Delivered
before a Roundtable at the Conference on
at
the Smithsonian Institution
15
March 1988
The problem with natural things is not that they
are commonplace or easy to achieve. They are not. Things that are natural are
really quite rare and difficult to achieve. But the problem is that, whenever
they are achieved, they are so easily taken for granted. The eradication of
slavery is a case in point. Slavery is not a natural thing. Our Declaration of
Independence, the true preamble to our Constitution and national life, says as
much when it holds these truths to be self-evident. Yet, prior to the promise
of our Founding—a promise taking no more than a single century to redeem—prior
to our American eradication of slavery, slavery was, more or less, an
institution taken for granted around the world. From time immemorial, for
example, Norse slave traders had harvested laborers among the Slavs, Arab slave
traders had run their profitable commerce with Black Africa, Turks had enslaved
Arabs and Mongols had enslaved Turks. This was not a natural state of affairs,
but it certainly was typical. And the natural repudiation of this state of
affairs was a long and a difficult time coming.
But, as we started out saying, the difficulty
with achieving the natural is that, however laborious that achievement may have
been, it is so easy to take it for granted, afterwards, and to assume that
things never should have been otherwise. Yet, generally it is the case that
things which look so inevitable, so easy, so long in coming, after the fact,
really were very difficult, very daring, very rare, and bought at the cost of
great suffering. Just because things are natural, this does not mean that they
come easily. When we speak of the
evolution of the Constitution, of the evolution of status of Afro-Americans in
the United States, we must never suppose that this “evolution” “just
happened.” We must never believe that
this “evolution” was inevitable, delayed only by the perfidiousness of an evil
few. We must never forget that this great achievement—this rare and amazing and
difficult achievement of a free society of many races—we must never forget that
this great achievement was won and is still being won only at the cost of great
deliberation, toil and suffering on the part of all Americans. Much to the
amazement of all the ages, much to the amazement of all the world, Americans
are in fact building, have always been building, a polity worthy of its
original Constitution, of the intention of its Founding Fathers, a polity
respectful of the dignity of all human beings, respectful not in the abstract,
not in paying lip-service to human needs, but respectful in its restraint,
respectful in its founding assumption that all men are capable of running their
own lives.
W. B. Allen
Harvey Mudd College
Claremont, California