Team of Rivals

The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
 
by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Whether we like it or not, the United States of America would not exist without politics or politicians.  Our constitutionally defined representative democracy is one of the greatest achievements of civilization.  Unfortunately, what makes it great is also its greatest threat:  it is the responsibility of the people who live under the rule of laws written by elected representatives to maintain the integrity of those laws by participating in the making of them.  Our founders understood how fragile their new form of government would be because it relied on a majority of the  people to agree to play by the new set of rules in order that the country function as a sovereign entity.  The question of slavery dogged the founders, but they found a way to unify the nation by permitting certain southern states to continue the practice.  For the next 80 years, slavery became increasingly divisive as the country began expanding westward.  Slave states wanted the new territories to permit slavery.  Free states objected to any expansion of slavery, and a growing number of abolitionists felt that the practice was intolerable for a nation founded on the principal of liberty and justice for all.

Abraham Lincoln joined the pantheon of great American presidents by winning the Civil War and by ending slavery.  He became president in a way that seemed accidental, because he was the least known of the leading contenders for the presidency in 1860.  Moreover, he was a humble country lawyer, largely self-taught, and quite awkward-looking.  What he lacked in appearance and credentials he more than made up for in intelligence and political skill. Doris Kearns Goodwin’s recent book, Team of Rivals, explains in detail exactly how Abraham Lincoln used politics not only to get elected to the presidency, but also to end the practice of slavery in America.  While ponderous, the book is extremely well written and maintains the sense of urgency felt throughout the United States before, during, and after the Civil War.

In 1858, former U. S. Representative Abraham Lincoln, at the time a Whig, lost a senate challenge to incumbent Stephen A. Douglas after a series of debates highlighted growing divisions in the nation on the question of whether slave owners could move into newly established western territories.  Lincoln opposed the practice of slavery but recognized that the Constitution permitted it in certain states.  Senator Douglas, through a piece of legislation known as the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, undid the Missouri Compromise which set the northern boundary for slavery at parallel 36°30′ north (except within the boundaries of the proposed state of Missouri).  Debate over this law emboldened the southern states because it allowed the settlers of the new territories to decide by majority vote whether or not to permit slavery.  The southern states’ agrarian economies depended on the industrialized cities of the northeast where political power was concentrated.  Both sides recognized that it had the potential to change the political balance of power in the United States by increasing the power of those who depended on slavery.  Meanwhile, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s landmark book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (published in 1852), enlightened the public on the horrors of slavery, giving traction to the Abolitionist movement in the north and setting the stage for the Civil War. 

Two years after his failed Senate campaign, in 1860, Abraham Lincoln re-entered politics seeking the Republican nomination to the office of President.  The leading contenders – William H. Seward, Simon Cameron, Salmon Chase, and Edward Bates – underestimated the “rail-splitter” from Illinois.  After three ballots Lincoln, through astute political maneuvering, honesty, and good manners emerged the nominee.  The presidential election results revealed how deeply divided north and south had become:  he won the northern states and western territories but not a single southern state.   His election to the presidency, with no constituents in the south, was the breaking point and eleven southern states – South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee, in that order – seceded from the Union.  Shortly before Lincoln’s inauguration, Jefferson Davis became the president of the Confederate States of America.  

Team of Rivals explains with great clarity the political brilliance of Abraham Lincoln.  He was elected president with less than 50 per cent of the vote; and to offset this vulnerability he brought several of his rivals for the office into his cabinet.  Not only did this lead to better debates, it helped him understand the will of the people from many perspectives.  Throughout his presidency, his rivals both underestimated and attempted to undermine him but he was always two steps ahead of them.  Rather than seek revenge, Lincoln found ways to defuse his opposition which allowed them to save face as he outmaneuvered them.  His first and most painful political lesson happened early on in the Civil War.

