The Moral Setting

What you sow is what you reap.

—The Bible, Galatians 6:7

Come, saints and sinners, hear me tell

How pious priests whip Jack and Nell,

And women buy and children sell,

And preach all sinners down to hell,

And sing of heavenly union

—Frederick Douglass, “The Parody,” 1854

Abraham Lincoln had a secret. During the election campaign for the Senate in 1858 he made his famous speech on slavery in the Union: “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or the other.”¹

In the presidential campaign of 1860, Lincoln changed tack: “I have no purpose directly or indirectly to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” Such contradictions defined the dilemma of Lincoln’s supporters and opponents because he never provided a direct answer even when the issue was repeatedly debated with his opponent Stephen A. Douglas. How did Lincoln intend to abolish slavery in the South without interfering with it? “Lincoln never poured out his soul to any mortal creature at any time . . . He was the most secretive, reticent, shut mouthed man that ever existed.” This studied opinion from his former law partner, William H. Herndon, defined the enigmatic characteristic of Abraham Lincoln’s personality. An understanding of Lincoln’s ambiguity provides the key to understanding the crisis of the Civil War and the lessons to be learned from it.²

Lincoln said slavery was morally wrong. So did some Southerners. Robert E. Lee, the Commander-in-Chief of the army of Northern Virginia, described it in 1856 as “a moral and political evil in any country. I think it, however, a greater evil to the white than to the black race.” Slavery had existed in one form or another long before biblical times. There was no agreement on why slavery was morally wrong or a moral and political evil. Nor did Lee elaborate why slavery was a greater evil for the white race. Historians have suggested that if slavery were immoral, it had to have adverse consequences. To prove it, they have attempted to establish a cause-and-effect relationship between immoral acts and historical consequences; particularly, the relationship between slavery and secession on the one hand, and the Civil War on the other. They have had their work cut out for them, as the journey from the advent of slavery to its demise in the USA, following the Civil War, does not represent the triumph of human rights over human wrongs.³

Looked at another way, slavery may be seen largely as a story of man’s inhumanity towards man, fueled by a lust for wealth that prompted a denial of the basic catholicity of mankind. Slavery also created a tumultuous relationship between two geographical regions with different economic fundamentals: Each region’s wealthy few had an overwhelming desire for social control in order to amass wealth. Enormous duplicity informed the interactions between one white man and another within each region and among them. The inclusion of slavery and its institutionalization in the Constitution to satisfy greed were the principal outcomes. While much has apparently changed in the social structures since the war, there is reason to ask whether even today there has been a fundamental shift in the unfairness of American society.

Morality Tests

A universal test of political morality is whether it provides good over a long period of time for the greatest number of people. Usually it takes several generations for the cause-and-effect relationships of a set of actions to work out in a specific setting. Lincoln observed that morality required faith that right begets might. Immorality assumed might was right and looked for immediate rewards without regard to long-term consequences. Usually politically immoral action is guided by the time frame of an election or term of office.

Yet again, the political test for moral action may lie in whether it results in more good than evil. Lincoln explained the moral way of arriving at decisions:

The true rule, in determining to embrace or reject anything, is not whether it have any evil in it, but whether it have more of evil than of good. There are few things wholly evil or wholly good. Almost everything, especially of governmental policy, is an inseparable compound of the two; so that our best judgment of the preponderance between them is continually demanded.

A general test for morality in a democracy is whether it is good for the majority of the population over a period extended to generations. Lincoln related the morality of slavery to the history of all mankind in the following way:

There are two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same spirit that says, you work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it. No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.⁴

Evaluating the political morality of slavery requires an understanding of how it affected different population segments in the North and South for over two centuries. It is also necessary to take into account the relationships of the institutions in control, such as the monarchy or the church, and their representatives in a distant colony. The early colonists made choices regarding slavery based on historical precedent and available experience with far-reaching consequences for whites and blacks. Understanding the cause and effect of their choices is essential to see how the dominant groups deceived the majority of their people in order to garner support for their own self-serving objectives.

The early Southern colonies had built-in segmentation for at least three economic classes: the slaveholders, the slaves, and the non-slaveholders. Their mutual relationship is germane to any evaluation of the morality of slavery. The slaveholders were a minority who benefited from slavery because they initiated and controlled the institution. The slaves, victims of the institution, had to be a minority, lest they seize any opportunity to overpower the slaveholders and free themselves. In the majority were the non-slaveholders, who did not benefit from slavery but whose cooperation was essential in controlling the economy and protecting slaveholders from the slaves.

Slavery also divided the country into two sections, the North and the South, based not only on geography but also on the proportion of blacks in the population. The Southern economy was based on black slave labor and whites had to live with them. The North, with a tiny black population of around two percent, was not economically dependent on black labor and was largely indifferent to what Southerners did with their blacks so long as they kept them in the South.

