The US Constitution: A More Perfect Union?

"The Constitution in Danger!" is a cry we hear constantly now, and it is no overreaction. The illegitimate fascist Trump regime violates the document on a daily basis. What is too often overlooked is that the constitution itself contains weaknesses and loopholes that allowed someone like Trump to come to power and act with disregard for the law. 

For too long people believed, or said, that the constitution would protect us against such an outcome. Separation of powers, the courts, Congress -- all have failed to do what they were designed to do, provide checks on unbridled power. The 14th amendment should have prevented Trump from even running for president, for inciting the January 6 insurrection. Many people believed it would, including yours truly. We can blame greed, corruption, bigotry, stupidity, treachery or fear, but those are things the constitution is supposed to guard against: human failings.

I grew up learning that the "Founding Fathers" were supremely wise men who drew up a "more perfect" constitution for the new United States in 1787. Leaving aside the problematic nature of the phrase "more perfect," how perfect was it? The present situation of the USA indicates some major imperfections.

One of its goals, obviously, was to cement the union of the former colonies, now states. The new constitution was an improvement in that sense on the country's first constitution, the Articles of Confederation, drawn up during the War for Independence. The Articles gave the states too much power and the central government too little. But the improvement made by the new constitution didn't prevent the secession of eleven "Confederate States" in 1860-61, leading to a bloody civil war, and 600,000 battle deaths.   

The main reason for that tragedy was the failure of the Founding Fathers to solve the problem of slavery. Many of them were disturbed by the existence of slavery in a country that famously proclaimed human equality and liberty in its Declaration of Independence. But nearly half of the delegates also "owned" people, including George Washington and James Madison, who wrote the first drafts of the Constitution. Their handling the slave issue reminds one of St. Augustine's oft-quoted line, "Lord, make me chaste, but not yet."

The framers agreed to end the African slave trade, but not until 1807. The horrors of the Middle Passage continued legally for twenty more years, and to some extent illegally afterwards. A fugitive "labor" clause required that the enslaved who escaped to another state must be returned their "rightful owners." The words "slave" and "slavery" were not used in the Constitution. The framers avoided them, believing that they would sully the document. But what was there was sullying enough. 

The infamous 3/5ths clause allowed states to count the enslaved as 3/5ths of a person for purposes of representation, a concession that gave the southern states more representation in the House of Representatives and the Electoral College than they should have had. Thus the legitimacy of slavery was enshrined into the Constitution and the spread of slavery into new states became a contentious issue until the Civil War.

Democracy was another thorny issue the makers of the Constitution had to confront. They wanted to prevent it, not promote it. They feared it. Democracy, they believed, led to chaos, tyranny, and expropriation of the wealthy (people like themselves). 

The Constitution they designed contained several sections designed to minimize popular influence in politics. It provided that Senators be elected by state legislatures, and that presidents be elected by an "Electoral College" chosen by the same bodies. Voters chose the members of the House of Representatives, but who were the voters? 

All of the states placed various restrictions on voting such as poll taxes or literacy tests. Women were excluded from voting until 1919. The enslaved could technically vote after 1865, but were often prevented legally and illegally from exercising it for nearly a century afterwards.   

Many of the anti-democratic provisions of 1787 such as those above have been reversed by amendments to the Constitution. But not entirely. All eligible voters can now vote for president. But it is not the popular vote that decides the winner: It's the undemocratic Electoral College of 1787. Twice in this young century the winner of the popular vote has failed to win the presidency.  

Senators, too, are now elected by popular vote. But the Senate remains a fundamentally undemocratic body. The Constitution provided that each state could elect two senators. That was a concession to the smaller states, who feared being dominated by the larger ones if the Senate was based on population, as the House of Representatives was. Thus, we have the absurdity that Wyoming with a little over 500,000 people, and California with 39 million, both elect two senators.  

The House of Representatives is theoretically democratic, but the distribution of House seats is often skewed undemocratically by gerrymandering the borders of electoral districts. This done by the parties who control the state legislatures. Various attempts to restrict certain voters from voting make things even worse. 

The opposition to the Trump presidency stresses its commitment to "Save Democracy." I fully support that. But we should acknowledge that we are working with an imperfect constitution, and its imperfections have paved the way for an aspiring fascist dictatorship. We should be calling for a movement to "Create Democracy."  

In 1787 a member of the public allegedly asked delegate Ben Franklin what the framers had created. "A republic, if you can keep it," Franklin replied. Notably, Franklin did not say a "democracy." Today, we should be saying that our goal is "a democracy, if we can make it."

