By law, a slave was three-fifths of a person. It came to me that what I’d just suggested would seem paramount to proclaiming vegetables equal to animals, animals equal to humans, women equal to men, men equal to angels. I was upending the order of creation . . .
“My goodness, did you learn this from the Presbyterians?” Father asked. “Are they saying slaves should live among us as equals?” The question was sarcastic, meant for my brothers and for the moment itself, yet I answered him.
“No, Father, I’m saying it.”
—from The Invention of Wings, Sue Monk Kidd’s novel about the life of the nineteenth-century abolitionist-activist Sarah Moore Grimké
The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified on July 28, 1868, when three-fourths of the states (twenty-eight of thirty-seven) accepted what would become some of the most important and frequently litigated constitutional measures, among them the citizenship, due process, and equal protection clauses. Ratification represented the triumph of the principles espoused by the abolitionist movement, in which Sarah Grimké and her sister, Angelina, were among the earliest and most ardent campaigners, advocating not only emancipation but equality.
The Grimké sisters came from a Southern slave-holding family, which they defied. In Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves, Henry Wiencek tries to make sense of the man who declared the nation built upon the self-evident truth of equality but, conforming to his heritage and his class, built his Virginia plantations and his wider prosperity upon “the execrable commerce” of slavery. Wiencek notes that while the younger, abolitionist Jefferson wished to take the ancient Roman dictum “Let there be justice, even if the sky falls” as his guiding principle, his personal documents reflect “a turmoil of doubts, loathings, self-recrimination, all vying with the imperative to create a productive plantation”:
The pages of Jefferson’s notebook offer a diorama of the young man’s psyche — the architect and planter struggling against the moralist, seeking a way to absorb this foul, repugnant system into his interior landscape and into the exterior landscape he is shaping.
Jefferson’s first public proposal against slavery was through an emancipation bill he proposed to Virginia’s House of Burgesses (boroughs). The first legislative assembly in the New World, the House of Burgesses is also tied to this week, its first session held on July 30, 1619. While its endorsement of the “one man one vote” principle was compromised — at first enfranchising only free men, then only landowning men, and of course no women — the House of Burgesses reflected a commitment to consensus and to community. Now 450 years onward, says Yuval Levin in The Fractured Republic, the nation must somehow renew that commitment, thereby overcoming the yawning liberal-conservative divide. This cannot be accomplished through a nostalgic recreation of some earlier stage of American greatness but by exploring how the foundational principles “could be applied to our novel, twenty-first-century circumstances — to build upon our dynamism and diversity while combatting the aimlessness, isolation, social breakdown, and stunted opportunities that now stand in the way of too many Americans.”
For Levin, “a politics of subsidiarity” offers a way forward. In principle, “Subsidiarity means that no one gets to have their way exclusively,” that freedom is “a social achievement,” and that the only way to mend the national fracture is “not by denying our differences, but by rising above them when we are called.” In practice, subsidiarity means empowering the “middle layers of society” — the contemporary boroughs, in which reside “the institutions of family, community, local authority, and civic action”:
The middle layers of society, where people see each other face to face, offer a middle ground between radical individualism and extreme centralization. Our political life need not consist of a recurring choice between having the federal government invade and occupy the middle layers of society or having isolated individuals break down the institutions that compose those layers. It can and should be an arena for attempting different ways of empowering those middle institutions to help our society confront its problems.
The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2a8USpK
Sig Nordal 