The Half That Was Never Told and Why it Matters Now

I just finished reading The Half Has Never Been Told, by Edward E. Baptist, a remarkable history of the Antebellum United States told from the point of view of slavery's role. I had known that slavery was economically important to the development of the US economy, and had understood the connection between the Northern textile industry and the enslavement of people in the South, but this reading took my understanding deeper in surprisingly unsettling ways.

First, the author nails us religious liberals in one of his carefully documented case studies of individuals.  The individual is the Rev.John Gorham Palfrey, Unitarian clergyman, graduate of Harvard, originally from Louisiana.  He found himself in a difficult situation after his father died back home in the Deep South, because much of his inheritance would be in the form of human beings owned as property. Could he sell them?  No. That would be a problem for his own moral scruples and his reputation in the North. Could he liberate them?  Not in Louisiana in those days. In the end he brought all but one of them to Massachusetts to set them free, finding placements for a few while the others took it on themselves, in the manner of free people, to find jobs and begin their new lives.

"If these newest Bostonians looked up in wonder at the King's Chapel's austerely magnificent vaults which soared like white wedding cake from pillars to roof, and if they felt intimidated by the rich variety of clothes on the congregants...the migrants had nevertheless spent their lives constructing this world."  (p.366)  Palfrey knew this, surely. Slavery was not an easy issue for the Unitarians, many of whom were the Boston elite, who also knew their own wealth rested on slavery.

Baptist shows, as our Unitarian forebears apparently knew, that opposing slavery in Boston and elsewhere in the Northeast was not different from undermining the foundations of American prosperity.  Only as the North became more populous and more economically diverse could it afford to question the wisdom of continuing to be a country where slavery was practiced. Only with greater economic diversity could testimony of enslaved people who had escaped become persuasive.

Slavery is deep in the foundations of who we are as America, and deep in the foundations of who we Unitarian Universalists are as a people. We are going to need to do some deep work to find ways to free ourselves from the morally difficult fact that we still stand on the shoulders of enslaved human beings.