Despite superior manpower and war machinery, the Union fought a half-hearted battle to reclaim the wayward states.  This was largely due to the failure of General George McClellan to lead the army.  The Confederate soldiers, on the other hand, fought with passion and bested the Union troops in battle after battle.  It seemed possible that the unthinkable might happen until the deliberative president, with his considerable political skill, reorganized the army’s leadership and rallied the troops behind the cause of preserving the Union.  Lincoln, being a civilian, had to tread carefully among the military leaders in order to keep their loyalty.  It took time and many lives before he was able to remove McClellan from command and replace him with a general who was willing to fight.

As calls for ending slavery became louder in the north and conditions in battle grew worse, Lincoln issued the “Emancipation Proclamation” (1863) ordering the entire executive branch of the government, including the armed forces, to treat the slaves in the Confederate states as free people and used this as leverage to attempt to bring the Confederate states back to the Union.  The Proclamation’s sole purpose was to weaken the Confederacy, not to eradicate slavery from the nation because it did not apply to the five slave states which did not secede.  Lincoln knew that it would take an amendment to the Constitution to abolish slavery from the entire country.    

Senator John B. Henderson of Missouri, on January 11,1864, called for this constitutional amendment which quickly passed in the Senate.  The House of Representatives, however, failed to achieve the two-thirds majority vote required until the following year.  President Lincoln, again used his political skill to persuade just enough Representatives to support it while he simultaneously campaigned for re-election.  He won and shortly after his inauguration in January of 1965, the House passed the amendment by a vote of 119 to 56.  The northern states voted to ratify the 13^th amendment in short order, but before it became part of the Constitution, President Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865, as he watched a play at Ford’s Theater in Washington, DC.  Vice President Andrew Johnson assumed the presidency and pushed the Confederate states to return to the Union and ratify the 13^th Amendment to the Constitution.  In all, 27 of the (then) 36 states voted to ratify and slavery ended, freeing millions of black Americans from bondage, but not from hardship.

President Lincoln, shortly before his death, had advocated giving black men the right to vote.  Not everyone who opposed slavery and supported the 13^th Amendment agreed with this.  Many Abolitionists favored sending the freed slaves to Liberia in Africa where many previously freed slaves had settled beginning in 1820.  This might have appealed to those who had been captured and imported on slave ships, but the majority of slaves in the United States in the mid-1800s were born on American soil and were not inclined to leave the only home they knew.  Thus began a massive migration of freed slaves to the industrialized north which created an entirely new set of problems for the nation’s politicians to deal with for more than a century, in ways both ugly and beautiful, but never with the finesse of Abraham Lincoln.

Today’s politicians are an unpopular lot, and deservedly so, thanks to a political system mired in dysfunction.  Very few Americans seem satisfied with the work being done by the politicians we have elected to do the nation’s business because they are not doing very much that could be called work (and this has been true for far too long).  The so-called “Sequester” is the latest example of politics gone bad in America.  It’s draconian spending cuts and tax hikes were designed to be so heinous that neither political party would let it happen, but they did anyway.  Watching the Washington drama play out is like witnessing a toxic divorce:  the parties cannot even agree on the weather.  Once upon a time, liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, could argue about policy, play a round of golf, and reach a consensus.  Gradually across the past thirty years politicians have stopped using good manners and have become focused on winning – the argument, the tactical maneuver, the debate, the election – by any means necessary.  Today, the American people are more cynical than at any point in our history, and this is a danger to our democracy.

In his first inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln closed with these words:

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

This country may never again be blessed with a politician of Lincoln’s greatness, but that is no excuse for the mockery we, the people of the United States of America, are making of our miraculous form of government when we allow political organizations to turn us against each other over issues we ought to be able to talk about.

Copyright 2013 Teresa Friedlander, all rights reserved  

Leaves of Grass

by Walt Whitman

“The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature.  The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem…Here is not merely a nation but a teeming nation of nations.” – Walt Whitman, from his introduction to Leaves of Grass.

