mutual affection" our authors claim to find in Southern
slavery, because all you hear from him is odious and hateful
trash-talking:
"Once more: If the society contains a class of adult
members, so deficient in virtue and intelligence that they would only
abuse the fuller privileges of other citizens to their own and others'
detriment, it is just to withhold so many of these privileges, and to
impose so much restraint, as may be necessary for the highest equity to
the whole body, inclusive of this subject class. And how much restraint is
just, must be determined by facts and experience." (Robert Lewis Dabney,
Defense of Virginia and the South, Kindle location 3069).
Who do you suppose, dear reader, it is who is "deficient in virtue and
intelligence"? 'Anglo-Celtics,' perhaps? Why, no, it is who it always
is with this author, African-Americans, whom he hates with a perfect
hatred.
But this obnoxious trash-talking is not gratuitous or incidental; without it there is no
'argument' for slavery. Throughout physical categories like heredity are
mixed with moral ones; did you know one can be a pagan by 'descent,' a
blot which evidently conversion cannot wipe away?: "If it appear that
the Africans in these States were by recent descent pagans and
barbarians, men in bodily strength and appetite, with the reason and
morals of children, constitutionally prone to improvidence, so that their
possession of all the franchises of a free white citizen would make them
a nuisance to society and early victims to their own degradation; and if
sound experience teaches that this ruin cannot be prevented without a
degree of restraint approaching that proper for children; that is, by
giving to a guardian the control of their involuntary labor, and the
expenditure of the fruits for the joint benefit of the parties; how can
we be condemned for it?" (Robert
Lewis Dabney, Defense of Virginia and the South, Kindle location 3080).
Where is any such assertion made in the Bible? Of course it isn't there,
and he doesn't even pretend to find it there; rather, he bases his claim
on "facts and experience": "And how much restraint is just, must be
determined by facts and experience." (Robert Lewis Dabney, Defense of
Virginia and the South, Kindle location 3067). What is advertised and
promised, by Dabney's modern acolyte Douglas Wilson, is Bible, what is delivered is not Bible, just bigotry. This
kind of thing goes on for pages: in Africa, the people were "living but
one remove above the apes around them" (Robert Lewis Dabney, Defense of
Virginia and the South, Kindle location 3351); the people displayed the
"savage's common vices" of "lying, theft, drunkenness, laziness, waste"
(Robert Lewis Dabney, Defense of Virginia and the South, Kindle location
3351); therefore, "Now cannot common sense see the moral advantage to
such a people, of subjection to the will of a race elevated above them,
in morals and intelligence, to an almost measureless degree?" (Robert
Lewis Dabney, Defense of Virginia and the South, Kindle location 3351).
That's it, that's the great 'Bible argument' that reduces
abolitionists to tongue-tied confusion, it's nothing but hateful animadversion against
African-Americans, combined with boastful self-promotion on behalf of white
slave-owners. From time to time we are reminded that all men are sinners, but evidently somehow
this taint 'sticks' to the "morally inferior" African-Americans more so than to
the "nobler race," the 'Anglo-Celtics' (Robert Lewis Dabney,
Defense of Virginia and the South, Kindle location 3362); though it does
seem in the end that the Yankees, with "their hypocritical puritanism,"
(Robert Lewis Dabney, Defense of Virginia and the South, Kindle location
3408), belong down there at bottom with the African-Americans, if not lower. So this man
thinks his kind of folks are the best there are, others, not so good.
What an amazing, and counter-intuitive, discovery, what a find is he, a man
strong and true, willing and able to demonize the outsider and flatter
the home-folks!
Dabney and Wilson share a predilection for that form of moral
reasoning called finger-pointing: 'Johnny! Why did you flush the
goldfish down the toilet?' 'That's nothing! Jimmy did something even
worse!' Who does not know the answer?: 'We're not talking about Jimmy, we're talking about you.' They
concede that kidnapping into slavery is wrong, and indeed realize that Moses condemned it: "The title by which the
original slave catchers held them may have been iniquitous."
(Robert
Lewis Dabney, Defense of Virginia and the South, Kindle location 3490). And
so they condemn those Northern ship captains who transported captured Africans to these
shores. . .without seeming to realize that, absent the Southern demand
for slaves to purchase, there would have been no supply. Dabney paints a
touching but decidedly unconvincing picture, which Wilson follows, of Virginia slave-owners purchasing the
evil Yankee slavers' wares for no other reason but compassion! They were
moved by the slaves' piteous cries, you see.
"The slaves themselves hailed the conclusion of a sale
with joy, and begged the planters to become their masters, as a
means of rescue from their floating prison." (Robert Lewis Dabney,
Defense of Virginia and the South, Kindle location 3495).
