On October 16 and 17 the University of Virginia's President's Commission on Slavery and The University is hosting a conference on "Universities Confronting the Legacy of Slavery." This discussion is going to be fabulous. I'll be talking a little more about this as we get closer, but I'm going to be focusing on the ideas about political theory and slavery that were developed and disseminated on that campus, largely in the 1850s. There is an important story of the shift away from Jefferson's ideas about universal equality to the 1850s when students and faculty routinely criticized Jefferson's Declaration. They spoke about the hierarchy inherent in nature; law professor James Holcombe is one of my key subjects. He urged alumni to give money to the University of Virginia in 1853 so that its faculty could produce proslavery literature and teach students to defend slavery. Three years later he spoke to the Virginia Historical Society about Virginia's role in the Revolution (and he took that as an opportunity to criticize Massachusetts residents for sowing sectional conflict in the 1850s). Holcombe delivered a very frank address in 1858 that argued slavery is consistent with natural law. This built in a lot of ways on work that Albert Taylor Bledsoe (also a UVa professor) published in the early 1850s that flipped the idea that humans first existed in a state of nature. Bledsoe argued that humans always lived in a state of society and that law needed to restrain individuals from interfering with the freedom and lives of others. (Abolitionists argued this, too -- which is a story I want to develop another time.) Bledsoe built an argument that law promoted liberty best by restraining individuals and by putting them in their proper place in nature's hierarchy. His book Liberty and Slavery was based on the idea that the state should restrain the liberty of those not fit for freedom. Enslaved people were the obvious and immediate target here. Henry St. George Tucker made a similar argument in his Lectures on Natural Law at UVa in the 1840s as well.
A lot the story here is quite straight-forward; for instance I'll talk some about the constitutional theory of alumni addresses in the 1850s, which put slavery and rights in enslaved people at the center of their constitutional interpretation. One article in the Virginia University Magazine (the student literary journal) celebrated the discussion of slavery (unusual in southern circles where usually no one wanted to talk publicly) because it gave southerners the chance to defend the institution and that led to the promulgation of the idea that slavery was central to southern society. Another used the publication of William Fitzhugh's Cannibals All to compare the lives of the enslaved to free workers and suggest that slavery was superior to freedom. Such ideas help us understand the move towards secession -- in which these ideas (and in some cases these very people) were central.
I want to talk about the conception of history (even the crusades) and jurisprudence in the Virginia University Magazine soon.
Update: here's my talk at UVA's Slavery and University Conference. Here are some comments on slavery and universities at the Southern Historical Society on slavery and universities back in 2011.
"His book Liberty and Slavery was based on the idea that the state should restrain the liberty of those not fit for freedom."
A rather ignorant question here: Was the influence of Bledsoe's work limited to slavery, or did it bleed over to other issues, such as treatment of the mentally handicapped or incarceration policies? Put differently, did the rationalizing of slavery exist mainly in a separate sphere, or did it interact with and cross pollinate discussion of other power driven social issues?
Posted by: Ray Campbell | October 11, 2014 at 02:54 AM
That's a really interesting question, Ray -- Bledsoe's primary concern (as well as that of just about everyone else) was slavery. Though what he said about hierarchy had a lot of implications for marriage, too. The 1840s and 1850s saw a dramatic rise in incarceration (and also in hospitals for mentally ill), but I don't know how related Bledsoe's theory is to that -- I think the rise of the penitentiary is related more to the general spirit of reform movements than to Bledsoe's attempt to maintain hierarchy.
There's a lot to say about Bledsoe's and Holcombe's concern for order. It says a lot about how southern courts operated and a lot about the prosecutions of enslaved people (and the failure to hold slave-owners to account for abuse of their slaves).
Posted by: Alfred L. Brophy | October 12, 2014 at 04:05 PM
I guess the ultimate question your interesting series of posts have brought to mind is this: how much does the ideology that developed to support the institution of slavery still impact American life? I realize tracing the intellectual history of something like that would be difficult, but I'm wondering if the ideology outlasted the institution of slavery and found homes in other areas. I would expect, for example, that the ideology of Jim Crow must owe a lot to the justifications for slavery. Certainly in my lifetime, and I think up to the present, the justifications for Jim Crow impact the way some people act and speak. The quote about "those not fit for freedom" reads like it comes out of a speech from a contemporary politician supporting high rates of incarceration. While it would seem that something different is meant by "not fit for freedom" the racial disparities that are a core part of our penal system make me wonder if there's more of a connection than at first meets the idea.
Posted by: Ray Campbell | October 12, 2014 at 07:14 PM
"I guess the ultimate question your interesting series of posts have brought to mind ..."
"I'm wondering if the ideology outlasted the institution of slavery and found homes in other areas."
"the racial disparities that are a core part of our penal system make me wonder if there's more of a connection than at first meets the idea."
I'm wondering if the real question that have been brought to mind are whether an idea of slavery found a homes in other areas and whether the continuing effects of slavery are more connected to slavery than when I first met this novel idea.
Posted by: anon | October 12, 2014 at 08:15 PM
than at first meets the eye is what I meant to say.
Sorry.
I think the anon post above, by the way, was created by some kind of bot. Software that recaps posts according to Markovian analysis is the only thing I know that creates that kind of weird syntax. What's odd is that such posts are normally accompanied by link to some scam site, and that seems to be missing here.
Posted by: Ray Campbell | October 12, 2014 at 08:55 PM
No. Just quoting and using your syntax and grammar, Ray.
Posted by: anon | October 12, 2014 at 08:58 PM
Ray, those are really intriguing questions of how persistent are ideas like Bledsoe's over time. Obviously a lot of his thinking was officially rejected in the fourteenth amendment (though not everyone subscribed to the idea of equality in it). There are some parallels between pre-war thought and post-war racial hierarchy. I see those parallels as particularly strong in the period 1890-1930. I'm not sure that this is a case where ideas made popular by academics are carried down over the years -- as with many areas I think academics are gauges of ideas with deep roots in the culture of which they are a part.
Posted by: Alfred L. Brophy | October 13, 2014 at 10:24 PM
In college, a course in southern history had Cannibals All on the reading list. After reading your post, I pulled it off Gutenberg and was struck by how his core ideas intersected with F.A. Hayek's. To oversimplify: Fitzhugh saw slavery as socialism, and hence saw slavery as good. Hayek saw socialism as slavery, and hence saw socialism as bad.
Posted by: Ray Campbell | October 13, 2014 at 11:06 PM
Ray Campbell: "Certainly in my lifetime, and I think up to the present, the justifications for Jim Crow impact the way some people act and speak. The quote about "those not fit for freedom" reads like it comes out of a speech from a contemporary politician supporting high rates of incarceration. While it would seem that something different is meant by "not fit for freedom" the racial disparities that are a core part of our penal system make me wonder if there's more of a connection than at first meets the idea."
This is where sociologists, historians and political scientists come in. I suggest reviewing the archives of Ta-Nesi Coates' blog on The Atlantic.
And speaking casually, I've seen so many comparisons of attitudes in the US by race and region that it's clear that yes, slavery (and it's successor, Jim Crow) still strongly influence the USA.
Posted by: Barry | October 14, 2014 at 08:30 AM