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Robert Burns and Women's Rights

The 25th of January is the birthday of Scottish poet Robert Burns (1759-1796). On the evening of that day, millions of his fans around the world gather for a "Burns' Supper" in his honor. After a meal of haggis, neeps, and tatties* they drink a toast of whisky to "The Bard" and listen to some of his poems. At midnight on January 1, much of the world sings "Auld Lang Syne," the song based on Burns' poem of that name. They pledge to "take a cup o' kindness yet, for auld lang syne!" 

Kindness appears in short supply around the world these days, and the supply is dwindling as rapidly as the number of eggs in Trump's USA. I wonder how many MAGAts sang those words about kindness this New Years with sincerity. 

But kindness, however crucial, is not my main theme here. It is human rights. Burns was a staunch defender of the rights of women as well as men. He wasn't always sensitive to that need. He was something of a womanizer, to put it bluntly. 

Before he became famous for his poetry, he had decided to take a job as an overseer and bookkeeper on a Jamaican sugar plantation, which was worked by enslaved Africans. He changed plans after his book of poetry was published to great acclaim in 1786. It is not clear if he ever denounced African slavery, at least directly. But he denounced injustice and inequality, notably in  "A Man's a Man for a' That."

For a few years after the publication of his book, Burns was the toast of Edinburgh, mingling with and lionized by Scotland's elite. That changed after the French Revolution began in 1789. Like many young men in Europe, he supported that revolution, and the earlier American one. The Scottish elite did not, and most of them distanced themselves from the radical Burns. He left Edinburgh and returned to farm near Dumfries, close to his birthplace. He married and became an exciseman (collector of customs duties), a government job that may have restrained his political radicalism. 

In 1792, Burns wrote "The Rights Of Women." The first stanza sets the tone:

While Europe's eye is fixed on mighty things,

The fate of empires and the fall of Kings;

While quacks of State must each produce his plan, 

And even children lisp the Rights of Man;

Amid this mighty fuss just let me mention,

The Rights of Woman merit some attention.

The poem was highly topical. Thomas Paine had just published The Rights of Man and Mary Wollstonecraft A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. These works alarmed and horrified the elites of Britain and much of Europe. By echoing their rhetoric in poetry, Burns marked himself as suspect in their eyes. 

The last stanza of the poem quoted approvingly a rallying cry of the French revolutionaries, "ca ira!" ("it will be fine") and seemed to place the "Majesty of Woman" above that of kings. 

By today's standards, Burns' list of women's rights may seem rather conservative. The rights he demanded were not political or even legal. They included protection, decorum (good manners), admiration and respect for women's opinions and influence. Good romantic that he was, Burns argued that the power of women lay in their ability to soften the harsher aspects of man's nature. 

All that may sound old-fashioned and anti-feminist, and certainly the sentiments were seized on by Victorian conservatives as an argument against women's suffrage and legal rights. But juxtapose Burns' praise of women to MAGAt statements and behavior toward women, and the difference is stark. Burns may have been something of a womanizer, but he never claimed things like "Your body, my choice." 

On this January 25, let's "take a cup of kindness" and have a wee dram in honor of "Rabbie" Burns, recently voted "The Greatest Scot." He narrowly beat out William Wallace, "Braveheart." 

*Neeps are turnips, tatties are potatoes.

PS. The first Burns Supper took place in Greenock, the town where I was born, on January 29th, 1801, which the organizers mistakenly though to be his birthday. It was later changed to the correct date of January 25th and has been held every year since on that day.

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A War Between History and Memory: The American Revolution

The 250th anniversary of the American Revolution and War for Independence is nearly upon us. It is destined to reach new heights of commercialism, with beer companies no doubt leading the parade. Corny commemorations and mythical tales will all be a part of the celebration. Will there be room for calm reflection on the events of 1775-1783? Not much, I fear, especially in the Age of Trump and MAGA. Even in the best of times, dispassionate analysis of great events tends to be in short supply, overwhelmed and marginalized by the popular taste for hoopla. On this occasion calm analysis is likely to be obliterated by Trumpist censorship. 

The revolution will of course be celebrated as a great victory for liberty and equality. That is true in part, though more in the rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence than in reality. Awkwardly, it was also a war to preserve slavery. 

In 1773, British judge Lord Mansfield declared in the Somerset Case that slavery had no basis in English law. The Somerset ruling aroused panic in the southern colonies, and helped unite them with the northern colonies, where the rallying cry was the more historically palatable "no taxation without representation." Traditional narratives of the revolution have tended to emphasize Britain's attacks on colonial liberty while ignoring the colonist's denial of liberty to the enslaved.   