And why did these compassionate souls happen to have the ready cash on them, no small
investment, to purchase a slave, if they hadn't gone down to the harbor
for that express purpose? Surely a slave-ship captain just passing through
could not have accepted a promissory note. Most of us, before making a
large investment, must shift the money from one account to another; but
these generous souls carried a fortune on them at all times, just in
case a pitiful slave needed rescuing! The kidnapped slaves knew no English, there being
no need to acquire that language in Africa; yet their
pantomimic skills were evidently so well developed they could
communicate, 'Purchase me and hold me in life-long subjugation,' as the
slave ships glided by. How does he know they did not seek rather to
communicate, 'Throw me a crust of bread, I'm starving,' or 'Call the
police! I've been kidnapped!' If there is no demand, there is no supply, no shivering merchandise
dumped on the slave market half a world away from the villages from which
these blameless people were abducted. The pretense that they benefited from
the transaction rings hollow against the reality that up to half the
slavers' cargo perished in transit; Alexander Falconbridge, a ship's
surgeon, describes horrific mortality on board one overcrowded slave ship: "This caused such a
mortality among them that without meeting with unusually bad weather or
having a longer voyage than common, nearly one-half of them died before
the ship arrived in the West Indies." (Alexander Falconbridge, quoted p.
99, Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce, Eric Metaxas).
This man, Robert Lewis Dabney, is bitter and defeated; everything connected with the North
lashes him to blind, spitting fury. So we find the moral dividing line placed
by him, and by Wilson following him, at this irrational point:
slave-trading is bad, because Yankees do it, but slave-owning is good,
because Southerners do it. Dabney's economic analysis is strangely Marxist:
the North is an imperialist power exploiting its colony, the South,
which is perceived as an El Dorado of plundered treasure, not an
economically backward part of the country. For those readers who feel they have any need to
know, here is a typical sample of this individual's schtick:
“But, we emphatically repeat, the
source of the evils apparent in an industrial system was the
presence among us of four millions of heterogeneous pagan,
uncivilized, indolent, and immoral people; and for that gigantic
evil, slavery was, in part at least, the lawful, the potent, the
beneficent remedy. Without this, who cannot see that such an
incubus must have oppressed and blighted every interest of the
country?. . .It would have been a curse sufficient to paralyze the
industry, to corrupt the morals, and to crush the development of
any people on earth, to have such a race spread abroad among them
like the frogs of Egypt.”
(Robert Lewis Dabney, Defense of Virginia
and the South, Kindle location 3545).
Who is he talking about? Not 'Anglo-Celtics,' that's for sure.
Polish people maybe. The much-advertised 'Bible argument,' by the
way, is that sinfulness is hereditary, and therefore "Ham's posterity,
like their father, would be peculiarly degraded in morals"
(Robert
Lewis Dabney, Defense of Virginia and the South, Kindle location
1209) (Noah having become a cut-out for God, and Canaan sliding back a
generation to Ham). It is to be expected that ". .
.depraved parents will naturally rear depraved children, unless God
interfere by a grace to which they have no claim; so that not only
punishment, but the sinfulness, becomes hereditary." (Robert Lewis Dabney, Defense of Virginia and the South, Kindle location 1211). Owing to "the peculiar
moral degradation" (Robert Lewis Dabney, Defense of Virginia and the
South, Kindle location 1221) of black folk, slavery is supposedly
God's best and highest for them, because the kindly slave-master can
correct their tendency toward degraded morals, no doubt by whipping
as is deemed appropriate. We learn these facts, not from the Bible, which
neglects to mention them, but from "actual history." (Robert Lewis Dabney,
Defense of Virginia and the South, Kindle location 1209). And this is
the much ballyhooed compelling 'argument' the abolitionists could not
answer!
The reader will have noticed that this new feint runs counter to the
'sentimental' defense of slavery before noted, which loved to dwell
on scenes of reunion between slaves and slave-owners: "Massa and
Missis have long gone before me, Soon we will meet on that bright
and golden shore, There we'll be happy and free from all sorrow,
There's where we'll meet and we'll never part no more." (Carry Me
Back to Old Virginny, James Bland). Now we learn the slaves are
hell-hounds who are not bound for glory, and indeed it is this reoriented destination which
justifies their enslavement. If the sentimentalists are right, Dabney is slandering God's people; if Dabney is right, the sentimentalists are raving.
To the extent the slavers believed his obsequious flattery, they
added the sin of pride to that of oppression, "He, whom his white
oppressor refused to worship with, eat with, sail with, or dwell
with on earth, shall dwell, and worship, and reign where his master
may never be; and when— as may often happen— the white skin is
shut out, and the black man, now and forever free, passes in at the
celestial gate, it shall furnish but another illustration of the
truth, that salvation is 'not of blood, nor of the will of the
flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.'" (Thomas Guthrie, The
Gospel in Ezekiel, Kindle location 2178).
