Recommended Reading, Law for Sustainability
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Charles Sumner in Harvard Square, Bob Dylan on vinyl, Victoria Leohle’s anti-disposal cup campaign
During this season of constant assault I took some refuge in Zaakir Tameez’s Charles Sumner, Conscience of a Nation,[i] which reminded me that although nature produces people who create and perpetuate toxicity it also produces those who face it head on and do not surrender to it, and thereby open a society to the evolution of a better future, by not suppressing that inner voice that whispers about what’s right and wrong.
In the face of extreme ugliness in his country Sumner continued to see its beauty. The Constitution his abolitionist friends denounced as a pact with the Devil he saw as a promise of a better world, and his work to make that happen enabled Lincoln and Congress to bring us the “rebirth of freedom” of the constitutional amendments remaking the nation from a caste to a democratic society, after the Civil War. (On the remaking of the U.S. as a caste society, see current news about this Administration’s actions, plans, attitude).
Bob Dylan had a big effect of sparking conscience when he first hit the scene - the whole uproar about his turning to electric rock seemed to be the resentment of those who wanted him to be their leader, but he was not Sumner, he was and is something else we can only call Bob Dylan, and the good side of that is that we have to figure things out for ourselves (giving us the chance to realize our potentials as individual thinkers instead of being unthinking followers). The intellectual ferment over injustice, which has caused such panic on the right, is something that each individual must figure out for themselves, but we all look to other people around us – which can cause confusion in relationships. An ethical standard on the way to universalization exists in many forms of manifestation, including the reflection of it in the backlash against it that we are experiencing now.
My students today see a future blighted in many ways, yet out of more than sixty this past Fall semester to a person none seemed frozen, too overwhelmed to pick up the puzzles of how we fix the world. Each one demonstrated a kind of positive energy in response to the world’s hollowing out. Our theme has been that environmental, public health, public interest work is more important than ever. These students are by no means a representative sample. Only a certain type of person takes a class entitled “Developing Sustainable Environmental Responsibility (DSER)”, or “Law for Sustainability”. But they are a powerful indication that there are reasons to hope for the continuing powerful resonance of conscience, for facing problems with practical optimism seems to give them more energy. I hope more teachers will explicitly call for moral fulfillment and not just skills training. They will find what comes forth comforting and helpful.
The positive force of morally impassioned young people feeds my life-long faith in democracy, even as it is challenged now. It may be that because the pursuit of power over others plays itself out in such ugliness that the human potential for creating a better world ends up winning, because it is constantly fed by hope, and when it prevails, it brings beauty, peace, prosperity, rather than continuous struggle and damage.
In the face of extreme ugliness in his country Sumner continued to see its beauty. The Constitution his abolitionist friends denounced as a pact with the Devil he saw as a promise of a better world, and his work to make that happen enabled Lincoln and Congress to bring us the “rebirth of freedom” of the constitutional amendments remaking the nation from a caste to a democratic society, after the Civil War. (On the remaking of the U.S. as a caste society, see current news about this Administration’s actions, plans, attitude).
Bob Dylan had a big effect of sparking conscience when he first hit the scene - the whole uproar about his turning to electric rock seemed to be the resentment of those who wanted him to be their leader, but he was not Sumner, he was and is something else we can only call Bob Dylan, and the good side of that is that we have to figure things out for ourselves (giving us the chance to realize our potentials as individual thinkers instead of being unthinking followers). The intellectual ferment over injustice, which has caused such panic on the right, is something that each individual must figure out for themselves, but we all look to other people around us – which can cause confusion in relationships. An ethical standard on the way to universalization exists in many forms of manifestation, including the reflection of it in the backlash against it that we are experiencing now.
My students today see a future blighted in many ways, yet out of more than sixty this past Fall semester to a person none seemed frozen, too overwhelmed to pick up the puzzles of how we fix the world. Each one demonstrated a kind of positive energy in response to the world’s hollowing out. Our theme has been that environmental, public health, public interest work is more important than ever. These students are by no means a representative sample. Only a certain type of person takes a class entitled “Developing Sustainable Environmental Responsibility (DSER)”, or “Law for Sustainability”. But they are a powerful indication that there are reasons to hope for the continuing powerful resonance of conscience, for facing problems with practical optimism seems to give them more energy. I hope more teachers will explicitly call for moral fulfillment and not just skills training. They will find what comes forth comforting and helpful.