It is during times of great social change that iconic artists, writers, and poets emerge whose works reflect and express the spirit of the times.  Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was one of these icons and his epic poem cycle, Leaves of Grass, describes a young nation attempting to define itself while reconciling the conflicts left unresolved at its inception.  Whitman was born at a time when slavery was ripping the United States of America into feuding camps:  abolitionists wanted slavery to end on purely moral grounds while slave states depended on the plantation economy in order to produce cash crops such as tobacco and cotton.  In the years leading up to the Civil War, friends and family members would often come to blows over the issue of slavery because there was no middle ground.  Either slaves were full humans and therefore entitled to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” under the Constitution, or they were on a par with livestock, entitled to no rights whatsoever.  In the end, it would take the catharsis of war to settle the question, but the end of the war was the beginning of the social turbulence created when tens of thousands of freed slaves abandoned the plantations of their birth, with little more than the clothes on their backs, for the hope of paid work in the smokestack industries of the northeast.

As this drama unfolded, Walt Whitman’s inner world roiled as he watched, listened, and reported on the national argument.  The greatness of the United States came from the idea that we are a nation of laws, not of men, and that all men are created equal.  Only the most intellectually dishonest people could argue that slaves were not human beings, and while he himself did not favor slavery, Whitman did not fully embrace the Abolitionist movement, because he felt it was somehow antithetical to the American ideal.  Whitman recognized that slavery as a practice was dehumanizing; that even the most beaten down slave was still a man or woman in possession of a soul, capable of goodness and evil, and made of the same stuff as his or her master.  The question of slavery notwithstanding, Whitman understood that the American ideal transcended the lesser aspects of human nature, allowing our more noble character traits to define us:  a pure example of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts.  Slavery and the American ideal were incompatible, but the southern United States depended on slavery for their survival.  Whitman recognized that resolving this issue was going to be painful, perhaps ruinous.

Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855, describes America and Americans in words the way a mixed media collage or abstract expressionist painting tells a story through visual imagery.  In the introduction to the poem cycle, Whitman writes that  “the genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors…but always most in the common people.”  Whitman himself was of modest origins and worked in journalism and publishing for most of his young life, taking time out to nurse Civil War soldiers before becoming a US government employee after the war ended.   He knew the meaning of work and was not afraid to get his hands dirty.  Whitman had little in the way of formal education, but had a high aptitude for the English language and became a writer at a young age.   In his early thirties, Whitman decided to become a poet and completed the first edition of the collection of poems which would establish him as one of America’s seminal literary figures.

Reading Leaves of Grass is a journey deep inside oneself.  Whitman’s struggle to make peace with ethical dilemmas, sexuality, religion, death and relationships is not unique:  it is something common to almost every human being, fortunate enough to live free from tyranny, who seeks a life with meaning.  His poems make another point which is that even though our constitution gives us freedom, we Americans do not always agree on what it means to be free.  Whitman received harsh criticism both for his free-form writing and for his treatment of sexuality in Leaves of Grass.  Some said it was immoral, pornographic, homoerotic, or all three.  Just the same, Whitman continued to revise and republish the work up until his death in 1892, and it remains a classic piece of American literature to this day.

I decided to read Leaves of Grass after finding my husband’s copy bookmarked by his terminally ill brother.  The first bookmark fell on a verse discussing immortality, the second on sleep – eternal and otherwise, the fourth on a verse about God, and the fifth about final judgment.  Clearly, my brother-in-law was preparing himself for the end and these poems were helpful to him.  So out of sympathy I read the first three verses of “Song of Myself” which begin as follows:

I celebrate myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,

I lean and loafe at my ease….observing a spear of summer grass.

And I was hooked which surprised me because I have never enjoyed reading poetry.  As a child, I loved listening to poems and nursery rhymes with their song-like cadences and colorful phrases; the captivating blend of stories and songs set to verse.  One of my fondest memories is of my mother’s voice reverberating as I rested my head against her while she read from “The Family Book of Best Loved Poems” with her arm tucked around my shoulders, my little sister on her other side, and my baby brother on her lap.  If I could relive one moment of my childhood, it would be this.

