Karl Marx[1]
“Scratch beneath the surface of any
debate about race in American history, and there you will find a struggle for
power, ultimately political power.”
Scorpion’s Sting James Oakes
“A slave-owner who through cunning
and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or
violence breaks the chains – let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they
are equals before a court of morality!”
― Leon Trotsky, Their Morals and
Ours
The relationship between Abraham
Lincoln and the institution of slavery is very complex. To Oakes’s credit, he
has written a book that is not only well-researched but, as David Holahan writes
in USA Today. “ brings clarity and insight to a political conundrum of
bewildering complexity.”
As James Oakes’s book The Crooked
Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution suggests,
there is not an easy path to understanding the relationship between Lincoln and
the question of slavery. From an early age, Lincoln hated slavery but was not an
abolitionist. According to James Oakes, Lincoln “never called for the immediate
emancipation of the slaves. He never denounced slaveholders as sinners and
never endorsed the civil or political equality of Blacks and whites… He never
opened his home to fugitive slaves. He endorsed voluntary colonization of free
Blacks… He certainly spoke at colonization meetings… but never at an
abolitionist meeting.”[2] Although
not a Marxist historian, Oakes believes a dialectical relationship exists between
Lincoln and the struggle to end slavery.
Oakes is a historian who is careful
with the words he uses. Again, as the title suggests, there was no
straightforward path to the abolition of slavery. Oakes spends a significant
part of the book examining the United States Constitution, which perhaps
unsurprisingly does not contain the word "slavery". Slaves are
referred to euphemistically as “persons” who are “held to service.” As Oakes
further points out, the Constitution contains much that is useful to both slaveholders
and abolitionists who point out that words “persons” and
"liberty" support their cause. Oakes does not sugarcoat the fact that
at the time the Constitution was written, slavery was on the ascendency, with
13 American states still practising chattel slavery.
Oakes does not see the Constitution
through rose-tinted glasses, and his book attempts to place it in a more
objective light, writing, “Parse every clause of the Constitution, peer into
the minds of its authors, and you may never find the antislavery document
revered by so many ordinary men and women, Black and white.”
As the Marxist writer Tom Mackaman points
out, “The American Revolution made incarnate the thought of the Enlightenment,
the period of intellectual rebirth that undermined the divinely sanctioned
feudal order of the Middle Ages, and that grew in tandem with the incipient
capitalist economy. Just as scientists—natural philosophers as they were then
called—such as Copernicus, Galileo and Newton challenged the feudal-religious
conception of the natural world, so Enlightenment political philosophers began
to raise questions about the political world—but not the social, which was only
dimly understood prior to Marx. Why did kings rule? What was the purpose of
government? What were the rights of man? Ultimately, in answer to these
questions, the Enlightenment established that there existed natural rights—that
is, rights that preceded government or that existed in a state of nature. [3]One
natural right identified was the right to private property. Another was the
right to freedom of self-ownership. However, the right to property, as James
Oakes has pointed out, was increasingly viewed to be the outcome of
self-ownership and the right to dispose of one’s labour. “The property which
every man has in his labour, as it is the original foundation of all other
property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable,” This political conundrum
that Oakes mentions in the book was one that Lincoln would grapple with until
his political murder in 1865.
In his review of Oakes's book, Richard
Kreitner concurs, writing, “This explication of the antislavery reading of the
Constitution represents Oakes at his best, showing how clauses that seemed to
protect slavery also opened, for a growing number of antislavery politicians,
doors to its potential abolition. The Constitution was a mess of
contradictions; it limited the possibilities of antislavery politics but
offered opportunities, too. Competing interpretations of the Constitution
“emerged in reaction to each other,” Oakes writes, adapting to new issues and
claims by the other, each invoking the founders to support its view. The
South’s increasingly aggressive twisting of the Constitution and demands for
slavery’s protection developed as much in response to growing antislavery
assertiveness as the other way around.”[4]
Like all of Oakes's books, The Crooked
Path educates and increases one's knowledge. He brings a clarity of thought,
which is rare among historians of his subject matter. I like reading his books,
but from my standpoint, his most important contribution to historical clarity
has been his decision to take to the battlefield against what he called the
“new consensus history”[5]. Over
the last five years, Oakes has been sharply critical of the various revisionist
narratives, including the historical racialism of the 1619 Project.