To reproduce the kind of sophistry on display in Dabney's 'Defense of
Virginia,' consider: is there anything wrong with the relationship between employer and
employee, in itself? Why, no. Thank you. Therefore, there can be
nothing wrong with an employer paying an employee ten cents an hour,
any more than paying him ten dollars an hour; nor can there be
anything wrong with stationing the employee within a sweat-shop in a
building likely to fall down, as opposed to providing a safe,
comfortable work-place. This is how Dabney wishes away the Mosaic law's
limitation of servitude to a term of six years: if service were wrong it
itself, it would be abolished, not limited; but the limitation to six
years is an administrative detail; therefore, life-long slavery is
enthusiastically endorsed by Moses. . .in spite of the slight
technicality, that it is illegal. This is not sound reasoning; among
other things, it equivocates on the word 'slavery,' because the points
of demarcation between slavery and other forms of labor organization are
precisely issues of 'how long' and 'under what circumstances.
Those American states, in the North, which abolished slavery
prior to the Civil War did so in most cases according to a gradual
schedule: persons born after a certain date, would become free on
their twenty-first birthday. There are several reasons for that. It
was not considered desirable to tell an eighty-year-old,
'Congratulations! Now you're free! Go out and make a living!' Such a
person would have no resources, nor any prospects of finding
employment. So the date of the enactment of the law was no Day of
Jubilee for the eighty-year-old, nor for anyone else, though the law's backers promoted
it as promising the end to slavery in the state. Generally speaking,
state governments are reluctant to confiscate lawfully acquired
property without compensation, and thus stretching the scheduled
emancipation out for twenty odd years was considered a fair
compromise. Now here's the beauty of R. L. Dabney's 'in itself'
argument: these laws abolishing slavery, which is what everyone
considered them to be, because the end result of the legislation was
that, after a date certain, there is no one held in slavery, are
actually the very proof of slavery's essential rightness, and of the
slave-owner's right to perpetual ownership of his 'property'! How
so? Well, because as the law states very plainly, the slave-owner is
allowed the use of the slave's coerced labor, for a certain, limited
period; perhaps not long enough to recoup his investment, but still
a period of years. Indeed, that's the way these laws were written.
This proves that slavery is right 'in itself,' because otherwise it
would not be tolerated for a second! So the very laws intended to
abolish slavery in the North, prove its essential righteousness and
establish the impossibility of abolishing it! We are far into
Alice-in-Wonderland territory, with this 'brilliant' and incisive
argument. Maybe such powerful arguments should come with a warning
label.
The reader is similarly reminded of the conundrum, called sorites, wherein the donkey
nibbles at the hay bale; he eats one straw, the bale is not diminished;
he eats another, there is still no visible change; but keep it up, and
at some point, there is not a single strand of hay left on the barn floor.
Whence departed the 'hay bale'? What is a working life, but a finite sequence of years?
How these years are distributed is precisely wherein labor justice is
found. Dabney's much-ballyhooed logic is no more than a card trick,
prestidigitation, by which he causes to disappear Moses' 'six years then
freedom:' now you see it, now you don't. Moses, by term-limiting servitude to six years, cannot simultaneously be
endorsing life-long slavery. What, after all, is the difference between
'employment' and 'slavery,' other than terms and conditions, including
length of the contract? Let's see how to take a minimum-wage law,
mandating an employer pay an employee $7.00 an hour, and employ Dabney's
'logic' to show it really means you can pay the employee 70 cents an
hour:
Q. The law says, an employer must pay an employee $7.00
an hour. That means the employer-employee relation cannot be evil in
itself; if it were it would be curtailed immediately, like the relation between
kidnapper and his victim, not regulated. A. Maybe. Did you know
your slaves were, in the main, originally kidnap victims? Q.
Thus, having established the relation between employer and
employee is good in itself, it is equally good if he pays him 70
cents an hour. A. Whether good or only permitted, the law says seven dollars, not 70
cents! Q. You are not listening. The law only proves the
employer/employee relationship is good in itself. In spite of
the little technicality that it also says to pay him $7.00, my
brilliant logic proves it is equally good to pay him only 70 cents. Just as,
if Moses exclaims that six years of slavery is good, why then twelve
years is even better,— twice as good, to be exact!
A. Tell it to the judge; he will ask what happened to the
missing $6.30. Just like Moses will ask what happened to the
six-year limitation which went poof.
Dabney makes preposterous claims, like that "in
their native country there was no marriage, and no marriage law" (Robert
Lewis Dabney, Defense of Virginia and the South, Kindle location 2716),
in defense of the South's failure to respect marriages between slaves. Dabney
incessantly argues in a circle: when Moses commands asylum for the
fugitive slave, he cannot really mean what he says, because Moses, as we
have determined, is pro-slavery. Yet Wilson commends this tinny special
pleading as if it were razor-sharp argumentation. In his mind, the important
thing is adjectives: if you pile up the correct set of adjectives in
structuring society, whether obedient to the law or not, you have done well. His adjectives are the opposite of Mary's adjectives in her
magnificat: God loves especially the big, the powerful, the strong. Who
else might a mighty God love and cherish? In their world, God champions
hierarchy: "But the Christian faith teaches that God has established the
world in hierarchal strata. In contrast, the democratic faith teaches
that we are all equal and that any child can become president."