The rhythmic poems I loved as a child are the product of a great tradition of spoken and –eventually –  written language.  Epic poems were how histories survived from generation to generation and across cultures.  Traveling orators committed poems to memory and earned a living by entertaining crowds while preserving histories until they could be written down.  The classic poems from pre-literate societies relied on  metered verses with repeating phrases and epithets to make them easier to memorize.  Some surviving examples of this spoken tradition include Homer’s “Iliad” and “Odyssey”, and Virgil’s “Aeneid” in Greek; Vyasa’s “Mahābhārata” in Sanscrit; and “Beowulf” of unknown authorship in old English. 

Unlike his predecessors and most of his contemporaries, Walt Whitman crafted free-form verse which had a more emotional and expressive quality than cadenced rhyming verses.  Reading Leaves of Grass engages all the senses as if one is sharing Walt Whitman’s experience in the moment.  I can see why it appealed to my brother-in-law when he believed he was dying, still hoping for a miracle.  (Perhaps the poems have curative powers because not only did my brother-in-law survive his high risk surgery, but his body remains completely cancer free some three years later.)  It took me the better part of a month to read Leaves of Grass in its entirety, taking it a few verses at a time, but when I was finished I felt like I could appreciate the beauty of life more deeply than before.   Walt Whitman is considered a “transcendentalist” in that he sought greater and more profound truths than what we can sense and prove scientifically.  What this means is that he could see God in a single blade of grass.

Copyright 2011 Teresa Friedlander, all rights reserved

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

by Mark Twain

Mark Twain enjoyed ruffling feathers by poking fun at politicians and preachers, but he could not possibly have foreseen, when he published Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1884, that this novel would be stirring controversy well into the 21st century. When it first appeared in the United States, Twain’s use of common speech between characters was so unprecedented that many librarians considered the book “trash” and refused to carry it. The subject matter, too, caused some uneasiness although it would be another century before Americans would have the vocabulary to discuss race relations intelligently. In my lifetime, black Americans have gone from segregation to the White House. Just the same, most white Americans are still uneasy discussing race in mixed settings. We are afraid of giving offence, of sounding insensitive, of betraying hidden racist tendencies. One word in particular – “nigger” – makes most of us cringe to the extent that we won’t say it even to ourselves. What is it about that word that makes us so uncomfortable?

In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the so-called “n-word” appears 219 times. “Nigger” is a bastardized form of the word “negro”, meaning black, which came into common usage in colonial times. When Mark Twain, wrote this book using “negro” would have seemed odd in dialog that was meant to capture the way people spoke. Recently, a publishing house catering to schools issued a sanitized version of the book, replacing “nigger” with “slave” and “injun” with “indian”. Rather than calming the controversy, these well-intentioned revisions have inadvertently started an important conversation in America about how slavery still defines us.

Before Huckleberry Finn there was Tom Sawyer: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is a delightful story of childhood along the banks of the Mississippi River. Tom is an engaging, opportunistic, and fearless boy who can’t avoid trouble. One of his friends is Huckleberry Finn, the motherless son of a shiftless and abusive drunkard. The two boys witness a murder but allow an innocent man to be jailed for the crime out of fear for their own safety. This is the first moral dilemma that Huck has to face in his life. In the end, the truth comes out and the innocent man is freed; and Tom and Huck find hidden treasure and become wealthy.

Huckleberry Finn is a much more nuanced and interesting character than Tom Sawyer. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn takes place after Tom and Huck come out of hiding and reveal their wealth. Huck is adopted by the “Widder” Douglas and her sister Miss Watson, who owns a slave named Jim. Huck chafes under the civilizing influence of the sisters and runs off to hide out with Tom and his gang. Huck’s father, “Pap”, hearing of Huck’s fortune, reappears to assert his parental rights. He tracks Huck down and confines him in a remote cabin in conditions resembling slavery. Huck contrives to fake his death and flees to seek his fortune on the mighty Mississippi River.

