When something crazy is the norm, opposing it seems crazy. When wrong is the norm, people who want to do the right thing are shunted to the lunatic fringe. And during the 17th and 18th centuries, most white Americans either embraced the institution of race-based slavery, merely accepted it, or looked askance but put up very little active opposition.
During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the Northern states abolished slavery, but until the 1840s, few people in the North and almost none in the South made any effort to challenge it in the remaining states. And when major opposition in the North did spring up, it was mostly in the form of the Free Soil movement, people who were against slavery’s expansion into the West on economic grounds, not moral ones; small farmers who didn’t want to compete with plantations, and the new breed of new wage workers who didn’t want to compete with slave labor.
Prior to the Civil War, only a few people opposed slavery on moral grounds. The abolitionists, standing up for what was right, were far outside the mainstream and castigated by many as the lunatic fringe. They were the crazies, the radicals, the ones that everyone else pointed to and said: Hey, you’re really nuts. What the hell’s wrong with you? Knock it off already. Abolitionists were the ones who regular people mocked, jeered, and cursed. They were the outsiders of their day, the lunatic fringe of the early 19th century. Slavery was normal, so a society that largely accepted slavery labeled them as crazy.
Of course most of them weren’t actually crazy, they were just the radical fringe. But even with the rise of the Free Soil movement in the North, the abolitionists remained a minority who opposed slavery not out of self-interested concerns but because they believed it was the right thing to do. Thus, on the eve of the Civil War, when the nation was being wrenched by the issue of slavery, abolitionists were still just a fraction of the national population and far removed from the cultural mainstream. Mostly comprised of well to do New Englanders and a shrinking number of Quakers, they were generally a minority even where they lived.
It’s tempting to put abolitionists on a pedestal for standing up for what was right because it was right, to identify them as the honorable ones who were misunderstood and unfairly
lumped in with the crazies. But that would be too simple a story. To find the truth you have to dig deeper. And when you look hard at the abolitionists, what you find is that while they opposed slavery, and they did so on moral grounds, it’s not as if they believed what you believe exactly: that slavery is a contemptuous manifestation of racism. No, that’s not what most abolitionists thought. Abolitionists thought slavery was wrong because it violated their religious convictions, that it was an offense to Jesus. And the whole racism thing actually didn’t bother them that much.
In fact, most Abolitionists didn’t have much of a problem at all with the racism that underpinned the institution of slavery. Why? Because they were racist too. Most abolitionists did not doubt the inferiority of the black people they wanted to save. That’s why many of them, when thinking about what to do with all those slaves they wanted to free, advocated repatriation: send all the blacks back to Africa. Someone advocates that now, you think they’re a degenerate racist, and rightly so. Back then, the send `em all back to Africa crowd were actually the good guys.
Founded in 1816, the American Colonization Society was an alliance of abolitionist Quakers and slaveholders afraid of free blacks influencing their slaves. From 1821-22, they set up a colony in Africa as a dumping ground for free blacks. They called it Liberia (sounds like “liberty,” get it?), and they named the capital Monrovia, in honor of then-President James Monroe, himself a goddamned slave owner. And that’s how you get the West African nation of Liberia today. Seriously. You can’t make this stuff up.
So let me ask you something. You think that if you lived back then you would’ve been the one? The one white person who thought slavery was bad because racism is bad? Yeah?
You’re flattering yourself. At best, you would’ve been half a scumbag, someone who thought slavery was awful, and that those poor monkey-like people, so childlike and inferior, should be shipped off to Africa for their own good. If you were, by the standards of the day, an angel with a penchant for martyrdom, that’s what you probably would have believed. And much more likely, you would have been three-fourths of a scumbag with one excuse or another. And who knows, maybe under the right circumstances, you might have even been a full on scumbag. You know, the type who defended the institution of slavery and maybe even participated in it in some way, perhaps as a slave trader, slave driver, slave catcher, slave overseer, or some such. Actual slave owner? Less likely. They were really expensive.
So here we sit in the early 21st century, judging those who participated in or were otherwise complicit in slavery, and rightly so. What they did was incredibly wrong and unjustifiable by our sensibilities. But if you were a white person living back then, you’d be somewhere along the spectrum of the day. So the question then becomes: Who are you now? What screwed up little spectrum are you sitting along today?
A hundred, two-hundred, five-hundred years from now they’re gonna be sitting in judgment on your ass. They’re gonna be shocked at some of the shit you do, that you just take for granted, or maybe feel kinda bad about, but you know, that’s life, everyone does it, and it does kinda work for me, I know, I know, but sigh . . .
What’s it gonna be? Can you look around and figure out what they’ll judge you for? What are you doing that will make them call you a monster?