(Douglas
Wilson, The Case for Classical Christian Education, p. 73). But the living God overturns
hierarchy: "He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them
of low degree." (Luke 1:52).
Cultural Inferiority
For most of his book, 'Black and Tan,' Douglas Wilson seems as though he is 'channeling' Robert Lewis
Dabney; he departs from him in almost no particular. The one
significant difference, however, touches upon the foundation of the
argument, no small matter; if the foundation fails, the structure collapses. Robert Lewis Dabney's defense of slavery is ultimately
based upon racism; the reason why slavery is a good thing and not a
bad thing is, to Dabney, because they are born bad: blacks inherit a
peculiar moral depravity. Douglas Wilson knows you cannot get away
with saying things like that nowadays. And so he substitutes an
altogether different foundation upon which to establish slavery:
namely, cultural inferiority:
"All men exhibit the image of God equally, but all
cultures are not equal. As we look at all the tribes of men, we see
some that have landed a man on the moon, and some that have not yet
worked out the concept of the wheel." (Douglas Wilson, 'Black and
Tan,' Kindle location 444).
So for Robert Lewis Dabney's theme of racial inferiority, we are substituting cultural
inferiority. Dabney's conclusion remains intact: namely, that some
people are entitled to enslave other people, and indeed it is the
very same people as before (white Anglo-Saxon Southerners, and
African-Americans). Now, those readers instructed in logic must
surely know, it is a delicate operation indeed to excise the
premises upon which a conclusion rests, leaving the conclusion
poised delicately in mid-air, while you substitute a different set
up premises. Indeed some of you may have been taught not to do that;
if you deposit the premises in the dumpster, and even Wilson admits
we must do this with racism, then you must deposit the conclusion
into the same dumpster along with them; the two go together. In any
case one must ask, is the new and improved set of premises: that God
prefers the mighty and strong over the weak, that He chooses the
glittering civilizations of Egypt and Babylon over a rough, low-tech tribe of
wandering Aramaeans, even compatible with the Bible? The answer is a
resounding no:
"Another evil which drives away the divine Spirit is pride.
The way to be very great is to be very little. To be very noteworthy in
your own esteem is to be unnoticed of God. If you must needs dwell upon
the high places of the earth, you shall find the mountain summits cold
and barren: the Lord dells with the lowly, but He knows the proud afar
off." (Charles Spurgeon, Lectures to my Students, p. 201).
Douglas Wilson's category of 'cultural inferiority' mixes together
the most disparate things, which do not necessarily track together.
Japan is an example of a technologically advanced civilization which is
a spiritual desert. Japan, according to what you read in the newspapers,
gets little bang for the buck out of its R & D expenditures. Some
speculate the reason is an educational system that stresses rote
learning and social conformity over creativity. Be that as it may,
suppose for the sake of argument that the Japanese get a handle on their
problems, and their research efforts take off by leaps and bounds, and
in no time at all they have surpassed our best technology. The Japanese,
flitting around with those jet-pack back-packs that were such a feature
of the 'future' years and years ago, then succeed in enslaving many of
the technologically backwards Americans, and transport them to Japan
where they are put to service as beasts of burden. Would anyone say,
this is right and proper, because America, in this hypothetical example,
is less technologically advanced than Japan? Of course not, because this
is us, and that's them. No pro-slavery author in the history of the
world has wanted to see 'us' enslaved by 'them.'
Douglas Wilson admires the Prohibition-era newspaper writer, H. L.
Mencken, an insult-meister who perfected a style of one-liner
put-downs. It was no part of Mencken's program to analyze and understand his
adversaries' viewpoint and rebut point-by-point, nor would his state
of sobriety have permitted such a project. He simply wanted to
insult them, to make them look ridiculous. Is Wilson really going to defend Dabney's idea that one
ethnic group suffers from a peculiar hereditary wickedness over
against another ethnic group, that blacks deserve slavery because of their
inherited moral depravity? I doubt it, but that doesn't mean
he'll shut up; to him, an insult is an answer. There is an element of
self-fulfilling prophecy to Dabney's pro-slavery argument, because
ancient authors noticed slavery's demoralizing effect on those
subjected to that institution. Dabney, no believer in the power of the
gospel to change lives, explained that the slaves were lazy and
shiftless, and that thus they were obliged to remain under the tutelage
of masters. Not the gospel, but "the birch," had the power to correct this
situation: "But slavery made the lazy do their part with the
industrious, by the wholesome fear of the birch." (Robert Lewis Dabney, Defense of Virginia and the South, Kindle location 3905).
But who in the antebellum South was lazy, and who was industrious?
