Displaced Persons

     I’ve been thinking about a WWII troopship, the USS General Leroy Eltinge. In 1965 I spent three weeks aboard the Eltinge with 4000 soldiers enroute from Oakland Army Terminal to Cam Rahn Bay. I recently came across an historic footnote involving the old tub. In 1948 congress passed the Displaced Persons Act authorizing entry of 200,000 European refugees into the US. The Eltinge was one of the ships sent to fetch them.
     It was a small part of the greatest humanitarian relief project in history. By some accounts WWII produced over 80 million refugees. Millions of them were survivors of Nazi slave labor camps. We remember them as mostly Jews but the vast majority were not Jews. They were Poles, Ukrainians, Latvians, Estonians, Lithuanians, White Russians, and Hungarians. By 1947 they were gathered in DP camps across the continent with no place to go.  One of the UN’s first missions was to take charge of them and get them resettled.
     And they did; by 1962 when I first visited Germany there were only a few thousand of the most tragic cases left. The others had all gone home or, if they had no homes, been admitted into England, Belgium, Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, the United States, and Australia. They and their families were getting on with life. By 1970 the last of the European camps were gone. Then there are the Palestinians. At Arab insistence many thousands of Palestinian who left Israel in 1948 remain refugees today, they or their descendents, for no other reason than to serve as pawns in the dispute with Israel. The squalid camps in Gaza, the West bank, and Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley are there to keep attention focused on their misery. They represent perhaps the most intractable issue in one of the world’s most dangerous confrontations.
     I have a proposition. Tell Arabs we have had enough of their intransigence. It’s time to resettle Palestinians so they can get on with productive lives in much the way their European predecessors did fifty years ago. Give the Palestinians something to do besides sending suicide assassins into Israel. We can help of course, in much the same way we helped in the reconstruction of Europe. But it’s time we stopped pouring money down a rat hole. The aid money we and our European “allies” send to Palestine should go to infrastructure projects; roads, schools, hospitals, irrigation systems, desalinization plants – the sorts of things a thriving economy needs. Not one more nickel should go to the corrupt heirs of Yasser Arafat, or to ensure the refugees stay in their camps, especially not to terrorist organizations like Hamas, even if they are in office through free and fair elections.
     I have another suggestion, that we make a show of faith by passing a Displaced Persons Act of 2006 authorizing immigration for 200,000 Palestinian refugees. If the USS Eltinge isn’t scrap metal by now we can send her to get them. I calculate the Eltinge could make the trip in three months and carry 5000 people. At that rate it would take ten years to get them all here. I suspect there would be no shortage of applicants. We could solicit the aid of local churches and mosques to resettle them, much as we did the boat people in the 1970s. 20,000 people a year is a drop in the ocean of American immigration. We should be able to screen out bad actors. Families only would be a good start. The threat of deportation for families of recalcitrants should be a strong incentive for good behavior once they get here.

