transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:09] Welcome to The Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast. I'm Jeremiah Regan.

Speaker 2:
[00:13] And I'm Juan Davalos. We're back with The Great American Story, A Land of Hope. We're gonna cover Lectures 7 and 8 today, The Culture of Democracy and Its Shadow.

Speaker 1:
[00:22] So we see America reaching a point of maturity. We've gotten past the War of 1812, so that means we've fought Britain twice and at least kept them out of our business twice, which is quite an accomplishment. And we're working on the establishment and the maturation of our polity. And questions arise, should we become more aristocratic? And this is prominent in some of the southern states, or should we continue with our Republican roots in which citizens participate in their government through their elected representatives? And these are the types of questions that Dr. McClay is going to address in these two lectures.

Speaker 2:
[01:00] Yeah, you start seeing that separation again, like you mentioned, between the North and the South, but again, also we see that a lot in the institution of slavery. The South is much more aristocratic, and they have much bigger division, a much different understanding of human nature and of the equality of all people, and therefore they're much more prone to be favorable towards an aristocratic society, and that starts causing tensions in the nation and leading up eventually to a war.

Speaker 1:
[01:31] That's right. While some questions such as tariffs or internal improvements were matters of prudence, is this a thing that is right? Will it better affect the safety and happiness of the people? Question of slavery is a question of justice and arguments developed and were eventually determined, as we'll see in later lectures, through war, as Juan said.

Speaker 2:
[01:51] I do encourage everybody to think about that point that you just made, Jeremiah, about the question of justice. What is justice? A definition of justice is something that unifies a people, unifies a nation. The Federalist Papers does a great job of explaining that. And what we're understanding right now is that you start seeing a division in the country because there's two very different and competing views of justice. And you can start thinking about our country today and what is the definition of justice? How do we define that today? Because then you start seeing maybe divisions also today in that definition.

Speaker 1:
[02:28] Hillsdale has long educated for liberty. And properly using liberty requires a proper understanding of justice. That's one of the things we do to our education. If you would like to help us participate in our mission, please consider making a tax deductible donation at hillsdale.edu/course. That's hillsdale.edu/course.

Speaker 2:
[02:48] And now let's turn to Dr. McClay in The Great American Story, The Land of Hope, Lectures 7 and 8, The Culture of Democracy and Its Shadow.

Speaker 3:
[03:00] I was speaking about Andrew Jackson a bit as we concluded last time. And the emergence of Jackson as a authentic bonafide national military hero coming out of the War of 1812. Jackson was destined for a political future, and his rise in politics corresponded with, in some ways, was a motive force in, in other ways was just a reflection of a new era in American politics, and in American life, in American culture. And this has sometimes been called the age of the common man, or the rise of the common man. Jackson was not a common man in any sense of the term, but his appeal to commoners, to people of lowly and middling birth and background was tremendous, and eventually earned him the presidency in the election of 1828. He came very close to the election of 1824 also, and there was a feeling that the nod going to John Quincy Adams, as it did, was, as Jackson's followers said, a corrupt bargain, and he came roaring back to victory in the election of 1828. And it was an election like no other in previous American history. Elections had generally been fought out between people who were of, as they said, the better sort, that is, the higher, more elite ranks of society. Politics of deference is the term that sometimes is used to describe this era in which the people of the lower class is deferred to their betters. And understood that the system demanded that such betters would be the educated, the more sophisticated, more cultured, more worldly, would serve better in that role. But as the broadening of the franchise, the right to vote and the participation of all straight of society, at least of white society in the electoral process, proceeded, the nature of campaigns began to change. They became more messy, more visceral, more devoted to spectacle and less to discussion of issues. And it's really at that moment that Jackson's political career peaks in his election to the presidency. His inauguration in March 4th of 1829 is one of the greatest spectacles itself in American history. It's legendary in this regard for the crowds of rowdy, unkempt individuals lining Pennsylvania Avenue and later thronging into the White House with their muddy boots and standing on chairs to get a glimpse of the great man. This was a spectacle not seen before in those quarters or since. And to be sure, Jackson was unlike any major candidate for the presidency of the past. He was a self-made man, a brawler, a tobacco-chewer, a frontiersman who had come from very lowly beginnings and through his military success, without the benefit of a college education or any other kind of refinement like that, became a wealthy, accomplished, and powerful man and a national hero to boot. He never lost a certain common touch which made him appealing, as did his rough manners and his ability to project sympathy for people of lower station. John Quincy Adams, his opponent, decried him as a barbarian, but his admirers begged to differ. These combinations of traits not only suggest changes in politics, but