{"id":112305,"date":"2017-07-07T12:24:03","date_gmt":"2017-07-07T16:24:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=112305"},"modified":"2017-07-10T11:46:33","modified_gmt":"2017-07-10T15:46:33","slug":"for-our-cause-is-just","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/07\/07\/for-our-cause-is-just\/","title":{"rendered":"For Our Cause Is Just"},"content":{"rendered":"

The abolitionist Lydia Maria Child feared the effects of electing \u201ca blot upon humanity.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a>

An engraving from Lydia Maria Child\u2019s The Oasis<\/i>, 1834.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cI am not yet prepared to believe that the people of this republic are corrupt enough to choose by fair and honest votes, such a blot upon humanity as Andrew Jackson,\u201d Lydia Maria Child wrote to her new mother-in-law in the early months after Jackson\u2019s election in 1828. When I stumbled upon this letter among Child\u2019s papers at Harvard, I felt a pang of sympathy. The sorrow and despair behind Child\u2019s reluctance to accept her fellow citizens\u2019 choice were all too familiar. She did not contest the election: the votes had been \u201cfair and honest.\u201d Why, then, did she call her fellow citizens \u201ccorrupt\u201d?<\/p>\n

Child was only twenty-six when Jackson was elected, but she was already an established author, well on her way to becoming a household name as a crusader for justice. Her 1824 novel Hobomok<\/em> had propelled her to literary fame with its sympathetic account of the plight of native Americans. Her 1833 treatise An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans <\/em>was so progressive in the cause of abolition and so scathing against northern racism that she was temporarily ostracized from Boston society. Undaunted, she followed the Appeal<\/em> with The Evils of Slavery, and the Cure of Slavery<\/em> and the Anti-Slavery Catechism<\/em>, as well as newspaper columns, children\u2019s stories, and novels all with abolitionist themes.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Those published writings give ample evidence of her convictions, but the box of letters in front of me provided a more personal view. In 1862, twenty-four years after she\u2019d lamented Jackson\u2019s election to her mother-in-law, Child was writing to her nephew William Haskins, then serving in the Fifty-first Massachusetts Regiment of the Union Army. (His brother, also enlisted, would die in the coming year.) By then, Child had penned any number of excoriating condemnations of slavery and diagnoses of its persistence. But the task here was different. How to describe to a young man whose life was on the line how it had come to this, that his country had engaged in an evil so radical that it required his life to right itself?\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cApologizing for despotism, and yielding inch by inch to its aggressions, had caused a great decline in the Spirit of Liberty among us,\u201d she wrote. As a precocious teenager living in what\u2019s now Maine, Child had seen morally compromising politics firsthand. Would-be Mainers had voted for independence in 1819 only to have their statehood made conditional on the admission of Missouri as a slave state. Child\u2019s early history suggests that her political consciousness developed around the dispiriting moral effects of this compromise. \u201cWe had given aid to cruel oppression,\u201d she continues in her letter, \u201cuntil the moral atmosphere of the country had become so corrupt, that nothing but a terrible thunder-storm could purify it.\u201d<\/p>\n

In her 1860 tract \u201cThe Duty of Disobedience to the Fugitive Slave Law,\u201d Child had railed against Massachusetts legislators for their complicity in the Fugitive Slave Act. Recognizing slavery\u2019s evil yet returning escaped slaves to their masters was moral outrage enough, she argued, but the impact on the moral character of northerners was a disaster unto itself.<\/p>\n

At the start of the Civil War, Child saw more corruption. Only their fear for their own safety\u2014not a conviction for justice, she writes to Haskins\u2014had finally galvanized northerners\u2019 resistance. In this Child saw a hidden, even devious, divine plan: Providence had so ordained things that although northerners could not be persuaded to fight for others\u2019 basic human rights, they could be threatened into fighting for themselves. \u201cIf the white working-men of the North want to secure of their own<\/em> freedom,\u201d Child writes, \u201cthey must see to it that the black working-men of the South have theirs.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/a>

A portrait of Child.<\/p><\/div>\n

Child had hoped fervently as war was declared that the slaves would be immediately emancipated and recruited into the Union Army. But Lincoln hesitated. Child places responsibility squarely on the shoulders of her fellow northerners: \u201cBut, after all, it would not be fair to blame the President for moving so slowly. The people were not prepared to sustain him in any such measure; they had become too generally demoralized by long subservience to the Slave Power.\u201d<\/p>\n

What was to become of such a corrupt, diminished, demoralized, nation? The question must have agonized Child, not just as a lifelong abolitionist but as one with close relatives at war. \u201cNo <\/em>news of you is good <\/em>news,\u201d she writes to her nephew; \u201cand so we feel better when we have looked in vain for your name.\u201d She adds, \u201cYour uncle keeps up a brave heart. A dozen times a day I hear him singing at his work:<\/p>\n