Oakes believes most contemporary
scholarship offers only “a history or politics and of hopelessness.” Oakes
wrote in above mentioned article in 2017, “The new consensus history has shaped
large swaths of the American past, from the American Revolution of the
eighteenth century to the “long” Civil Rights movement of the twentieth
century. Here, I focus primarily on my field of inquiry—slavery, antislavery,
and the Civil War—where the drift toward consensus has been startling.
Everywhere you look, historians are collapsing fundamental social
distinctions—between slavery and racial discrimination, for example, between
being married and being enslaved, between the free labour system of the North
and the slave labour system of the South. The social bases of political
conflict thus erased, consensus historians go on to suppress the significance
of antislavery politics, even to the point of denying that politics played any
role whatsoever in the destruction of slavery. These crucial erasures are once
again explained by a reference to a broad political consensus—not the liberal
consensus of Hofstadter and Hartz, but the smothering, all-consuming consensus
in favour of “white male supremacy.” It’s still consensus history; it’s just a
different consensus.”
One revisionist narrative Oakes is
particularly hostile to has been the racialist viewpoint emanating from the New
York Times 1619 Project. For readers unfamiliar with the Vergangenheitsbewältigung,
visit the wsws.org[6].
This website has extensive coverage from a Marxist perspective. In a recent interview
with the historian Tom Mackaman on wsws.org, Mackaman asked the following: “ Another
aspect of the way the 1619 Project presents history is to imply that it is a
uniquely American phenomenon, leaving out the long history of chattel slavery,
the history of slavery in the Caribbean. Oakes answered, “ And they erase
Africa from the African slave trade. They claim that Africans were stolen and
kidnapped from Africa. Well, they were purchased by these kidnappers in Africa.
Everybody’s hands were dirty. And this is another aspect of the tendency to
reify race because you’re attempting to isolate a racial group that was also
complicit. This is conspicuous only because the obsession with complicity is so
overwhelming in the political culture right now, but also as reflected in the
1619 Project. Hypocrisy and complicity are basically the two great attacks.
Again, not a critique of capitalism. It’s a critique of hypocrisy and
complicity. Here, I agree with Genovese, who once said that “hypocrites are a
dime a dozen.” Hypocrisy doesn’t interest me as a critique, nor does
complicity.[7]
Notes
1.
February 1, 1959, issue of Commentary John
Higham “The Cult of the ‘American Consensus’
2. The New York Times 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History- Edited by David North and Thomas Mackaman-Mehring Books.
3.
Slavery in White and Black-Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
and Eugene Genovese
Books by James Oakes
The Radical and the Republican:
Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of antislavery Politics
(2007);
Freedom National: The Destruction
of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (2012).
The Scorpion’s Sting: antislavery
and the Coming of the Civil War (2014).
[1]
Address of the International Working Men's Association to Abraham Lincoln,
President of the United States of America-https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/iwma/documents/1864/lincoln-letter.htm
[2]
“The Crooked Path To Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery
Constitution,” by James Oakes. £21.99-WW Norton & Co
[3]
Slavery and the American Revolution: A Response to the New York Times 1619
Project- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/11/01/amer-n01.html
[4]
Did the Constitution Pave the Way to Emancipation?- https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/james-oakes-crooked-path/
[5]
The New Cult of Consensus- https://nonsite.org/the-new-cult-of-consensus/
[6]
https://www.wsws.org/en/topics/event/1619
[7] An interview with historian James Oakes on the New York Times’ 1619 Project