The other interesting influences around the issue of the morality of slavery were the church and king of England. He did not care what the slaveholders did in his faraway colonies so long as he received his profits, nor had he any experience with black slavery. After the Revolution, the slaveholders, rid of the king, wrote a Constitution that preserved their peculiar institution. Most slaveholders were Protestants and did not have to comply with the Pope’s directives on slavery, as did the Catholics. From the outset, Protestants assumed the authority of the king in interpreting the Bible for their own convenience, eliminating the role of the church in questions of slavery and morality.

The final influence on this socio-economic phenomenon was the white indentured servant who worked on the cash crop, tobacco. As an extension of an English custom, young men and women bound themselves to a master for between four and seven years in exchange for a passage to America, food, and shelter. White indentured servants were considered by Southern colonists to be more difficult to handle than the slaves and had to be kept at bay with slave power. Therefore, the slaveholders installed a legal infrastructure permitting permanent control over black slaves through generations. To prevent any interference by the church, they passed laws that the baptism of a black as a Christian would not affect his status as a slave.

Evolution of Slavery

Perhaps the most dominating influence in the process was the Protestant faith of the early colonists in the South. As the South set out its own slave legislation agenda, it selected as its model English Protestant slavery as developed in the West Indies. This could be compared with the French Catholic slavery of Louisiana. The two systems were based on different relationships between the slaveholder, the slave, the non-slaveholder, the king, and the church.

The code of Protestant slavery was first defined by legislation in Barbados, among the earliest British settlements in the tropics with a plantation system dependent on black slaves. Following a dozen minor laws to control the blacks since 1644, Barbados adopted a comprehensive slavery statute that came into force in 1688. When South Carolina needed a general statute in 1712, the assembly virtually copied the Barbadian Act of 1688. Later, Georgia in 1770 and Florida in 1822 based their laws on the South Carolina code. A similar set of laws was adopted by Virginia and passed on to Maryland, Delaware, and North Carolina, making the Protestant slave code the law of the South.

The preamble to the general statute of 1688 points out that the plantation industry was dependent upon great numbers of Negro slaves whose “barbarous, wild and savage nature…renders them wholly unqualified to be governed by the laws, customs and practices of our nation,” and the need for separate laws and orders to “restrain the disorders, rapines and inhumanities to which they are naturally prone and inclined.” Because Protestant slavery codes denied the humanity of blacks, laws applicable to the white slaveholders, yeoman farmers, and indentured servants were not applicable to them. For black men, the slaveholder would be the accuser, the judge, and the executioner; and he would countenance no interference in the management of his slave property from other citizens, black or white. Indeed, the Protestant slavery laws prevented blacks from entering into contracts of any nature, even marriage.⁵

The Protestant slavery codes defined all blacks as slaves, with the color of their skin providing the necessary evidence. A Maryland law of 1663 said, “All Negroes or other slaves within the provinces, and all Negroes and other slaves to be hereafter imported into the province, shall serve durante vita; and all children born of any Negro or other slave, shall be slaves as their fathers were, for the term of their lives.”⁶

The Catholic slavery code, the Code Noir, was promulgated by the French State in 1685, and an improved version was decreed by Louis XV for the colony of Louisiana in 1724. In 1763, the French colony was transferred to Spain and returned to the France of Napoleon I in 1801. It became a part of the United States with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. Originally the purchased territory was set up as the Territory of Orleans, becoming a state in 1812 under the old name of Louisiana. After Louisiana entered the United States, the Catholic slavery code was gradually replaced by its Protestant counterpart, so that by the time of the Civil War, Louisiana was almost indistinguishable from the other Southern states in its treatment of blacks.⁷

According to the Code Noir, blacks were human beings and subject to the same law as whites; slavery was not a condition defined by color; a black man could be a slave or he could be free. Indeed, in the absence of proof to the contrary, a black man was assumed to be free just as in the case of a white man. The Code Noir, decreed by the king in France, treated slaveholders, slaves, and non-slaveholders as the subjects of the king, with rights and responsibilities. Blacks—whether slave or free—had a legal right to marry, a right to life, and to safeguards against abuse while fulfilling their contracts as slaves. They could be baptized, become Christians, and stand on an equal footing with whites in the sight of God and the Church. A black man was a member of the community, and the non-slaveholders and the Church had a say in his treatment. Having made a provision for free blacks, Catholic slavery provided an infrastructure for the gradual abolition of slavery if the circumstances required it.

