Commentary—

Let’s Not Get Too Righteous About

Knowing Better Than Our Ancestors

By CHRIS POWELL

Anyone who traces his ancestry back far enough, it is said, will find a horse thief. That seems to be the lesson of a campaign to link some major corporations with slavery from the age when it was legal, the better to intimidate them into adopting an agenda of supposedly compensatory political correctness.

Inclined to political correctness itself, The Hartford Courant seemed to consider such guilt mongering a great idea the other day, as it front-paged the discovery that Hartford’s Aetna insurance company had once insured the lives of slaves and thus possibly profited from slavery. But Aetna’s board of directors was already engaged in replacing its chief executive for quite a different reason. Before the company could vote on liquidating the company and delivering the proceeds as reparations to the descendants of slaves, a former Hartford teacher, Billie Anthony, disclosed, through The Courant’s letters column, that the newspaper itself was more tainted on the slavery issue than the insurer was. That is, Anthony wrote, her students’ research had found that prior to Connecticut’s abolition of slavery in 1848 The Courant often advertised slaves for sale, and the newspaper’s founder, Thomas Green, for whom the Courant’s main reception room is ceremoniously named, was himself a slave broker who plied his disgraceful trade in his paper’s pages.

For thinking that an old corporation’s obscure connection to slavery 150 years ago or more was remarkable enough for the front page, the Courant, another old corporation, may have deserved the embarrassment of its ignorant or hypocritical omission. For of course nearly everything in the United States that has endured from before the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment may be tainted with slavery. While some jurisdictions and institutions are more tainted than others, the whole country was built by slave labor to a great extent, and some of the country’s revered founders were slave owners.

Regardless of politically correct front pages, this really can be no revelation even in Connecticut. After all, while the state was never enthusiastic about slavery and never had many slaves, whose hands picked the cotton that was turned into cloth in all those stone mill buildings that still huddle along Connecticut’s larger streams, where the state’s industrial and mercantile heritage was created?

But the guilt for slavery was long ago expunged by those who had lived with slavery, even if slavery’s consequences linger. That is, the bloodiest war this continent ever saw and the bloodiest war ever until that time was fought over it, with more than 600,000 deaths. That same figure represents the number of casualties suffered by the United States in all its other wars, and the leader of the good guys in that war proclaimed that it could not end until the guilt for slavery was expunged.

“Fondly do we hope — fervently do we pray — that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away,” Lincoln said in his second inaugural address. That mighty speech is generally neglected in favor of his remarks at Gettysburg though it is far more profound, poetic, and accurate about the causes and purpose of the Civil War.

“Yet if God wills that it continue,” went on the new President, “until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said 3,000 years ago so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”

Imputing guilt to the oldest enduring institutions because they can be connected to the great crime of many generations ago is stupid. It ignores not only the war over slavery but also that all society was guilty back then and that imperfection and improvement are but the two sides of the coin of the human condition.

Of course the past must be judged, and of course there are certain moral absolutes. But the test of the past is not whether people reached perfection as it is perceived by those who judge them at such distances but whether they tried to improve and whether they put themselves at risk to do so, tried to be any better than their times or to make their times better. That is what the Civil War was about, what the civil rights laws enacted since then were about, and, indeed, what this country itself, despite its faults, has been about since the national charter discerned the unalienable rights that were to be pursued here even though they were not yet fully secured.

For even if things go well, our own descendants, many generations from now, may find us as quaint and in some ways as morally obtuse as some people today purport to find an insurance company of the 1800s and, presumably, a newspaper founder of the 1700s. It may be hard for the future to have sympathy for those who, in smugness or political opportunism, judge the past so much out of context, judge it only by standards that, while modern for the moment, themselves may be considered primitive soon enough.

(Chris Powell is managing editor of The Journal Inquirer in Manchester.)