I was doing an interview on a Christian radio station today and we got chatting about the Treaty of Tripoli, the 1797 treaty that states: “The government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion….” I argued that treaties like this need to be understood in historical context. The primary purpose of this treaty was not, as many today assert, to make a definitive statement about whether or not the United States was a Christian nation. The primary purpose of the treaty was to strike a deal with Tripoli to protect U.S. trade in the Mediterranean Sea.
We then moved on to the discussion of the founding fathers and slavery. While this radio host was not willing to let the founders off the moral hook for holding slaves, he did note, drawing from my previous remarks about Tripoli, that the founders were part of a culture in which slavery was accepted and as a result we need to be careful about condemning them for being caught up in a system that was not of their making.
Fair enough. I would argue that this is the way that historian’s must think. We are not primarily in the business of condemning the founders for holding slaves. We are primarily in the business of understanding their world and making sense of why they held slaves.
But as a Christian, I also believe that there are universal truths that I adhere to that transcend time and place. For example, I believe that the Christian gospel is relevant to humans in all areas. The truth of the gospel transcends time I think all Christians, to one degree or another, would have to agree with me on this. (If it is possible to believe that the gospel is salvific or relevant in one era of history and not another, please let me know).
I also don’t think you have to be a Christian to affirm the idea that certain truths or values transcend time. Now I realize that the idea of “truth” is problematic in our postmodern age, but I would still imagine that many non-Christians are still “modern” enough to think that enslavement of another human being is wrong in any age or time period. As a result, they would condemn the founders for holding slaves.
In other words, it seems that we could ask two kinds of questions about the founders and slavery, or of the past in general. We could ask historical questions that guide us in exploring the institution of slavery, the mind of the founding class, and why they supported this institution. But we could also ask moral or even theological questions about the past. In this case, I think that many of us, despite the postmodern turn, would say that the founders were ethical and moral failures for upholding slavery in the 18th century much in the same way we would find people involved in slavery today to be unethical or lacking in basic morality.
This begs several questions:
Are there universal truths or ethical positions that transcend time? Or is everything historically determined?
Is the act of condemning the historians for owning slaves something that historians should be doing? And if we do, does that mean that we cease being historians and start being moral philosophers?
What do you think?
RECOMMENDED READING
LONG FORM: Frederick Douglass and the Challenge of Seeing Clearly 
On the slaveholder Jonathan Edwards and the Christians who read him 
Jack Hibbs dabbles in American history and it is a disaster. We need another Dudley Rutherford moment! 
From the archives: Jack Hibbs dabbles in American history and it is a disaster. We need another Dudley Rutherford moment
Condemning slaveowners for owning slaves is not, I think, something that a historian should be doing.
This is a fairly new idea for me, and it has come at a price: slogging through THOUSANDS of pages of the Genoveses, David Brion Davis, Drescher, Haskell, et al., ad infinitum, and spending a couple hundred hours of focused critical discussion of the problems of slavery and freedom in modern thought and American culture.
Now, this does not by any means make me an expert. But this program of study has forced me to think historically about the one issue in American history which, more than any other, I would tend to think of in moral terms. And I wouldn't be alone in that.
The idea that “everyone knows” (or should have known) that slavery is wrong is a very new idea indeed. The mystery of the anti-slavery movement is not why it took so long to happen, but why it happened at all.
It would be convenient to say something like, “Men had hardened their hearts against the moral will of God until in the fullness of time the Spirit moved in history.” But that's a theological argument, not a historical one.
What I like most about being a historian, I have found, is that appeals to Providence — including appeals to the “unchanging will of God” or “timeless moral truths” — are not allowed.
We have to be careful in a couple of ways when we discuss historical context. A statement like “the founders were part of a culture in which slavery was accepted” seems very reasonable. But slaves were part of that culture and certainly they didn't accept slavery. And there were Northern whites, esp. Quakers, who were opposed to slavery as well.
Another problem is how far we take historical context. John, I think your questions about universal truths and historical determination are getting at the same thing. Imagine if we said, “Sure that concentration camp commandant gassed thousands of Jews. But we must remember that he was part of a culture in which genocide was accepted.” Where does one draw the line?
Great. Unless we come out and say that “Slavery was wrong” we might as well be saying “The Holocaust was excusable”?
Isn't the job of the historian not to say that slavery or genocide is wrong, but to try to understand how and why slavery or genocide could happen? How was it possible for people to embrace the idea of owning other people, body and soul? How was it possible for people to calmly, blandly participate in scheme to exterminate millions of their fellow human beings? Those seem to me to be far more urgent questions for historians.
And they are questions for historians precisely because we are (being) trained not to impose our present moral vision on a past era. Who else learns and practices this discipline?
We need historians to do what only historians can do. No matter how unsavory the beliefs and behavior of past historical actors may seem to us, our job is to understand the past, to investigate its complexities, to explore the contours of all its contingencies, its “causes,” and its chains of choice.
If we are faithful in that task, we will not need to intrude upon our reader's conscience (or salve our own?) by spelling out “the moral of the story.”
Great points LD and JLivingston. This is a tough one. For readers just joining this conversation, check out some of LD's additional thoughts on this at http://gatesofmercy.blogspot.com/2011/03/moral-of-story.html