The “True Treatment” for Slavery

Martin Luther King Day supplies a possibility to mirror on self-defense by people in persecuted minorities.

Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave, printed a newspaper out of Rochester, NY, named the Frederick Douglass’ Paper. In 1854, one other escaped slave was caught in Boston and finally returned to his grasp in Virginia underneath the federal Fugitive Slave Act. Whereas he was jailed, a crowd of abolitionist intent on liberating him attacked the jail and killed a US marshal making an attempt to repel them. (No one was ever condemned for that.) The Frederick Douglas’ Paper of June 9, 1854 (web page 2) commented with a bit titled “The True Treatment for the Fugitive Slave Invoice.” Though with out a byline, it was seemingly written by Frederick Douglass himself. The primary paragraph reads (emphasis within the authentic):

A superb revolver, a gradual hand, and a willpower to shoot down any man making an attempt to kidnap. Let each coloured man make up his thoughts to this, and dwell by it, and if wants be, die by it. This may put an finish to kidnapping and to slaveholding, too. We blush to our very soul once we are instructed {that a} Negro is so imply and cowardly that he prefers to dwell underneath the slavedriver’s whip—to the lack of life or liberty. Oh! that we had a bit extra of the manly indifference to dying, which characterised the Heroes of the American Revolution.

The Library of Congress advises me that that “the ‘true treatment’ theme in reference to slavery is talked about greater than 30 instances in numerous African American newspapers, from ca. 1828-1860” (e mail of December 28, 2022). I used to be alerted to Douglass’s assertion by Damon Root’s fascinating article “The New York Times Is Surprised To Find Public Defenders Championing the Second Amendment” (Motive, August 1, 2022).

The final two sentences of Douglass’s quote above elevate what is understood to economists as the issue of collective motion (see Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Motion [Harvard University Press, 1971]). If a lot of slaves (assuming they may have owned or obtained revolvers), escaped slaves, and their supporters had shot a adequate variety of slave homeowners and slave catchers, they might have abolished slavery. The collective motion drawback is who will begin the motion and shoot first, for these are themselves seemingly be killed or punished as a substitute of being liberated. Most individuals aren’t keen to die for a trigger, even simply, that’s more likely to solely profit others.

If nonetheless Douglass had succeeded instilling in a adequate variety of people the “willpower to shoot down any man making an attempt to kidnap” or to shoot any slave grasp, slavery would have unraveled by way of a easy mechanism of incentives. The way in which to cease persecution is to extend its value for persecutors in order that they don’t derive any web profit from it. If that succeeds, the persecutor will again off. Particular person self-defense by persecuted people or their supporters will not be adequate by itself to attain that aim, however it may contribute to it.