Each semester when the class studies the literature surrounding slavery and Abolitionism, I see a variation on the question, "I wouldn't condone slavery. How could they?" My response is that slave owners and early Americans were just people, no better and no worse than others--including us today. Helping students "get" the fact that the authors they read are people just like them is often the first step toward getting students to move beyond seeing history and literature as something foreign and safely left behind when you move from school to life. We create and live history everyday, and the literatures--the written texts which help create our history--may seem everyday, unimportant texts to us, but they're not. We study literature to understand ourselves, others, and our past; others will study the texts we create to understand their selves, their past, and us.
So, here is a brief history of slavery in the Americas and why the Anglo who taught a slave girl Bible verses could think of herself as doing good and slavery as a good for all.
The acceptance of the ideas of equality and freedom were far from universal in America, especially early one. Most people thought the Revolution would fail, and it took Washington's victory at Trenton and Tom Paine's propaganda to begin to get folks out of their homes and into the field. Even then, ideas like a Bill of Rights were controversial among many of the leaders, who feared giving voting privileges to what they called, "the mob." By the time of the Revolution, long standing ideas of class and race were already well entrenched. The Enlightenment challenged these ideas and provided a strong, self-consistent world view and, equally important, the discursive means on which to construct a society which would, eventually erode in-equalities based on gender, race, and class. Notice I said, "erode," because the supper-structure of these very powerful memes remains with us, and gets used every day in how our own society works.
The Christianity argument is more complicated, and it is made more complicated because we tend to associated Christianity with love of neighbor and others as "brothers" and "sisters." As a religion, Christianity is at its best when it focuses on these aspects of its ideology, but you need to remember that the humans and human institutions which embody Christianity are now over 2000 years old. Religions and other social ideologies do not survive for this long if they are not robust enough to allow expression of the entire range of human action, nor do they survive if they cannot be co-opted and used for the ends of those in power. For over and eon, the Church existed side-by-side with feudal systems of government, and these were the norm until the Catholic Church was challenged in the Reformation. If you want to see how brutal Christians can be to other Christians, study the 30 Years War and the history of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. You also might look at the Christian institutions which grew up to support the expulsion of Muslims and Jews from Spain. These effort to unite Spain under a Christian government succeeded the same year that Columbus sat sail--1492.
Here is the kicker. One means used to justify contact and conquest of the Americas was bringing the heathen Indians under the rule of Spain and Portugal, making these areas Christian and, in the process, bringing Christianity to the peoples of, say, the Caribbean. There were honest, well-meaning court cases where folks worked out and established in Catholic and secular law that Indians were indeed human and had souls and, hence, deserved the same treatment as the Moors and Jews of Spain, that is, a chance to accept the king and Pope as rulers and to accept and be taught Christianity. Of course the flip side of the coin was that this acceptance had to be immediate, and if one didn't accept King and Pope as one's ruler, then one acknowledged that you and yours deserved to be treated as vassals in revolt, whose family could be taken and who deserved to be made slave and have war made on you and yours. Ninety plus percent of the Indian population in the Caribbean died. At the time, the word genocide didn't exist, but it applies. Even though it was challenged and the worst of it was mitigated by Christian brothers like Las Crusas, all was done under the legal and moral fiction that Spain was doing the Indians the favor of giving them a chance to go to heaven and move from being savages to becoming Christian.
OK, here is how all this ties back into Jacobs, the Bible verses she was taught, and why you can't see the people of the era as ignorant. Without the Spanish depopulation of the Indians of the Caribbean, chances are the use of Africans as slaves would not have happened, at least to the degree that it did. Those dead Indians were the peon population which allowed plantations to spring up in the Caribbean, plantations which were driven by a growing taste in Europe for sugar--once a luxury only enjoyed by the nobility. The death of the Indian population created a labor shortage which was filled by building on traditions of slave trading in West Africa. In many respects Africans made better plantation labor slaves than had the Indians. Africans were displaced, so they didn't have ken hiding in the back woods and ready to absorb them if they ran away. Africans were usually marked by the color of their skin, so they were easily recognizable as slaves in any mixed population. Taken from many language groups and social traditions, they were often reliant on the social infrastructure of Spanish society to provide a common language and communal structure in which to live.
