Sin and Slavery in the Northern States

We generally think of American slavery as something defended by, and practiced by, the states that eventually formed the Confederacy. And it is true that most slaves worked on southern plantations. We also think that the northern states were morally superior because they did not have slaves. Actually, as I now explain, that was not at all true. The North tolerated slavery, but simply had not much economic reason to have slaves. In fact, many northerners were openly hostile toward abolitionists, who wanted the United States to abolish slavery.

One example is an editorial written by William Cullen Bryant in the August 8, 1836 issue of the Saturday Evening Post, an American magazine, of which he was the long-time editor. He wrote about a public meeting of abolitionists in Cincinnati, Ohio, which was solidly on the northern side of the slavery controversy. It was apparently an orderly meeting until the anti-abolitionists came in and disrupted it by force. Bryant, well known as an abolitionist, said that the anti-abolitionists “will stir up mobs against it, inflame them to madness, and turn their brutal rage against the dwellings, the property, the persons, and the lives” of the abolitionists. “There is no extreme of cruelty and destruction to which, in the drunkenness and delirium of its fury, it may not proceed…the whirlwind and the lightning might as well be expected to pause and turn aside to spare the helpless and innocent as an infuriated multitude.” Bryant speculated that the anti-abolitionists could persuade state legislatures to prohibit abolitionist meetings and publications; but “there is not a single free State the people of which would sustain a legislature in so doing. These are the facts, and the advocates of mob law know them to be so…There is no tyranny or oppression exercised in any part of the world more absolute or more frightful than that which they would establish.”

Remember, this referred to the anti-abolitionists of Ohio, not of a southern state. It took bravery to come out against slavery even in the North.

What Bryant was calling for was the freedom of the press, so that newspapers and people could proclaim their beliefs for or against abolitionism. “We are resolved that the subject of slavery shall be as it has ever been—as free a subject of discussion and argument…as the difference between…the Armenians and the Calvinists. If the press chooses to be silent on the subject, it shall be the silence of perfect free will, and not the silence of fear. Bryant called for citizens to fight to the death not for abolitionism itself, but for the right to debate it without fear of reprisal.

Today, we can hardly imagine that it might be dangerous to openly condemn slavery. But, apparently, even in northern states, denouncing slavery put a person at risk of mob violence.

More Native American Diversity

 

In my book, Forgotten Landscapes, I wrote that precontact Native Americans accepted more cultural diversity as normal than do most modern white Americans. The principal example I gave was the tolerance of different tribes and languages, which was unavoidable since there were so many tribes with mutually unintelligible languages.

Another example, which I did not include in my book, was an acceptance of sexual diversity. The conservatives would have thrown a fit if I had said this in the book. This is not the reason I left it out, but I just needed to keep the book from rambling. Native American tribes had individuals who did not fit into the model of two distinct genders, just like every other cultural group. In particular, there were some people who did not identify with the prevailing sexual roles. Formerly called berdache, they are today called two-spirit. The meanings of this and related terms, as well as a list of terms used in the Native languages, is given in the Wikipedia article.

The presence of this group of Natives, in each tribe, was recognized as long ago as in a nineteenth-century painting by George Catlin, and in the diary of Don Pedro Fages in the Portolà Expedition in eighteenth-century California. In both of these cases, the two-spirit men were held in esteem by the tribe.

Comrade Corn Cob

Until his death in 1952, Joseph Stalin was practically God in the Soviet Union. Everything that was believed and everything that was done had to conform to his wishes, even, as I described in another essay, music.

Stalin considered himself the ultimate authority in science, as well. He even had his own theory of genetics that was strikingly different from genetics as understood in the western world, and everywhere (even Russia) today. He copied his theory (Lysenkoism) from Comrade Trofim Lysenko. In this theory, things that happen to a plant or an animal during its life get passed on to the offspring. This would include the ability of crops, such as wheat, to endure cold temperatures if the seeds were frozen in cold temperatures. That is, you can create cold-hardy wheat by freezing the seeds. Millions of Russians and Ukrainians died in famines because of this stupid theory: when they planted frozen wheat seeds, the wheat simply died over the winter. (Wheat is often planted in the fall, then it produces seeds in the late spring.)

Lysenko was a fake scientist if there ever was one anywhere.

Another Soviet scientist, Nikolai Vavilov, was a real scientist. He studied genetics extensively and traveled the world to find seeds that carried the genetic basis of adaptation. He knew you had to breed cold-hardy wheat, not just freeze the seeds. Vavilov was a geneticist in the modern sense. In return for his scientific beliefs, he was imprisoned, where he died.

As soon as Stalin died, the Communists felt free, at last, to admit that they had created a “cult of personality” around Stalin, a cult that nearly destroyed the Soviet Union. The new leader, Nikita Kruschchev, was an enthusiastic promoter of agricultural research, after the pattern of Vavilov, not Lysenko. His enthusiasm was so great that he was called “Corn Cob.” When he visited America about 1968, one of his main interests was how Americans grew corn.

Once freed from the Stalin personality cult, conditions in the Soviet Union began to improve a lot, but not enough. The Soviet Union collapsed, and Russia began to enter the modern world of prosperity.

That is, until it entered another period of personality cult, this time centered on Vladimir Putin. Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine is, as nearly as most of us can tell, just a personal whim of Putin. Maybe in the future Russia will see Putin as an evil dictator, and as destructive to Russia as was Stalin. A lot of pain and suffering remains ahead before that can happen.

Quest for Religion

 

A quatrain I wrote in 2004:

 

Between the bastion of Christianity

And the swamps of agnosticism

Are a thousand paths, all winding,

Trodden by a few, without guides.