Meanwhile Jim, hearing that Miss Watson plans to “sell him down the river”, runs away and by chance he and Huck meet up on an uninhabited island. Their reunion is comical in that Jim, believing Huck to be dead, thinks he is encountering a ghost. It takes Huck a while to overcome Jim’s superstitions but eventually the two team up to escape their respective horrors. Huck, being a Christian, has been taught the difference between right and wrong and so he is conflicted about whether or not to turn Jim in, after all Jim is Miss Watson’s property. While Huck believes he is guilty of a crime for helping Jim escape from kind Miss Watson, it is a dilemma he chooses to live with until he reaches an epiphany: that Jim is not only his true friend, but a human being in his own right.

The friendship between Huck and Jim is one of the sweetest in American literature because Huck’s uneducated mind follows his heart to a place of deep appreciation and compassion. On the surface, Jim is the stereotypical slave: ignorant, superstitious, passive, cajoling, humble, and servile. What we learn is that despite his lack of education and his pandering behavior, he possesses a great wisdom and morality which enable him to teach Huck by example and willingly put himself at risk to protect his young friend.

Mark Twain was an astute observer of the human species and used his works of fiction and journalism to point out hypocrisies and self-delusions. During their travels, Huck and Jim encounter a couple of grifters who latch onto them for their own advantage. The grifters who come to be called “The King” and “The Duke” move from town to town selling tickets to a bogus show which they call “The Royal Nonesuch”. Huck and Jim cannot escape from these menacing con artists and end up being pawns in a scheme to steal the inheritance from an orphaned girl who befriends Huck. He manages to thwart the thieves and rejoin Jim on the raft, but The King and The Duke catch up with them and cook up a scheme to sell news of Jim’s whereabouts in order to collect a reward. Huckleberry Finn could have ended in tragedy, but Mark Twain had a light heart; he tied up all the loose ends and made Jim a free man.

Samuel Clemons, who wrote under several pseudonyms, was born in 1835, in Florida, Missouri, not far from the Mississippi River. As a youth, he worked as a printer’s apprentice and typesetter. Drawn to the mighty river, he earned his riverboat pilot’s license, which required that he understand the ever-changing dynamics of moving water in order to guide boats into port. His career ended when the Civil War halted river traffic. Mr. Clemons then followed his brother, Orion, to the Nevada Territory and tried his luck at mining. The people he met during his travels provided fodder for his writing career which took off following the publication of “The Celebrated Frog of Calaveras County”, a humorous piece about a man with a betting problem. The pen name “Mark Twain” comes from a nautical term referring to the depth of water needed for a riverboat to clear, an apt metaphor for an author who sought to elucidate hypocrisies, delusions, and frauds.

Mark Twain’s success as a writer led to his marriage to Olivia Langdon, a wealthy woman from a liberal, Connecticut family. Through this connection, he met Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, and other Abolitionists who helped shape his views about slavery, which - like Huck’s, and like America’s – evolved. Mark Twain was born in a time when people legally kept slaves. As an adult, he saw that slavery was an evil practice and famously said that Emancipation freed the entire nation from the chains of slavery.

Ending slavery in America – a moral imperative – did not usher in a golden age of harmony between the races. Hundreds of thousands of newly freed slaves who owned nothing and belonged nowhere suddenly had responsibility for themselves. Some remained where they were, working the same land as before, beholden to a boss instead of owned by a master. Others moved to cities in search of work. A fortunate few had valuable skills and property which enabled them to create businesses and farms of their own. What they all shared was the taint of slavery, of somehow being less than human and therefore subject to scorn and revulsion. The word “nigger” carries this ugliness and hatred with it to this day.

