Slavery, Lincoln, Dead-eye Dick

 THOUGHT OF THE DAY:     
"No man is good enough to govern another man, without that other's consent." - Abraham Lincoln, from his speech in Peoria, Ill., on 1854-10-16 

Demonstrates Lincoln's rational if not moral opposition to slavery early on.

Yes—and the wording is especially revealing. Lincoln's opposition to slavery was already firmly grounded in the principle of political consent, rather than merely in an assertion that slavery was cruel or economically undesirable.

The Peoria speech came in the middle of the Kansas-Nebraska controversy. Lincoln's argument was essentially: if government is legitimate only insofar as people consent to it, then slavery presents a fundamental contradiction when one person exercises political authority over another person who has never consented to that authority.

There is an interesting distinction, though. “Rational if not moral” is a good way of putting it, because Lincoln's argument here is constitutional and political rather than an appeal to humanitarian sentiment. But elsewhere in the same speech he was quite explicit about the moral dimension. He called slavery a violation of the principles of the Declaration of Independence and rejected the idea that the founding generation intended its language about equality to apply only to white people.

And that makes the quotation rather more powerful. He wasn't saying merely, slavery is unpleasant or slavery is economically inefficient. He was attacking its legitimacy: What right does one human being have to exercise government over another without that person's consent?

That is a remarkably modern-sounding principle in 1854—and, of course, it sits squarely in the American political tradition Lincoln inherited from the Declaration. The extraordinary thing is that the country had been proclaiming the principle for nearly eighty years while maintaining an enormous institution that flagrantly contradicted it.

Large parts of the States still flagrantly contradict the maxim that all men are created equal.

Yes. And that is one of the uncomfortable continuities in American history.

The phrase “all men are created equal” was revolutionary in 1776, but the United States has repeatedly had to decide how literally it meant it. Slavery was the most glaring contradiction, but abolishing slavery did not abolish the assumptions and institutions that had grown around it.

What strikes me about Lincoln's formulation is that it goes beyond “these people deserve better treatment.” It challenges the right of one person to exercise power over another without consent. That principle has a much wider reach than slavery. Once accepted consistently, it becomes rather difficult to confine it to the particular injustice that prompted the argument.

And, yes, that makes the maxim rather troublesome even today. Equality before the law, equal political power, equal opportunity, and equal social standing are different things, and the United States has never achieved all four simultaneously. Some contradictions are legal and institutional; others are embedded in people's behavior and attitudes.

Lincoln himself understood the difficulty. His great achievement wasn't that he magically resolved the contradiction. It was that he helped force the country to stop pretending the contradiction wasn't there.

Precisely. That completes the picture rather nicely.

You don't need to believe that any particular institution is inherently virtuous. Employers can exploit workers; unions can intimidate employers or outsiders; guilds can become cartels; governments can become tyrannical; individuals can be dishonest. The fact that an institution exists to correct one imbalance doesn't magically make it immune from creating another.

So the answer is not “trust the employer” or “trust the union.” It is law above both, with reasonably impartial enforcement.

And that gives us a useful little hierarchy of principles:

Individual liberty → voluntary association → law → institutional power.

Institutions are useful because individuals acting alone often have too little power to protect their interests. But once an institution acquires substantial power, it too has to be constrained. Otherwise the cure for one form of domination simply becomes another form of domination.

That also makes your original Lincoln quotation more interesting. His principle isn't really “nobody should give orders.” Human society couldn't function that way. It is closer to: power over other people needs a legitimate basis, and ultimately that basis must rest with the people subject to it.

And law is the mechanism by which we try—never perfectly—to prevent anybody from turning that power into arbitrary domination.

Which is rather a long philosophical journey from Pinafore. Gilbert and Sullivan would probably have approved. 😄

Sullivan is irrelevant.  He just wrote the melody.

Quite right. 😄 I was giving Sullivan entirely too much philosophical credit.

The words—and therefore the social satire—are Gilbert's. Sullivan supplied the music. In this particular discussion, it is Gilbert we should be talking about.

And Gilbert's satire is particularly apt to your point because he wasn't merely making fun of individual bad actors. He loved exposing the absurdity of institutions whose rules and hierarchies had acquired an authority that nobody bothered to question.

So Pinafore belongs here because Gilbert is poking at the social machinery that says, in effect, this person gives orders because that is his position, while the circumstances that produced that position are themselves arbitrary or ridiculous.

Sullivan can have the lovely tunes. Gilbert gets the political philosophy.

That brings up something I've long wondered about, why was Sullivan knghted but not Gilbert?

Ah, this has a rather delicious irony to it.

First, I should correct the premise slightly: Gilbert eventually was knighted, but not until 1907, twenty-four years after Sullivan.

Sullivan was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1883, officially for his “services ... rendered to the promotion of the art of music.” The important point is that the honor was understood principally as recognition of Sullivan's contribution to serious music, rather than of the Gilbert-and-Sullivan comic operas.

And there was a social reason for the distinction. Sullivan was an eminent composer in the conventional musical establishment. He had written symphonic, choral, orchestral and other “serious” works, and The Martyr of Antioch and later Ivanhoe helped establish his credentials in that world. The establishment could therefore honor Sir Arthur Sullivan the composer without quite having to honor the man who wrote the wickedly satirical words of Pinafore, Iolanthe, The Mikado, and the rest.

Gilbert was a different proposition. His principal weapon was precisely the one that made establishment figures uncomfortable: ridicule. He mocked the navy, army, courts, clergy, aristocracy, politicians and the British class system. There is contemporary recollection of Gilbert being quite conscious of the disparity and resentful of Sullivan's earlier honor.

But the irony gets better: when Gilbert finally received his knighthood from Edward VII in 1907, he became the first British dramatist to receive a knighthood specifically for his plays alone. So in a sense his eventual honor was actually more directly an acknowledgment of his particular achievement than Sullivan's had been.

And I suspect Gilbert would have appreciated the absurdity of the situation. The man who spent his career making fun of the machinery of rank and privilege was eventually made Sir William Schwenck Gilbert by that very machinery.

There is also something particularly Gilbertian about the twenty-four-year delay. It almost sounds like a plot device he would have invented.