The Liberia Solution

     Of all people you would expect Jews to know better. Yet here are the advocates of a Greater Israel proposing to expel Palestinians from their home and ignoring the brutal history of such expulsions. They know they can’t live in a Jewish democracy with a majority Arab population. Their answer is to deport them. They argue that most Palestinians are recent immigrants or their descendants and so aren’t really Palestinian. They should be sent home. At least they aren’t proposing to kill them all as Joshua did the Canaanites. Of course Arabs make essentially the same argument in reverse, only they would appear to be more amenable to Joshua’s strategy.
     The “not really Palestinian” logic goes like this. In the early days of Zionism Palestine was a very sparsely populated place. The Palestine of 1918 included all of what is now Israel, Jordan and the “Occupied Territories.” An estimate counted 512,000 Arab Muslims, 61,000 Christians, and 66,000 Jews, including by then a number of Zionist immigrants. There is substantial evidence that most of the Muslims even then were recent arrivals, many of them refugees from Russian expansion into Central Asia. The inhabitants were so badly exploited by absentee Arab and Turkish landlords that families rarely stayed more than a generation before moving on. The original Zionist idea was to establish a Jewish homeland in what was essentially empty space.
     The Zionists moved in, bought nearly worthless property at exorbitant prices, irrigated, and turned arid ground into productive farms. As they prospered the local economy improved and created a demand for labor. Arabs flocked in looking for work at a time when, from 1925 to 1947, the British were strictly limiting further Jewish immigration. The old landlords began to think they had been cheated and initiated the myth that Jews were stealing the land, forcing Arabs from their homes and …, well you know how that part of the story has escalated. The point of this is that there was never a Palestinian national identity. That was a propaganda creation of the 1950s to help generate sympathy for Palestinian refugees.
     Now all of this is true. The problem of course is that regardless of how they got there or when, there are today somewhere between 2.4 and 3.4 million Arabs living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. The numbers are intensely disputed but if Israel expands into the West Bank and Gaza as the Greater Israel advocates want to do, they will have if not a majority, a sizeable minority of Muslims living among them. Population growth statistics suggest that would be untenable for a Democratic Israel.
     It is an interesting coincidence that the numbers involved are roughly equivalent to the populations of Blacks and Whites in the American Anti-bellum South. Many anti-slavery activists thought Blacks and Whites could not live together with common citizenship and a popular solution was to transport freed slaves back to Africa. Modern Liberia was founded for that purpose. Fortunately the idea was dropped soon after the Civil War. We can get some idea of the horror it would have entailed by looking at the experience of the Cherokee as they were sent to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears.
     What could make all this moot is a mass voluntary exodus. That isn’t as inconceivable as it sounds. Large Jewish minorities in Arab countries migrated en-mass to Israel after 1948. Christians have largely left too over the years. I suspect more than a few Palestinians would emigrate if they could but no one wants them. If that changes all bets are off.

Ignorance is Bliss

     Richard Cohen argues in a recent column that we don’t use algebra much and it shouldn’t be a requirement in high school. The idea that it teaches reasoning is a lie propagated by algebra teachers. He cites as proof that none of the math whizzes in his high school could write a readable English sentence, the only true sign of genuine intelligence. After all, since tenth grade he has avoided any form of mathematics like the plague and he has led a “pretty full life.” Baloney, that Mr. Cohen only got half an education is no reason to accept the recalcitrant teenager’s argument that he or she will never need algebra and shouldn’t have to study it.
     In order to hold a decent job in our society one needs at least a high school diploma, precisely because it assures a potential employer that the holder is reasonably literate and numerate. That a student can’t do basic algebra suggests that he or she is seriously deficient in the latter and needs some remedial work. Most of us poor schmucks have to be able to balance a checkbook, make change, buy things on credit, even on occasion estimate proportions. It’s true that these days we can use computers to do most of the drudge work but if you’ve got a crew charging by the hour and workmen are coming and going you need a little algebra to know if you are being cheated. I wonder if Mr. Cohen can figure the tip on his restaurant tab, or does his publisher always take him to lunch?
     It’s interesting that the word “algebra” is derived from the name of the Arab who taught us to use it, and that in order to use it we had to adopt the Arabic numbering system. Before that we were using Roman numerals and had no concept of zero. It is true that some Romans lived “pretty full lives” but I would argue that we’ve come a long way since then, in no small part because algebra was a primary enabler for the scientific revolution that emerged in the sixteenth century. Without algebra Isaac Newton could not have developed his calculus and Mr. Cohen would be writing his columns with a quill pen, that is if he could make a living as a writer. More likely he would be a subsistence farmer.
     Speaking of farmers, show me a farmer who can’t estimate his costs and how much he will get for his crop and I’ll show you a farmer who is headed for bankruptcy. A real estate agent who can’t figure a price per square foot isn’t likely to be very successful. A businessman who can’t do the numbers is at a severe disadvantage to his competitor who can. Numeracy is a fundamental requirement for modern life. Without it one cannot be a nurse, a carpenter, an airline pilot or a computer programmer. You can’t even effectively run a household budget. To be numerate one must master basic algebra. To start out life without it limits one’s prospects severely.
     Now I will heartily agree that to be able to write intelligibly is also a critical skill and I have seen my share of technical whizzes who couldn’t. But I have also seen many competent technicians who could. They have the advantage, hands down. Mr. Cohen is a successful writer but that puts him in a tiny minority. The number of aspiring writers exceeds that even of aspiring actors. Most of us need a day job. For that we need algebra, even if Mr. Cohen doesn’t.

