When the Spanish and Portuguese explorers of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries broke through the established horizons and compelled their fellows to get acquainted with the unknown, they turned the medieval mind loose in a world of fantasies and marvels. New myths were created and old myths regained credence. Columbus suspected that he had found either Japan or the true terrestrial paradise; the flat Florida peninsula was believed to contain the authentic Fountain of Youth; the Seven Enchanted Cities of ancient legend were thought to lie, attainable at last, somewhere north of Mexico; and such creatures as dragons, griffins, unicorns, sea monsters, giants, and headless men with eyes in their chests were accepted as realities in the fabulous lands beyond the seas. Men who supposed that they had a fairly complete understanding of an orderly cosmos found themselves living in a world where almost anything might be true.
In such a world, men have to recast many of their ideas, and out of the intellectual ferment that developed in the sixteenth century came notions which have immense relevance to the state of today’s world. For the age of discovery took the lid off of the world, a process not entirely unlike the opening of Pandora’s box; some of the ideas that came out when the lid came off have had an amazing development and have become very hard to live with, and constitute present-. day problems of the first magnitude.
Among these, apparently, must be listed that enormous obstacle to peace and good will, race prejudice itself; and a succinct and provocative discussion of the development of this problem is provided by Lewis Hanke in his compact little book, Aristotle and the American Indians, which is subtitled: “A Study in Race Prejudice in the Modern World.”
As Professor Hanke makes clear, true race prejudice hardly existed in the fifteenth century. Mankind then was divided into two antagonistic groups, to be sure, but the division was between Christians and infidels rather than between men whose skins had different pigmentation. It was only when Europeans entered not only the Americas but Africa and Asia as well that the issue of race became dominant.
It developed naturally enough. The new lands that were being opened had enormous wealth. The men who occupied these lands were either uncouth barbarians or, at the least, eminently conquerable, and in any case they were strange folk of a different race. Who were they? How should they be treated? Could they be Christianized and civilized? Was it not, perhaps, wholly right and proper for Europeans to conquer and despoil them by force of arms?
Aristotle and the American Indians, by Lewis Hanke. Henry Regnery Co. 164 pp. $3.50.
The debate that centered around this final question was carried on most extensively in Spain, which was making the largest conquests and which was also an extremely devout nation, troubled by pangs of conscience. In 1550 Charles V took the remarkable step of ordering all further conquests suspended until a special assembly of theologians and counselors could debate the matter. In his examination of the ensuing debate Professor Hanke centers his attention chiefly on two distinguished opponents—the Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas, who argued that the Indians had natural rights which had to be respected, and the famous Renaissance scholar Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, who held that the Indians were such crude and brutish people that their subjugation was lawful.
Given the circumstances, it was probably inevitable that Sepúlveda’s idea should prevail, inasmuch as the pressure for continued conquest and exploitation was all but irresistible. But it was the justification which Sepúlveda offered that did the damage. For Sepúlveda brought forward the ancient theory of Aristotle—that a part of mankind is set aside by nature to be slaves in the service of a master race. The Indians, obviously, were the sort of inferior folk Aristotle had in mind.
As Professor Hanke points out, the debate led to no formal, clear-cut decision, and the Spanish Crown actually made sincere attempts to follow the humane doctrine of Las Casas. But the Aristotelian notion took hold. It was mightily comforting, not only to Spaniards but to all other Europeans who could see huge profits coming from the merciless exploitation of less fortunate peoples. If these people of another race were, in fact, ordained by natural law to serve their betters, and if you as a conqueror could elect yourself as one of the betters—well, what more could the master race ask?
It could ask for nothing more, and the notion has prevailed ever since. It did not always need Aristotle, as a matter of fact. Professor Hanke calls attention to the fact that the Protestant English embraced the idea, and cites the possibly apocryphal tale of the New England assembly which, in 1640 or thereabouts, considered three resolutions:
“1. The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof. Voted.
“2. The Lord may give the earth or any part of it to his chosen people. Voted.
“3. We are his chosen people. Voted.”
So it went, and so the people of Europe adapted themselves to the idea that other races were somehow set aside by nature to be subject folk. It was a very reassuring notion indeed, for those who believed themselves to be on top of the heap, and the idea took hold and grew. Las Casas might go on insisting that “all the peoples of the world are men” and that men have natural rights which cannot be overborne; the infinite weight of the people who could wax rich and prosperous by following Aristotle was too great for him, and one of the great tragedies of world history was the fact that just as the white Europeans entered on a period of closer and closer contact with nonwhite races, they developed a powerful conviction of their own innate superiority. You can justify any imaginable oppression or injustice if you can first demonstrate that the people you are oppressing were ordained by natural law to be your servants. The records of the Nuremberg trials contain hair-raising testimony about the things men will feel free to do when they follow Aristotle’s theory.
