Originally Posted by
Olympia
Glad to hear the review, Chris. I hope to see the movie at some point.
To continue your discussion about how the people of that time viewed race, Toni, we did some research on Prudence Crandall, a Quaker teacher who opened a school where she taught black girls in the early 1830s. She was arrested--in fact the local government made up a law just so that she would be in violation of it. Later she was released, and she vowed to continue teaching black girls, because they deserved an education just as much as anyone else. Then her school was firebombed, and she realized it was too dangerous to her students for her to continue. So she closed the school and eventually moved west.
This all happened in Connecticut.
Yes, many people in Connecticut were abolitionists. But in those days, many people who thought themselves enlightened wanted to free slaves and then repatriate them to Africa. (This is the motivation behind the founding of Liberia not long before--hence its name, and the name of its capital, Monrovia, after James Monroe.) Most people (with the exception of groups like the Quakers and the Unitarians) hadn't yet progressed to the idea of a multiracial society. Thank goodness people and cultures do evolve.
The people who were able to see things differently included the Alcotts--Louisa May Alcott wrote an astonishing short story called The Brothers--and, eventually, Lincoln himself. You're right, Toni, that he felt that his primary mission was preserving the Union. He said as much himself. But after meeting people like Frederick Douglass, his thoughts moved forward. In his extraordinary second inaugural address, Lincoln said this:
If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."
This is the generation that did all the hard thinking so that subsequent generations didn't have to deal with that root issue. Social justice still hadn't been achieved, but at least the baseline was higher. A lot of blood was spilled to achieve that, including Lincoln's.
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