changes in the whole texture of American democracy, a more democratic democracy, if you will. Jefferson had believed that education could raise the commonest person to the standing of the well-born, to a parity of standing. Jackson, on the other hand, believed that the common man was already innately capable of governing. He was already where he needed to be. He didn't need education to raise him up. His innate capacity for deciding questions of politics and economy on his own was sufficient. This is when we use the term Jacksonian democracy, this is the distinction that we want to make. Indeed, Jackson is arguably the first American political leader of any note that we can apply the word populist to. Populism, if populism means opposition to entrenched elite classes, resentment of elite classes, privileged elite classes as a force driving the political appeal. So this is an age of democracy, age of the common man, and the great observer of all of this, as it turns out, was not an American. The greatest observer was not an American. It was a Frenchman, Alexis Tocqueville, who came to the United States as a visitor, a 26-year-old man who actually was very interested in having a big political career for himself in France. But given the times, he wasn't likely in any near future to attain that status. So he figured, I'll go to America. America is the place where it's really happening, where the emergence of a mass democracy, which he considered to be the wave of the future is actually happening. See what it's like. See what the Americans are doing. Examining, let me use this more eloquent words, in details as scientifically as possible, all the mechanisms of the vast American society, which everyone talks of and no one knows. So this all became compiled in a two-volume study called Democracy in America, published in two volumes, 1835 and 1840. He saw the United States as a nation moving in the vanguard of history, a young, vigorous country endowed with an extraordinary degree of social equality among its inhabitants. Because there was no feudal or aristocratic background to overcome in America as there was in Europe. America exemplified the condition towards which he believed all the rest of the world was tending. America gave the image of democracy itself, of its pensions, its characters, prejudices, its passions. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville was very thorough. He didn't just look at political institutions, he didn't just look at the Anglo-American history by which the nation came into being. He was interested in the way of the democracy. Let me add stress that when he used the term democracy, he meant social equality. He didn't mean necessarily the political system. He meant a social system in which all were equal. This was the way of the world. This was the way the world was going. He thought democracy would affect everything, not just the way people voted, not just the way they elected officials, not just the way political campaigns would be conducted, but everything, philosophy, manners, relations between the sexes, the parental authority of fathers and mothers, friendship, love, marriage, you name it. It would be affected in volume two of the democracy. It goes through an almost systematic way, looks at the way in which the change from aristocratic societies to democratic societies would manifest itself. We could spend a lot of time talking about that. But the point is that democracy is not just a political system for him, it's a culture, a culture of democracy, of people's sensibility and their way of life. Since religion is at the root of culture, let's start by examining this question, looking at the path of what the culture of democracy would be, with a look at the way that religion develops in the years after the revolution. One of the things we see is a kind of bifurcation. Remember that I made the observation that Protestantism and Enlightenment thinking were very compatible. They rested easily together with one another during the revolutionary era. Well, that starts to change. This harmony starts to break down into basically elite and popular bifurcation. On the elite level, more and more of the established churches, particularly in the North, and I'm almost exclusively talking about the North here in this lecture, this part of this lecture, found that the old Calvinism, the orthodox Calvinism, original sin, human depravity, all of that very dour and negative stuff, was out of phase with this new era in which the individual was emerging, it's powerful, the ability to shape his or her own destiny, and the world was, if not their oyster, at least a field of opportunity to which the application of rational and deliberate and scientific enlightened measures could produce improvements in the way of life as far as the eye could see. So these elite classes tended to drop the hardcore, hard-shell Calvinism in favor of deism or Unitarianism or various other forms of rational or rationalist religions. A supernatural element tended to follow by the wayside, particularly the notion as a Unitarianism, a Unitarianism of the Trinity, of the divinity of Christ. Meanwhile, there's a far more intense activity happening on the other side of the religious divide, which we'll call the revivalist side. A second great awakening had begun around 1800, and revivals, especially on the southern and western frontier, were huge in number and very indecorous, shall we say. In fact, they were wildly enthusiastic, and Tocqueville thought they showed the Americans' penchant for an exalted and almost fierce spiritualism. Legendary camp meeting in Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in the summer of 1801 was kind of like a Pentecostal woodstock, a gathering of souls featuring ecstatic and emotional outpourings of people who felt themselves possessed by the Holy Spirit, people who had came from lonely, unchurched, really barely civilized backgrounds, people living in poverty and isolation on the frontier, who