Alarmed southern slaveholders denied the right of Parliament to pass laws affecting the internal or domestic affairs of the colonies. Slavery, they argued, was a domestic issue. In 1775, on the verge of war, they accused the British of plotting slave revolts and Indian attacks as a means of subduing the rebellious colonies. In 1776, they decided that independence was necessary to prevent emancipation and loss of control over enslaved Blacks. 

In that sense the War for Independence had more in common with the Civil War than is generally acknowledged. Looked at from the perspective of the enslaved population, both were wars for liberty. Many Blacks absorbed the rhetoric of their white masters and saw the Revolutionary War as an opportunity to secure their freedom, by joining the British. Historians estimate that around 100,000 enslaved persons ran off to British lines between 1775 and 1783, 25,000 in South Carolina alone. They were not complacent bystanders, but active participants in the struggles that gave birth to a nation. 

History is often unpleasant, messy, and chaotic. It is seldom as simple as we would like it to be. Historical myth is the opposite: neat, generally pleasing -- at least to our prejudices -- and comfortably black and white. The myths are "alternative facts" or "fake history." Not surprisingly, myths tend to dominate if not smother actual history in the popular consciousness, the "public memory." 

By "actual history" I do not mean the "truth" but the result of painstaking historical research, writing, and interpretation. If well done, the result is our best current approximation of the truth. In that sense, history resembles science. Science is a more exact business, of course. Scientists can use repeated experiments to confirm their hypotheses. Historians do not have that luxury. They cannot repeat history. In most cases, they would not wish to. 

Historian Lewis Namier wrote that the writing of history "is not a visit of condolence." He might have added that the same is true of reading it. Learning our history is often difficult, troubling and confusing. If it never is, we are reading the wrong stuff. Some people avoid the problem by ignoring history. Henry Ford is alleged to have said that "history is bunk." He didn't say exactly that, but he did reject the past as dead and meaningless, not worth bothering about. 

Abraham Lincoln disagreed with Ford. In his Second Inaugural Address he declared, "My Fellow Americans, we cannot escape history." He understood that the terrible war nearing its end was the result of the country's failure to abolish slavery early in its history. Novelist William Faulkner held a similar view: "The past isn't dead. It is not even past." His characters are prisoners of their history, in this case the history of the Deep South. 

Karl Marx wrote in much the same vein in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852): "The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living." Marx prefaced that statement with "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past." One does not have to be a Marxist to agree with that statement. Our history, like our biology, constrains us, for good or ill.

Images of Anti-Slavery

The UK has the unenviable distinction of having been a global leader in the Atlantic slave trade, second only to Portugal. British ships transported more than three million Africans to the Americas between the 1600s and 1807. The profits of the trade and the labors of the enslaved were huge. 

[Image: British Slave Ship, Insurrection on Board a Slave Ship, Carl Wadstrom, An Essay on Colonization, 1795]

By the late 18th century, a movement to end the trade and eventually slavery itself began to gain momentum in Britain. Anti-slavery sentiment arose from both religious and secular sources. 

Religious sects like the Quakers had long opposed slavery. After mid-century, they were joined in Britain by members of Dissenting (Non-Anglican but Protestant) sects such as Methodists and by some Anglicans. 

The influence of Enlightenment thinkers also played a role. The illustration below, from Voltaire's popular novella Candide, shows Candide and his companion Cacambo encountering a slave who has had his hand destroyed in a mill and a leg cut off for running away. The slave tells them, "This is the price of your eating sugar in Europe."

In the 1780's, the pioneering potter Josiah Wedgwood, Charles Darwin's grandfather, produced the famous medallion below on behalf of the movement to end the slave trade.

The image below, of "tight packing" aboard the slave ship Brookes, was published in Plymouth, England in 1788. It became an icon of the antislavery movement. Mortality onboard such vessels was often enormous. As much as 50% of the "commodity" did not survive the voyage. 

In the same year, British artist George Morland exhibited his sentimental genre painting "The Slave Trade," showing Africans being loaded into boats on the West African coast.

The painting below, by JMW Turner, depicts the infamous case of the slave ship Zong . The Zong Incident occurred in 1783, almost sixty years before Turner painted his take on it. 

When the Zong overshot its intended destination in Jamaica and ran low on water, the captain ordered more than 100 Africans thrown overboard in order to save the rest. The captain claimed insurance on the "lost cargo." The insurance company refused to pay.