Who did all the work, and who did none? Rather, the indolent 'Anglo-Celtic' parasites in the big house
should have been grateful the slaves were not so lazy and shiftless as
they! Who, in this brave new world, were to be the Africans' instructors in
the virtue of hard work? The plantation-owner's children, a class of
persons notorious to all observers, both those sympathetic to slavery
and those unsympathetic, of having no concept whatever of hard work,
much less any inclination to engage in any such thing? These useless,
lazy drones were fortunate to be surrounded by hard-working slaves, who
would from time to time shove a tray of food in front of their faces,
otherwise they would have starved to death. How can a virtue be taught
by persons completely bereft of it themselves? This instructional plan: that
persons who do no work ought to teach those who do all the work, about
what? The work ethic!— does not pass the straight face test.
One would naturally suspect that slaves worked no harder than they had to, because this system of organizing
labor does not distribute the burden so as to maximize effort. Visitors
to the state collective farms in the old Soviet Union used to shake
their heads at the neglected common fields, but then marvel at the
lovingly tended garden plots. Were the Russian people who tended the
state fields ethnically diverse from the Russian people who carefully
watered and weeded their own little plots, the one group having an
inherited tendency to moral depravity, the other to hard work and
discipline? No, they were the very same individuals; in the one case
they were given an incentive to toil out in the heat of the day, in the other
they were not.
Douglas Wilson's instructor in all things slave-related, Robert
Lewis Dabney, explains that slavery is a remedy for indolence which will
correct this and other vices. Will it be needed forever?:
"But, it may be asked: Will not the diffusion of the
pure and blessed principles of the Gospel ultimately extinguish all
forms of slavery? We answer: Yes, we devoutly trust it will, not by
making masters too righteous to hold slaves, but by so correcting
the ignorance, thriftlessness, indolence, and vice of laboring
people, that the institution of slavery will be no longer needed.
Just so, we hope that the spread of Christianity will someday abolish
penitentiaries and jails. . .so it may be perfectly righteous to
hold a class in bondage, which is incapable of freedom. . ." (Robert Lewis Dabney, Defense of
Virginia and the South, Kindle location 2459).
Dabney asserts that "slavery is the useful and righteous remedy" for "the
ignorance and vice in the laboring classes." (Robert Lewis Dabney,
Dabney's Defense of Virginia and the South, Kindle location 2468). Is
it 'slavery' or 'Christianity' which is promoted here as a cure for
shiftlessness? The intent seems to be both, or perhaps he really
cannot tell them apart. But is slavery in any sense a remedy for
poor work habits, if it seems rather to generate poor work habits,
in all ethnic and cultural groups who have hitherto been subjected
to it? It wouldn't surprise me if American slaves did display some of these
behavior patterns, because the writers of classical antiquity
observed a similar complex in their European slaves. Slavery is not
the corrective for "indolence," because it produces indolence.
This purported correction action on the part of slavery justified the
institution, according to Dabney and his followers: ". . .so it may
be perfectly righteous to hold a class in bondage, which is
incapable of freedom. . ." (Robert Lewis Dabney, Defense of
Virginia and the South, Kindle location 2459).
When did the Africans first show any signs of this
characteristic vice which Dabney officiously diagnoses? While they
lived in their own land, in tidy and busy little villages with
well-tended fields, as John Wesley relates, condensing
travellers' accounts, in his pamphlet 'Thoughts Upon Slavery'?
There, a rational system of land tenure left the farmer content
he was laboring to put food into the mouths of
people he had reason to care about. Or did they first display signs
of this malady when placed in a situation where they were no more
stake-holders in the plantation, no more entitled to sign up for the
profit-sharing plan, than were the beasts of burden in their stalls? In being
torn from their homes, the slaves entered into a vicious cycle. The
slave-driver whipped them to make them work, like a drunken or
drug-addled boyfriend who beats a child to make him stop crying,
which only makes the terrified child cry the more. Either he will
kill the child, or the police will intervene. It will never happen
that whipping unwilling and unpaid laborers who have no rational incentive to
work will teach them the virtue of industry. Things are topsy-turvy when the
only people doing any work on the plantation are accused of
'indolence,' by the very same people whose only observable
connection to work is that of spectators.
Observers both ancient and modern have long noticed the spur that
equality and opportunity give to achievement, both on the individual
and on the communal level: "The Athenians accordingly increased in
power; and it is evident, not by one instance only but in every way,
that equality is an excellent thing, since the Athenians while they
were ruled by despots were not better in war than any of those who
dwelt about them, whereas after they had got rid of despots they
became far the first. This proves that when they were kept down they
were willfully slack, because they were working for a master,
whereas when they had been set free each one was eager to achieve
something for himself." (Herodotus, The Histories, Book V,
Chapter 78, p. 38). What Dabney does is to step on someone, then
blame him because he is unable to stand up, offering his weakness as proof he needs a conservator. Stop stepping on him, and he
will get up. Realizing that slavery has no real life tendency to improve the
character of those subjected to it, when would slavery be done away with
in accordance with Dabney's ideals? The twelfth of never. The day after
penitentiaries are abolished. Don't forget, he is a racist after all.