While removing the offensive epithet from Huckleberry Finn might make certain students, parents, and teachers more comfortable, it does a great disservice to the book and to the people on whose backs the plantation economy was built. Sanitizing Mark Twain’s American literary classic takes away an opportunity for students in mixed race settings to have the discussion about why a little six-letter word can have such power, and how we might one day strip that power away.

Copyright 2011, Teresa Friedlander, all rights reserved

On Slavery

REQUIRED READING: On Slavery

By Teresa Friedlander (copyright 2008)

Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
The Lost German Slave Girl by John Bailey
The Known World by Edward P. Jones

Why do humans enslave their brethren? One answer is that slave labor enables the powerful to achieve great things. Another answer is that slaves, being denied their free will, serve at the pleasure of their masters. A third answer is that slavery is the most severe form of racism because one race can justify enslaving another by claiming genetic superiority. There are many answers to this question, and coupled with the pervasiveness of racism and tribal hatred, suggest that as a species, we still have work to do.

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) was the sensitive and insightful daughter of a minister who preached vehemently about the evils of slavery during the time when the United States of America was embroiled in an angry debate over whether new slave states should be admitted to the Union. Harriet Beecher had the benefit of a good education and a successful marriage to Calvin Stowe, a professor at a theological seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio. While raising their seven children, Mrs. Stowe became a well-known writer and published 30 books, the most famous of which is Uncle Tom’s Cabin. This book, a classic piece of American literature, was an immediate best-seller and served to raise the consciousness of many Americans, particularly in the north, about the horrors of slavery. President Abraham Lincoln is said to have credited Harriet Beecher Stowe with starting the Civil War because of the public outcry her book generated.

Uncle Tom, a middle-aged husband and father, starts out as the property of Kentucky farmers, Arthur and Emily Shelby. Mr. and Mrs. Shelby express genuine affection for their slaves, however, when bad times come they decide to reduce their inventory. In addition to Tom, the Shelbys plan to sell Harry, the son of Mrs. Shelby’s maid, Eliza. Eliza will not be parted from her son, so she and Harry escape in the hope of reaching Canada where Eliza’s husband lives in freedom. Their journey is fraught with hardship and peril given the cold winter and the pursuit of a ruthless slave catcher.

Meanwhile Tom, accepting his fate with quiet dignity, is taken away from his family and home by a slave trader. While traveling down the river to the slave market, a golden-haired and blue-eyed child named Eva falls overboard. Tom dives in and saves her from drowning. Eva’s father, Augustine St. Clare, purchases Tom out of gratitude for his heroism and brings him home to New Orleans. Tom and Eva become very attached to one another, but the little girl falls ill and eventually dies. Harriet Beecher Stowe uses the St. Clare household as a forum for discussing attitudes toward slavery. Mr. St. Clare does not like the institution of slavery, but knows no other way to make a profit off his land. Eva’s Aunt Ophelia, on the other hand, is an abolitionist but feels disgust toward blacks. In the end, however, Eva through her charitable heart teaches her aunt to love the slaves as humans. Shattered by Eva’s death, Mr. St. Clare decides to give Tom his freedom, but is murdered before he is able to do this. Mrs. St. Clare shares none of her late husband’s humanity and sells Tom to a vicious plantation owner named Simon Legree.

Simon Legree’s plantation is a hellish place where young black women are kept for sex and slaves are ordered to beat one another. Tom, being the gentle, loving, and spiritual person he is, cannot obey his master’s order to beat a fellow slave. Mr. Legree decides to beat the Christianity out of Tom but fails. Just the same, Tom suffers a crisis of faith wondering how a loving God can let such cruelty stand. Eva appears to him in a vision and restores his faith in Christianity. Thus restored, Tom facilitates the escape of two women from Mr. Legree’s sex slavery and is able to withstand the beatings aimed at making him reveal the whereabouts of the runaways. As death approaches, Tom forgives Mr. Legree and men who are beating him. The end of the story features a tragic and ironic twist which brought thousands of readers to tears.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin unfortunately fell into disfavor during the civil rights era of the 1960s. Many African Americans at the time felt it described African slaves as so downtrodden that they meekly accepted beatings and degradation by cruel masters. “Uncle Tom” became a pejorative label for a black man who didn’t join the fight against segregation. This is a sad mischaracterization because Uncle Tom’s Cabin was one of the most important works of the Abolitionist cause, and ultimately set the stage for the end of segregation.

