Posted by
Rogue Historian on Tuesday, August 22, 2006 10:51:50 PM
Black and white racists are equally ignorant of history: white racism is as much a chimera as black inferiority- and equally caustic. The idea of black inferiority rests upon a misinterpretation of the causes of human advancement. It insults the intellect to suppose that the differences between a bushman and a brooklynite are accidental; yet they are.
It just so happened that a rather trivial group of northern barbarians absorbed the good traits, and eschewed the bad, of their Roman conquerors. Over many centuries, these barbarians stumbled across the notion that society derived benefits from freedom. Principal among these freedoms was that of commerce, of contract and property. A few centuries later, a singular man risked his life and liberty to defend an abstract idea, the rule of law. Justice Coke's nemesis, a blowhard aptly named Bacon, threatened to reverse the advance of liberty by subjecting it to the whim of inherited privilege. Francis's court employed itself in flattery, not law. The king responded to Coke- and emboldened Bacon- with a hostile admonition:
"Let the judges be lions, but let them be lions beneath the throne."
Coke prevailed, in time, at least among a subset of the Crown's populace. These were colonists. Were it not for the fortitude of a former British officer and a little orphan from the Bahamas, the colonies may well have been part of Francis Bacon's inheritence. But Washington and his former aide-de-campe, Alexander Hamilton, twice prevailed: once in the Revolutionary War and again in Philadelphia.
Chance never fails to frown, eventually. A ball, not from the British, but from a former hero turned scoundrel, Aaron Burr, extinguished one half of Washington's genius. Hamilton recognized a fatal flaw in the American version of Coke's rule: he lived and died an abolitionist. He knew what many of his fortunate posterity have forgotten: the color of a man's skin is trivial.
Hamilton was not a genius because he was white- Burr and Jefferson were likewise embellished, and both were beasts. Hamilton intimately understood the struggle of man against his past. Abandoned by his parents- his father,willingly, his mother, by disease- Hamilton transcended a birth that would leave most men wallowing in poverty, pity and tears.
The role of chance in our fortunes cannot be exaggerated. We are not free because we are moral, but moral to the extent that we are free. The bottom line is that Americans today benefit from an adulterated gift given to their English ancestors, freedom.