The positive force of morally impassioned young people feeds my life-long faith in democracy, even as it is challenged now. It may be that because the pursuit of power over others plays itself out in such ugliness that the human potential for creating a better world ends up winning, because it is constantly fed by hope, and when it prevails, it brings beauty, peace, prosperity, rather than continuous struggle and damage.
In one of my classes students do one project all semester. You can see the variety this has produced from just one of my courses, “Research for Environmental Agencies and Organizations”, www.bu.edu/rccp, where scrolling down you are in a fresh green forest of good ideas that would give us sustainable supply systems, cleaner air and water, safer and quieter communities, environmental health and safety. We held a conference to present what we did this Fall, (the recording is posted there), which included some of the experts students talked to.
This Fall students:
In Developing Sustainable Environmental Responsibility, students helped create a new initiative, to bring nongovernmental professionals working on pollution prevention (P2) into a workgroup of the National Pollution Prevention Roundtable (NPPR, an organization of mostly state government P2 officials). The idea is that although the national P2 commitment has waned, there are many doing it in private facilities, and they can come together and share information and help it to spread, so that much more unnecessary waste and toxicity can be avoided. They introduced the idea at an NPPR meeting composed mostly of Board members, and it was received with enthusiasm. We are committed to producing a national meeting of the workgroup this Spring.
With that refreshing thought that there are people willing to pick up the torch and carry it for a bit, let us retreat again from the world of today long enough to recover something troubling and helpful at the same time from the past.
Charles Sumner’s idea of equality before the law was one that literally meant everyone. But in 1850 Massachusetts Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw did not see it that way. He ruled that the court was not going to do anything about how young Sarah Roberts, who walked by a good school every day, was not to be allowed to attend it, it having chosen to be exclusive to black people. He told us people were equal before the law but if the laws adapted to their respective relations and conditions didn’t respect those rights, then somehow although people were equal before the law the law was not going to do anything about the denial of their rights. To us today his opinion reads as a real brain twister. It raises the question of what good is law divorced from rights? He wrote:
The great principle…is, that by the constitution and laws of Massachusetts, all persons without distinction of age or sex, birth or color, origin or condition, are equal before the law. This, as a broad general principle,…is perfectly sound; it is not only expressed in terms, but pervades and animates the whole spirit of our constitution of free government. But, when this great principle comes to be applied to the actual and various conditions of persons in society, it will not warrant the assertion, that men and women are legally clothed with the same civil and political powers, and that children and adults are legally to have the same functions and be subject to the same treatment; but only that the rights of all, as they are settled and regulated by law, are equally entitled to the…consideration and protection of the law, for their maintenance and security. What those rights are, to which individuals…must depend on laws adapted to their respective relations and conditions.
Roberts v. City of Boston 59 Mass. 198, Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, 1850.
We have a caste society, he is saying, without saying.
Charles Sumner had argued that black people were entitled to the same privileges in public life as whites and that segregation was wrong. The court had to resort to the bizarre logic above – in which social preferences are the real law and that other one made of principles, that disappears - to shoot him down. Standing beside Sumner and working with him was a black lawyer, William Morris. By doing just this, working alongside a black man in his time, Sumner demonstrated the absurdity of the fact that no other white lawyer would do that. Though he lost his case, he won public opinion. The Massachusetts legislature ended public school desegregation five years later.
Tameez’s biography tells us that Sumner’s dad was not acknowledged by his own father, and that Sumner himself grew up on the cold, northern side of Beacon Hill with the poorer folk, including the Black population. He had some knowledge of the injustice of social disrespect for individuals. He also spent some time in France where he saw Black and White treated the same in public places, doing all kinds of things without the segregation he saw at home. He did not see his own country the way many or perhaps most whites seemed to, that segregation was natural. He correctly saw it as unnatural and utterly wrongful.
Abolitionists at the time would publicly burn the Constitution because it was a “pact with the Devil Slavery”. But Sumner said it contains the sacred original idea of the founders of universal individual equality and liberty. He pointed to the Declaration of Independence.
Today’s conservatives can be very literal. They say the noble language in the Declaration (or the Preamble) doesn’t spell out how you enforce the principles we can clearly hear them articulating, and without that, well, you can’t enforce them. The 9th Amendment – written to preserve rights that aren’t spelled out – has been termed an “ink blot” we cannot interpret. The Constitution Center explains: “During his failed confirmation hearing to become a Supreme Court justice in 1987, Robert Bork analogized the Amendment to an ‘inkblot,’ which hid the constitutional text that was under it. Just as judges should not guess what was under an inkblot, he argued, so too they should not guess at the Ninth Amendment’s meaning. Bork’s very public denial that any meaning of the Amendment could be discovered fueled intense academic interest in the original meaning of the text.” (https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/amendments/amendment-ix/interpretations/131).