In the court case that followed, Lord Chief Justice Mansfield (pictured below), who had effectively declared slavery illegal under English law in 1772, denied the insurance claim. Many people thought the captain and his henchmen should have been tried for murder.

The Zong "Massacre," as it is often called today, galvanized opponents of the slave trade. In its wake, they mounted a mass popular movement to end it, led by MP William Wilberforce. Parliament finally abolished the slave trade in 1807. 

Abolition of slavery itself in the empire followed in 1833, but the institution survived decades longer in many parts of the globe. Turner's painting the Zong Massacre in was done in 1840 for the International Conference on Abolition of Slavery, held in London.

The legal slave trade to the USA ended in 1808, but a clandestine trade and slavery itself lasted until the end of the Civil War. British artist Eyre Crowe produced a famous depiction of a slave sale in Charleston, South Carolina in 1856. 

During the Antebellum Era (1820-1860), abolitionists in the USA produced many anti-slavery images. They tended to focus on the brutality and violence of the slave system, in which slaveowners wielded tyrannical power over their human chattels. Below are a few examples.

Today, a new curriculum for US History in the Florida of Governor Ron DeSantis, emphasizes the "benefits" of slavery to the enslaved.  He is simultaneously at war with one of Florida's biggest economic powerhouses, Disney, Inc. 

There is a certain irony in this. Disney famously produced a film that, inadvertently, perhaps, made slavery look like a Good Barbie land. I refer of course to Song of the South (1946), the movie based on the Uncle Remus Stories of Joel Chandler Harris. 

My, oh my, what a wonderful day! Zippity do da! Zippityay, sings Uncle Remus to the nice little white children of his owner. Yes, it was that good. 

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Masters of Caricature: George Cruikshank

"Please Sir, I want some more." If you have read Dickens' novel Oliver Twist, or seen the musical Oliver! that line is probably familiar. Perhaps you may even have seen the illustration from the novel, shown below. It depicts the famous scene when the half-starved orphan Oliver dares ask Mr. Bumble for more gruel.

The artist who drew that illustration, and many others for Dickens and other authors, was George Cruikshank. His father Isaac was a leading caricaturist of the late Georgian era. Isaac was born in Edinburgh but moved to London where George was born, in 1792. 

Young George originally made his name as a caricaturist, along with his brother Robert. They produced hundreds of works of social and political satire during the Regency period. Many of George's works focused on what he called the "monstrosities of fashion" and hedonistic Regency "dandies." 

In 1819, the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester inspired "Britons, Strike Home!" It depicts the local yeomanry (militia) attacking a peaceful crowd of demonstrators for parliamentary reform. Eleven were killed and hundreds injured. The title and scene were meant to invoke a contrast with the charge of British soldiers at Waterloo four years before. 

George Cruikshank soon gained particular notoriety from political prints attacking the royal family and leading politicians. At one point he received a bribe of £100 (a lot of money then) to refrain from ridiculing George IV. 

Previously Prince of Wales and Regent, he was an easy target: extravagant, gluttonous, massively obese, and a collector of mistresses. Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson had also produced prints of the man some people called "The Prince of Whales."

Cruikshank drew the cartoons below at the time the prince succeeded his father as king, in 1820. The first depicts George IV contemplating himself in a mirror. He sees a ghost from the past, his estranged wife Caroline of Brunswick. She had returned from exile in Germany to claim her lawful right to be Queen. Cruikshank quotes Hamlet: "To be or not to be."

George detested Caroline. He tried to prevent her from becoming Queen. He brought a bill to Parliament to dissolve their marriage, alleging adultery, something he had often committed himself. The affair generated a huge scandal for the monarchy, which only began to recover under Victoria. 

In the next cartoon, Cruikshank portrays George and Caroline wrapped in large green bags. The bags are green to reflect the fact that the evidence he presented against her was taken to the court in green bags. They are large because there was a lot of documentation and of course because the pair were large. George is considerably larger. He weighed in at 240 pounds at the time. 

The words at the bottom of the print mock their incompatibility and physiques: "Ah, sure, such a pair was never seen so justly form'd to meet by nature...Dedicated to Old Bags."

The government withdrew the Pains and Penalties Bill when it became clear that it would never pass the House of Commons. It had also aroused a huge uproar in an already badly divided country. 

Much of the public and especially radicals demanding political reform supported the Queen. The scandal soured any remaining affection most people had for the king. He was fortunate that Caroline conveniently died a few months later.

Cruikshank's prints were not confined to exposing the follies of the fashionable rich, royals, and Tories. He lampooned politicians of all parties, and reformers of various stripes. Some of his works were blatantly racist and misogynist. 

