Slavery, Oppression, and the Dawn of the Free World

Imagine that you are the passenger in a car on a long work-related road trip. In the driver’s seat is your boss — a hard, driving tyrant of a man who seems to be on his last nerve. He’s driving the two of you to your destination on a busy, narrow two-lane highway. You hoped to get this trip over with a minimum amount of communication between the two of you, and so far, it’s going okay. But there’s just one problem. You checked your GPS…he’s headed in the wrong direction. He’s been heading in the wrong direction for over an hour.

You’re terrified to say anything. In his current mood, he might stop the car and tell you to get out. He might fire you or cut your hours. But getting to your destination on time is too important. You decide to speak up and tell him you think that the two of you are headed the wrong way.

He responds as you’d expect him to respond — he’s angry and insulted. He tells you to “keep your damn mouth shut” and continues driving. At first, you obey but after another 10 minutes of heading in the wrong direction, you insist that he reverse course. Finally, he pulls over, slams the gear into park, and gets out of the car. “You think you’re so smart? Then you drive! I’m taking a nap in the backseat!” And so he crawls into the backseat and you take the wheel.

You would love to turn around right then and there, but there’s too much traffic and the road is too narrow. Your only hope is to continue driving in the same direction and make a U-turn at the earliest available opportunity. It could come up in five miles or 50 miles — you don’t know. But it will come eventually, so you get back on the highway and drive.

After 25 miles, you see a rest area that allows you to stop and turn around safely. You’re now set to reach your destination, later than you planned, but still better late than never.

The Analogy Applied to History

When I think of human history, I think of the centuries that humans lived under the tyranny of kings who ruled by Divine Right, or religious rulers who burned heretics at the stake, or of civilizations who bought and sold slaves as all civilizations did at one point in history. Those centuries in which people were thought of as means to ends — rather than ends in themselves whose sovereignty was to be respected because it was fundamental to their dignity — were analogous to the time that your boss was driving in the wrong direction.

Your realization that the direction was wrong is analogous to the Age of Reason and The Enlightenment during which thinkers began to assert that people had rights — namely that to self-ownership, and that along with that, tyranny, whether it be in the form of an oppressive government or a slave owner, was no longer morally acceptable.

When your boss finally gave you the keys and allowed you to drive is analogous to moments in history like 1776, and other revolutionary movements that embraced the sovereignty of the individual as the moral building block of society.

But slavery, along with other forms of tyranny, couldn’t be abolished overnight. At least, it wasn’t within the power of those who argued and fought for the ideas enshrined in the Declaration of Independence to do so. In the case of The United States, had the founders insisted on the abolition of slavery in 1776, half of the country would have refused to be a part of the new nation, and slavery would have persisted just the same.

The only hope of those who believed in the sovereignty of the individual was to drive forward, knowing full well that in one sense they were driving in the wrong direction. But in a truer, larger sense, they were going in the only direction that could ever lead to their ultimate destination. That is, it was the ideas that spawned movements like the American Revolution that provided the moral impetus for the abolition of slavery, and later on the abolition of Jim Crow laws. The abolition of slavery in the United States was the U-turn that would eventually result in full citizenship of all people regardless of any immutable characteristic.

Economist Thomas Sowell puts it well:

“Of all the tragic facts about the history of slavery, the most astonishing to an American today is that, although slavery was a worldwide institution for thousands of years, nowhere in the world was slavery a controversial issue prior to the 18th century. People of every race and color were enslaved — and enslaved others. White people were still being bought and sold as slaves in the Ottoman Empire, decades after American blacks were freed….

…You could research all of the 18th century Africa or Asia or the Middle East without finding any comparable rejection of slavery there. But who is singled out for scathing criticism today? American leaders of the 18th century.”

Source: The Thomas Sowell Reader

Final thoughts

Granted, the point I’m making applies to the Western world more generally (Great Britain was the first major Western nation to abolish slavery, Haiti was the first altogether), but as those of us in the United States prepare to celebrate the beginning and success of the American experiment, we should remember that July 4th, 1776 is not a day that we need to look back on with a sense of moral confusion. It was the day that the believers in the idea of self-ownership — those who believed that no one should ever be the slave or either a plantation owner, a king or a priest — took the keys and began driving. And the world has never been the same sense.

Happy Fourth of July, my friends.