This strikes me as a lot like Lemuel Shaw – looking at the world, squinting, show me where those principles are really required, spelled out! Just seeing the surface of things, injustice appears to be ordained reality.
But the original intent of the founders was not limited to their current conditions, a government that did not work for them. Some seemed to do their best to consider the future, to build in some foundation of shared values. They all joined in the general task of basing government on the natural recognition of mutual existence, institutionalizing something to counter the ages of cruel competition. If Right did not then replace Might (or the Civil War would not have happened), it took its place in the driver’s seat with ordinary power playing, giving citizens a chance to uphold it.
When asked to write a constitution for Massachusetts John Adams said let the people come together in convention – expand the right to vote and get the people to make their own rules. Then he wrote one that they passed. This process and much of the content was then the model for how the national Constitution came about.
To read the Massachusetts Constitution is like taking a refreshing, cold drink on a hot, dry, thirsty day.
The end of the institution, maintenance, and administration of government, is to secure the existence of the body politic, to protect it, and to furnish the individuals who compose it with the power of enjoying in safety and tranquility their natural rights, and the blessings of life: and whenever these great objects are not obtained, the people have a right to alter the government, and to take measures necessary for their safety, prosperity and happiness.
The body politic is formed by a voluntary association of individuals: it is a social compact, by which the whole people covenants with each citizen, and each citizen with the whole people, that all shall be governed by certain laws for the common good. It is the duty of the people, therefore, in framing a constitution of government, to provide for an equitable mode of making laws, as well as for an impartial interpretation, and a faithful execution of them; that every man may, at all times, find his security in them.
We, therefore, the people of Massachusetts, acknowledging, with grateful hearts, the goodness of the great Legislator of the universe, in affording us, in the course of His providence, an opportunity, deliberately and peaceably, without fraud, violence or surprise, of entering into an original, explicit, and solemn compact with each other; and of forming a new constitution of civil government, for ourselves and posterity; and devoutly imploring His direction in so interesting a design, do agree upon, ordain and establish the following Declaration of Rights, and Frame of Government, as the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
A Declaration of Rights precedes everything else, serving as the foundation from which all else flows.[ii]
There was a solidarity passed down by the Federalists primarily that Sumner absorbed. He got to know the Adamses, old John Quincy himself, who made sure Sumner was given a ring of his, and he was friends with Joseph Story, and even got to know old John Marshall, the second and first great Supreme Court Justices. They and others impressed on him the meaning of the original Constitution, and that it resonated with and was generated by the principles of the Declaration of Independence. When you hear someone diminishing the meaning of the grand aspirations it is like someone tapping on the horn of a tuba instead of blowing it to make it sound. It only means we have not succeeded in embodying in our established processes the means for making manifest the principles we say we observe. It is like Judge Shaw saying the grandness of the law is over there somewhere, not to impact here where we actually live. This may serve the tendencies that be for now but it is a mistake to think that this eliminates or even diminishes the meaning of the principle, which retains the potential to guide humanity to a safer position than it is in without it.
When Ben Franklin suggested that the Declaration’s assertions were “self-evident”, he marked the liberation of thought from dogma and its location back where it belongs, where it starts: in each individual mind. The same thing happened when Thomas Jefferson and others worked for religious freedom, and Madison made sure that and other aspects of freedom of conscience were recognized as sacred by the First Amendment.
As Ronald Dworkin later explained, “relying on Immanuel Kant’s thesis that no one respects his own humanity who does not respect humanity in other people, (…) we can define what we owe to other people as part of what we owe to ourselves. The key is the idea of dignity: it belongs to our own dignity to respect the dignity of other people.[iii] (Emphasis added).