Slavery is not likely to correct anyone's laziness, as he sees it, just to keep them
from getting away with it.
The reader can only stare in disbelief at Douglas Wilson's claim that
Southern slavery represented an altruistic effort on the part of
slave-owners to civilize African barbarians. What better way to make
people fit for civic life than to teach them to read and write? But
not only did the slave-owners not do that, they prevented the
meddlesome Yankees who would have done it! The assumption that God values
civilization above all things is not itself Biblical. The Egyptians and
Babylonians nurtured glittering civilizations; to this day people
stand in line to marvel at the wonderful things the Egyptians made,
taken from King Tut's tomb. Yet God did not show Himself to those
cultured and refined (and slave-owning) folks, but to herdsmen who
went out into the wilderness, away from the city, to seek Him.
Roman slavery was brutal enough, but the Romans never lost sight
of the fact that the slave was a human being. Every year they held a
festival called the 'Saturnalia,' a drunken riot unfortunately,
during which slaves and their masters traded places, in memory
of a fabled Italian king, who had somehow got confused with the
planetary body of the same name, whose reign was remembered as a
time of justice and equity, when mankind's modest needs were met by
a diet of acorns. After slavery was revived in Christendom, having
gone dormant, some people marched into court and arrogantly
announced that Africans were not even human:
". . .yet it has been alleged by the said Seller (even
after the Negro had been a second time set at liberty by the
authority of the right honorable the Lord Mayor) that he, the said
Negro, is as much private property as a horse or a dog."
(Granville
Sharp, A Representation of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of
Tolerating Slavery, Part I, p. 13)
In fact the dispute was not so much whether the slave was like a
horse or a dog in being property, but whether he even was a human being
at all, and wasn't rather properly classed with beasts of burden by nature. So the nauseating racism upon which Southern slavery was founded was
a new wrinkle. The people who wanted to argue against slavery had first
of all to prove that the slave was a human being; Dabney concedes,
nominally, this much. Robert Lewis Dabney is all about racism, but
Douglas Wilson somehow dreams of a Dabney cleansed of this fault. This
would be a Dabney whose conclusions remain, founded upon a rock, though
a new rock must somehow be inserted without being noticed, and the old
one quietly withdrawn, because the old one, racism, has fallen out of
favor.
Still, Wilson believes only so much of Dabney as suits him; Dabney
explains that Virginia fielded no African-American soldiers, "But we exposed
no negro to the dangers of the battle." (R. L. Dabney, Defense of
Virginia and the South, Kindle location 1102). But Wilson prefers
his undocumented, ahistorical fantasies on this point; because
neo-Confederates indignantly deny they are racists like their forbears,
therefore entire battalions of African-American Confederate troops must
be wished up, from smoke. Strictly speaking, it is true that Virginia
exposed no African-American to the dangers of the battle, though in
a last desperation move, they did recruit black soldiers: "In the
few weeks of life left to the Confederacy no other state followed
Virginia's lead. The two companies of black soldiers hastily
organized in Richmond never saw action." (James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 837).
Why weren't there more? Well, because, as even Robert E. Lee
realized, you have to promise them freedom if they are to fight:
"The negroes, under proper circumstances, will make efficient
soldiers. . .Those who are employed should be freed."
(James M.
McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 836). A chain gang will find it
difficult to move at quick time over broken ground. Now this was a
problem, because the theory under which the South fought the Civil
War was that blacks were better off under slavery than freedom,
whereas, as the newspapers explained, the idea of freeing slaves was
"'a repudiation of the opinion held by the whole South. . . that
servitude is a divinely appointed condition for the highest good of
the slave.'" (McPherson, p. 834). As Georgian Howell Cobb explained
it, "'The day you make soldiers of them is the beginning of the end
of the revolution. If slaves will make good soldiers, our whole
theory of slavery is wrong.'" (McPherson, p. 835). Indeed. Dabney's
theory of slavery is that freedom for the slaves would be a curse
rather than a blessing, and Wilson follows his hero's thinking,
although he imagines he has cleansed the theory from the taint of
racism by substituting cultural inferiority for Dabney's inherited
racial inferiority. In theory, this condition of cultural
inferiority is correctible, although it will take about 300 years
for improvement to be noted. As will be seen, Wilson is no believer
in the power of the Holy Spirit instantaneously to change human
hearts; in his scheme of things, the gospel, a cultural construct
rather than real or personal, ultimately permeates through these
backward societies, but slowly, very slowly.