In 1819 Cruikshank produced the now infamous "New Union Club" portraying a dinner held by the  Society for the Abolition of Slavery. The cartoon portrays a scene of chaos and intimacy between whites and blacks. Among the people Cruikshank represented was William Wilberforce, a major leader in abolitionist movement, at far left.  

Cruikshank also ridiculed women who joined the abolitionist movement, portraying them as unfeminine and grotesque. In a book on the Irish Rebellion of 1798 he drew the rebels as simian-like beings. He gave the Chinese similar xenophobic treatment. 

In the 1820s, Cruikshank embarked on a new career as a book illustrator. One of his most successful early efforts were illustrations for the 18th century novel by Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, done in (1832)

Around that time, Cruikshank became friends with Charles Dickens, and illustrated several of his early works, including Sketches by Boz and Oliver Twist. One of his illustrations for the Twist novel is shown below, of the criminal fence Fagin in prison before being hanged. 

In the late 1840s, Cruikshank embarked on yet another career, as a propagandist for the temperance movement and teetotalism. Once a heavy drinker and smoker, he gave up both and became an advocate of teetotalism, or complete abstinence. As early as 1829 he attacked the evils of cheap gin in "The Gin Shop." Here Death is stalking the customers. 

Cruikshank produced several illustrated books focusing on the evils of alcohol, most notably, The Bottle (1847) and The Drunkard's Children (1848). Below is one of the prints from The Bottle, in which the drunken husband is beating his wife while his children look on and try to stop it.

Cruikshank's advocacy of complete abstinence from alcohol led to a break with Dickens, who favored moderation. After Dickens' death in 1870, Cruikshank claimed to have been the originator of the plot of Oliver Twist. 

In his later years, Cruikshank, a fervent British patriot, became heavily involved in the Volunteer Movement. It began 1859 in response to a diplomatic crisis between France and the UK, and a exaggerated fear that Napoleon III was planning an invasion of England. Cruikshank organized a couple of Rifle Volunteer Corps in Surrey and Middlesex. 

He developed palsy in his final years and died in 1878. He is buried in St. Paul's Cathedral. 

*Cruikshank was not exactly innocent of adultery himself. He married twice but also kept a mistress, a former servant, with whom he had eleven  children.  

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South Carolina's Last Royal Governor: Lord William Campbell

The last royal governor of South Carolina, Lord William Campbell, arrived in Charleston (Charlestown) in June 1775. It was an inauspicious time. The previous royal governor, Charles Montagu, had been greeted with the ringing of church bells, large cheering crowds, saluting cannonades, and a sumptuous dinner at Dillon’s Tavern. Now there were no crowds and no cheers. No welcoming dinner, either. 

The waterfront was eerily quiet as his ship, HMS Scorpion, glided up to the wharf near The Exchange. A detachment of blue-coated soldiers stood ready to escort Lord William, whether as dignitary or prisoner was not clear. None of the leading gentlemen of the town had come out to welcome him.

Lord William had been to Charleston before, during the French and Indian War. In 1762 the Royal Navy assigned him to serve there as captain of a Royal Navy frigate, HMS Nightingale. 

On that occasion the citizens had treated him as a hero. He fell in love with and married the daughter of a wealthy local family, Sarah Izard. Their wedding in 1763 was a great event. After all, he was a son of the Duke of Argyll, the most powerful man in Scotland. [Image:  Sarah Izard Campbell, by Charles Fraser, said to be a copy of painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds] 

After the wedding, the couple returned to Britain. Lord William served in Parliament, then as royal governor of Nova Scotia. In that position he had earned a reputation for fair and honest governance. 

A couple of months before he arrived, in April 1775, the simmering conflict between the colonies and the mother country had boiled over into open rebellion in Massachusetts. Other colonies, including South Carolina, had established provisional governments, and begun to prepare for war.

Lord William had another disadvantage as royal governor. He was a Scot. Soon after George III had come to the British throne in 1760, his political opponents concocted a story that liberty hating Scots were conspiring to gain control of the government, and intent on reducing English liberty. English Whigs accused the king’s former tutor, Lord Bute, of being the chief plotter. 

Initially a favorite of the young king, Bute had become Prime Minister in 1762. In order to pay the enormous expenses of the recent war with France, he proposed to levy new taxes in Britain and its colonies. The attacks on Bute caught on in America, and lasted for years after Bute lost all influence over government policy. 

In 1772, another Scot, Lord Mansfield, gave the conspiracy theory more life. As Chief Justice of the King’s Bench Court in London, he ruled that slavery had no basis in English law. The Somerset ruling sent shock waves through the American colonies.