Slavery has been a human practice since before recorded history. The ancient Babylonians under their Code of the Hammurabi (circa 1800 BC) legitimized slavery as a redress for serious crimes against others. In the 1700s, slave labor in North America enabled the British Colonies to develop vast cotton and tobacco plantations, yielding the economic leverage needed to win independence from England. As a new nation, the United States of America faced an immediate crisis when designing an unprecedented form of government: southern states depended on slave labor to produce their crops while many in the northern states felt that slavery was criminal and unacceptable. In order to establish a government, the framers of the Constitution wisely deferred decisions about slavery to a future time. Slavery for some was a way of life, for others a necessary evil, and for many in the original 13 colonies, an abhorrent and sinful practice.

Slavery was emotionally loaded even within the slave states, so it became important to create clear delineations between the different castes. Many, if not most, slave owners considered themselves Christians and in order to avoid damnation for sins against other humans, they decided that Africans were less than human and therefore among the creatures that God had instructed Adam and Eve to subdue. White masters were often sexually attracted to their slaves and pregnancies occurred. Over generations, the clear line between black and white became harder and harder to define. Many so-called blacks were much more white than black, but because they were the descendents of slaves, regardless of how much or how little African blood coursed through their veins, they were denied personhood. The Lost German Slave Girl by lawyer John Bailey, is an analysis of this twisted bit of logic. Based on a true legal case, The Lost German Slave Girl is the story of Sally Miller a slave to a cabaret owner in New Orleans, who looked as white as her master but was said to have had a black ancestor. Salome Mueller was a German child who had travelled across the Atlantic Ocean to America with her mother, father, brother, sister, and godmother in 1818. Witnesses testified that Frau and Herr Muller died en route and the brother disappeared into the Louisiana wilderness. With no money to pay for further passage, Salome and her sister were put off the riverboat and left to their fate.

About 20 years later Salome’s godmother, Eva Schuber, spied Sally Miller and “recognized” her as her missing goddaughter. Mr. Bailey builds his story around the facts of the case which are often in conflict with one another. Was Sally Miller the missing Salome Muller – a white woman wrongfully enslaved – or was she legally owned by cabaret proprietor, Louis Belmonti? Mr. Bailey has an opinion about the truth, but the point of the book is more about the rationalizations slave owners used to deny the humanity of their subjects. In order to enslave another human being, it is necessary not only to dominate him or her, but to believe that you are higher on the evolutionary chain, and therefore closer to God.

Slavery, however, was a messy business. It turns out that a surprising number of African Americans, themselves freed slaves, became slave owners. The Known World by Edward P. Jones is a fictionalized analysis of this phenomenon. According to the author, "In 1855 in Manchester County, Virginia, there were 34 free black families... and eight of those free families owned slaves." This is a staggering statistic and turns the notion of slaves being solely under the domination of white owners on its head. Because slavery caused many slave owners anguish, a number of blacks were given their freedom and they had papers to prove it. Some of these newly freed blacks had great talents and highly developed skills and were able to amass a degree of wealth. With wealth came land and land required slaves in order to make the economy of farming work. The title “The Known World” comes from a quote by Voltaire: “All the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books.” It suggests not only that the keeping of slaves is an ignorant and backward practice, but also that slaves having not had the benefit of any education only knew the world within the confines of their masters’ properties. More than any other work cited here, The Known World made it clear that all men are indeed created equal whether pursuing greatness and beauty or ugliness and brutality.