Bad Press

     I don’t know why Dick Cheney’s office held off a day before announcing the Vice President had accidentally shot his hunting partner but I can guess. The Bush administration in general and the Vice President in particular face the most openly hostile press corps since Richard Nixon. Now, three days into the coverage they are portraying the incident as the crime of the century. The New York Times web site leads with three separate articles on the front page, an op-ed piece, and an editorial, all excoriating the White House. It’s much the same at The Washington Post. At a press briefing on Monday reporters were all but throwing chairs. There were calls for Cheney’s resignation, even a criminal prosecution. There is nothing new about incivility and a lack of decorum in White House press briefings but this was extraordinary. Those people were out of control. Don’t they ever listen to themselves? No wonder the media is held in low public esteem. This was a hunting accident!
     Much of the coverage focuses on the delay, and on the fact that the first reports came from the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, which the Eastern establishment apparently considers a hick town rag. It would be an understatement to say the media insinuates the administration attempted to cover the incident up. They are using it to drag out and re-hash old grievances about everything from Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to hurricane Katrina.
     At least this incident really happened. The press isn’t always so particular and over the past few years false reporting has been rampant. It was particularly prevalent during Katrina, with reporters passing on every rumor of murder and mayhem without even a pretense at verification. I don’t know why. The storm was bad enough without their exaggerations. But they have been at their worst when they have faked the news and deliberately misrepresented conditions in order to influence public policy and even swing elections. The Dan Rather attempt to falsify George Bush’s National Guard service record wasn’t a lapse of judgment but representative of a belief that a lie told in a greater good isn’t really a lie. Depending on whose ox is being gored it is an attitude common to many who like to call themselves journalists.
     Most truly despicable has been the reporting from Iraq. In an effort to produce a debacle they have attempted to paint it as one. The fact is the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a brilliant military success and efforts to put down the ensuing insurrection have gone pretty well, as insurrections go. If conditions were as chaotic as presented there would be masses of refuges and we haven’t seen them. Schools and hospitals are open and functioning. If I look in the background in the nightly images of suicide bombs, I see people going about their business. I think I would recognize a catastrophe if I saw one and Iraq isn’t it.
     Maybe some good will come of the hunting incident. Maybe a few cooler heads in the press will come to their senses and realize they have gone way overboard in their attempts to vilify the administration, and not just in this. It is something that has been building for years and some of it is more than an otherwise harmless embarrassment for the Vice President. The public deserves news, not vituperative. For now we’ll pretty much have to go to the internet to get it and we’ll have to do our own separating of the wheat from the chaff. The main stream media isn’t going to do it.
     