The shock was especially severe true in the southern colonies, heavily dependent as they were on enslaved African labor for their wealth. Southern planters feared that Parliament could extend the Mansfield ruling to the empire. The solution they embraced was to deny Parliament’s power to legislate for the colonies, which led to rebellion.

The Scottish conspiracy theory was bogus, but the Crown had appointed many Scots to colonial offices after the accession of George III, posts that some colonial leaders, like William Henry Drayton, had sought. 

Another colonial leader, Christopher Gadsden, threatened to use "imported Scotchmen" as a foundation for the wharf he was building in Charleston. Gadsden resented having to compete with newly arrived Scottish merchants.  

Soon after landing in Charleston, Lord William learned that he was virtually powerless. Most local leaders refused to cooperate with him or treat him as anything but suspicious. Some of the more extreme  Carolina “Whigs” (later “Patriots”) had even considered preventing him from landing in the first place.

Charleston was awash with rumors of Indian attacks and slave rebellions allegedly fomented by the British government. Colonel John Stuart, the British Superintendent for Indian Affairs in the Southern Region, had already been forced to flee to Florida, pursued by a liberty mob and false charges that he was organizing Native American risings in the backcountry. 

Shortly after Lord William arrived, local authorities arrested several blacks on suspicion of plotting a slave rebellion. They charged one of them, Thomas Jeremiah, and tried him in a slave court, although he was a free man. The court found him guilty on flimsy evidence and sentenced him to be hanged and burned.

Lord William intervened, calling the trial a farce. He tried to have Jeremiah pardoned but discovered his complete lack of authority. Worse, “Liberty Boy” rioters accused him of being involved in the plot. They threatened him and attacked other royal officials, some of whom left the colony.

Convinced of the danger, he fled his residence at 34 Meeting Street in the dead of a September night. He took refuge on HMS Tamar, a British naval sloop stationed in the harbor. His wife Sarah joined him there later after being harassed herself. [Image: 34 Meeting Street, Charleston, where Lord William Campbell lived during his brief governorship]

 

 

Lord William remained close to the city for a couple of months, commanding a flotilla of three small naval vessels. In November they fought an inconclusive engagement with a rebel ship commanded by William Henry Drayton near Hog Island.

Meanwhile, Lord William landed some of his men on Sullivan’s Island at the entrance to the harbor. Enslaved black runaways soon joined them and together, they conducted raids on plantations in Christ Church Parish (now Mt. Pleasant) to secure food and supplies.

Just before Christmas 1775, Patriot leaders decided to end this threat before the island became the center of a slave rebellion. They sent a force of two hundred Whig Rangers to clear the enemy off the island. Disguised as "Indians," they attacked shortly before dawn. They achieved complete surprise, killed dozens of runaways and captured others, including a few whites. Some of those in the camp escaped to the British ships or to Morris Island across the harbor.

After the attack, Lord William sailed off to the British stronghold at St. Augustine in Florida. From there he returned to Britain. In reports, he referred to the execution of Jeremiah as a “judicial murder” and called those responsible “barbarians.”

Lord William was not yet through with South Carolina. In June 1776, he was present when a British fleet attacked the rebels hastily built palmetto log fort on Sullivan’s Island. The Battle of Sullivan’s Island ended in disaster for the British, and for Lord William. He was wounded in the leg by a flying splinter of wood. The wound never healed properly, and he died, probably of infection, in 1778. He was 48. [Image: The Battle of Sullivan's Island, by John Blake White]

Lord Williams' wife Sarah remained in England, where she died in 1784, aged 39. Her brother, Ralph Izard, became a prominent Patriot. 

[The portrait of Lord William Campbell in his naval uniform is by Thomas Gainsborough]

e is wearing his naval uniform]

Further Reading: 

J. William Harris, The Hanging of Thomas Jeremiah: A Free Black Man's Encounter with Liberty (Yale University Press, 2009)

William R. Ryan, The World of Thomas Jeremiah: Charles Town on the Eve of the American Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2010)

Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992)

John Drayton, Memoirs of the American Revolution 2 vols., (Charleston, 1821) 

The Papers of Henry Laurens. 16 vols., (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1972-2003. Volumes dealing with the 1760s and 1770s.)

