As students of history, we enjoy reading books, articles, poems, speeches, and at times technical works, in their historical/grammatical context. This is true of the Bible as well as other historical works. Doing so gives us a genuine insight into the lives and thoughts of the people of yesteryear. We have spent a fair amount of time over the years visiting Civil War battlefields and museums when we travel, and we read notes and letters from soldiers on both sides of that terrible conflict. How very human they were and befuddled about the obstinacy of those on the other side. The commander of the Army of the Potomac, General George B. McClellan, held a low view of President Abraham Lincoln, referring to him as a “baboon.” But whatever McClellan thought of the President, he had issues of his own that held him back from greatness. Although McClellan was outstanding at training and preparing an army, he was seriously ineffective in actually leading an army into battle. When it was way past time to send the troops in, he was frozen into inaction by always believing he was outmanned by the other side. At one point, Lincoln sent him a note saying something along the lines of:

“My dear McClellan: If you don’t want to use the Army, I should like to borrow it for a while.”

Lincoln was a man of good wit, as is shown in his comment above, and used satire to make his points from time to time. The language, context, and historical setting gives us a better grasp of what was being communicated and for what reason.

One thing we observe as we read historical works is that King Solomon was indeed correct when he noted, “There is nothing new under the sun.” In the contemporary cultural thinking of the politically correct, though, two contradictory positions can be held in tension without someone being wrong. Supposedly, anyway. We are told not to make judgments about the behavior and morals of other cultures. Who are we to judge? Yet, despite what these enlightened ones may say, they believe that their view is the only right one to hold, and will certainly damn others who don’t agree with their viewpoint. Two stories from 2011 demonstrate what we are talking about.

The first was the hubbub over Mark Twain’s book, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and the revelation that the then Upcoming NewSouth ‘Huck Finn’ Eliminates the ‘N’ Word. What is the issue? Well, as we all know, the ‘N’ word is derogatory and demeaning. Of course, that is true, but then that was Mark Twain’s point in using it. Black’s in the South before the Civil War were not regarded as persons deserving of Constitutional rights or respect. They were merely property, to be used, abused, bought, and sold like a cow, horse, or piece of furniture. Two quotes out of the many we could cite give us the historical setting and clearly show Twain’s intentional poke in the eye of those who held these views.  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is on Loudlit where we can still read the Race Quotes in context. For example, in chapter 31, page 9,  Mark Twain has Huck saying:

“I wouldn’t shake my NIGGER, would I? – the only nigger I had in the world, and the only property.”

Huck wouldn’t run off and leave his “property;” after all, it is the only “property” he owns. In chapter 32, page 4, a short discussion between Huck and his aunt Sally affirms this same ignorant viewpoint:

“Good gracious! anybody hurt?”
“No’m. Killed a nigger.”
“Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.”

A Black is killed, no big deal they aren’t persons after all. But “sometimes people [who are officially persons] do get hurt.” For the record, Huck Finn did not own Jim, and he knew Jim was a runaway slave from the time they met.

Mark Twin artfully, with careful word selection, paints a cultural picture of an evil time in our nation’s past when blacks in the southern states were regularly called the “N” word, because it was demeaning and served as a regular reminder that black people were not to be viewed as people, not persons, but property, as defined by the southern slave-owning culture at that time. And yes, even slave owners  understood the slaves were human—no one really questioned that—but a lower class of human, and thus not worthy of respect, consideration, or legal protection under the Constitution. That brings us to the second story.

The 112^th Congress in 2011 began with a reading of the Constitution. However, as “House Reading Amended Slavery-Free Constitution This Morning” notes, what the House read was really an amended Constitution.

Instead of reading the Constitution in its entirety, House members will read an “amended version” that only includes the sections and amendments that were not changed at a later date. The decision in part will allow members to avoid reading less pleasant sections, like the clause in Article 1, Section 2, which counted black slaves as three-fifths of a person.

Of course, anyone unfamiliar with the historical context might assume that this reading meant that every black person was considered by the US Government to be not a full person. That is not true. It is true that the Southern States viewed slaves as property, not persons. Human perhaps, but not persons or, as Aunt Sally viewed it, not “people.” The slave that died was just “property” and could actually be taxable assets putting a supposed unfair federal tax burden on “owners” of slaves.

In actuality, this original compromise centered on representation and taxation. Representation was based on population. But if slaves were property, they were not people any more than horses or homes were. The southern states did of course wish to add their many slaves to their official state population rolls in order to increase the number of Representatives they would be allocated. Numbers equal power when it comes to the House of Representatives. So, the southern states wanted to count their slaves in their overall population when it came to receiving a larger number of Representatives, but they did not want to pay exorbitant property taxes on their slaves. Tongue-in-cheek, some of the people in Northern states started counting their cows, couches, and other pieces of property to show up the absurdity of their position.

In the end, the “compromise” was to count the slaves, but they would only be counted as three-fifths of the white population. In other words, 100 blacks would equal 60 whites in tallying up how many representatives each state would receive. The “compromise” had nothing to do with the individual worth of a black person, or the ‘Founding Fathers’ view of blacks. There is no place in the world where stupidity and/or evil does not exist, so we know people in the Northern States were far from perfect, no more righteous in most ways than their fellow Americans in the South. But Northerners viewed Black people as persons, deserving of all the Constitutional rights accorded to persons. Many Americans started and/or joined abolition movements and certainly would have abolished slavery right there and then if they had the power. But it would take a terrible war to accomplish that. The Southern States, in the main, thought they needed slavery to work their farms, plantations, etc., and so used an arbitrary criterion, skin color, to define the worth and station of individual darker-skinned humans. The wrong skin color classified a person as a mere human type of property.

Things are not altogether different today. Those who decry the evils of a culture of a previous generation for denying personhood to humans due to skin color, deny personhood to humans based on their size (too small). Level of development (not as developed as, say, a 1-year-old, for example). Environment (where they live). Degree of dependency (cannot fend for themselves).¹See The S.L.E.D. Test

How is this criteria today any different than the skin color test of the southern slave states in the past? Which human is a “person” with Constitutional rights, and which human is not a person? In “Do Humans Have Rights That Can Be Violated?” and “Every Grandma a Wanted Grandma” we looked at the problem of a lack of absolutes today. Personhood and rights have become culturally arbitrary again. This attitude is rife today, blatantly seen in the modern ruling class elite. On the one hand they are horrified that Mark Twain used the “N” word in his book, even though he was using it to show the wrong-headed attitude of the Southern States at the time and exposing their arbitrary definition of blacks as property instead of persons. These same people lack a historical understanding of the American Constitution, and because they lack historical understanding, they are “offended” by imagining that the US Constitution, our founding document, legitimizes something (the inferiority of blacks) which it does not legitimize.

But even if it did mean that our founding documents indicated that the founding fathers believed black people were not persons, or less than persons, why should they, of all people, be offended? They are obviously using “differing weights” (Deuteronomy 25:13), holding a different set of standards for themselves and others. While they look down their noses at people in the past who wrongly did not see black people as persons, they, too, define certain humans as non-persons but instead as property today. Their criteria is geographical. A human in the womb is property in their eyes, and can be kept or disposed of as the owner sees fit. Once the human makes a few-inch geographical transition through the magical birth canal, voila, it is now a person and has legal protections.

The only reason this works for the ruling elite today is their double standards and the narrative they are selling. God speaks to this in Proverbs 20:10:

Differing weights and differing measures, both of them are abominable to the LORD.

And again in Proverbs 20:23:

Differing weights are an abomination to the LORD, and a false scale is not good.

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.Ω

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