were yearning for spiritual uplift, a sense of belonging. Events like Cane Ridge gave them that. And in general, the revivalism of the Second Great Awakening moved in that direction. Methodism caught that particular wave, and Methodism became the largest Christian denomination in America for a time in the early 19th century. By the 1820s, this revivalism was especially widespread and common in upstate New York, of all places, upstate New York, in the region between Lake Ontario and the Adirondack Mountains, roughly speaking, the region through which the Erie Canal, connecting the Great Lakes with the Hudson River, and ultimately with New York City, was built. And this was an area that almost immediately underwent rapid industrialization and modernization changes that almost certainly led to spiritual questing from the people living in the area who were disoriented by all the change. That's one of the explanations for this outburst of revivalism. They called it the Burned Over District because the fires of revival had flamed up so many times in the area. There was a young lawyer named Charles Grandison Finney who underwent a mighty conversion and set about making himself from a lawyer into a minister, although he said, I have a retainer from the Lord Jesus Christ to plead his case. So ever the lawyer, he didn't stop speaking that language. He became the great revivalist of his day, the prototype of the Billy Graham, Dwight L. Moody kind of American evangelist, particularly the open air stadium type of revival. Yet Finney's theological convictions were a lot like in some ways those of the elite figures, even though he was not appealing to an elite audience. He really also felt that Calvinism was too confining and restrictive. He thought that the infusion of grace from God, which Calvinists believe was dependent on God's will, which could not be a product of human action or human deeds works. It was possible to induce this through careful, what he called new measures or new methods. That were designed to produce a state of receptivity to conversion in the auditor. So, Finney became a big deal, and his style of revivalism became the prototype of much of American evangelicalism in the years to come. You can see in this the individualism that Tocqueville spotted as a feature of American life. It's a feature of this new democratic age. Reflects the can-do optimism and sense of expansive possibility that the Jacksonian moment provided. Finney's innovations were far from being the only one. So, we could spend a lot of time talking about innovations such as Mormonism or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as it's more formally known, which is another product of upstate New York and was, like so many strains of Protestant Christianity, an effort to bring back the Church of the Apostolic Age, the Church of the Time of Christ, which was simpler, more primitive, less encumbered by tradition, and in this case, more individualistic. Although, of course, Mormonism evolves into a very communal solidarity-oriented faith, and that's one of the reasons that it thrived and survived in ways that other experiments did not. Mormonism was an experimental community, and experimental communities were also a part of this era. Again, it's a sense of boundless possibility. We can reinvent the social world, and so the nation is awash in these kinds of reform possibilities. Ralph Waldo Emerson said in 1840, We are all a little mad here with numberless projects of social reform. Every man has a draft of a new community in his pocket. He exaggerated a little bit there, but this is a great era for the creation of identifiable utopian communities, which in a way always been a feature of American life as Daniel Boorstin pointed out. But many of these communities will be short-lived, but they're often fascinating in their peculiarities. Some of them tried to deconstruct the family, reconstruct marriage, impose celibacy. These had, for obvious reasons, a hard time surviving. Every other element that you can think of, diet, fads, temperance, were elements of this perfectionist streak. And I don't mean perfectionist in the bad sense of somebody who has obsessive-compulsive disorder or something like that. I mean perfectionist in the sense that believing that the human prospect was perfectible, that the Calvinist weight of original sin that can never be abolished, that waits on the grace of God to be at least, if not annulled to be atoned for, that was gone. So the sky is the limit. The anti-slavery movement was perhaps the most notable example of this, and the one in which eventually all of the other reform movements would coalesce. It was in the sense the granddaddy of them all. Starting in the 1780s, surfacing in the Missouri Compromise, that I just talked about last time. By the 1830s, it was being pursued as a religious cause. This is very important, that anti-slavery was a religious movement. It was not a secular cause. It was a grave, soul-imperiling sin, the national entanglement with slavery. Not a mere withholding of rights. The language of anti-slavery, the language of the second great awakening, which had signed on to the notion of the reform and the elimination of slavery in the South, was a big part of its essential core of the opposition to slavery as it manifested itself as a political movement. All the main players, almost all the main players in the anti-slavery movement, were committed Christians, even clergy, of evangelical or Quaker, which we can include in the evangelical camp, persuasion. William Lloyd Garrison, who was arguably one of the leading figures, was so passionate about this issue that he said the Constitution was invalidated. In fact, he said worse things than that. The Constitution was a pro-slavery document, a covenant with death, an agreement with hell. He burned a copy of the Constitution in public to make known his disfavor of it. Others were much more willing to work within the system, including eventually, in some ways, the most impressive of all the abolitionist figures, Frederick Douglass. He was born into slavery in Maryland and managed to not only escape, but educate himself and become one of the great orators of the 19th century. There was a lot of disagreement about means and ends. I can't leave the subject though without mentioning one of the most important contributions to anti-slavery, and that was the publication of a book. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, published in 1852, one of the best-selling books of the 19th century, but certainly the best-selling American novel of the 19th century. That's a lot, being published over halfway into the century. Stowe was an evangelical, came from an evangelical family, and her tale, which was an attempt to vivify and humanize the plight of slaves in the South, cut through a lot of the blindness or immune-ness, callousness, lack of awareness of Northern readers, and left a mark on all who read it. That perhaps above all else, they saw that the institution of the family, which was prized as in no other time in American history by antebellum Americans, was one of the chief casualties of slavery, that slavery tore asunder marriages which had no legal standing, and tore children away from their parents. And by vivifying this in the form of a novel, Stowe changed American attitudes and changed American history. It had an impact that may well have been greater, we can't really measure these things, than that of the abolitionists themselves. Moving in a different direction with the culture, let me just mention briefly of high culture, not that Tara Deacher Stowe's work wasn't read by an educated and an elite audience, because it was, but what it feels like high literature, philosophy and such, there was a question in the minds of many Americans as to whether America had it in itself to produce such things, literature that the whole world would want to read, the way they read the novels of English writers and French writers and Russian writers. Did America have the wherewithal to innovate on the level of culture the way it had on the level of politics? A lot of people, Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom I mentioned a minute ago, being first among them, agitated for that. Nathaniel Hawthorne, the great novelist to be agitated for it. That there needed to be an American culture worthy of the American political democracy that they had created. Some of the problem with this began with Columbus in the sense that, I remember Robert Frost's words, America can be hard to see. There are ways in which the real breakthroughs in American culture came from American writers ceasing to imitate European models on an American stage and trying to look around at American life as it actually was. Emerson was very important in this. He, in one of his great speeches, The American Scholar, he enunciated the principle that Americans, as he put it, have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The courtly muses referring to monarchy, to the court, the courtly muses of Europe. We've listened too long to them. We've tried too much to be like them. Instead of producing things that are our own, that come out of our own way of life, the conclusion of the speech, the American Scholar speech as it's called, delivered in 1837, he says with confidence in the unsearched might of man, belongs by all motives, by all prophecy, by all preparation to the American Scholar. We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of the American free man is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame. Not so, brothers and friends. Please God, ours shall not be so. We will walk on our own feet. We will work with our own hands. We will speak our own minds. A nation of men will for the first time exist because each believes himself inspired by the divine soul, which inspires all men. Well, there's a lot to say about that, but catch the individualism. Each man will feel himself inspired by the divine soul. That is a radical individualism. Other Wendell Holmes Sr., the father of the famous Supreme Court Justice, said that Emerson had produced in the American scholar address America's Intellectual Declaration of Independence, and the comparison, I think, has some aptness. Even more than Ralph Waldo Emerson, the poet Walt Whitman exemplified what might be called this Jacksonian moment in American culture. This emergence of the individual. Whitman was a poet. He wrote in unrhymed free words, which is appropriate for his sort of free and easy way of being. His first book, it shows him in a picture wearing workers' garb. You never catch Emerson wearing that kind of stuff. He had his undershirt visible, his hat cocked provocatively on his head, and saying these words, I'm not a bit tamed. I too am untranslatable. I sound my barbaric yawp above the roofs of the world, and so on and so on. He was a connoisseur of everything. The democratic impulse in him spread to the realm of sensation. Anything you could see, anything you could observe was fair game for his poetry. The odors and passions of the body, the preoccupations and occupations of workers, of bricklayers and prostitutes. He presented all of reality in this equally accepting way. All were worthy of his attention. This was the ultimate democracy of the mind and spirit. Some of it can be a little hard to take. It's undifferentiated mess at times. Whitman took years to find his proper audience. He was a little too radical for his time. But the British writer DH. Lawrence, writing in the 20th century, recognized him as achieving something beyond the literary, expressing the emerging culture of democracy. As he said, Whitman's essential message was the open road. The leaving of the soul free unto herself, the leaving of his fate to her and to the loom of the open road, which is the bravest doctrine man has ever proposed to himself, the true democracy where soul meets soul in the open road. This is a great doctrine of human