Alfred W. Blumrosen and Ruth G. Blumrosen, Slave Nation: How Slavery United the Colonies & Sparked the American Revolution (Naperville, Illinois: Source Books, 2005)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Abortion Rights and Mill's "Subjection of Women"

"All that was most striking and profound in what was written by me belongs to my wife." John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)

In 1869, the British philosopher John Stuart Mill published an influential pro-feminist essay called The Subjection of Women. It remains highly relevant today, especially with the recent threat to abortion rights in the United States. [Image: Mill, 1873, by Frederic Watts]

Mill did not address the issue of abortion in The Subjection of Women. But he would almost surely have favored what today is called "reproductive freedom." In an earlier work, On Liberty (1859), he had declared the principle of bodily sovereignty: "Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign." Twentieth century feminists translated that into "Our Bodies, Ourselves."

It is significant that Mill acknowledged the influence on his ideas of his wife, Harriet Taylor Mill, and also his stepdaughter, Helen Taylor. He was not lecturing women, but learning from them, and his message was directed at men more than women. [Images: Harriet Taylor Mill, unknown painter, National Portrait Gallery, and photo of Helen Taylor with Mill. Harriet died in 1858.]

In 1867 Mill presented a petition to Parliament calling for women's suffrage. He did so at the request of two women, Dr. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Emily Davies. The first draft of the petition was written by his stepdaughter, Helen. It failed but got the issue into the political discussion at the highest level.  

What was Mill's message in The Subjection of Women? It was the then outrageous claim that women were very likely the equals of men in most spheres of life, and superior in some. And the world would be a happier place if women had equal rights to men. 

Mill rejected the traditional view that it was women's nature to be limited to the role of wives, mothers, and housekeepers, obedient to their male superiors. In fact, he denied that anyone could justify such limitations on the grounds of something as nebulous as women's natural constitution. What society considered "natural" was only what was "customary;" that is, what they were accustomed to.

Women had always been kept in an "unnatural state" of subjection to men, preventing their free development. Their "nature" had been "distorted and disguised." No one could predict what women's nature would be if they were "left to choose its direction as freely as men's." What society calls the nature of women is an "eminently artificial thing -- the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others." 

If "artificial" restrictions on female development were removed, it might be found that there would be no "material difference" in their "character and capacities" compared to men. The only way to find out would be to remove the restrictions, to let women choose their own way, and see what happens. 

Such an "experiment" was not a mere intellectual exercise. It would materially affect the future of humanity. The subjection of women suppressed the talents of one-half of the human race. Who could tell what women, freed of traditional restraints, might do to improve the world? No one could find out what anyone was capable of except by letting them try.

The existing relationship between men and women was one of power. Men had it, women were subject to it. Fathers, brothers, uncles, husbands -- all had the power to control the women in their lives. 

Mill likened marriage to the master-slave relationship. Chattel slavery had been abolished, but the law left married women in bondage to their husbands. He admitted that wives were generally treated better than slaves, but argued that their legal position was, if anything, worse than that of a slave. Wives had virtually no protection for their property, their aspirations, or their bodies. The law treated them as children, or worse, imbeciles. [Image: Suffragette Poster, c. 1910]

Defenders of the status quo objected that good men did not abuse their power over women. Mill conceded the point but insisted that laws and institutions needed to be designed for men who were not good.

Women had no power and no legal protection from abusive husbands. The law in effect, left "the victim still in the power of the executioner." It was "contrary to reason and experience" to expect that women in such a position would be safe from "brutality."

Mill did not spell out what he meant by brutality, but it is not hard to imagine the possibilities, given our current experience of spousal abuse, both physical and psychological. 

Mill's arguments in The Subjection of Women are rooted in utilitarianism, a philosophy he had learned as a child from its founder, Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and his own father, James Mill. 

Bentham had famously argued that human laws and institutions should be judged according to the principle of utility. They should be favored or rejected according to the extent to which they promoted "the greatest happiness of the greatest number."  

Mill rejected parts of Bentham's philosophy and made it more human. Bentham had tried to develop a calculus of happiness ("the felicific calculus"), to determine mathematically what would contribute to the greatest happiness. It did not work, but it did lead one of Bentham's disciples, Charles Babbage, to develop the principle of the computer.

Mill centered happiness in the mind of the individual. It was not possible for anyone to decide what was best for others. There was "no means by which anyone else can discover for them what it is for their happiness to do or leave undone."

In On Liberty, Mill argued that society has no right to limit individual freedom except to prevent harm to others (The Harm Principle). Would Mill have argued that abortion should be prohibited because of the harm to the fetus, or allowed because forcing a woman to carry a baby to term violates the principle of bodily sovereignty, and may harm the woman? 

Because he never directly addressed this issue, we can never know. But I'm confident he would have been on the side of pro-choice. 

