Of their time
Oney Judge
How often do you hear somebody defend, say, a Thomas Jefferson or a George Washington for their heinous racial views because they were men “of their time”? Or maybe it’s giving a pass to Lincoln, who made speeches during his presidency making it clear that the preservation of the Union was the goal of the Civil War, not establishing the equality of the races. For Lincoln, blacks were not his equal in "intellectual and moral endowments." His solution to the problem of race was shipping blacks to Liberia, Central America, or Haiti, an ethnic cleansing of the nation. Cutting these guys slack for their slow evolution is an insult to the men and women of their times that truly were visionary.
If Lincoln was only a man “of his time” in believing white people to be inherently superior to black people, then what does that say about these other men and women of his time that didn’t believe that? To name a few, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, John Brown, the members of Brown’s army, Thaddeus Stevens, Solomon Northup, Sojourner Truth, Nat Turner, William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Ward Beecher, tens of thousands of committed Northern abolitionists, and hundreds of thousands Southern slaves who had zero political power, but clearly each possessed a personal belief in the equality of the races that Lincoln didn’t have.
George Washington is on our currency but he was far from even the most enlightened member of his household. That would likely be Oney Judge, who was enslaved at Mount Vernon as the property of Martha Washington from the time of Judge's birth, but who publicly defied the most powerful and admired man in America, not to mention the Fugitive Slave Act, by absconding to freedom in New Hampshire in 1796.
The establishment of today will always feel the instinct to defend the establishment of yesterday, but that doesn’t mean that the rest of us have to. If you’re personally concerned with how history will remember you and your views, I suggest abandoning the conservatives and the liberals of today, and join with the radicals.
posted by CM @ 6:15 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home