Then conquer we must
\n<\/em>For our cause it is just<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The belief that good will conquer was, for Child, a kind of philosophical truth. \u201cI cannot otherwise than trust that all is coming out right, at last,\u201d she writes to Haskins, \u201cthat the great<\/em> battle of Freedom<\/em> will surely be won.\u201d The war, she suggests, was a storm sent \u201cnot in anger, but in love\u201d; \u201cand in spite of the evil devices of man, I believe the storm will accomplish its work of purification, and a serene sky will light up the retreating clouds with a brilliant bow of promise.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the Star-Spangled Banner\u2019s prophetic \u201cmust,\u201d as Child knew all too well, is conditional. The certainty of victory requires us to embrace a just cause. And on this front, Child was less certain, little though she admitted this to her enlisted nephew. Could a population so corrupted, so weakened by complicity with injustice, be trusted with a just cause? Sometimes she seems to think that the war itself will root out corruption; elsewhere, she fears that the destruction of war is too good for a people so degraded. \u201cIt seems as if it would be better than this guilty nation deserved<\/em> to get rid of its blasting curse without going through more suffering,\u201d she regrets. And sometimes she despairs of both justice and victory: \u201cThus far, the U.S. have been acting so basely towards the slaves, that it seems that God could not think us worth<\/em> saving, as a nation. Perhaps we are destined to be a warning<\/em> to future nations, having proved ourselves too wicked to be used as an example<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/a>

An illustration from Child\u2019s An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

The range of philosophical beliefs expressed in these letters could have been paralyzing. If Providence is ordering all for the good, our efforts are unnecessary. If one\u2019s country is doomed by its sinful past, resistance is futile. But Child refused to be paralyzed. Her lifetime of struggle evidences her belief that even if the triumph of justice was inevitable, it depended on the actions of individuals. Even if the country were beyond saving, it was her duty to try.<\/p>\n

So she devoted her formidable talents for research, rhetoric, and philosophical argument to pricking her fellow citizens\u2019 consciences. She wrote with empathy about suffering southerners and was unsparing of northern hypocrisy. She raised money for regional anti-slavery organizations and used her body to shield abolitionist speakers from threatening mobs. Here, too, her letters give a more personal view, showing the small, human efforts she undertook: making sewing-kits for \u201cthe freedwomen of Mississippi,\u201d forgoing new clothing to fund homes for fugitive slaves, knitting hats for soldiers. She refused to take her national anthem\u2019s \u201cmust\u201d for granted. She believed it could only be fulfilled by tireless, creative, multi-pronged effort.<\/p>\n

In Child\u2019s early despair over the results of an election, there\u2019s the beginning of a lifetime of refusing to be infected by moral complacency. She may initially have been reluctant to believe in her country\u2019s corruption, but once having acknowledged it, she attacked its root causes and devoted her talents to its eradication. She made mistakes; she often doubted; sometimes her efforts failed. In this box of letters to her family, she often admits to depression and despair. Nevertheless, she persisted. She could not have foreseen our current moment, but she would have understood it well.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The referenced letters by Lydia Maria Child are archived at Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.<\/em><\/p>\n

Lydia L. Moland is associate professor of philosophy at Colby College in Waterville, Maine where she is also associate director of the Center for the Arts and Humanities.\u00a0She is the author of<\/em>\u00a0Hegel on Political Identity: Patriotism, Nationality, Cosmopolitanism\u00a0and the forthcoming\u00a0<\/em>Hegel’s Aesthetics: The Art of Idealism.\u00a0<\/i>She has written numerous articles on moral and political philosophy and is a current fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lydia Maria Child despaired of the results of the 1828 election, calling Andrew Jackson \u201ca blot upon humanity.\u201d But she refused to fall to moral complacency.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1189,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7555],"tags":[29457,29458,142,29459,4215,2626,5733,9147,111,182,29456,29461,12856,5014,12985,7403,2426,18274,29460,7258],"class_list":["post-112305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-history","tag-abolition","tag-abolitionists","tag-america","tag-an-appeal-in-favor-of-that-class-of-americans-called-africans","tag-andrew-jackson","tag-civil-war","tag-correspondence-2","tag-elections","tag-freedom","tag-letters","tag-lydia-maria-child","tag-moral-character","tag-morality","tag-new-england","tag-nineteenth-century","tag-philosophy","tag-politics","tag-slavery","tag-the-evils-of-slavery","tag-the-south"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhat an Abolitionist\u2019s Letters Can Teach Us About Our Political Moment<\/title>\n<meta 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