The better angels of our nature: Patriotism and dirty hands

Journal of Political Philosophy

Volumn 18, Issue 3, 2010, Pages 249-270

  Callan, Eamonn ^a  

^a STANFORD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 77955252126     PISSN: 09638016     EISSN: 14679760     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9760.2009.00352.x     Document Type: Article

References (34)

1. Abraham Lincoln, "First inaugural address," Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings 1859-1865 (New York: The American Library, 1989), p. 224.
2. Frederick Douglass, "The inaugural address," Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. Philip S. Foner, abridged and adapted Yuval Taylor (Chicago, IL: Lawrence Hill, 1999), p. 433.
3. My definition of "dirty hands" is adapted from C. A. J. Coady's "Messy morality and the art of the possible," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (Supplement), 64 (1990), p. 262. See also Michael Walzer, "Political action: the problem of dirty hands," Philosophy and Public Affairs, 2 (1973), 160-80.
4. Paul Gomberg, "Patriotism is like racism," Ethics, 101 (1990), 144-50.
5. For excellent examples of anti-patriotism at its most radical see George Kateb, "Is patriotism a mistake?" Social Research, 67 (2000), 901-24, and Simon Keller, "Patriotism as bad faith," Ethics, 115 (2004), 563-90.
6. Michael Slote, Goods and Virtues (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), p. 69. The idea of a dependent virtue is implicit in Philippa Foot's illuminating discussion of virtues turned to evil ends. See her "Virtues and vices," Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Virtues (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 1-18, at pp. 114-8.
7. Eamonn Callan, "Love, idolatry and patriotism," Social Policy and Practice, 32 (2006), 425-46.
8. Harry Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 38.
9. James Oakes, The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics (New York: Norton, 2005), p. 139.
10. Frederick Douglass, "The inaugural address," pp. 434-5, 438.
11. "There is no record of the number of votes cast for Smith in 1860, but it seems unlikely that it was greater than two or three thousand, and it may well have been less"; James M. McPherson, The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964), p. 20. The vote is likely a serious under-estimation of support for the politics of Smith because he was a decidedly half-hearted candidate. But even if a zero or two were added at the end of the number that McPherson gives, it would still be politically inconsequential.
12. After Lincoln called for volunteers in response to the attack on Fort Sumter, Phillips became an avid supporter of war on the South. On Phillips's volte face see James Brewer Stewart, Wendell Phillips: Liberty's Hero (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1986), pp. 219-222. Garrison would also give qualified support to Lincoln soon after the war began. See Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998), pp. 524-5.
13. Chandra Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2007).
14. Lincoln, "Speech on Kansas Nebraska Act at Peoria, Illinois," Abraham Lincoln, p. 328.
15. Tamar Schapiro distinguishes between noncompliance with the norms of a social practice that are merely transgressions (e.g., some shenanigans at the polls in a more or less imperfect democracy) and noncompliance that subverts the public function of the practice (e.g., the wholesale disenfranchisement of citizens opposed to the ruling party). Lincoln's point about slavery's incompatibility with government by consent implicitly appeals to some such distinction. See Tamar Schapiro, "Compliance, complicity, and the nature of nonideal conditions," Journal of Philosophy, 100 (2003), 329-55.
16. Lincoln's confidence that slavery would eventually die out if its extension were checked was fueled by a characteristically nineteenth century faith in human progress. Slavery belonged among those barbarous and archaic institutions that the march of progress would inevitably destroy. But Lincoln was certainly very ready to help the process along when the opportunity arose. His efforts to persuade the slave-holding states that remained within the Union to opt for compensated emancipation long before the Emancipation Proclamation is notable in this regard. See Oakes, The Radical and the Republican, pp. 152-6.
17. The Union held on to slave-holding Maryland, Delaware, Missouri and Kentucky. The military significance of these states is the theme of William Freehling's The South vs. the South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
18. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 required federal marshals to assist slave-catchers from the South in apprehending runaway slaves. Ordinary citizens in the North could also be impressed into assisting slave-catchers, and those who refused to help were subject to fines and imprisonment. Slaves (or freedmen) who were apprehended were denied the right to a jury trial. Federal commissioners who heard the cases were paid ten dollars if the captive were returned to the alleged owner but only five if the captive were set free. See Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York Norton, 2005), pp. 648-9.
19. Lincoln, "Speech on Kansas Nebraska Act," p. 316.
20. I do not say that there was anything original about Lincoln's prescience in these respects. These views were commonplace within the colonization movement, which espoused the return of freed blacks to Africa. The movement had been politically prominent since the 1820s. See David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 256-7. White racism was pervasive among the supporters of colonization, but they were rather more realistic about the problems that freed blacks would face in the USA when slavery ended than many abolitionists were.
21. The literature on Lincoln and racism is enormous and often veers tediously between demonization and defensive hagiography. A short, balanced survey is George Frederickson, Big Enough to Be Inconsistent: Abraham Lincoln Confronts Slavery and Race (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).
22. Lincoln, "To Albert G. Hodges," Abraham Lincoln, p. 585.
23. I owe the idea that non-ideal conditions might sometimes make only a "surrogate for justice" feasible to Schapiro, "Compliance," p. 349.
24. In the "Declaration of the Sentiments of the Peace Convention" in 1838, Garrison claimed: "Our country is the world, our countrymen are all mankind. We love the land of our nativity only as we love all other lands." I do not think love of country has to be monogamous, but a love as undiscriminating as this is no love at all. The text is available at 〈http://fair-use.org/the-liberator/1838/09/28/declaration-of-sentiments-adopted-by-the-peace-convention#p3〉.
25. Mayer, All on Fire, pp. 443-5.
26. Lincoln, "Second inaugural address," pp. 449-50.
27. David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln: A Relationship in Language, Politics, and Memory (Milwaukee MN: Marquette University Press, 2001), p. 16.
28. David Blight, Race and Reunion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 135-8.
29. McPherson, The Struggle for Equality, pp. 430-1.
30. David Blight, Race and Reunion, p. 266.
31. George Frederickson, Racism: A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 85-6.
32. Douglass, "I denounce the so-called emancipation as a stupendous fraud," Frederick Douglass, p. 722.
33. Charles Mills has taken Douglass to task for the naïve constitutional faith he enunciated in his speech "The meaning of fourth of July to the negro" in 1852. Douglass had been convinced by the arguments of some abolitionists that the antebellum Constitution was in fact anti-slavery. Unsurprisingly, Mills has little difficulty demolishing that argument. What Mills seems not quite to see is that the justification of love of country does not hinge decisively on questions of constitutional interpretation. See Charles Mills, "Frederick Douglass and 'original intent,' " Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), pp. 167-200.
34. Coady, "Messy morality," p. 272.