Recent “woke” campaigns have raised a legitimate question: How could the founders of our country espouse the ideals of freedom, especially in the Declaration of Independence, and still support slavery?
A related question (not so often asked by critical theorists) is: How did the country ultimately conduct a deadly war (with 600,000 combatants killed) to end slavery?
Two related essays shed light on both questions. One is by Jeffrey D. Grynaviski and Michael Munger, the other by Michael Munger and Daniel Klein.[1]
The argument reflected in these essays is that ideological, emotional, and political support for slavery changed over time. Southern founders such as Washington and Jefferson believed that slavery was a “necessary evil,” but a temporary one. Beginning around 1830 (after most if not all the founders were dead) Southern elites argued instead that slavery was a “positive good.” The development of what Grynaviski and Munger call institutional racism was a “conscious project of ideological reconstruction.”[2]
Munger and Klein summarize the process.[3]
“What precipitated the change were movements and growing recriminations against the slaveholders, for being unjust. The slaveholders responded with more injustice. They could not control voices in the North, but Southern governments could control their subjects. Slaveholders and government resorted to ‘cancel culture’ and heightened oppression, to protect . . . the legal enslavement of human beings. . . .
“The shackles grew tighter.”
In other words, the growing pressure against slavery after 1830 led to ever more powerful efforts to preserve it. The shackles grew tighter as the stakes grew higher, as slaveholders’ fears of rebellion and abolition grew. And that spurred a shift in the defense of slavery, to racism.
“The ideology of racism allowed slave owners to live with the contradiction between owning slaves and seeing themselves as Christian, ” write Grynavisky and Munger. In 1835 the Charleston Mercury even published articles arguing that “Christianity actually required race-based slavery,” they point out. [4]
Slavery became a “positive good” that benefited slaves as well as slaveowners and the economy of the South. This happened as the political conflict over slavery increased, from Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831 to the infamous Dred Scott decision of 1857. Famous milestones include the nullification crisis of 1832 (a battle over state’s rights), the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, and the “Bleeding Kansas” fight over expanding slavery in the 1850s.
The Two Views
Grynaviski and Munger outline the two views of slavery by Southern elites. (The following is a direct quote from their paper.) [6]
Slavery as a necessary evil
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- Slavery is incompatible with liberal ideals and sustainable agricultural development
- Abolition is inevitable
- Racial prejudice and fear justified restrictions on manumission and delaying emancipation, to protect society.
Slavery as a positive good
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- Slavery is implied by liberal ideals, because it brings civilization to the slave, republican character to the owner, and protects “workers” better than wage labor
- Abolition is impossible
- Racial prejudice justified paternalism and further restrictions on slaves’ rights, not least for the benefit of the slaves themselves.
The Messages
Taken together, these essays have two powerful messages. Grynavisky and Munger speak directly to historical questions, but also raise a more fundamental one.
Seeing “moral evil, justified as a positive good,” [5] they wonder how often this justification takes place. In some cases, perhaps it is inevitable.
“To put it starkly, if the reader (or the authors) had been born to a wealthy slave-owning white family in 1820, would that person have had the independent moral strength to reject slavery? . . . [W] e are not so sure.”
Munger and Klein suggest that our nation today (and other so-called democratic nations) may be experiencing a comparable road to despotism. They see the dynamic of the South in the mid-nineteenth century and today’s efforts at government control to be similar: government actions that violate traditional laws, leading to vigorous opposition and increasing resistance. The result, they say, may be tyranny, which in the nineteenth-century South, led to war.
Notes
[1] Jeffrey D. Grynaviski and Michael C. Munger, “Reconstructing Racism: Transforming Racial Hierarchy from ‘Necessary Evil’ into ‘Positive Good,'” Social Philosophy & Policy 34, no. 1 (Summer, 2017): 144–163; Michael Munger and Daniel B. Klein, “The Descent into Tyranny,” American Institute for Economic Research, Sept. 18, 2022.
[2] Grynavisky and Munger, 145, 163.
[3] Munger and Klein.
[4] Grynavisky and Munger, 146.
[5] Grynavisky and Munger, 146.
[6] Grynavisky and Munger, 158.
[7] Grynavisky and Munger, 147.