I think that concern with \u201creputations\u201d is a mistake \u2014 a way of distracting ourselves from the meaning and implications of the very important questions Jenkins is grappling with there. I discussed that last week in this post: \u201cBad Reputation: The right subject, the wrong question<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n Jenkins latest post \u2014 \u201cRemember Lord Dunmore!<\/a>\u201d \u2014 involves the last British royal governor of the colony of Virginia, John Murray. (Murray was the fourth Earl of Dunmore, but his side lost the war so I, as an American, am free not to call him that or to even bother understanding what it means.) As the colonies began their revolution, Murray responded with a proclamation offering emancipation to every slave or indentured servant willing to take up arms to join \u201cHis Majesty\u2019s Troop.\u201d<\/p>\n The post is a good discussion of a moment in history that represents an unlovely but important aspect of the American Revolution. It makes me think of Samuel Johnson\u2019s pointed question about the Revolution: \u201cHow is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?\u201d<\/p>\n Johnson makes an appearance back in that first post from Jenkins, who discusses him as a kind of exception that proves the rule. Jenkins is arguing that while there may have been a widespread, well-established moral consensus against slavery developing by the mid-1800s, no such consensus existed a century earlier. The early and mid-1700s was the time when the Founding Fathers of American evangelicalism, Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield, were casually involved in human trafficking:<\/p>\n Shift the focus a century earlier, to an equivalent slave owner in the early 18th Century. To say the least, no such consensus existed, whether social, moral, religious, or legal \u2013 not in the English-speaking world, nor in the larger Europe, nor the Atlantic and imperial realms. Insofar as a consensus did exist, it was entirely in favor of enslavement and the slave trade as a foundation of national prosperity, without serious moral qualms. \u2026 We can certainly find abolitionist sentiment around the British Atlantic, but usually confined to religious groups that were regarded as far on the social and cultural fringe, such as the Quakers.<\/p>\n You could also point to isolated Anglicans like Samuel Johnson, who was strongly anti-slavery from the 1740s onward. He even spoke out in favor of the slaves\u2019 right to armed resistance against their captors and oppressors. He appalled respectable Oxford with his toast, \u201cHere\u2019s to the next insurrection of the Negroes in the West Indies!\u201d\u00a0But in this as in so much else, Johnson was a cranky eccentric in this regard.<\/p>\n \u2026 At least before about 1770, opposition to the slavery system as such was rare and sporadic.\u00a0At that particular time and place,\u00a0we might reasonably ask how or why someone could have been expected to go against that social current. And that consideration should surely affect how we judge that person\u2019s character, and fitness for historical commemoration.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The problem with this thesis, though, is that Jenkins himself hints at why it fails it in his post on Lord Dunmore. There he writes this:<\/p>\n In the context of a slave-owning society terrified of slave revolt and bloody insurgency, this was invoking the nuclear option, and as such, the Proclamation was widely and furiously condemned.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Granted, Dunmore\u2019s proclamation came in 1775 \u2014 well after \u201cabout 1770.\u201d But this description of \u201ca slave-owning society\u201d as being marked by perpetual terror \u201cof slave revolt and bloody insurgency\u201d remains just as accurate if we\u2019re talking about earlier generations in the time of Edwards and Whitefield (and also the time of Woolman and Benjamin Lay<\/a>).<\/p>\n Consider again the mass hysteria that swept through New York City in 1741<\/a> \u2014 a longer, deadlier, wilder<\/em> frenzy of lawless show-trials than anything seen in Salem 50 years earlier. This is sometimes referred to as the \u201cslave revolt of 1741,\u201d but there\u2019s no evidence there ever was<\/em> any such revolt or even the barest outlines of a plot for one. Basically, there was a fire and white New Yorkers freaked out and began screaming \u201cAieee! The revolt is here! Our slaves have started to burn the city!<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n And then they spent the next several months torturing false confessions out of every slave they could get their hands on before executing them in the most excessively grisly and public manners they could manage. (Torturing and killing a bunch of white Jesuits<\/em>, too, for some reason.)<\/p>\n One factor in the mindless panic of these white New Yorkers may have been the memory of the very brief \u201cslave revolt\u201d that occurred in the city 29 years earlier. The \u201cNew York Slave Revolt of 1712\u201d started with a building set on fire. (About two dozen slaves were involved \u2014 many more than that were tortured or executed in reprisal. Nine white New Yorkers were killed in the short-lived revolt.)