Further reading: 

J.S. Mill, The Subjection of Women (1869) and On Liberty (1859). See also his Utilitarianism (1863), for a full discussion of his philosophical outlook. 

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Dying in Paradise : Colonial South Carolina

Dying in Paradise

South Carolina was the wealthiest colony in British North America at the time of the Revolution. It was also the unhealthiest. It was long notorious for its deadly fevers, notably malaria and yellow fever, both transmitted by mosquitoes. 

Dysentery was another major hazard, transmitted by amoebas or bacteria in water. The “bloody flux” subjected many to enormous suffering and in many cases, an early grave. Smallpox and other periodical contagions added to the grisly toll.

Wealth and unhealth were intimately connected. Both arose largely from the cultivation of rice with enslaved Africans, the majority of South Carolina’s population from 1708 until the early 20^th century. [Image: Africans hoeing in the rice fields]

 It is widely known that whites suffered terribly from disease in the lowcountry plantation areas. In Christ Church Parish [now Mount Pleasant] in the early 18th century, the parish register records that 86% of baptized children died before age 20. 

Between 1750 and 1779, planter Henry Ravenel and his wife had 16 children. Eight died before age 5. Only six survived past 21. Of their seven daughters, none lived to be 20. Elias Ball and Mary Delamere, who married in 1721, had six children. All died before age 20. Many other families fared the same or worse. The death rate for whites in early 18^th century Charleston was roughly twice that of the average parish in England or New England at the time. 

Less well known is that Africans also died in large numbers from these diseases and many others. This is due to the staying power of pro-slavery arguments of the 19th century, which claimed that Africans were virtually immune to the “tropical” fevers that killed so many whites. A benevolent God had “designed” African constitutions for this work. 

Gov. John Drayton summed up this argument in 1802: “these situations are particularly unhealthy, and unsuitable to the constitutions of white persons … that of a Negro is perfectly adapted to its cultivation.” In 1850, the Lutheran minister and naturalist John Bachman claimed that Africans were perfectly designed for laboring in the lowcountry environment. [Images: John Drayton and John Bachman] 

In stark contrast, some 18th century observers commented on the heavy mortality of the enslaved. An example is Alexander Garden, a Charleston physician and naturalist for whom the gardenia is named.  Garden served for several years as port physician in the 1750s. In this capacity he inspected arriving ships for signs of contagious diseases. This included slave ships. 

Garden was shocked by what he found. Many of them had lost as much as one-third to three-fourths of their "cargoes" during the voyage from West Africa. The ships on arrival were "so filthy and foul it is a wonder any escape with life.” (Image: JMW Turner, Slave Ship, showing sick slaves being thrown overboard, alive, based on the infamous Zong Case 1783)

Many Africans also died on the slave ships in harbor waiting to be sold. Their bodies were often thrown overboard into the Cooper River to save the cost of burial. In 1769, the royal governor published the following proclamation in the South Carolina Gazette:

"A large number of dead Negroes have been thrown into the river … the noisome smell arising from their putrefaction may become dangerous to the health of the inhabitants." The governor offered a reward to be paid on the conviction of those responsible  in hopes of ending this "inhuman and unchristian practice." [Image: Charleston harbor, c. 1770] 

It did not end. In 1807, the last year that the slave trade was legal, traders brought almost 16,000 Africans to Charleston in the last four months of the year alone. The local economy could not absorb so much "labor" in such a short time. Hundreds died of disease on the filthy ships while waiting to be sold.

In April 1807, The Courier reported on an inquest on the body of an African woman found floating in the harbor. The jury concluded that she died as a result of "a visitation of God," shifting responsibility to the Almighty. They "supposed her to belong to some of the slave ships in this harbour, and thrown into the river, to save expence of burial."

This was hardly an isolated incident. The newspaper's editor noted that such "burials" had become so common that something ought to be done to stop it. His great concern was the unpleasant thought that Charleston's citizens [whites] might eat fish from the harbor that had "fattened on the carcasses of dead Negroes."

Alexander Garden also treated many sick and injured Africans, of whom he wrote: "Masters often pay dear for their barbarity, by the loss of many valuable Negroes, and how can it well be otherwise -- the poor wretches are obliged to labor so hard ... and often overheat themselves, then exposing themselves to the bad air ... The result was pneumonia and other respiratory disorders, "which soon rid them of cruel masters, or more cruel overseers, and end their wretched being."

Further Reading: Peter McCandless, Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011, PB, 2014) Winner of the SHEAR Prize for Best Book on the early American Republic, 2012.

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