As the institutions of social control needed to make a society based on slavery work, Spain developed ideas about race, which they borrowed from the interactions with Moors and Indians, which were to become mainstays of how slavery was justified in the minds of the slave owners. One of these was that the Spanish were ultimately doing African Slaves good by exposing them to a "higher" civilization than their own and, in specific, introducing Christianity and the opportunity to be saved. These notions easily transferred into the English traditions surrounding African Slavery, since English Plantation life was largely modeled on that of one of their main trading partners--the Caribbean. By teaching Jacobs the Bible, her owners and others in the community were allowing Jacobs to become like them. They gave her an opportunity to be saved, and slavery was seen as a small price to pay for such an opportunity. Moreover, there are passages in the Bible which can be interpreted and used to justify slavery as an institution. Once you can build on the idea that someone is not yet your equal and you are doing good by educating them, you can justify all kinds of evil.
Most of the thinkers in the Revolution knew that slavery was incomparable with the great experiment and the keystone of the new American society that "all men are created equal." That picture in the assignments for the week came from an early advertisement for the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Society. Ben Franklin was a founding member. Washington and Jefferson both acknowledged that if the Christian God were a Just one they trembled for the price American would have to ultimately pay for the stain of slavery. As you will see when you read the Declaration this semester, Jefferson and Franklin did all they could to get the delegates to adopt a version which condemned slavery as a British affront to natural human equality. The proposed text never made it into the final version. They tried again when our current constitution was adopted, but the truth was that the young Nation needed the south to be strong enough to survive when surrounded by European powers on every side. Sometime look at who controlled the continent and surrounded the New Republic. The founders were confronted with the need for some kind of compromise, and the one they picked was to allow slavery to continue as an institution while creating the ground and the institutions, like religion freedom and freedom of the speech and press, which would erode and challenge slavery from within. Sometimes, you don't fight and win the good fight; sometimes you fight the battles you can win and which set up others to carry on the good fight.
These men were not evil; at least, they are no more evil than most other humans. Most people don't get up and decide to oppress others. Everyone has self consistent rhetorics, ideologies, and rationalizations which allow us to overlook the evils we propagate. The founders and the slave owners did as well. This isn't ignorance; at worst, it is selective blindness and an unwillingness to sacrifice for others. Few realized that a taste for cheap tea, chocolate, tobacco, and sugar drove plantations systems which had to have slaves to produce them. Think of all our own outcries surrounding cheap gas, which we "need" to sustain our own way of life, but most buying gas do not consider themselves evil. Those wearing cheap cloths rarely think about the producer of those clothes and the lives these producers live and the oppression and poverty they must endure for a $10-20 tee shirt. We see the shirt and the needs we have for the money we save to take care of our own family, who seem so much more important, than families half way around the world. We can tell ourselves that we are doing good for these families by providing them with some income. You could go on considering the evils of our own society and those we condone in our everyday lives. We too are human.
Once you get your head about the fact that everyone in history were every bit as human and as smart as you and were dealing with their lives as best they could, you'll be a step closer to understanding history as it happened as opposed to how we wished it would have happened. The fact that the founders were willing to sacrifice so much to get the great experiment started deserves gratitude, respect, and study. The fact that people like Garrison, Jacobs, and Child were able to look at the institutions everyone else saw and accepted and say, "These do evil and must be changed," deserve gratitude, respect, and study. It take a tremendous among of courage to be able to see and articulate a better way of living and to then sacrifice to bring these better ways of living into reality against all the existing competition.
By the way, this is one reason that the Early Ame Lit class exists. By studying those who resisted positive change and those who were able to help pull it off, we learn techniques and methods we can use to make positive change in our own lives, society, and world. At the least, we begin to develop a sense of who deserves to be taken as a personal hero. In turn, these heroes help us recognize those in our own world who are moving use in good directions and helps use focus our support of them, so we can use our own resources do help were we can in the best way we can.
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