The Question without a Solution

Melville wrote these sober and sobering words as his own nation was struggling with increasing desperation to discover a remedy to its great division—a division that had been bequeathed to Melville’s contemporaries by the inability of the Founders to reach a coherent position on the practice of slavery, which of course long preceded independence. (As that wise king says of the rival islanders, “Ere, as a nation, they became responsible, this thing was planted in their midst.”) It is unlikely that the Union could have been achieved in the first place without representatives from the Northern states making significant concessions to the slaveholding states, including a clause in the Constitution itself mandating the return of escaped slaves to their owners. Yet the Constitutional provision was not explicit enough to suit the Southern states, and they repeatedly insisted on revisiting the issue, first in the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 and then, with increasing urgency, in the period during which Melville wrote his strange book—a period that led to the passage in 1850 of a second Fugitive Slave Act. That second act led, as much as any one event did, to the Civil War.

In The War Before the War, Andrew Delbanco narrates this history in lucid prose and with a moral clarity that is best described as terrifying. It is not easy to look upon the long march of the nation towards war, and even harder to look upon the suffering of American slaves during that march—and not just slaves. To be sure, the 1850 act made absolutely explicit the radical stripping of all rights from them. “It was,” Delbanco writes, “an act without mercy”:

But the act was almost as alarming to free blacks in the North, who “found their lives infused with the terror of being seized and deported on the pretext that they had once belonged to someone in the South.”

You read all this with a feeling of rising horror, and not just because of the physical and mental and spiritual suffering. You feel that horror also because it becomes increasingly difficult, as the story progresses, to imagine how the even the worst of the pain could have been avoided. Not one man, or woman, knew a prudent remedy.

What Melville meant by “prudent” was this: No one could be certain that his or her preferred solution would not create more problems than it fixed. Now, to be sure, when the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was being debated, many abolitionists proclaimed that nothing could be more obvious than the moral necessity to refuse any concession to slaveholders, Union be damned. Ralph Waldo Emerson said flatly that “none that was not ready to go on all fours, would back this law”; and if that meant the end of the United States, well, why would one even wish to have “an intimate union between two countries, one civilized & Christian & the other barbarous”?

And it was not just abolitionists like Emerson who looked at their nation and saw such absolute division: John C. Calhoun, the most intelligent and impassioned defender of the “positive good” of slavery, wrote some six months before the passage of the 1850 act and just three weeks before his death that “it is not improbable” that such an act could cause the great question of slavery to “be adjusted or patched up, for the present”—but only for the present. “Indeed, it is difficult to see how two peoples so different and hostile can exist together in one common Union.”

So if many prominent Northerners and Southerners alike could see that the Union of “two countries,” “two peoples” so antipathetic to each other is unsustainable, why not let it go? Why not go our separate ways? This solution, when looked at in the light of cold reason, was perhaps more difficult for the abolitionist to reach than the slaveholder. As Delbanco explains, according to one view of the situation held by many modern historians, there was good reason to fear that “an independent South released from federal constraint would grow into a slave-based empire not only incorporating territories won from Mexico but reaching to Cuba and into the Caribbean.” On this view, one did not need to “go on all fours” to accept the 1850 act: One needed merely to have the foresight to buy some time, to secure what proved to be “a decade of peace during which free states outstripped slave states in industrial development”—thus ensuring that when the war did come, as it had to, the North was prepared to win it.

This seems to have been Herman Melville’s view also. Seventeen years after publishing Mardi, in a prose supplement to a collection of poems he wrote during the Civil War, he insisted that “Secession, like Slavery, is against Destiny”—the destiny of the United States of America, whose long arc bends toward freedom. Secession could not have been accepted because what that arc bent toward was “the erecting in our advanced century of an Anglo-American empire based upon the systematic degradation of man.”