Politically Correct Cartoons

     I have particularly enjoyed watching the media trying to justify their obvious double standard in the current to do over Danish cartoons. Most in the American press have either refused to publish them altogether, or have dubbed out the images of Muhammad in deference to Muslim sensibilities. The same outlets showed no such reluctance to reprint a Washington Post cartoon ridiculing an American Army amputee. Some pundits have accused editors of being intimidated by the threat of Muslim violence but I don’t think it’s that at all. It’s just that there is an unspoken list of subjects and groups for whom any sort of lampooning is strictly off limits. In fact the list has grown until about the only people who are truly fair game are Christians and white males, especially fundamentalist Christians and conservative white males. If we ever developed sensitive feelings I suppose the cartoonists would be out of work altogether.
     You can bet that the Washington Post wouldn’t be caught dead making fun of a black amputee or of a female soldier unless of course she were an embarrassment to George Bush. Any caricature of American Indians is over the top, same with gays, Jews, and now Muslims. I’m not sure about Shamanism or Animism. They might be ok, depending on what racial stereotype is used. It’s probably not an issue. Not too many people remember what a Shamanist is.
     I’m not really upset by any of this, though I did fire off a letter to the editor about it. Most of us learned to accept being the only safe target a long time ago. I just think it’s funny. These people don’t even recognize their own bigotry. It’s a bit of a shame too. Political cartoons have their place and every now and then the cleverest among them can capture in a drawing what no amount of prose could ever get right. We lose something when we get so insecure about who we are we can’t take a little good natured teasing, though I am quick to admit these things can and often do go well beyond the bounds of good nature. Cartoons drawn with a sharp pen can be vicious. I may keep my cool over Doonesbury and I still read it but I don’t think it’s funny.
     It used to be that newspapers openly represented a particular political point of view. The small town I grew up in had two weekly papers, one Republican and one Democratic. Nowadays they maintain a pretense of balance. It would be better if they didn’t. It costs them their edge and they are less interesting for it. I’m not sure if that is a cause or symptom of the general decline in the medium. I’m sad to say that of my five grown children only one subscribes to a daily newspaper. Another gets one on Sundays. Not to worry though, they get most of their news from the internet and for anyone who wants a different view clearly expressed it is certainly there. Google on the Danish cartoons if you have any doubts.
     While I’m back on the Danish cartoons, it strikes me that most American Muslims must be livid. Since 911 they have been working hard to polish a badly tarnished image. Now this comes along and we are back to square one with Muslim crowds around the world calling for blood. It’s hard to see how anyone could say with a strait face they are a tiny minority. The cartoons have made their political point. That’s what political cartoons are supposed to do.
     
     

Preserving the Union

     The man who would emancipate slaves in the United States was not an abolitionist. Abraham Lincoln hated slavery but he believed the U.S. Constitution prohibited congress and the federal government from interfering with it in those states where it was legal. In an attempt to placate the South, and especially to stop Border States from joining the seven that had already seceded, his first inaugural address contained support for a proposal to amend the constitution and make the prohibition explicit. Lincoln’s active opposition to slavery was limited to its spread into new territories. Because of that the famous orator, abolitionist, and ex-slave Frederick Douglas was one of Lincoln’s most frequent and caustic critics. So why did Lincoln’s election prompt seven states to leave the Union and form an independent Confederacy? Well for one thing slavery wasn’t the only issue. There was also the North’s tendency to favor protective tariffs to the advantage of their industrial base and to the disadvantage of southern exports like tobacco, sugar, and cotton. Northern States lobbied for federal projects to build canals, bridges, and roads. Southerners didn’t like the idea of subsidizing such projects in the North. There were more Northern States, they were more populous, and they had begun to dominate the congress. For years it had been only the threat of secession that restrained Northern interests. Most of all, the newly formed Republican Party that had elected Lincoln contained only a minority of abolitionists but was comprised entirely of anti-slavery elements, mostly disaffected Democrats and refugees from the collapsed Whig party. Southerners saw themselves losing their ability to influence events at the federal level and Republicans as having no need to compromise. They had been threatening to secede long enough. It was time to act.
     Lincoln was willing to compromise on slavery but was not willing to see it extended and he saw secession as a violation of sacred trust. He often used the analogy of marriage, a union freely entered into but once formed impossible to dissolve. If states were free to leave there was no Union at all. It was mere cohabitation and could not stand. Lincoln would fight to preserve the Union and when a Confederate Army fired on Ft. Sumter he prepared for war. Four more states seceded to join the Confederacy. Had a fifth, Maryland, the war might well have been over almost before it began. Sandwiched between Maryland and Virginia it would probably have been impossible to defend the capitol. Had Confederates taken Washington they would have controlled all the symbols of power, and quite possibly the Army, in an effective coup d'état. But Maryland did not secede and the war proceeded in earnest. More than 600,000 American soldiers would die before it was over, more than in all other wars combined, including the war in Iraq.
     By 1862 abolition had become an accepted war aim and in the fall of that year Lincoln prepared The Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln, along with most of his cabinet, thought it was probably unconstitutional and when issued it contained conditions so restrictive as to have the immediate effect of freeing not a single slave. The document was designed as a propaganda weapon, intended to demoralize the South. After the war, fearing courts would reinstate slavery on constitutional grounds, congress passed the 13th Amendment. By the time it was ratified it had practical effect only in Kentucky. Anti-slavery sentiment had already forced emancipation in Maryland and Missouri. Reconstruction legislatures had followed suit in the Confederate South. Lincoln would have been proud. Slavery was gone and through constitutionally legitimate instruments.