The American debate over slavery was asynchronous; as R. L. Dabney explains, the flurry of
abolitionist pamphlets with which the North buried the South was not met
by any answering flurry of pro-slavery pamphlets. After the South's
crushing defeat, Dabney realized that this prior disdain of meeting Bible
arguments with any attempt at counter-argument was a huge mistake on the
South's part; first they had lost the propaganda war, without firing a
shot, then they lost the shooting war. That is his interpretation, not mine. So after the war, Dabney sets
out to declaim what would have been the South's Bible defense, if it had
given one, to an empty room. It's a horror; it is altogether racist. Douglas
Wilson disclaims Dabney's racism, but since there's nothing else there,
no 'argument' beyond the purported hereditary sinfulness of African-Americans, it
is impossible to conceive a morally innocent Dabney acolyte.
While all men have inherited a sin nature from Adam, this isn't the
heritage of one of the tribes of mankind versus another, but a shared
characteristic of the human race. This communal template is the starting
point for many of this author's errors; he does not believe in a God who
deals with individuals, but only in bulk at the wholesale level, contra
Peter who urged his hearers to free themselves from their group: “And
with many other words he testified and exhorted them, saying, 'Be saved
from this perverse generation.'” (Acts 2:40). You can't defend this racist bilge:
"But here the reader should be reminded of what has been already shown;
that if this industrial evil existed among us, that evil was not
slavery, but the presence among us of four millions of recent pagans
characterized by all the listlessness, laziness, and unthrift of
savages." (Robert Lewis Dabney, Defense of Virginia and the South,
Kindle location 3842), and he won't even try. (No great believers in the power of the gospel to
change lives, are these 'Reformed' folks? 'Recent pagans' indeed! If
they were 'recent[ly]' pagans, then they are not so now; will he never
stop slandering Christian folk? Evidently it takes a couple of generations,
or maybe even centuries, for a Christian conversion to 'take,' the reductio
ad absurdum of 'Federal Vision.') He should be ashamed to repeat that African-Americans are laboring under the burden of any
hereditary moral depravity, and yet he and his atheist friends want it understood the
South won the debate on slavery! They won the debate by saying things you
can't repeat?
Douglas Wilson makes all the right noises about Dabney's racism;
he deplores it, he rejects it, he condemns it, etc. However he
accepts Dabney's pro-slavery argument, and encourages the reader to
join him. But to filter out the racism from Dabney's pro-slavery
argument is to rip out its guts. Dabney believes African-Americans
suffer from an inherited moral depravity which is best ameliorated
(it can't be removed, evidently, certainly not by the gospel) by
placing them under the tutelage of a stern but kindly white slave-master, who enjoys a
more wholesome racial heritage. (Dabney realizes not all slave-masters are paternalistic; his response to the
sadists in the guild is to shrug his shoulders. Woe to the slave purchased by John Wayne Gacy, he has no
meaningful legal protection.) Therefore, slavery is not oppressive, but benign. This paradigm of
hereditary sinfulness is presented as empirical observation. If
Wilson does not believe in it, what will he substitute for it? To
remove it is to eviscerate Dabney's argument. We are left with
Dabney's pro-slavery argument, disemboweled, but still towering
victoriously over the losing abolition side, which has suffered no loss by
the subtraction of racism. This whole things sounds like a dog whistle to me; perhaps only the one-toothed crowd can
sound, or hear, the nearly-inaudible note.
The correct designation for Douglas Wilson is 'pro-slavery;' he
is a 'pro-slavery' author. This does not mean that he is willing to
see any and all persons enslaved at any and all times to any and all
other persons; what pro-slavery writer in the history of the world
ever has? From the start of the world to this present
point, pro-slavery writers have always wanted to see the same thing:
namely, that people like them should feel free to enslave people who
are not like them. Even Robert Lewis Dabney, a pro-slavery author if
ever there was one, does not believe in universal slavery; he
believed that one group of people, white Southerners, were entitled
to enslave another group of people, black African-Americans. Had he heard of
a case, on some foreign shore, where black pirates had captured and
enslaved white sailors, he would have been every bit as indignant as
the most fervent abolitionist; indeed, he himself was an abolitionist, in
almost all cases except white-on-black slavery.
Our author follows Dabney
slavishly, even in his irrational twists and turns; Dabney draws the
dividing line on slavery between the slave trade, which he correctly
diagnoses as evil, and slave-owning, which he considers benign. How can
this be? As a simple matter of supply and demand, did not slave-owning
call slave-trading into existence? But it was the hated Yankees who
conducted the slave trade, Virginia had very little of a merchant marine
at the time; and so, doing ethics by zip code, slave trading has to be
bad, and slave owning good. Wilson follows Dabney at every irrational
step. One drawback to illegal drug use, by people capable of ethical
thought, is that if you purchase illegal drugs, you thereby become
responsible for murders among drug cartels; demand elicits supply, and
all that goes along with it. Are people who buy slaves not responsible
for slave trading? According to Dabney, the slave purchases of Virginia
only bought those people because they felt sorry for them, not because
they desired their service!
