Last week I noted the anniversary of Henry Highland Garnet’s sermon/discourse in the House of Representatives from 1865. Carla Peterson also had a piece as part of the NYT Disunion series about Garnet’s work before this speech and the speech itself, which I definitely recommend. For this post I will reflect on the portion of Garnet’s speech that I quoted last time. There are several themes running through this passage, themes which, standing alone, will be familiar to modern readers, but when woven together are likely to create confusion or dissonance for us today.
For instance, Garnet employs the basic theme of legal or formal equality: the cause of antislavery reformers will be secured, he asserts, “when all invidious and prescriptive distinctions shall be blotted from our laws, whether they be constitutional, statute, or municipal laws.” He similarly argues against “class-legislation” and for a time when blacks “shall be equal before the law, and shall be left to make his own way in the social walks of life.” This sounds today much like the conservatism promoted by Justice Thomas, among others, particularly in opposition to government programs and affirmative action (Thomas cited a similar passage from Frederick Douglass in Grutter for this point—more on that below).
But Garnet weaves this theme with others that are not so commonly advocated by modern conservatives: voting rights, government supports, and eradication of private prejudice. Immediately after his first mention of formal equality, Garnet states that the demands of reformers will be met “when emancipation shall be followed by enfranchisement, and all men holding allegiance to the government shall enjoy every right of American citizenship.” Voting, and its concomitant, political power, was an essential component for enforcing and maintaining equality and freedom, and was itself a basic right of citizenship. This sounds much more like the arguments made by supporters of the Voting Rights Act. And in the same breath that Garnet states that blacks should be left to make their own way, using a poetic metaphor of storms and ships he askes that blacks also “be furnished with rudder, helm, and sails, and charts, and compass. Give us good pilots to conduct us to the open seas; lift no false lights along dangerous coasts.” This resembles arguments made in support of the Great Society and War on Poverty, arguments about an equal opportunity society championed by modern liberals.
There is much to say about these themes, but my point here is simply to highlight them and stress that a modern looking back at the speech can be easily distracted by contemporary issues and miss the structure and relationship of these themes. This is perhaps what caused Justice Thomas to highlight only the conservative portion of Douglass’s speech and to excise the surrounding context that makes that speech read much more like Garnet’s from the same year, with an emphasis on education, suffrage, and labor (Cedric Powell has aptly criticized this omission). As I hope to explain in future posts in this series, there is a lot to be gained for both originalists and progressives from a more contextualized readings of Garnet and other African-American speakers and writers from this period.
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