YDS: The Clare Spark Blog

I ask my readers to compare the value placed on science, lifelong learning, and human brotherhood in Sumner’s speeches, which were also turned into pamphlets and commanded a broad following, at least in the North. What is significant as we contemplate the vacuousness of the current discourse on education (begun in the blogs on Arne Duncan’s statism), is the literacy that Sumner expected from his nineteenth-century audience. What “moderate” intellectuals today would dare to write for a popular audience with the expectation that the audience would read important books or share his passion for an excellent scientific and moral education? Also, note that “local control” in today’s debates over educational policies can signify resistance to Sumner’s conception of liberal nationalism. See my blog http://clarespark.com/2008/05/03/margoth-vs-robert-e-lee/. The Wikipedia article on Sumner is almost unremittingly hostile, like some of his contemporaries, blaming his moral intransigence for the Civil War.  (For an opportunistic appropriation of Sumner, see http://clarespark.com/2011/03/30/eric-foners-christianized-lincoln/.) Moreover, the cultural history establishment (social democrats all) define him as paranoid, as a hater or as harsh in his proposals for Reconstruction, though that may be changing.

[Added, 11/21/09: The roots of the Republican Party are not found in the Reagan administration, but in the pre-Civil War Republican Party, founded by such as Charles Sumner, the great proponent of modernity, and with Thaddeus Stevens after the war, opponent to those who would rehabilitate the Southern rebels, hence injuring the freedmen for decades. Had the "Black Republicans" prevailed, American history would have been transformed. The essay on Robert E. Lee, linked above, lays it out, with Melville's postwar views on the fate of the freedmen suggesting a departure from his earlier anti-racism.]

VITAL TRUTH OF HUMAN BROTHERHOOD

ENCELADUS LIKENED TO SLAVE POWER, pp. 211-212, Springfield Mass, Whig State Convention, Sept. 29, 1847. “Necessity Of Political Action Against The Slave Power And The Extension Of Slavery.”

THE QUARTER-DECK OATH?] ANTISLAVERY LINKED TO FRENCH REVOLUTION AND ATTACK ON BASTILLE (p.229)

DESCARTES AND LIFELONG LEARNING (“The Law of Human Progress. An Oration Before The Phi Beta Kappa Society Of Union College, Schenectady, July 25, 1848) quoting Descartes, “Discourse on Method” (1637): “In these new triumphs of knowledge, he says, ‘men may learn to enjoy the fruits of the earth without trouble; their health will be preserved, and they will be able to exempt themselves from an infinitude of ills, as well of body as of mind, and even, perhaps, from the weakness of old age.’ As I repeat these words, uttered long before the steam-engine, the railroad, the electric telegraph, and the use of ether, I seem to hear a prophecy, the prophecy of Science, which each day helps to fulfill. …There is grandeur in the assurance with which the great philosopher announces the Future. (258)

ROMANTIC WANDERING JEW? Quoting Pascal (same essay), a repressed chapter in Les Pensées (first ed. 1669), “Of Authority in Matters of Philosophy”. “Not until the next century was the testimony of Pascal disclosed to the world. ‘By a special prerogative of the human race,’ says he, ‘not only each man advances day by day in the sciences, but all men together make continual progress therein, as the universe grows old; because the same thing happens in the succession of men which takes place in the different ages of an individual. So that the whole succession of men in the course of so many ages may be regarded as one man who lives always and who learns continually…. “(258-259)

GEOLOGY “THAT UNIMPEACHED INTERPRETER OF THE PAST…” (p.271) (Post-Civil War, Melville wrote Clarel, distancing himself from his Promethean characters, Taji, Ahab, and Pierre. The geologic Jew Margoth is mocked by the other characters, but it is not clear if Melville shared their views.)

