Slave Nation

by Alfred W. Blumrosen

  The notion that these leaders—who had lived in their lifetimes under at least four different governments—wished to freeze the concepts they developed in the hurly-burly of current events is nonsense. What they expected of successive generations was that the inheritors of the system of freedom and democracy that they built would act with as much wisdom for their own time as they had shown in shepherding the nation into being. The Constitution was not created to be a straightjacket; it is a framework for a living engagement with the contemporary problems.

  Our nation was born partly to protect race slavery, and grew to maturity with a decision to limit that slavery. We have a collective responsibility to view this history from our own perspective. While personal guilt is not in question, personal responsibility for the condition of people of color continues. Whites are the beneficiaries of the totality of the decisions made by our founders. Where, in the light of more modern views, they erred, we have the same obligation they assumed; to build in our time a society that better accords with our fundamental values than the one that we inherited.

  They chose to fight a rigid society that was not responsive to their needs. They sought to create a society that would be more flexible and responsive and they succeeded. The value of their success lies in our continued willingness to address today’s problems with the same spirit. Madison summed this up best in the Federalist 14, responding to the argument that the nation was too vast to be governed by a republic:

  Why is the experiment of an extended republic to be rejected, merely because it may comprise what is new? Is it not the glory of the people of America, that, whilst they have paid a decent regard to the opinions of former times and other nations, they have not suffered a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom, or for names, to overrule the suggestions of their own good sense, the knowledge of their own situation, and the lessons of their own experience?…They pursued a new and more noble course. They accomplished a revolution which has no parallel in the annals of human society. They reared the fabrics of governments which have no model on the face of the globe. They formed the design of a great Confederacy, which it is incumbent on their successors to improve and perpetuate.30

  In this spirit, it is our opportunity to address the resonances of slavery that are still heard in the land. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 marked our most recent sustained effort toward a more equal society. At the first anniversary of that act, President Lyndon Johnson, at Howard University—probably without knowing it—sounded eerily like Benjamin Franklin in 1789.

  Freedom is the right to share, share fully and equally, in American society—to vote, to hold a job, to enter a public place, to go to school.…But freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please. You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race, and then say, “You are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.

  Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates.…We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.31

  President Johnson’s sentiment was echoed in 1990 by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor of the United States Supreme Court:

  As a nation we aspire to ensure that equality defines all citizens’ daily experience and opportunities as well as the protection afforded to them under the law.32

  While we have made measurable progress in improving opportunities, we still need to address these issues in the spirit of Benjamin Franklin.34 Our posterity should be able to look back and conclude that we accepted Madison’s obligation to “improve and perpetuate” the society that the founding fathers—and their successors over two centuries—bequeathed us. The phrase “improve and perpetuate” may appear internally inconsistent, but it is not. It acknowledges that values of the Declaration infuse our lives with obligations to each other, to those who came before and will come after, to enhance those values that— in our view—will make the pursuit of happiness—which includes living in a just society—a genuine human option.

  * * *

  In Memoriam

  * * *

  Ruth and I first began this book about slavery after we visited the mansion in Northern Virginia that belonged to Robert E. Lee. We wandered the sweeping lawns and the luxurious rooms—what had once been the great wealth of the Southern Aristocracy, most of it based on slavery. It was in the rooms of that mansion that the Lees had conspired with Jefferson to overthrow the British government. We wondered why the scions of the successful planter slaveholder families would bite the hand that had brought them such wealth. We continued our research over the years, and at the behest of our literary agent, Ronald Goldfarb, we completed one more revision in December of 2003. In January 2004, Ruth died in an automobile accident. In the spring, while I was struggling with memories of our marriage of fifty-one years, Ron urged me to complete the manuscript. As I did so, I felt that Ruth was by my side, and we were still working together.

  Her spirit and her life come alive in the “Requiem for Ruth Blumrosen” written by our dear friend Barbara Chase-Riboud:

  Requiem for Ruth Blumrosen

  * * *

  I will leave your white house and tranquil garden

  Let life be empty and bright.

  -Anna Andreyevna Akhmatova

  I

  I think about you to the point of tears,

  Catch the hundreds of intonations of your voice,

  The self-taught justice of your smile,

  The many allées of your brilliant mind,

  The bottomless reservoir of sweetness.

  How could you end so suddenly?

  Drowning out the sound of my own voice speaking

  With the crack of hot steel and plate glass

  And the shriek of shattered dreams?

  It is so absurd I almost laugh crazily,

  Into the bitter virgin silence you have left behind,

  Polite to the end, closing the door softly

  On unforeseen evil, everything upside-down forever,

  In secret places that you never showed me,

  Laughing together in passing.

  II

  Thus you bear my heart away chilled,

  Amongst the peonies which bloomed yesterday,

  Where only my tears live and my fear reflected

  In the mirror of serene Gulf waters where patiently

  I wait each day for one last conversation, one last kiss,

  In that bronze twilight between being and not being,

  And the melancholy frustration of a loved one’s

  Cancelled rendezvous. I can’t be angry.

  For I wasn’t there; only grief and darkness were there,

  In my place, deep and velvety and above all,

  Incomprehensible as are other people’s dreams, as is,

  A distant light-house or a burden in an outstretched palm,

  I don’t even recognize my own wailing voice,

  Or the unsolvable riddle burning like a night lamp

  Before an eternal door, eternally closed.

  III

  Your home is now the waters of the Gulf of Mexico

  Grown silent from the sun’s bright blaze.

  Your limpid countenance and tender eyes

  Watch from its depths the long day extinguished

  By violence and the even longer night when penguins

  Dance on shore in a grove of singing nightingales

  And illegal aliens take flight for the border.

  But you are quiet, resplendent in moonlight and salty mist,

  Your judicial eyes are closed wide open.

  Your lips curve in an arc at our reckless rovings

  And incessant
murmurings because: you are quiet. Dark blue drifts over the sea’s lacquer.

  My Requiem is no longer sorrowful, but radiant,

  A copper penny thrown over my shoulder, slicing

  The satin surface, a silver coffin, pure swan.

  IV

  Rest. Rest. Rest, my love, my Ruth,

  Leave our sobbing and our prayers

  Facing your magnificent smile

  How bright the lunar eyes and relentless far-off gaze

  That has come to rest on the doorstoop of Paradise.

  Glancing back she cries: “I will wait”

  Which like a wax seal on the heart, unique, valedictory,

  Unforgettable, erases all remaining memory of the event,

  Forgiving all with a wave of her tawny hand so that

  Each day becomes a Remembrance Day. And she can’t return!

  But even beyond Lethe, I shall take her with me,

  Hold to the living outline of her soul: “I will wait” she cries,

  A sacred reproach from the one who died to those who cannot

  Imagine her death, which is neither a magnificat of roses nor a

  Host of Archangels, but a gracious acquittal of the living.

  Barbara Chase-Riboud

  Rome, March 19, 2004

  * * *

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  * * *

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&nbs
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