As we saw in the previous posting on this subject, we have been looking at American type liberalism as
fundamentally different from the English and European types. Our case is based on the claim that European
type liberalism vests sovereignty in the collective, while English type
liberalism puts it in an élite.
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| The Continental Congress |
American type liberalism, however, asserts that every
single human being, every child, every woman, every man, is sovereign, i.e., has rights by nature that can
never be taken away, nor even the exercise thereof limited except by duly
constituted authority after due process, or there is clear and present danger
to one’s self, other individuals or groups, or the common good as a whole. That is the theory. We will now point out how wrong we are . . .
in practice.
And how wrong are we, at least in practice? To answer that, we ask, How wrong is slavery
. . . in practice?
The basic theory
of American type liberalism is that every human being is sovereign, and is thus
a “natural person,” having inherent rights of life, liberty, and private
property. The basic practice, however, was that chattel slavery was widespread in the
American colonies, and a slave is a human being without rights. A slave therefore has no right to life,
liberty, or private property. Instead,
it — slaves are things, not persons — is an owned thing, and utterly under the
control of its owner. And that, to put
it mildly, inserted a fundamental contradiction into American political
philosophy.
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| Cardinal Bellarmine |
As we saw in the previous posting on this subject, America’s
“Founding Fathers” (and probably the Mothers and Children as well. . . .)
derived their political philosophy from Robert Cardinal Bellarmine. Most of them, however, appear to have done so
“second hand,” filtered through the responses of John Locke and Algernon Sidney
to the “divine right” theories of Sir Robert Filmer, chief theologian and
advisor to James I/VI of England/Scotland.
The exception was George Mason, who may have read
Bellarmine in the original. A punctilious
scholar, Mason might have been led to investigate Bellarmine’s writings
directly as a result of the somewhat contradictory references to him in Locke
(who disparaged him) and Sidney (who praised him). Copies of Bellarmine’s works were known to
exist in Northern Virginia, and Mason as a prominent community leader would
have had no problem borrowing them.
The significance of this is that Locke and Sidney were
firm adherents of the “state of nature” theory, virtually their sole point of
agreement with Thomas Hobbes. That is,
man in a state of nature has all rights, and surrenders some of them on
agreeing to enter society in exchange for safety and protection of property.
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| George Mason of Gunston Hall |
That man is naturally a member of society, however, is
found throughout Bellarmine’s writings, notably in De Laicis, his treatise on civil government. No one loses or surrenders rights when
agreeing to enter society because human beings are naturally members of society
and thus natural persons.
Unless you happened to be a slave, this was not a serious problem
until May of 1776 when Mason was asked to draft a declaration of rights for the
Virginia Convention to justify the American Revolution. Mason, however, was something that people
today regard as a paradox, a slave owner who hated slavery, and who spoke out
against it on every possible occasion.
Now, we can either dismiss Mason as a hypocritical windbag
right now, or give not a justification, but a brief explanation, and get on
with the story. We’ll do the latter.
Slavery was legal, and Mason in common with most
slaveowners inherited both the fact of slavery and slaves. Whether or not he treated them well is not
the issue here, although by all accounts Mason treated his slaves better than
most workmen treated their nominally free apprentices . . . which was why when
socialism came along later, it found a welcome among apprentices in the
northern cities, especially Philadelphia.
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| Thomas Jefferson of Monticello |
Be that as it may, the economic arrangement in the
colonies resulted in the fact that, in general, employers who relied on free
wage labor simply could not compete economically with masters who relied on
slave labor. This was also one reason
why slaveowners preferred black slaves who were slaves for life unless
manumitted (which was both difficult to do and dangerous for the former slave,
who could be kidnapped back into slavery into a much worse situation) to white
convicts sentenced to penal servitude for a period of years. After all, once a white slave’s sentence was
up, he or she was free, and the former master lost his investment. Plus, it was much, much easier for a white
slave to escape and take up a new life elsewhere free from fear of being
captured and taken back into slavery.
The bottom line was that abolition of slavery would not be
effective if it was partial. Either all
slaves had to be freed, or none, or those owners who freed their slaves faced
utter ruin as they would not be able to replace slaves with free labor and
remain competitive with those who did not free their slaves. So, when the other delegates saw how Mason
opened his draft of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, some of them went through
the roof:
That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and
have certain inherent rights, of which they cannot, by any compact, deprive or
divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring
and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.
Some of the more conservative members of the Virginia
Convention were, frankly, ready and waiting for Mason to do exactly as he did:
insert language undermining the legal basis for human chattel slavery. If Mason’s language was allowed to stand
unaltered, it endangered the economic wellbeing and security of most of the men
in the Convention . . . the very people essential to making the American
Revolution a success.
Mason’s implicit argument was that if all men — meaning all human beings — are naturally members of
society, regardless of circumstances, it logically follows that this applies to
slaves. The clear implication is that slaves — absent conviction of a crime for
which the slave is actually and personally guilty — have the natural right to
be free.
And that set up a contradiction. . . .
#30#