There is one case where Douglas Wilson can sound almost like a
normal, moral, human being, and that is the case of
Christian-on-Christian slavery. So he stresses this case, hoping his
readers will develop tunnel vision and fail to notice this pairing
is only one of several possible. What about Christian-on-pagan
slavery, for instance? He expects Christian-on-Christian slavery to
fade away, as indeed it is prone to do, because Christians are
abolitionists. One must wonder why it would be natural for slavery to
disappear, if it is simply wicked for any Christian to say 'slavery
ought to disappear.' Perhaps they can pantomime it? But with regard to the initial starting point of
Southern black slavery, that is, Christians enslaving pagans, he is
solidly pro-slavery. There is no reason not to describe this author
as pro-slavery; it is a perfectly accurate designation. Pro-slavery
authors always privilege their own group above others, and the fact
that he sees nothing wrong with white Southerners enslaving Africans
puts him into the same category with his mentor R. L. Dabney, not
into a different one.
The pagan philosopher Aristotle thought that some men were
natural-born slaves. Who were they: people like him? Why, no, but
the 'barbarians,' the wild men from Thessaly for example, not the cultured
Greeks, who were natural-born masters. Has there ever been a pro-slavery author who argued that,
a.) slavery is a good thing, and b.) people like himself ought to be
the slaves, and some other group the masters? So when Douglas
Wilson comes along, proposing that people who are uncivilized,
lacking technology skills and transportation mechanisms like the Apollo moon rocket, who are
moreover pagans, ought to have been enslaved by people like him, nominal Christians
with enough purchasing power to obtain technological goodies, then this is
simply par for the course; it is no departure, pro-slavery people
always restrict this great gift of slavery. . .to other folk. Inasmuch as
the world population of pagans living in less-developed countries
numbers today in the billions, one cannot be sure that, with him,
slavery is a closed book.
Because race is an indelible character and 'cultural
inferiority,' however defined, is presumably a remediable one, Wilson is
able to tack a 'Hollywood ending' onto Dabney's bleak vision of a lost, cursed race. He
laments that emancipation ended Southern black slavery prematurely, before
this institution's imagined civilizing mission could be accomplished,
because he claims that this premature ending left our nation's African-American
population in a semi-civilized condition, mired in what his son calls
"residual paganism." ('Black and Tan,' Kindle location 41). He
blames urban crime and other social ills on this circumstance.
One might think becoming a Christian is a quick transition, taking no longer than the
time needed to walk up the aisle in response to an altar call, but in their
eyes, evidently it takes generations, perhaps even centuries, for
pagans to become Christianized, and slavery is the ideal way to do it.
Admittedly, their way, there is at least some end in sight for
Southern slavery, as there was not with Dabney, who saw emancipation as a
Yankee crime. In spite of this marginal improvement over Dabney, for whom he otherwise
serves as a ventriloquist's dummy, this is a horrible book and
certainly no contribution to our nation's dialogue on race.
Realizing that Doug Wilson ascribes present social ills
besetting African-Americans to the premature ending of slavery,
before that benign institution could work its wonders in civilizing
the black race, what is his time frame? When would this period of
tutelage, which he insists was beneficial and necessary, have come
to an end? He doesn't give an exact time scale in 'Black and Tan,'
but he is a bit more forthcoming in a panel discussion held under
Reformed auspices (the visitor to the web site hosting this
podcast might be perplexed, but realize, these folk are Reformed.
Quite naturally, guzzling beer is de rigeur in
these circles, and they end their drinking bouts with a rousing
rendition of the Doxology). It's three hundred years. Adding this sum to the
year in which importation of slaves into America was formally
banned, 1807, gives us the upcoming year 2107. See:
Could be worse, could be 400 years. The primitive and backwards
children of Israel, descended from a wandering Aramaean, were in bondage to the glittering civilization of
Egypt for that long. Although Ethiopia adopted the gospel long before
Douglas Wilson's precious Scots, notice that he has no conception that,
in any one's eyes, they could have contributed anything to human culture. Dear Reader, if your Reformed friend wants to share
this 'gospel' with you, run as you would from a house on fire.
The concept of 'civilization' was not invented here, it's not an in-house
church construct, it's not a Biblical
category. Roman Republican authors like Cicero came up with it as an
ideology of conquest. Some of the places they conquered, like Egypt and
Greece, were civilized long before Rome was anything but a rural
village, but other places, like France and England, were quite primitive
at the time. The inhabitants of these places used to plaintively
complain, why are you stealing from us, when you're so rich, and we're
so poor? But Cicero and others explained, that the Romans brought
civilization. This is the practice of building cities, establishing
written law codes and courts of justice, and other good things. The
barbarians knew nothing about any of this. And the Romans had a point;
the gentle Celts were head-hunters.
But the gospel is something
different, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with "white people." Dear
Reader, please do not let a 'Reformed' person explain the gospel to you;
there is eternity at stake. The gospel is not a promise that, if an
ethnic group adopts cultural Christianity, then, three hundred
years later, they will be building cathedrals and writing
symphonies. This false gospel will populate Hell as readily as will
any other false gospel.