Immoveable Object Meets Irresistible Force

     I have been watching with some amusement as the media try to decide how to react to the current brouhaha over the publication in a Danish newspaper of cartoons depicting Muhammad in an unflattering light. At least it would be amusing if it weren’t so serious. There are few things so precious to western media types as a free press and Muslims absolutely cannot abide any criticism of their religion or its prophet. It’s no surprise that they have collided head on. Actually it is a bit odd that either side can see the issue in terms of anything but black and white. But here we have a few Muslims condemning the violence and political correctness trumps even a free press in some western circles. The only religious groups they are allowed to criticize are Christian. The Dallas Morning News has taken the plague-on-both your-houses approach, printing one of the offending cartoons with the image of Muhammad dubbed out.
     Now let me say I think the cartoons are in bad taste, but they are political cartoons, not religious ones. Bad taste is stock-in-trade for a political satirist. It can be most effective when it captures an unflattering stereotype and uses it to make a political point, in this case that journalists risk their lives when they take on Islamic extremists. The stereotype is not one created by the media. Muslims did that for them and now are reinforcing it in spades. In the process they are also demonstrating that intolerance is not confined to the fringes. It is a fair characterization of the community at large. They are reminding us all just how much difficulty we still face in trying to integrate Muslims into the modern world.
     Then there is the fantastic double standard that is apparently held almost universally by Muslims. The vilest slander applied to Christians and Jews is nothing more that good clean fun but even a hint of disrespect toward Islam is intolerable. Muslims can’t expect much sympathy for offended sensibilities when they have that sort of attitude. The depiction of Christians and Jews I have been seeing in the Muslim media are as bad as anything from Nazi propagandists. In the twenty first century these people are still accusing Judaism of sponsoring ritual murder of Muslim children in order to use their blood in the Seder meal. Muslim clerics and political leaders regularly accuse Jews of plotting to take over the world, citing as proof The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, 85 years after that document was debunked as a libelous Tsarist fraud. Does anybody seriously think these people can be placated by any amount of western “sensitivity?”
     Having said all that, I still think the cartoons were in bad taste but the sad truth is the cartoonist pretty much got it right. The modern face of Islam is one of violence, hatred, and extreme intolerance. It is of young men slaughtering the innocent, dictators practicing thuggery, clerics spewing venom, and ordinary Muslims wallowing in the filth of religious bigotry. It doesn’t have to be that way but no amount of political correctness is going to change it. That is going to require the community to take a hard look at itself and its attitudes. Until it does I don’t see how Muslims will ever take their place in the world. The process may take generations to work its way through. In the mean time a free press is here to stay. They are going to have to learn to deal with it. There is no avoiding it.

