The last time the U.S. stared existential disaster in the face was sparked by the Fugitive Slave Act (passed by Congress in 1850) and the Dred Scott decision (issued by the Supreme Court in 1857). The first defined escaped slaves as property that must be returned to their owners and imposed penalties on those who aided them. The second stipulated that no person of African origin could be a U.S. citizen, and that slavery could not be prevented from expanding westward or even outlawed by so-called free states.
According to the Handbook of the National Parks Service on the Underground Railroad, “slave catchers and kidnappers,” emboldened by these expanded powers, “swarmed north threatening all blacks, not just fugitive slaves, with arbitrary arrest and swift hearing before a federal officer followed by a life of bondage.” Before 1850, the Handbook continues, “abolitionists were regarded as dangerous extremists by most Americans,” but the stark brutality of these government actions convinced more and more Northerners to support the immediate abolition of slavery. Millard Fillmore, who signed the Fugitive Slave Act, was the last president from the Whig Party. It collapsed over the issue of slavery. A new anti-slavery Republican Party began to gather support, and in the election of 1860 its nominee, Abraham Lincoln, defeated Democrat Stephen Douglas — the last presidential candidate to support legal slavery. For most Northerners of the 1850s, it was the swaggering escalation of cruelty that could not be abided, or accommodated, or compromised with. It needed to be abolished.
Today, we stare disaster in the face once again. A mad captain is plunging our ship into darkness. He leads a cult terrified that white, Christian, English-speaking males are threatened by all others who must now be silenced, dominated and cleansed from the ship. The numbing brutality of ICE has globalized in step with Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s atrocities, normalizing the breach of all appeals to mercy, to human equality. Power as its own justification.
Will such outrageous cruelty constellate a counterpart? A release of submerged revulsion? Can deep waves of resistance converge as they did in the 1850s to challenge the entire direction of current power? A movement not just to critique cruelty: to abolish it!
No one alive knows the trouble ahead, only the trouble behind. One way or another, nothing will be the same.
Patrick McGreevy lives in Greenfield and invites comments at pmcgreevy64@gmail.com.