Lemuel Shaw was more the type to work with the world as it was, rather than to imagine the world as it should be, based on this original idea of the importance – the dignity – of each individual. Some suggest he was Herman Melville’s model for the severe Captain Vere who executes the innocent Billy Budd. Thus it is understandable that he would reason in 1850 that Black people were simply not part of social society – that though they could have “civil” rights, the chance to go to court, get married, for example, the state played no role in social organization and if Whites wanted to exclude them, that was that, maybe too bad. Social rights were not the business of the state. He washed his hands, like Pilate, turned to the mass of people, and let their unwashed opinions call for the death of what is possible for everyone to love (universal equality, individual dignity). In the same way the Supreme Court recently looked to practices of the past to determine whether women today have the right to control what happens to their own bodies, disrespecting human dignity, diminishing the law to the point of obvious universal principles disappearing from view. They washed their hands of the injustice done to all women who assume they deserve the right to control what happens to their own bodies.
Sumner called out the racists, in a Senate with many slave-owners, who spat tobacco on the rug and were often drunk. They had their own sense of dignity that they called honor, which meant no one disses them and gets away with it. Like today’s thug honor, it meant a showing of respect to them, not to something shared, as in real honor. Preston Brooks beat Sumner nearly to death at his Senate desk with his cane, (a part of the image of a Southern gentleman) becoming a hero to many in the South. It must be supposed that he and those who cheered him felt, as many using violence to do politics must, today, that foolish people of conscience must be shown that their precious sentiments mean nothing next to the will to be violent. Their delight in winning this simple as mud tactic may be short-lived, but the question is always how long must we endure this supposed lesson before it is obvious to everyone what poverty of mind produces it.
Bob Dylan sang in 1963 in the Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll how William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll
With a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger
At a Baltimore hotel, society gath'rin'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmbwU3J-2kk
The song is based on a real incident.[iv]
I imagine Charles Sumner, sitting in his metal throne in the center of the traffic of Harvard Square, noticed perhaps by few, as the song ends.
In the courtroom of honor, the judge pounded his gavel
To show that all's equal and that the courts are on the level
And that the strings in the books ain't pulled and persuaded
And that even the nobles get properly handled
Once that the cops have chased after and caught 'em
And that the ladder of law has no top and no bottom
Stared at the person who killed for no reason
Who just happened to be feelin' that way without warnin'
And he spoke through his cloak, most deep and distinguished
And handed out strongly for penalty and repentance
William Zanzinger with a six-month sentence
Oh, but you who philosophize, disgrace and criticize all fears
Bury the rag deep in your face for now's the time for your tears.
Sumner kept alive the original dream of a nation strong through justice – he was the friend holding Lincoln’s hand when the great Emancipator died – and we too can look at the Constitution and see what he saw.
Sumner didn’t keep quiet. He was like John Quincy Adams, who after being President went to Congress and raised the issue ending slavery so many times they issued a gag order to shut him up. If you find yourself in Harvard Square someday, visit the Sumner statue. If you get a chance, read the biography. It may help empower the upholding of the light of universal values. We can have faith in those ideals, because his faith came to some fruition.
But it needs to keep happening. We need to go back to the sacred ideals of the founders, not the history of social practices, and give them the meaning they need today.
Bob Dylan told us Times Were A-Changing but without advancing the truth of conscience that change can be a degradation of principles instead of their adoption.
Then, if your thinking has become oriented by this reading or these considerations, check out Howard French’s The Second Emancipation – about the decolonization of Africa, (mostly Kwame Nkrumah and Ghana, the first to liberate itself). This book, revealing a whole history many may not know, of small nations asking for help from the US and not receiving it, breaks your heart at lost opportunities, but the lessons can still be learned. In the lives of people who raised their voices, and the desires of so many young people today, we see that the chances for a truly humane and flourishing world remain before us. We are reminded that we can learn to relate to each and the planet, and destruction can cease. What we know about the Golden Age of Sustainability and Justice that we are hoping for is not that it is unattainable. All we know is that it isn’t here yet.
I keep asking people, what is the Third Emancipation?[v]
[i] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Yky2U0txgk
Youtube presentation by Zaakir Tameez on Charles Sumner to the US Capitol Historical Society.
[ii] The opposite of our national constitution, where the Bill of Rights is an add-on a couple of years later.
[iii] https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2013/11/07/law-inside-out/
[iv] February 9th, 2023. https://folklife.si.edu/magazine/hattie-carroll. Ian Nagoski.
[v] You should come up with your own answer and if you do, write me at [email protected]. I think maybe from Nationalism, or from Toxic Group Identifications or from Unsatisfiable Wealth Maximization – they would all be good.