dignity, of the dignity and the infinite worth of the individual person, which in some ways is the deepest aspiration of the age. In my title, I said something about a shadow for the culture of democracy. And I'm very conscious, and you should be too, that everything I've been talking about is mostly confined to the northern states. And we shouldn't be so rash as to think that the north was America. There was a south that was in some ways more prosperous and certainly politically powerful, perhaps arguably more politically powerful by the 1850s than the north was. When do we have something that we can call the south in America? It's not entirely there at the time of the Constitutional Convention. It probably is there by the time that Jefferson heard that fire bell in the night in the time of the Missouri Compromise crisis. But the south had a certain unifying distinctiveness from the start because the climate and the economic means of existence. The south was an agricultural society. It was destined to be. It had a favorable climate for almost year round cultivation of a variety of crops. It had fertile bottom land that made it ideal for growing all cotton, tobacco, rice, sugar, indigo, and so on, all of which were cash crops that could be exported for income. Cotton, of course, by the early part of the 19th century, was unarguably the most important of these. The invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney in 1793 had made cotton into a extremely attractive export product which chewed up lots of lands but was well suited to that climate and unfortunately also well suited to the use of slave labor to produce the cotton. So much of the distinctiveness of the South in the antebellum years can be traced to this very particular economy and the labor systems that evolved to support it. The South also was more self-contained than the North, less immigration, more less permeable, more conscious of its own identity as a distinctive region. So as time passed, these things reinforced one another, less immigration, and the lack of immigration made immigrants more and more reluctant to come precisely because of the fact that immigrants had not been welcomed or comfortable in the past. So the South becomes this strikingly biracial society, black and white, with the dividing line of free and enslaved, marking off the difference between the two. But in other respects, very much having things in common. The Protestant Christianity that was dominant, very little Roman Catholicism and other religious forms of religious expression in the South. How did it come that even though a tiny minority or small minority of Southern whites were slave owners and only a very tiny number of those were plantation owners with large numbers of slaves, how did it come about that white Southerners who did not have a direct stake in the institution of slavery were nevertheless inclined to defend it? That's an interesting question for which there are a number of answers. But the fact of the matter is, as the historian UB. Phillips determined a long time ago, the central theme of Southern history became this common resolve to maintain that system, which was a form of what could be called white supremacy. The white population should maintain its dominance. So that became a feature of the Old South really by the early part of the 19th century. It's puzzling in some ways that students of the Old South are struck by the way in which this brutal economic system coexisted with high intellectual culture, the elements of beauty and graciousness in the plantation like learning and high cultures, languages, piety, devotion to religious duties, all coexisting with the most ugly and brutal dehumanization. How to put that puzzle together? One of the best things, and I can only quote what they say about it, one of the best things written on the subject is by the historians, Eugene and Elizabeth Fox Genovese in their 2005 book, The Mind of the Master Class, which I strongly recommend. They asked this question, how could people who were admirable in so many ways have presided over a social system that proved itself an enormity, and inflicted horrors on their slaves? This is the generalization we have to wrestle with in trying to parse out what we think about the Old South and its place in American history. But there are certain generalizations that we can make. It was, as I've already said, an agricultural society dominated by the cultivation of cotton, and cotton became the overwhelming source of southern wealth, to the point where one slave holder, James Henry Hammond of South Carolina, boasted that at the south were to deprive England, a major textual manufacturer, of a steady supply of southern cotton, England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized world with her. No, he went on, you dare not make war on cotton. No power on earth dares to make war upon a cotton is king. Well, was there ever greater hubris than that statement? The pride that goes before a fall. Lulled into a false sense of economic security by the illusion that cotton was invincible and prices would never fall, the South became fatally committed to a brutal social and economic system that was designed for the lucrative production of cotton on a massive scale, but that achieved that productivity at an inestimable cost in human and moral terms. It placed the region on a collision course with the changing moral sensibilities of the rest of the world and the rest of America. So let me say a few words about slavery because that's a topic that I think deserves more attention than we've been able to give it so far. Slavery is a hard thing to generalize about, the condition of slavery. It wasn't any one thing. It varied a lot over time and according to region. It's actually quite fascinating how much variety there is in North American slavery. There were periods in which slavery was a looser and less confining institution than it would become. It was different in the Upper South where you