The Dog that Caught the Car

     Four years ago last month Israelis intercepted the Palestinian freighter Karine A carrying 50 tons of Iranian manufactured weapons. Yasser Arafat told President George Bush he knew nothing about it. When Bush caught him in the lie he refused to have further dealings with the old terrorist, leaving him to spend the last two years of his life rotting in his office in Ramallah under Israeli house arrest. It was the right thing to do. For over forty years American Presidents had been trying to broker a peace between Israel and a Palestinian leadership that didn’t want peace. Now we have had free elections and Palestinians have elected Hamas, essentially telling the world it isn’t just the leadership that doesn’t want peace. Or have they?
     Those sad people had an awful choice. The ruling Fatah party had been in charge of their political destiny for as long as anyone could remember and had delivered only misery.  They gave them a kleptocracy that could not pick up the garbage, maintain law and order, or operate the schools. And they were every bit as belligerent toward Israel as Hamas is. The difference is that Hamas is up front about it and may be less corrupt. The question is whether they can govern any more effectively than Fatah.
     It’s going to be interesting to see what they do now. By all appearances they never expected to actually win an election. Now they have lost the luxury of criticizing from the sidelines. The responsibility is all theirs and they may surprise us. If I can believe what I read they have demonstrated an ability to deliver community services with a degree of competence Arafat’s organization could never approach. And from Israel’s perspective they will have a government to deal with that may actually be in charge. If Hamas should decide to stop the lawlessness they just might be able to pull it off. If they don’t, well they will be easy to find.
     When Bush told Arafat to take a hike he put a pin into one of the most enduring hot air balloons of late twentieth century conventional wisdom. Squeals went up from around the world and on a trip through the Middle East then Secretary of State Collin Powell got a public dressing down from every potentate he met with. The United States had to deal with Yasser Arafat. Baloney, the old buzzard was exposed as a hapless fraud and when if came right down to it no one of any consequence was prepared to go to his aid.
     Now Bush has told Hamas that unless they clean up their act he will treat them as he treated Arafat. He will ignore them. He has the credibility to be taken seriously. With Iran hard at work building a bomb in the neighborhood even Europeans appear to be prepared to follow Bush’s lead, that is if they aren’t intimidated by a few broken windows in their embassies. That remains to be seen. Europeans haven’t been known lately for the stiffness of their spines.
     But back to Hamas; they have some fundamental choices to make over the next few weeks that will determine the future of Palestinians for years to come. It would be a shock if they suddenly acknowledged Israel’s right to exist and renounced violence. But if they decide to focus on the basic functions of government, clean up some of the corruption and leave the Israelis alone while they withdraw to the relative security of their fence they just might gain a few international friends.

A Nation Divided

     In 1835 William H. Seward, who would become Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of State, took his wife and young son on a holiday excursion from their home in upstate New York through Pennsylvania and Virginia. They were impressed with the picturesque countryside as they rode through Pennsylvania, dotted as it is today with neatly kept farmsteads. Virginia was a study in contrast, stately homes interspersed with ragged shacks. Francis Seward later recounted two incidents that would shape their attitudes for the rest of their lives. They encountered a blind elderly Negro woman turning some sort of machine in her yard and stopped to talk. The woman told them she had to do something and given her age and condition that was all she could manage. She had no family. They had all been sold years before. She had never heard from them again. Francis couldn’t get the old woman out of her mind as they continued on but then something even more disturbing happened. As the sun was setting a group of twenty Negro boys came along, ages six to twelve, all tied together and being herded by a tall gaunt white man with a whip. He had purchased them from several different plantations earlier in the day and was taking them to market. The Sewards watched as he shoved the boys into a shed where they laid down and began to whimper themselves to sleep. Francis broke down in tears and asked her husband to take her home.
     Francis told and retold that story through the years. Tales like it, and worse, reinforced a Northern image of the South as an evil place, increasingly viewing the South and Southerners solely through the prism of slavery. Southerners reacted defensively. After all, slavery was as old as civilization. Romans had slaves, so did Greeks. Nobody condemned them. Southerners saw their society as one of grace and gentility. They were proud of the sort of hospitality they had shown the Sewards and in fact Francis was quick to remark on how kindly they had been received. Why all of a sudden were they villains? Only a few years earlier slavery had been not uncommon in the North as well. Who were Yankees to judge?
     William H. Seward became a distinguished Senator. He made a number of famous speeches opposing the extension of slavery to new territories. In 1860 he was the leading candidate for president at the Chicago convention of the brand new anti-slavery Republican Party. But there was sometimes an edge to Seward’s rhetoric that made people think falsely he was an abolitionist, that he favored the immediate abolition of slavery. It wasn’t true. Like Abraham Lincoln, Seward thought the constitution put slavery beyond the reach of the federal government. The Southern States would have to abolish slavery on their own. Also like Lincoln, he thought history was on his side. It would happen, soon. Still the perception was there and enough delegates thought he was too radical. Talk of war was heavy and most delegates wanted to avoid it if at all possible. Seward was unable to carry a majority on the first ballot. The nomination went to a compromise dark horse candidate, Lincoln.
     It wouldn’t matter. Lincoln was no more acceptable to the South than Seward was. I have often argued that the Civil War was about more than slavery and it was but in the end, to say that it wasn’t all about slavery is to put too fine a point on it. Lincoln was right in his acceptance speech. A house divided could not stand.
     

