The Half Never Told: May 21, 2026

  

The Half Never Told: May 21, 2026

Peter Schultz

 

         “In 1787, the Constitutional Convention allowed the [slave] trade to go on.” And Baptist focused on the “owners” who “would drive decisions about him [the slave].”

 

         But it wasn’t just about “him” and, most importantly, it was about slavery itself and the decisions that sanctioned, created, promoted, protected, and constructed slavery as an institution taken as justified. And because thought of as justified, as justice, a slave regime was created. And this was the crucial issue, not the slave trade.

 

         That this was the crucial issue is confirmed by the vast expansion of slavery that took place after the slave trade was outlawed. The outlawing of the slave trade was, from the point of view of ending slavery, meaningless. [By the by, those slaves who were captured by the government when illegal slave traders were captured were sold into slavery in the US. They were not freed in the US or elsewhere.]

 

         Similarly, the Missouri Compromise was meaningless insofar as post-compromise “active white opposition to slavery dwindled toward the vanishing point.” That compromise was merely a tinkering with the parts of the slavery regime that existed.

 

         “The interstate slave trade mocked the hopes of abolitionists that slavery would die out on its own.” [186] Of course it did because slavery was not a growth. It was a regime and regimes don’t grow; they are constructed.

 

         “Slavery expansion was consciously chosen, a crime of intent.” Well, not so consciously chosen in a slave regime and definitely not criminal in that regime. So: “Most whites, … North …  and South, believed that slave owners had obtained their slaves by orderly business transactions, well recorded by law.” [188] Indeed, they had! Slave trading was legitimized by the regime, which like all regimes defined the just and the unjust. That’s what regimes do, construct beliefs about what is just and unjust.

 

         Focusing on the slave trade hides the crucial issue, slavery and the slave regime. They become the “back story,” so to speak. When treated as such, such stories are powerful because they permeate the action that more visible stories do not. So, when Jane Austen, e.g., treated slavery as such a “back story,” she was in fact favoring that story and revealing its dominance. E.g., in Mansfield Park slavery actually dominates that story because it dominated life at Mansfield Park, even having the made the Park possible. Just as the British military dominates the action in Pride and Prejudice.  And, of course, quite clearly, how the British Navy – and Austen’s anal sex joke about “rear admirals” – dominates the action in Persuasion. [Another example of slavery serving as such a back story occurs in Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. In Twain’s Connecticut Yankee, the back story of significance is that the Connecticut Yankee is an arms manufacturer, and he serves as a foil to Merlin who is a magician. He also creates a holocaust, which is quite some commentary on modernity.]

 

Jefferson’s obfuscation: Jefferson asserted once that slavery was like riding a wolf, holding on, and not knowing whether to hold on or to let go. But that’s a soft sell. In a slave regime, the wolf is on the loose, and in control. The choice? Kill it or die or succumb to it. We’re not riding the wolf; it’s chasing us, threatening to devour us.  

 

Did Lincoln realize this? That he wondered and spoke about the perpetuation of our institutions suggests he did. Slavery as a regime made perpetuating America’s original institutions as conventionally understood highly unlikely. And appeals to the spirit or ghost of Washington or to strict law-abidingness would be insufficient for that perpetuation. What was sufficient, ala’ Lincoln? Read his second inaugural as he provides his answer there.