Something like this seems to have been Abraham Lincoln’s view as well. It is disconcerting to see him write of fugitive slaves, as he did to a friend in 1855, “I hate to see the poor creatures hunted down, and caught, and carried back to their stripes, and unrewarded toils; but I bite my lip and keep quiet.” Why keep quiet? Because Lincoln believed that over-assertive protests could lead to secession, and secession would lead to the consolidation rather than the elimination of slavery. That such evil would happen on the other side of a newly drawn national boundary would for Lincoln have been no comfort. Nor should it have been.

And yet, and yet: While Lincoln and Melville and their like were waiting for that long arc to make its hoped-for bend, how many black Americans were born in, and died in, slavery? How many were tortured and disfigured, and killed either by plain murder or by being worked into the grave?

In a great essay called “The Pursuit of the Ideal,” the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin describes his reading, as a young man, of Machiavelli and his dawning realization that Machiavelli quite calmly held the view that one could not follow simultaneously a classical and a Christian model of human excellence. “The idea that this planted in my mind was the realisation, which came as something of a shock, that not all the supreme values pursued by mankind now and in the past were necessarily compatible with one another.” One of the most significant figures in Delbanco’s narrative is Daniel Webster, the great senator from Massachusetts, whose political motto was “Liberty and Union, Now and Forever, One and Inseparable!” To which Delbanco asks the deeply discomfiting but essential question: “But how to reconcile the two—the evil of slavery and the good of union?” How indeed? These were “supreme values,” indeed; but that didn’t make them compatible.

When the 1850 act was being debated, Webster, after some vacillation, decided to support it, on the grounds that the return of fugitive slaves was enshrined in the Constitution. Which is to say, he chose Union over Liberty. As Delbanco points out, Webster’s speech in support of the bill “might have been the moment that saved the nation from secession or, at least for a decade, staved it off.” However, as Delbanco also says, “For anyone alert to slavery as an actuality rather than an abstraction, Webster’s speech was, and is, hard to take—a speech filled with platitudes about the prudence of the new law but silent about its effect on those whose hopes for freedom it would crush.” Did Webster speak in wise discernment of necessity or in craven appeasement of evil? Or was there in point of fact no valid resolution of the dilemma that he, and the whole nation, faced? Recall Melville: “For the righteous to suppress an evil, is sometimes harder than for others to uphold it. Humanity cries out against this vast enormity:—not one man knows a prudent remedy.” Or, as William Greenleaf Eliot put it, “Right-minded men could hardly tell where the lines of right and wrong crossed each other. . . . The complications of action and motive, both right and wrong, were past finding out.”

One of the most admirable features of this truly great book is the subtlety with which Delbanco considers his story’s applicability to our own moment. Throughout the narrative proper he remains silent about the implications—except to note that the consequences of slavery for America’s black people persist to this day. But at the end of the introduction he quotes a passage written by the historian Richard Hofstadter in 1968 about comity—consideration of others, mutual regard. “Comity exists in a society,” Hofstadter writes, when “one party or interest seeks the defeat of an opposing interest on matters of policy, but at the same time seeks to avoid crushing the the opposition, denying the legitimacy of its existence or its values, or inflicting upon it extreme and gratuitous humiliations beyond the substance of the gains that are being sought.” Comity is present when “the basic humanity of the opposition is not forgotten; civility is not abandoned; the sense that a community life must be carried on after the acerbic issues of the moment have been fought over and won is seldom very far out of mind; an awareness that the opposition will someday be the government is always present.”

But how can one tell whether comity is present in one’s own society? “The reality and the value of comity can best be appreciated when we contemplate a society in which it is almost completely lacking.” The War Before the War describes how the United States of America, in the period between the composing of the Constitution and the outbreak of civil war, became such a society. And this happened not only because of wicked people who supported a wicked system—though Lord knows there were plenty of those—but also because so many Americans lost the ability to see the moral legitimacy of any proposed remedy of that wickedness other than the one they themselves embraced.

It seems clear, to me at any rate, that our society has not yet abandoned comity altogether. But the choice to do so presents itself to us with increasing force, at least if we watch television or participate in social media. I would only suggest that it is not too late to refuse that choice—and that the costs of accepting it can be very, very high.