This Fall students:
- wrote companies torturing their neighbors with noisy operations, to tell them how they could, instead of being indifferent, investigate options for reducing their impact;
- envisioned a circular economic system of international trade in which electronic products are taken apart and their materials used again, so that we can stop destroying the planet by mining that instead of the earth, and can help heal the digital divide;
- created art (and shirts and stickers) and events that can reduce plastic waste and spread ideas about things we can do to further sustainability;
- analyzed Federal Aviation Administration data to prove that a low-income minority community has indeed had a huge sudden increase in overflights imposed upon it (this involved analyzing a complex data set the community obtained from the FAA through the Freedom of Information Act);
- developed a proposal for using climate credits to help small and medium size farms afford to implement available technology for methane capture;
- crafted legislation to ensure rental properties are truly habitable and not harming people with lead or other toxics;
- wrote, in conjunction with Watershed Council staff, educational pamphlets on reducing invasive plant problems (and their relationship to combined sewage overflows), and on urban heat.
In Developing Sustainable Environmental Responsibility, students helped create a new initiative, to bring nongovernmental professionals working on pollution prevention (P2) into a workgroup of the National Pollution Prevention Roundtable (NPPR, an organization of mostly state government P2 officials). The idea is that although the national P2 commitment has waned, there are many doing it in private facilities, and they can come together and share information and help it to spread, so that much more unnecessary waste and toxicity can be avoided. They introduced the idea at an NPPR meeting composed mostly of Board members, and it was received with enthusiasm. We are committed to producing a national meeting of the workgroup this Spring.
With that refreshing thought that there are people willing to pick up the torch and carry it for a bit, let us retreat again from the world of today long enough to recover something troubling and helpful at the same time from the past.
Charles Sumner’s idea of equality before the law was one that literally meant everyone. But in 1850 Massachusetts Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw did not see it that way. He ruled that the court was not going to do anything about how young Sarah Roberts, who walked by a good school every day, was not to be allowed to attend it, it having chosen to be exclusive to black people. He told us people were equal before the law but if the laws adapted to their respective relations and conditions didn’t respect those rights, then somehow although people were equal before the law the law was not going to do anything about the denial of their rights. To us today his opinion reads as a real brain twister. It raises the question of what good is law divorced from rights? He wrote:
The great principle…is, that by the constitution and laws of Massachusetts, all persons without distinction of age or sex, birth or color, origin or condition, are equal before the law. This, as a broad general principle,…is perfectly sound; it is not only expressed in terms, but pervades and animates the whole spirit of our constitution of free government. But, when this great principle comes to be applied to the actual and various conditions of persons in society, it will not warrant the assertion, that men and women are legally clothed with the same civil and political powers, and that children and adults are legally to have the same functions and be subject to the same treatment; but only that the rights of all, as they are settled and regulated by law, are equally entitled to the…consideration and protection of the law, for their maintenance and security. What those rights are, to which individuals…must depend on laws adapted to their respective relations and conditions.
Roberts v. City of Boston 59 Mass. 198, Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, 1850.
We have a caste society, he is saying, without saying.
Charles Sumner had argued that black people were entitled to the same privileges in public life as whites and that segregation was wrong. The court had to resort to the bizarre logic above – in which social preferences are the real law and that other one made of principles, that disappears - to shoot him down. Standing beside Sumner and working with him was a black lawyer, William Morris. By doing just this, working alongside a black man in his time, Sumner demonstrated the absurdity of the fact that no other white lawyer would do that. Though he lost his case, he won public opinion. The Massachusetts legislature ended public school desegregation five years later.
Tameez’s biography tells us that Sumner’s dad was not acknowledged by his own father, and that Sumner himself grew up on the cold, northern side of Beacon Hill with the poorer folk, including the Black population. He had some knowledge of the injustice of social disrespect for individuals. He also spent some time in France where he saw Black and White treated the same in public places, doing all kinds of things without the segregation he saw at home. He did not see his own country the way many or perhaps most whites seemed to, that segregation was natural. He correctly saw it as unnatural and utterly wrongful.
Abolitionists at the time would publicly burn the Constitution because it was a “pact with the Devil Slavery”. But Sumner said it contains the sacred original idea of the founders of universal individual equality and liberty. He pointed to the Declaration of Independence.