didn't have the large plantations, large concentrations of slave populace. There might be one or two slaves with a family who were more like hired hands in the actual way that they lived than what we think of when we think of slavery. And then there were the enormous plantations of Louisiana and Alabama where you had hundreds, even thousands living together and confined together in the slave mini-societies, which had their own social order, their own pecking order from the household servants who were at the top of things, and they field hands who were at the bottom, who often slept on the ground in crude wooden shacks with dirt floors, and poorly fed and living in fear of the master's lash. One of the key elements, though, to understanding the culture of slavery is to understand the slave religion. And again, that too had variety, although less than you might think. And in some ways, the slave religion was a combination of African survivals, which were especially reflected in the mode of worship, the enthusiastic mode of worship, and Protestant Christian fundamentals. Slaves especially saw themselves in remarkably similar terms to the way the Puritans had seen themselves. You remember I mentioned the New England Puritans of the 17th century saw themselves as reenacting the exodus in their lives. Slaves too found the story of the exodus of the Hebrew people from Egypt and deliverance into the Promised Land very inspiring. It gave them a kind of coded way, even worshiping in the master's religion to signify their freedom and to signify their hope. Of course, the Promised Land for them was more likely to be Canada than Canaan, but the basic algebra was the same, and so many of the great spirituals reflect that. They reflect the sort of go down Moses, steal away to Jesus, rock my soul in the bosom of Abraham, these songs that have the exodus theme in some way reflected in them. Some of the slave songs are just cries, planes of sheer desperate loneliness and sadness, a kind of inconsolable longing. Sometimes I feel like a motherless child. Nobody knows the trouble I've seen. These are intensely moving expressions of this despair of being trapped inside an exploitative and dehumanizing system. Slaves had lots of small ways of resisting their condition, often feigning illness, breaking implements, farming implements and the like. But there were surprisingly few slave rebellions, and none of them were successful in the fullest sense. Even though the example of a slave rebellion in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue, which that is Haiti, which led to the murder and exile of thousands of former masters, was an example of the fact that it could be done. The one effort that came close to some degree of success was the Nat Turner Rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831, inspired by religious vision, by Nat Turner. He was inspired to kill as many of his white neighbors as he could, beginning with his master's wife and children and the master himself. It led to a very bloody uprising, killing about 60 whites, mostly women and children. And Turner was eventually caught and put to death. And the upshot of it was a sense of terror that spread through much of the South, that the institution of slavery was no longer safe, no longer something that could be counted on. There was a need to crack down, to tighten control over the slave system, ensuring that it would not come apart and no similar uprising would occur. Shortly thereafter, the Virginia General Assembly in 1831-32 discussed the issue of slavery. It's a very poignant debate because one of the things that's clear at this time, 1830s, early 1830s, is that it was still possible to have a debate about this institution, what was called the Peculiar Institution of the South. And the tenor of the debate was surprisingly critical. No one defended slavery in absolute abstract terms as something that should exist in perpetuity. The question was how to work their way out of it. But after vigorous debate, the motion was tabled. And the decision was made to wait until a more definite development of public opinion. An act that was another kicking the can down the road that doomed the state to any possible hope that slavery could be abandoned in an orderly and peaceful way. In fact, the opposite began to happen. There was such a hardening of opinion around the necessity of perpetuating slavery that writers arose who defended slavery not only as a necessary evil, but as a positive good, a way in which the order of nature was reflected in the order of society. This was racism as pure and simple as you could ever want to find it. It was a lie, these writers argued, George Fitzhugh, one of the principal ones among them. It was a lie to think all men were created equal. It was a lie to promote the idea of fundamental social equality as a value to which the country should be devoted. It was a positive good, therefore, recognize that the differences that exist were not to be overcome by adaptation of the social system. Masters should rule and slaves should obey. In fact, Fitzhugh argued that slavery in the South was much more humane than the free labor of the North, which he called wage slavery. And some Marxists have often found that an interesting argument as a way of opposing capitalism. But he said, slavery is the very best form of socialism, the best counter to the rampant competitiveness and atomization of free societies. So with Fitzhugh, we've come a very long way from the founders, from the language of the Declaration of Independence, from the culture of democracy. So you see why I called this The Shadow. It's not clear how widespread the pro-slavery arguments acceptance was. But the fact that it was made publicly is yet another sign that the division between the North and South as two distinct cultures was hardening. And that was an ominous development that had nothing but bad portent for the future.

Speaker 2:
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