The Lincoln Douglas Debates

     Henry Clay Roberts was my great grand father and a private soldier in the Confederate Army. It is ironic that he was named for the famous senator from Kentucky who crafted the Missouri Compromise, and that the abrogation of that compromise would propel Abraham Lincoln to the presidency and precipitate the Civil War. With President’s Day coming I’ve been reading up on Lincoln and thinking what I might learn from that unlikely hero. I had forgotten, really, what the famous debates were all about. Since the debates first brought Lincoln to national prominence they are a good place to start. At the time Lincoln wasn’t even running for office. He was just a country lawyer who felt strongly about the great issue of the day, slavery and whether it would tear the Union apart.
     First the compromise; everybody knew slavery was an abomination, including most southerners, but economies in southern states were dependent on it. Everybody also understood that, as the Union grew, adding new states without slavery would cause the institution to wither. Bringing them in as slave would prolong it. That’s what the argument was all about for most people. Abolitionists, those who wanted slavery ended immediately, were always a small minority. It’s hard for us to understand this reasoning today but most anti-slavery advocates in the early 19th century thought slavery was a necessary evil. If the constitution hadn’t allowed it there would be no Union. So in 1820 the compromise, for the sake of preserving the Union, was that Missouri would be slave but slavery would not be allowed in territories north of a line extending from Missouri’s southern border.
     The compromise was never an easy one and over the next 30 years it was chipped away at, mostly in favor of new slave territory. When Kansas and Nebraska applied for statehood in 1854 Steven Douglas, a senator from Illinois, offered a bill to let voters in the new states decide for themselves whether to be slave or free. With southern senators threatening to secede the Nebraska bill narrowly passed. It caused a furor back home in Illinois and for Lincoln it was the last straw. He spent weeks preparing a speech. Douglas came to the state fair in Springfield and spoke for three hours defending his bill. The next day Lincoln offered a rebuttal. It was the speech of his life. Newspapers across the country printed it and Lincoln was famous, at a stroke the leading spokesman in opposition to allowing slavery in places where it did not already exist.
     Lincoln’s genius was in addressing a moral issue in terms that did not cast his opponents in terms of evil. He appealed to their own sense of right and wrong, reminding them of the words in the Declaration of Independence, of why they had agreed to ban the Atlantic slave trade, asking them why those who still ran slave markets in the south were universally despised, pointing out that southern slave owners had already freed over 400,000 slaves at serious financial sacrifice to themselves. Why would they do these things if slavery weren’t wrong? He pleaded with them not to add it to the new territories.
     It was too late. The die was cast, but Lincoln’s capacity for empathy, his ability to place himself in another’s shoes, had emerged as his signal personal attribute. He understood that when you begin by calling your opponent a scoundrel, any discussion is already ended. It was one of the things that made him the greatest of our presidents. We could use more of that.