"If Slavery isn't wrong, nothing is wrong"

The Virginia Sesquicentennial conference last week consisted of four panel discussions. I wasn't sure what to expect from the format, but this experience showed that when it is done well, it is a great approach, something that could be applied to almost any subject. In each case the President of the University of Richmond, Ed Ayers (himself a Civil War scholar) led a discussion among four panelists each of whom had a lengthy resume of Civil War scholarship.

The one topic that I thought would be of least interest to me was about Virginia in 1859, primarily because it would be of more local interest. Yet like the rest it turned out to be a fascinating discussion especially the 20 minutes or so that was devoted to the slave trade in Richmond (picture above in an 19th century drawing). Apparently the records of one slave trading company survive and one of the panelists had analyzed the figures. As I remember them, this one slave trader reported annual volume of about $2 million (about $40 million in today's money) and this was only one of four or five large slave trading operations in Richmond.

As the discussion went on, it made it clear how the slave trade permeated every aspect of Richmond both its economy and its society. No matter what aspect of life the panelists talked about it seemed clear that the slave trade was accepted as a normal business and there was no one who opposed it in any significant way. To me, at that point, the tone was almost one of despair when one of the panelists finally said that he had grown up in the segregated south which was another society that tolerated something that was morally wrong. This led to some discussion about the idea that there is something in human nature that allows us to accept or at least tolerate things that we know are wrong.

My immediate reaction when I heard this was to think of something that I read somewhere about Shakespeare's play, "Richard III." The critic, whoever, he or she was, said that one of the major points of the play is the importance of resisting evil. It just demonstrates once more the broad application of Shakespeare to almost every human situation.

This discussion brought home as clearly as anything I have heard heard or read about the horror of slavery. Thinking about it, my sense is that slavery was such a terrible institution because it draws on three of the worst human sins - racism, greed and lust - the latter because of the way black women were further exploited by white men. Each of these sins is powerful by itself, combined together they would have incredible power. For example, if blacks are inferior and worthy only to be slaves, then there is every reason to exploit them for both economic and sexual reasons. Seen like this, Abraham Lincoln's quote which is the title for this post seems even more accurate and appropriate.

This panel discussion was the second of the two morning sessions, the next immediately after lunch was entitled "Making Sense of John Brown." The discussion about slavery put the John Brown discussion in context and set the stage for that difficult issue - something that will be the subject of the next post.