The roots of the variance lay in the Catholics’and Protestants’ historical experience. Negroes had been brought to the Iberian Peninsula as slaves in the mid-fifteenth century. Slavery, which had ended in the rest of Western Europe, survived there because the continuing wars with the Moors provided war captives as slaves. At the end of the fifteenth century, Portugal and Spain had numerous slaves, including Negroes, Moors, Jews, and Spaniards. By the mid-sixteenth century, Negroes outnumbered whites in Lisbon. As late as 1616, the law speaks of baptized Moorish slaves. Catholic slavery had a long tradition of slave law that had come down from the Justinian Code. By the time the Catholics came to America, they had over two hundred years of experience and a body of slave laws to guide their actions. When black men were brought to the new continent, a slave slot previously filled by Moors or Jews was available to them.⁸

In contrast, Protestant slavery in the Americas was a novel phenomenon for the British, who had no previous experience with blacks. British common law had a written contract for indentured servants, but long-term slavery for life was unknown to them. As land was scarce and the number of paupers abundant, the British could not imagine why anybody would want to accept the responsibility of feeding another person for life. Therefore, slavery was not only inconceivable in law but also in thought. Because of the remote nature of the American colony, the king and parliament allowed the slaveholders total freedom to maximize profits. In defining the Protestant slavery code, the slaveholders maximized profits by eliminating interference from non-slaveholders and the church, and by ignoring considerations of morality and precedents for the future.

Cause and Effect

Lincoln hinted that the Civil War was the day of reckoning for the misdeeds of the slaveholders. In his Second Inaugural Address, he prayed that the War might quickly end:

Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bondman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn by the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, “the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.”⁹

In a democracy, ballots are supposed to substitute for bullets to resolve differences between different classes of people. Yet Lincoln’s victory in the 1860 presidential election caused the Southern states to secede from the union. Why did the South believe that it could win with bullets what they had lost at the ballot box? Was the Constitution, the handiwork of the slaveholders which dictated the rules of the election, rigged? Obviously, the slaveholders controlled the federal government, including the presidency, for over two-thirds of the time before the Civil War. Clearly they understood the rules of the game. Why were the Southern states so alarmed by the election of Abraham Lincoln, and why did the slaveholders feel they had no option other than to secede?

After the end of the Civil War, Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States, insisted that slavery “was in no wise the cause of the conflict,” without offering any specific explanation for his statement. That is why it is necessary to clearly establish the cause-and-effect relationship between slavery and the Civil War.¹⁰

The same Constitution—whose checks and balances of freedom of the press and the independence of the legislative, judicial, and executive branches, was thwarted by the slaveholders—that was in force before the Civil War, was in effect with amendments after the war. It was not meant to guarantee the rule of the people, for the people, and by the people because it was written by the slaveholders to closely protect their interests. Constitutional checks and balances were bound to be historically circumvented. Abraham Lincoln noted this wide gap between the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the actual operation of the Constitution in his Peoria speech of 1854:

This declared indifference, but as I must think, covert real zeal for the spread of slavery, I cannot but hate. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world—enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites—causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty—criticizing the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self interest.¹¹

Historian Charles A. Beard observed that slavery was “no simple, isolated phenomenon. It was a labor system, the foundation of the Southern aristocracy. It took more than a finite eye to discern where slavery as an ethical question left off and economics—the struggle over the distribution of wealth—began.” If the Civil War was in reality a war over the distribution of wealth, that is, the class system, it has important lessons to offer. Some Southerners have pointed out that the North had a white “wage slavery” system before the Civil War. The Civil War and the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution abolished only the black Protestant slavery of the South and acknowledged the humanity of the blacks, but “wage slavery” as practiced in the North has continued. Abraham Lincoln, who realized the dangers of wage slavery, thought a class of yeoman farmers, who would be the foundation of the Republican form of government, would check its abuses. It is therefore possible to see the Civil War as an economic class war and a second American Revolution. Learning these lessons about balance in the economic class system for political stability may prevent other social upheavals in the future.¹²

One historian has suggested:

That the Lord seems to have worked back to his Old Testament phase, bent on an eye for an eye and the wiping out of armies. For every Negro slave hustled ashore filthy and naked in North America, a white man was to die in fratricidal violence; for every misbegotten excuse for treating men like things, a white man would lie festering in a fly-fetid hospital; for every free Negro treated as subhuman by Northerners reproaching the South for the crime of slavery, a Yankee would succumb to some foul camp disease; for every mulatto sold to strangers by his own cousins, a white child would be orphaned. The score had long accumulated, and compounding interest had long since dwarfed the principal.

About the morality of slavery, Thomas Jefferson said: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that this justice cannot sleep for ever; that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation is among possible events; that it may become probable by supernatural interference!” We shall also see how numbers, nature, and natural means combined in the American setting to make the Civil War as inevitable as the day of reckoning.¹³