ON RACE, BROTHERHOOD AND UPLIFT LED BY AMERICA. (CF. WHITE-JACKET)

THE ISABEL FACTOR: ORDINARY PEOPLE AND THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH: DESTINY AND THE RAINBOW (p.285)

OUT ON (caste) PRIVILEGES,” p.81(AHAB). “Equality Before The Law: Unconstitutionality Of Separate Colored Schools In Massachusetts. Argument Before The Supreme Court Of Massachusetts In The Case Of Sarah C. Roberts v. The City of Boston, December 4, 1849.” (vol.3, 51-100)  The term equality before the law is introduced in America for the first time: its precedents are Diderot, Condorcet, Declaration of Independence, and Massachusetts State constitution [Sumner should have included legislation in the Dutch Republic. C.S.]. (Editor’s comment: “…Shaw reduced it to very small proportions, when he said that it meant “only that the rights of all, as they are settled and regulated by law, are equally entitled to the paternal consideration and protection of the law for their maintenance and security.” This made it mean nothing; but such was the decision.” (The legislature repaired the error in 1855) On stigma of separation: (p.88) “The Jews in Rome are confined to a particular district known as the Jewish Quarter. It is possible that their accommodations are as good as they would be able to occupy if left free to choose throughout Rome and Frankfort; but this compulsory segregation from the mass of citizens is of itself an inequality which we condemn. It is a vestige of ancient intolerance directed against a despised people. It is of the same character with the separate schools in Boston.”

ABSOLUTELY INDEPENDENT SUMNER/AHAB, the Faneuil Hall speech against the Fugitive Slave Bill as prompting his election as Senator (April 23, 1851), and the signal for break in the Union; pp.158-159 (editor’s comments, then quotation from London Times, May 24, 1851): “The election of Mr. Sumner to the Senate is everywhere regarded as an emphatic declaration, on the part of his own State, that the law is at least not to remain in its present form unassailed. The South responds to such an election by louder declarations of its resistance to all infractions on its local institutions, even at the sacrifice of the integrity of the Union.” (Sumner has succeeded Daniel Webster as spokesman for Massachusetts principles.)

Sumner’s Faneuil Hall speech: “Our Immediate Antislavery Duties. Speech At A Free-Soil Meeting At Faneuil Hall, November 6, 1850. (122-148, Vol. 3) Links the current struggle with Pilgrims and Revolutionary Fathers, resistance to Stamp Act. Shortly after this, Sumner is made Free-Soil candidate for Senator, and elected. [Lemuel Shaw upholds the Fugitive Slave Law in April, 1851. All these events take place before the completion of Melville’s Moby-Dick. See Michael Rogin, Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville, Chapter 4 “Moby-Dick and the American 1848”. Rogin, aware of the Shaw decision and of the label “monomaniac” applied to abolitionists, plays off the abolitionist Theodore Parker against Leviathan, viewing Ahab as an egotistical merchant capitalist enslaver of the working-class crew and interested only in his own power. There is no reference to Charles Sumner in the book. When Rogin wrote his book (published in 1983), the Melville annotations to Paradise Lost had not yet been revealed.

Samuel Clarke objects to freethinkers like Anthony Collins: “there could be no such thing as liberty or a power of self-determination.” P.616.  (Freethought for Israel means freedom to philosophize and speculate; Vico, a radical, believes that “the truth of the philosophers can never be the truth of the people and must remain segregated, excluded from the sphere of commonly held and publicly approved notions which underpin institutions, laws, and government.” P.668) Incredulous mechanical materialists are worse than the Jews, Mohammedans, or Idolators: (The Venetian scholar Concina, author of Theologia Christiana Dogmatico-Moralis, 1754) “The deists and spiriti forti of our days are incomparably more blind, obstinate, and more malign, that [sic] the Jews themselves.” P. 681 Concina’s hostility to Saint-Evremond, Toland, Collins, and Mandeville, p.682. Also pantheists like Epictetus.

Final words (in Jonathan Israel): (approving of “the general will”) “Spinoza, Diderot, Rousseau: all three ground their conception of individual liberty in man’s obligation to subject himself to the sovereignty of the common good.” (720) Cf. Lippmann, The Phantom Public. At a UC:A conference, I asked Prof. Israel to either declare himself a statist social democrat or to deny it, but he appeared nonplussed at my question. After reading Ayn Rand again, I could have been more confrontational.