Today’s conservatives can be very literal. They say the noble language in the Declaration (or the Preamble) doesn’t spell out how you enforce the principles we can clearly hear them articulating, and without that, well, you can’t enforce them. The 9th Amendment – written to preserve rights that aren’t spelled out – has been termed an “ink blot” we cannot interpret. The Constitution Center explains: “During his failed confirmation hearing to become a Supreme Court justice in 1987, Robert Bork analogized the Amendment to an ‘inkblot,’ which hid the constitutional text that was under it. Just as judges should not guess what was under an inkblot, he argued, so too they should not guess at the Ninth Amendment’s meaning. Bork’s very public denial that any meaning of the Amendment could be discovered fueled intense academic interest in the original meaning of the text.” (https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/amendments/amendment-ix/interpretations/131).
This strikes me as a lot like Lemuel Shaw – looking at the world, squinting, show me where those principles are really required, spelled out! Just seeing the surface of things, injustice appears to be ordained reality.
But the original intent of the founders was not limited to their current conditions, a government that did not work for them. Some seemed to do their best to consider the future, to build in some foundation of shared values. They all joined in the general task of basing government on the natural recognition of mutual existence, institutionalizing something to counter the ages of cruel competition. If Right did not then replace Might (or the Civil War would not have happened), it took its place in the driver’s seat with ordinary power playing, giving citizens a chance to uphold it.
When asked to write a constitution for Massachusetts John Adams said let the people come together in convention – expand the right to vote and get the people to make their own rules. Then he wrote one that they passed. This process and much of the content was then the model for how the national Constitution came about.
To read the Massachusetts Constitution is like taking a refreshing, cold drink on a hot, dry, thirsty day.
The end of the institution, maintenance, and administration of government, is to secure the existence of the body politic, to protect it, and to furnish the individuals who compose it with the power of enjoying in safety and tranquility their natural rights, and the blessings of life: and whenever these great objects are not obtained, the people have a right to alter the government, and to take measures necessary for their safety, prosperity and happiness.
The body politic is formed by a voluntary association of individuals: it is a social compact, by which the whole people covenants with each citizen, and each citizen with the whole people, that all shall be governed by certain laws for the common good. It is the duty of the people, therefore, in framing a constitution of government, to provide for an equitable mode of making laws, as well as for an impartial interpretation, and a faithful execution of them; that every man may, at all times, find his security in them.
We, therefore, the people of Massachusetts, acknowledging, with grateful hearts, the goodness of the great Legislator of the universe, in affording us, in the course of His providence, an opportunity, deliberately and peaceably, without fraud, violence or surprise, of entering into an original, explicit, and solemn compact with each other; and of forming a new constitution of civil government, for ourselves and posterity; and devoutly imploring His direction in so interesting a design, do agree upon, ordain and establish the following Declaration of Rights, and Frame of Government, as the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
A Declaration of Rights precedes everything else, serving as the foundation from which all else flows.[ii]
There was a solidarity passed down by the Federalists primarily that Sumner absorbed. He got to know the Adamses, old John Quincy himself, who made sure Sumner was given a ring of his, and he was friends with Joseph Story, and even got to know old John Marshall, the second and first great Supreme Court Justices. They and others impressed on him the meaning of the original Constitution, and that it resonated with and was generated by the principles of the Declaration of Independence. When you hear someone diminishing the meaning of the grand aspirations it is like someone tapping on the horn of a tuba instead of blowing it to make it sound. It only means we have not succeeded in embodying in our established processes the means for making manifest the principles we say we observe. It is like Judge Shaw saying the grandness of the law is over there somewhere, not to impact here where we actually live. This may serve the tendencies that be for now but it is a mistake to think that this eliminates or even diminishes the meaning of the principle, which retains the potential to guide humanity to a safer position than it is in without it.
When Ben Franklin suggested that the Declaration’s assertions were “self-evident”, he marked the liberation of thought from dogma and its location back where it belongs, where it starts: in each individual mind. The same thing happened when Thomas Jefferson and others worked for religious freedom, and Madison made sure that and other aspects of freedom of conscience were recognized as sacred by the First Amendment.
As Ronald Dworkin later explained, “relying on Immanuel Kant’s thesis that no one respects his own humanity who does not respect humanity in other people, (…) we can define what we owe to other people as part of what we owe to ourselves. The key is the idea of dignity: it belongs to our own dignity to respect the dignity of other people.[iii] (Emphasis added).
