"Can you not let us alone?"
A Recurring Theme Amidst the Current American Crisis
In February of 1861, as the secession crisis of the Union mounted, former senator James Henry Hammond, a prominent South Carolina planter, slaveholder, and ardent defender of the “peculiar institution,” wrote to a friend and critic of slavery from New York, asserting that anti-slavery agitation was the primary cause of the division between North and South.
As he put it, “You think our system [slavery] an evil—a sin, and one that, therefore, cannot last . . . . We think the same precisely of yours, but while we don’t trouble ourselves about yours, you make all sorts of war on us about ours in which we see no evil, no sin, and nothing but good. We think it is far better than yours—at least for us—in all respects.”
“Can you not let us alone?” [Italics added.]
This comment, made almost 165 years ago on the brink of the Civil War, could be uttered today. Only the issues have changed. Indeed, I’ve practically had this exchange with more than one leftist friend. Why can’t “progressives” just leave ordinary people alone to live their lives without interference by reformers, moralist busy bodies, climate change fanatics, Malthusians, LGBTQ+infinity fanatics, trans fanatics, assorted other fanatics, and the Federal government?
In 1861, only a tiny minority of those living in the free states were abolitionists. Most would have been happy to leave the planters alone, and the slaves to their fate, so long as slavery was not allowed to spread into the western territories. But to abolitionists, the answer to Hammond’s question was: No. We cannot leave you alone because slavery is evil. It is a sin, and we cannot live with sin without attempting to root it out. It is our moral duty to struggle against sin wherever we encounter it, and nothing is more sinful than human bondage. Should we fail to do our utmost to destroy sin we would be as guilty as they.
Indeed, the abolitionist agitator William Lloyd Garrison, editor of the famous anti-slavery newspaper The Liberator, went so far as to advocate that the free states secede from their union with the slave states in order to free themselves of the moral taint of political association with the slave states. In short abolitionists believed they had a moral obligation to wage an unrelenting crusade against slavery. In the concluding stanza of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, Julia Ward Howe expressed this idea when she urged Union soldiers that, “As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.”
Reform was a moral calling deeply embedded in the protestant Christianity of New England and wherever their descendants had settled. It exploded into an intense crusade during the Second Great Awakening in the decades prior to the Civil War. If reform was its objective, crusade was its method. In the antebellum period reformers launched crusades against many social evils such as “demon rum,” and in favor of world peace. But the overwhelming national sin was slavery and the crusade against it absorbed most reform energy.
Once slavery was abolished by Union arms and the Thirteenth Amendment, reformers found many other evils to fight in the rapidly growing cities of industrializing America. Modern American progressivism was born in those cities, but the reform impulse is much deeper. It is a psychological drive to remake the world rooted in Protestant millennialism, and the emotional revivalism of the Great Awakening. It is the origin of the American impulse to export “democracy” to the world.
So, no. Progressives, or whatever they call themselves at any given time, can’t let us alone. They feel called upon to remake us in their image and will gladly enlist the power of government to force us to comply.
Of course, things have changed since Hammond’s day. Very few believe, as Hammond did, that slavery was a “positive good.” Overwhelmingly Americans today recognize, as most did even then, that slavery was “a moral evil,” that it was a living reproach to Thomas Jefferson’s declaration that “All men are created equal.” Likewise, Americans today overwhelmingly agree that racism and racial discrimination are repugnant.
Slavery is long gone, and Jim Crow was abolished during the Civil Rights movement that culminated in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The Civil Rights movement, merging as it did with the anti-war movement, and second wave feminism, triggered a multi-generational explosion of reform activity that spread to every form of American social and economic life, and which has yet to run its destructive course. It is essentially a heretical third Great Awakening which has paradoxically taken secular, even at times atheistic form.
Accordingly, sixty years later, progressives still purport to see racism buried deep in our souls as if they can read our minds. It is no coincidence that their Puritan cultural forbears in the Massachusetts Bay colony believed they could distinguish the “elect,” who were predestined to spend eternity in heaven, from those headed in the other direction, by seeking “signs” in their behavior in this life. Then they sought signs of moral depravity and religious hypocrisy, or even demonic possession. Today they see signs of suppressed racism in so-called “micro-aggressions.” Accordingly, they demand the prohibition of “hate speech,” a clear sign in their view, of moral failing, and accuse others of what amount to thought crimes that only they can detect.
Yes, much has changed since Hammond’s day. But the answer to his question remains the same. No, they can’t let us be. We have not yet reached the utopian perfection of their vision. Nor have we cleansed our corrupted souls.
For progressives, although religious reform has taken secular form, the crusading impulse that emerged from the Second Great Awakening remains as powerful as ever.
There is always another evil to overcome, another sin to fight, and guilt to assuage.
So long as social inequality exists between races, between the rich and the poor, between men and women, injustice exists. So long as injustice exists anywhere, the restless soul of the progressive cannot be at peace. It can never settle for less than perfection because if we tolerate sin, we are guilty. If we are guilty, we must atone for our sins. The only way to do that is to struggle against them. It is the permanent war of good against evil. That may work in the human soul, but it is a prescription for tyranny in a nation of 340 million individuals.
Slavery and Jim Crow were great evils, especially in a land that claims that “all men are created equal.” It was right and proper to abolish them. But today the great evil is said to be man made “climate change,” allegedly caused by modern industrial society and the burning of “fossil fuels,” such as coal, oil, and natural gas. We in the west are guilty, and we must atone for the sin of prosperity by doing away with fossil fuels. We must exchange the internal combustion engine for clean electric motors. We must get rid of our gas appliances and other utilities. If we don’t do it voluntarily, progressives will force us to do as they say.
Fanatics who are driven by their sense of guilt, once they get control of government feel justified in using it to compel other citizens to fall into line with their objectives. In this manner they quickly become tyrants, not unlike the Maoist Red Guards of the Chinese cultural revolution.
But of course, not all people are driven by guilt or religious fanaticism, not even close. Some are driven by greed and see an opportunity to make a buck by exploiting the movement. That’s where climate scammers like Al Gore, and John Kerry come in. Any such movement propelled by government invites corruption. But most ordinary people just want to be left alone.
Where this leads we do not know. Last time we were nearing the brink, it led to tragedy because, as one historian concluded long ago, the nation was led by a “blundering generation.” Unfortunately, it is hard to imagine that the current generation of leaders is any better than those of the 1850s. The stakes however are infinitely higher today.