So the controversy of the 1550’s still goes on, and we have not left Aristotle behind us. There may, however, be a way out, which Las Casas probably would have understood. Professor Hanke quotes the Mexican José Vasconcelos, who was asked how he proposed to solve the Indian problem; had he considered the means by which the Indians should be educated? Vasconcelos replied: “No—we are simply going to treat them like human beings, with Christian principles.”
The Basis for Slavery
By BRUCE CATTON
The belief in racial inequality has been fairly expensive, considering the lives that have been spent because of it. Out of it we got, among other things, the institution of chattel slavery in the United States. Slavery is gone, but we fought a four-year war to make it go, and now and then it occurs to us that the war somehow grew out of the belief that there are in this world, by an unalterable law of nature, a master race and a subject race.
Negro slavery and its part in bringing about the American Civil War have been studied, questioned, and hashed over for the better part of a century, and the whole business has suffered just a little because it has been sicklied o’er by the pale cast of what now and then passes for thought. The war was fought because many things had gone wrong, and it is easy enough now for studious men to examine trends, social and economic developments, and the hidden intricacies of roughhewn American politics and conclude that the whole war was a tragic mistake that could easily have been avoided if the men of the 1860’s had only managed to have the benefit of the serene wisdom which their grandchildren were able to attain threequarters of a century later. This is quite possibly true: and yet the point does remain that the war somehow had its beginning in the simple fact that one race held another race in slavery, and beyond that there lies the fact that the owning race considered itself infinitely superior to the race that was owned.
This was a rather expensive attitude, since it led to the loss of some 600,000 lives. If today we are paying rather more attention to the approaching centennial of the Civil War than the situation really seems to warrant, the trouble probably comes from this business of the race problem, which Aristotle helped bequeath to us.
And the race problem does date back to the notion that there are inferior and master races on this earth. For several years, a classic discussion of this matter has been Dwight Dumond’s Antislavery Origins of the Civil War in the United States. This is now available in a paperback reprint from the University of Michigan Press, and it is a book of peculiar timeliness today.
Antislavery Origins of the Civil War in the United States, by Dwight Lowell Dumond, with a foreword by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. The University of Michigan Press. 133 pp. $1.65.
From the beginning we had slavery in the United States, and from the beginning this fact pressed heavily on the national conscience. This conscience was quieted, for a long time, by a number of factors, among them the tragic fact that even the people who did not believe in slavery did, for the most part, believe in the inequality of the races. One race was inferior to the other, as Aristotle had said; set it free and you would create a completely insoluble problem—equality between basically unequal races. No one was quite ready to look such a development in the eye, so antislavery agitation in this country began by demanding a system of colonization.
In the course of time—say by the middle 1830’s…men who considered slavery an unendurable wrong began to see that colonization was not quite the answer. Slavery infringed on the idea of freedom, and that idea is one which has to be taken straight; it runs all across the board, or it is phony. So either slavery or liberty would eventually have to go, and the antislavery movement could no longer base itself on colonization, or on any other adjustment to the notion that there is an unbridgeable gap between the races. The story of the antislavery movement in the 25 years preceding the Civil War is very largely the story of the effort to put this point across. Freedom and abolitionism were on the defensive in 1834, but slavery was on the defensive by 1860. Public opinion, in the North, swung over to a new orientation.
Mr. Dumond does not hold to the traditional belief that it was mostly New England that led the way to this new viewpoint. The thing was settled in the great Mississippi Valley, as he sees it; if the old Southwest was the great stronghold of slavery, the old Northwest was the area in which the antislavery decision was finally reached, and “had the region east of the mountains somehow been blotted out in 1830 and these two western regions been an entity unto themselves, things would not have happened very much differently from what they did.…” The hard determination to abolish the evil came out of what we now call the Middle West, as Mr. Dumond interprets the matter; and the South viewed things correctly when it saw Lincoln’s election in 1860 as a final, fatal threat to the continued existence of the peculiar institution.
For Lincoln, besides being a personal opponent of slavery as an institution, had a radically new notion about the nature of the federal government. While he was on his way from Springfield to Washington he said, in effect, that the states were really political subdivisions of the United States, and bore about the same relation to the nation that a county bore to a state. In his inaugural address, “he enunciated a political philosophy designed to make the mandates of an unrestrained numerical majority the operative law—it was a complete endorsement of the doctrine of the higher law.” The Republican victory in z 860 was essentially a victory for the higher law doctrine, and this meant that the governmental machinery, which previously had protected slavery, would no longer be adequate.
Who Is Superior?