Lemuel Shaw was more the type to work with the world as it was, rather than to imagine the world as it should be, based on this original idea of the importance – the dignity – of each individual. Some suggest he was Herman Melville’s model for the severe Captain Vere who executes the innocent Billy Budd. Thus it is understandable that he would reason in 1850 that Black people were simply not part of social society – that though they could have “civil” rights, the chance to go to court, get married, for example, the state played no role in social organization and if Whites wanted to exclude them, that was that, maybe too bad. Social rights were not the business of the state. He washed his hands, like Pilate, turned to the mass of people, and let their unwashed opinions call for the death of what is possible for everyone to love (universal equality, individual dignity). In the same way the Supreme Court recently looked to practices of the past to determine whether women today have the right to control what happens to their own bodies, disrespecting human dignity, diminishing the law to the point of obvious universal principles disappearing from view. They washed their hands of the injustice done to all women who assume they deserve the right to control what happens to their own bodies.
Sumner called out the racists, in a Senate with many slave-owners, who spat tobacco on the rug and were often drunk. They had their own sense of dignity that they called honor, which meant no one disses them and gets away with it. Like today’s thug honor, it meant a showing of respect to them, not to something shared, as in real honor. Preston Brooks beat Sumner nearly to death at his Senate desk with his cane, (a part of the image of a Southern gentleman) becoming a hero to many in the South. It must be supposed that he and those who cheered him felt, as many using violence to do politics must, today, that foolish people of conscience must be shown that their precious sentiments mean nothing next to the will to be violent. Their delight in winning this simple as mud tactic may be short-lived, but the question is always how long must we endure this supposed lesson before it is obvious to everyone what poverty of mind produces it.
Bob Dylan sang in 1963 in the Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll how William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll
With a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger
At a Baltimore hotel, society gath'rin'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmbwU3J-2kk
The song is based on a real incident.[iv]
I imagine Charles Sumner, sitting in his metal throne in the center of the traffic of Harvard Square, noticed perhaps by few, as the song ends.
In the courtroom of honor, the judge pounded his gavel
To show that all's equal and that the courts are on the level
And that the strings in the books ain't pulled and persuaded
And that even the nobles get properly handled
Once that the cops have chased after and caught 'em
And that the ladder of law has no top and no bottom
Stared at the person who killed for no reason
Who just happened to be feelin' that way without warnin'
And he spoke through his cloak, most deep and distinguished
And handed out strongly for penalty and repentance
William Zanzinger with a six-month sentence
Oh, but you who philosophize, disgrace and criticize all fears
Bury the rag deep in your face for now's the time for your tears.
Sumner kept alive the original dream of a nation strong through justice – he was the friend holding Lincoln’s hand when the great Emancipator died – and we too can look at the Constitution and see what he saw.
Sumner didn’t keep quiet. He was like John Quincy Adams, who after being President went to Congress and raised the issue ending slavery so many times they issued a gag order to shut him up. If you find yourself in Harvard Square someday, visit the Sumner statue. If you get a chance, read the biography. It may help empower the upholding of the light of universal values. We can have faith in those ideals, because his faith came to some fruition.
But it needs to keep happening. We need to go back to the sacred ideals of the founders, not the history of social practices, and give them the meaning they need today.
Bob Dylan told us Times Were A-Changing but without advancing the truth of conscience that change can be a degradation of principles instead of their adoption.
Then, if your thinking has become oriented by this reading or these considerations, check out Howard French’s The Second Emancipation – about the decolonization of Africa, (mostly Kwame Nkrumah and Ghana, the first to liberate itself). This book, revealing a whole history many may not know, of small nations asking for help from the US and not receiving it, breaks your heart at lost opportunities, but the lessons can still be learned. In the lives of people who raised their voices, and the desires of so many young people today, we see that the chances for a truly humane and flourishing world remain before us. We are reminded that we can learn to relate to each and the planet, and destruction can cease. What we know about the Golden Age of Sustainability and Justice that we are hoping for is not that it is unattainable. All we know is that it isn’t here yet.
I keep asking people, what is the Third Emancipation?[v]
[i] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Yky2U0txgk
Youtube presentation by Zaakir Tameez on Charles Sumner to the US Capitol Historical Society.
[ii] The opposite of our national constitution, where the Bill of Rights is an add-on a couple of years later.
[iii] https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2013/11/07/law-inside-out/
[iv] February 9th, 2023. https://folklife.si.edu/magazine/hattie-carroll. Ian Nagoski.
[v] You should come up with your own answer and if you do, write me at [email protected]. I think maybe from Nationalism, or from Toxic Group Identifications or from Unsatisfiable Wealth Maximization – they would all be good.
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