<\/p>\n That revolt came four years after<\/em> New York had passed the first law in the colonies mandating the death penalty for any slave involved in such a thing. The premise for that 1708 law \u2014 the \u201cAct for Preventing the Conspiracy of Slaves\u201d \u2014 was the killing of a Queens slave-owner. But that wasn\u2019t the whole reason, and it wasn\u2019t close to being the main<\/em> reason.<\/p>\n The main reason for the mass hysteria of 1741 didn\u2019t have to do with any actual plots or uprisings, but with white New Yorkers\u2019 understanding that such plots and uprisings were to be expected<\/em>. More than that, white New Yorkers understood that such plots and uprisings were wholly justified<\/em>.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s how I described this a few years ago:<\/p>\n White New Yorkers panicked due to their fear of a\u00a0potential\u00a0slave revolt. That fear, I think, refutes all the nonsense we often hear about how the stark immorality of the slave system was perceived differently back in those days, and how we should all be more generous toward the defenders and exploiters of slavery because things were different back then and (white) folks just didn\u2019t know any better.<\/p>\n They knew. That\u2019s why they were scared. In 1741 \u2014 more than 60 years before Toussaint Louverture shocked the world and nearly a century before the enslaved preacher Nat Turner took up arms \u2014 white New Yorkers were wild with fear of a slave revolt because they knew that slavery was an abominable, intolerable injustice. They looked at this brutal system and \u2014 even if only semi-consciously \u2014 thought about\u00a0what they<\/em> would do\u00a0if they were the ones being crushed by it. And they realized, with utter clarity, that they would want to resist and revolt and to overthrow their oppressors. And they realized, just as clearly, that they would be justified in doing so.<\/p>\n That is why they were afraid.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n They knew<\/em>. They knew with a certainty and clarity that produced an ever-present dread.<\/p>\n \u201cEvery white man there [had] this thought stowed\u00a0somewhere or other in his mind. \u2026 It was a kind of secret which [they] all knew and were too clever to tell.\u201d<\/p>\n That cleverness was expressed as a widespread, multi-form\u00a0social, moral, religious, and legal consensus not to look directly at the thing everyone knew \u2014 not to speak of it or to in any way openly acknowledge this dreadful secret. That consensus was not the reason they couldn\u2019t have known better. It was the mechanism by which they managed to pretend they did not know any better.<\/p>\n For those still stuck in the misleading frame of \u201creputation,\u201d this may seem like a harsh, unforgiving condemnation of people from an earlier time. But, again, the point is not that we should be withholding or extending absolution to them. That exercise isn\u2019t ever really about them<\/em>. It\u2019s always, rather, about seeking absolution for ourselves.<\/p>\n And we\u2019re gonna need it. Because right now, as Jenkins wisely notes, \u201cyou and I are today failing to protest or condemn something that generally appears acceptable today.\u201d<\/p>\n We\u2019re not doing so because we, too, have a powerful, multiform mechanism for allowing ourselves to pretend not to know better. We too have an ever-present dread that persists as a background hum we semi-successfully drown out with the white noise of our social, moral, religious, and legal consensus. We too have thoughts stowed somewhere or other in our minds, secrets which we all know but are too clever to tell. We too have mastered the instinctual applications of categories like \u201cfringe\u201d or \u201ceccentric\u201d as a way of ignoring anyone who speaks such secrets aloud.<\/p>\n So, yes, we\u2019re also going to need absolution. And thus we shouldn\u2019t be stingy about extending it to others.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat then are we to say? Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound?<\/span>\u00a0<\/sup>By no means!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n We like to think that the folks back then couldn\u2019t have known any better because we like to think that we don\u2019t know any better. But they knew and we know. Or we, at least, suspect. Because, on some level, not looking at something always involves knowing what it is we\u2019re trying not to look at.<\/p>\n Not listening to someone also always involves keeping track of who it is we\u2019re not going to listen to. And that\u2019s maybe the most pertinent point for those of us trying to overcome the narcotizing effect of the social, moral, religious, and legal consensus that keeps us in our sins. Because it doesn\u2019t matter whether you agree with me that \u201cthey\u201d knew better or if you agree with Jenkins that \u201cthey\u201d couldn\u2019t have known better, this disagreement involves only an exclusively white antecedent for \u201cthem.\u201d<\/p>\n Could or should Jonathan Edwards have known that buying and selling human beings was a despicable and deplorable injustice? Regardless, Titus<\/em> knew. And Venus<\/em> knew. And Susanna<\/em> and\u00a0Joseph<\/em><\/a>. They all surely knew.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/52\/2019\/02\/TheyKnew.jpg\")
<\/p>\n