By BRUCE CATTON
For slavery was a holdover from the old colonial era, and in the increasingly mechanized, highly organized world of the mid-nineteenth century it could survive only by mutual consent. As Mr. Dumond remarks, “Few … institutions were ever so dependent as slavery upon tranquillity.” When the guns opened on Fort Sumter America’s tranquillity was violently shattered, and the conditions under which slavery could live no longer existed. Perhaps the real depth of the tragedy which followed lies in the fact that the nation destroyed slavery without first discarding the belief in racial inequality.
In the violent convulsion of the Civil War, it is significant that the hard blows were struck not so much by the dedicated abolitionists as by the military and industrial technicians who brought the North’s overwhelming strength to bear on the Confederacy’s basic weaknesses. One of these—a man who had a far larger part in the final Union victory than he usually gets credit for—was the devoted, hard-working quartermaster general of the Union Army, Major General Montgomery C. Meigs, whose biography is presented by Russell F. Weigley in an excellent study, Quartermaster General of the Union Army.
A career soldier and an engineer officer of distinction, Meigs had one of the key roles in the Northern war effort. It was up to him to outfit and equip the Union armies: shoes, wagons, tents, steamboats, uniforms, horses, mules, hospital equipment, railroad rails, pontoon bridges—the all but infinite list of things the Union armies needed was made up, bought, and distributed under Meigs’s direction, and during the war he was responsible for the spending of more than $675,000,000. All things considered, he performed his job with remarkable efficiency. Toward the end of the war the job actually looked like simple routine.
In effect, it was Meigs’s task to take the enormous potential material strength of the North and transform it into actual strength that could be applied on the battlefield. In doing this he had to make certain not only that the stuff was produced but that it was distributed to the places where it was needed, and it was here that Meigs did his best work. As the war progressed, the Confederate services of supply progressively collapsed; those of the Union continued to improve, and the striking contrast between the condition of the two armies on the Petersburg front at the end of 1864 is profoundly significant. The Northern states not only had much the greater resources to draw on, but they did a far more effective job of using what they had.
Meigs was an odd mixture. As Mr. Weigley emphasizes, he was in many ways a man of the new day, “of the materialistic, mechanically and scientifically inclined America born in the second half of the century of industrialization, urbanization and technological change”; but at the same time he was a dedicated sort of person, convinced that slavery was a profound moral wrong, almost mystically devoted to a vision of himself as an instrument in “the consummation of some inscrutable but certainly glorious divine purpose.” He saw the war as a sort of penance which the nation had to undergo for the sin of having permitted slavery to exist in the first place, and he never doubted that victory had resolved a great moral issue.
But a belief of this kind can be a dangerous possession; for unless it is linked with deep compassion and a great breadth of understanding it can be—and in Meigs’s case, actually was—the source of hatred and bitterness. When the war ended, Meigs had little room in his heart for reconciliation with the beaten foe. One of his friends from the prewar professional army was Gustavus W. Smith, who became a major general in the Confederate Army. Shortly after the war Smith was in Washington and tried to renew the old friendship with Meigs. Meigs would have none of him, arid in his diary he wrote bitterly: “I for one have no pleasure in association with such as he. Hemp or salt water should be offered to all such had I the power.” He complained repeatedly that the Southerners, owning themselves beaten, did not feel at all repentant; to him they were sinners, and he wanted them to confess their sins and ask for absolution. He came to believe, at last, that the men of the South would not believe they were wrong until a dozen or more of their leaders had been hanged.
To the eternal good fortune of this nation, a milder point of view at last prevailed, and the hangings Meigs wished to see did not take place. And the fact that a basically decent man like Meigs could come to feel as he felt illustrates in a striking way the evils that arise when human beings permit themselves to believe that they are somehow better men than other people are.
Quartermaster General of the Union Army, by Russell F. Weigley. Columbia University Press. 396 pp. $7.50.
For Meigs, and the other vengeful Northerners who felt as he did, had simply fallen into the old error: they had become convinced of their own innate superiority to a large segment of their fellow citizens. In a queer, upside-down way they were serving the old fallacy, following not so much Aristotle as the Pharisee who publicly thanked God that he was not as other men were. If there is a moral in all of this it perhaps is that any sort of belief in group superiority is the source of evil.
Slavery had been born, and had developed to the point where the country had to fight a ruinous war to get rid of it, because men had taken for granted the notion that one race of men is inherently better than another race. Slavery itself may indeed have been a great moral wrong, but it existed not because some men were sinners but simply because all men had given way to a delusion about fixed grades and classifications in the great family of man. Failing to understand that it was race prejudice itself rather than willful human wickedness that was at the bottom of the nation’s troubles, the Northerners who clamored for hangings and proscription lists were doing no more than perpetuating the real evil. Any belief that justifies the conqueror in doing whatever he chooses to do to the conquered is bound to be the source of profound wrong.
The lesson is there for us, if we have the wit to learn it. Considering the state of the world today and the hazards that it presents, it is perhaps high time that we got on with our studies.
