Latter-Day Abolitionists

As we in America are debating the "enhanced" interrogation techniques used on terror suspects under President George W. Bush, forces abroad (see John R. Bolton - Obama's Prosecutions by Proxy) are threatening to prosecute instances of purported U.S. "torture."

What's really going on here?

An analogy can be drawn to slavery and our Civil War. Southern states in our as yet incomplete nation seceded at a point when it looked like all new states would be "free" rather than "slave" — meaning that eventually the free states would become numerous enough to put through a constitutional amendment banning slavery everywhere, the Land of Cotton included.

Abolitionists had long been calling for the emancipation of slaves as an absolute moral imperative, since slavery was an insult to human dignity. Many leading abolitionists were from New England, where slavery was not immediately an issue.

We now know that the abolitionists were right, but in their day they were ahead of their time. Slavery is an inexcusable insult to human dignity. Yet in the years leading up to the onset of civil war in 1861, many of America's greatest minds could make excuses for it. President Lincoln, first elected in 1860, abhorred slavery, but he wrote in an open letter to Horace Greeley:

My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause.

Lincoln was willing to subsume the moral principle that slavery is absolutely unjust to the pragmatic need to save the Union, so to hold foreign powers at bay who otherwise would not hesitate to take over our divided land.

Among the Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson in particular despised slavery (though he was a slaveholder), and George Washington went so far as to free his slaves. Yet their acquiescence to southern representatives who upheld slavery during the Continental Congress and, later, the Constitutional Convention was mandatory, if the United States (plural, then) were to be born at all.

Slavery would finally be outlawed (in the Union, not the Confederacy) by Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, and when the Confederacy was defeated, the reunited states were required to free their slaves as well. Reconstruction ensued, and then came the Jim Crow laws in the South. By 1896, Americans of African descent, though nominally free, were herded into a separate society in the South, one that the Supreme Court's Plessy v. Ferguson decision ratified under the guise of "separate but equal." The civil rights movement of the 20th century eventually put paid to that doctrine and set the stage to right the lingering wrongs brought about by segregation and racial discrimination.

In short, it took a lot of pain, indignity, death, hard work, patience, and disappointment over a long period of time before the principle took root that slavery and racism are absolute moral wrongs.

Now we are testing whether the moral principle that torture is absolutely wrong has taken root. It seems to have done so in Europe, where Spanish magistrate Baltasar Garzón is making noises about prosecuting the American perpetrators of torture. He is, one might say, a leading voice among latter-day abolitionists. Like the New Englanders of the 19th century who sought to end southern slavery, he has no direct tie to the U.S. behaviors he opposes on moral grounds. He thus points the way to our moral future. The question is, are we ready to go down that road just yet?