Two Slaves and the Capacity for Indignation

Born into slavery, Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey became one of the most influential social reformers of the 19^th Century. Better known as Frederick Douglass, this remarkable storyteller bespeaks a childhood with “no shoes, no stockings, no jacket, no trousers, nothing on but a coarse linen shirt, reaching only to my knees,” a time when his feet were so “cracked with the frost that the pen with which I am writing might be laid in the gashes.” He and the other children on the farm, he says, were fed coarse boiled corn served in a trough set upon the floor. This runaway slave, whose exploits eventually led him to become an adviser to Abraham Lincoln, tells us of a society where slaveholders more readily remembered the names of their horses than the names of their slaves. He lived at a time when it was not unusual for farmers to father their own slaves, and when local preachers spoke of the divinely designed nature of slavery. The South, as we know, took every pain to take everything away from its slaves: parents and children, their sense of family, their ability to read and add. In the case of Douglass, what the South could not take away was his “capacity for indignation,” to borrow the phrase from Alberto Flores Galindo, a Peruvian Marxist historian interested in colonialism and the nature of the colonized mind. And it was this capacity, which allowed Douglass to squeeze “drop by drop the slave of himself and [to wake up] one fine morning feeling that real human blood, not a slave’s, is flowing in his veins,” as Chekhov put it.

Natural as it seems, this capacity for indignation should not be taken for granted. Additionally, we cannot assume that when we feel it, this moral sentiment will be necessarily proportional to the magnitude of the offense that confronts us. Consider, for example, the story of the slaves who voluntarily joined the Confederate Army. The St. Petersburg Times recounts the story of “a young slave from a Tennessee plantation named Louis Napoleon Nelson, who went to war as a teenager with the sons of his master.” He “cooked and looked out for the others.” “One time, he killed a mule, cut out a quarter and hauled it back to his comrades.” Having memorized parts of the King James Bible, this slave served as an illiterate chaplain for mortally wounded confederate soldiers. He also “saw action, fighting with a rifle under the command of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest,” a slave trader, a plantation owner, and arguably the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. “The slaveholders,” Douglass wrote, strive to “darken the soul of the slave,” to turn his life into the experience of its absence.

The South was defeated, Louis Napoleon found freedom and he freely chose to live on the plantation for another 12 years. “Over the years, he went to 39 Confederate reunions,” the Times reports, always wearing the woolly gray uniform of the Rebel Army, always recalling, with his former masters and comrades in arms, the bygone days of slavery in the American south. He died in 1934, a time when blacks were born in segregated hospitals, when they were educated in segregated schools, when they attended segregated churches, and when they were buried in segregated cemeteries. When he died, the St. Petersburg Times tells us, “The local paper ran an obituary that called him a ‘darky.’” Before dying, Louis Napoleon Nelson bequeathed his Rebel uniform to his grandson, a man who still dons the Rebel garb today, and who appears to believe that Lincoln was a despot.

Flores Galindo says that having a capacity for indignation can be liberating, politically and existentially. He implies that this moral sentiment is not only important for individual people, like Douglass and Nelson. In fact, the historical courses of groups, including countries, sometimes hinge on people’s ability to feel morally revolted.

In Peru, for example, the presidential elections next month largely hinge on such capacity, as Peruvians have to decide whether the loving daughter of a thief and murderer will be elected president.

Closer to home, the war in Iraq could have taken a different route, even if by degrees, if this capacity for indignation were more active and more widespread within the American consciousness.

Historical events elsewhere, the massacres perpetrated by Israel, for instance, would have been less likely as well, and probably less murderous, if this feeling were more alive in the West today.

These events and others, from Guantanamo, to the incarceration of artists and activists in China and Cuba, to the massive pollution of the ocean, suggest that this moral sentiment described by Flores Galindo is weak today. It is not dead, of course. But it seems that to become indignant nowadays is, generally speaking and save exceptions, not very effective and not very impressive, and that often enough peppy and sordid forms of pragmatism easily win. Pope Benedict XVI and the cases of pedophilia that he swiftly silenced come to mind, for example.

All moral sentiments have a life and a history, and peaks and valleys. They grow and sometimes they die. Don Quixote incarnates a whole constellation of dead moral sentiments. Flores Galindo has helped us see that the lives and deaths of these ethical emotions are not without consequences. They can make the difference between a runaway slave and a confederate slave. Today, when violence — military, environmental, symbolic — is typically edited to fit 30-second segments on a continuous stream of news and entertainment, the idea of this forgotten historian seem worth recalling.