MUCH OF MY personal library is still packed away in my strange year of moving from and, probably soon, moving back to my little house - it's complicated - so I can't find the ink on paper for the passage concerning the Hollywood-show-biz misrepresentation of one of our countries most admirable white abolitionists,* Lewis Tappan in the movie Amistad. I've found what I believe is a faithful reproduction of it online, authorized or not, I don't know. It's as I remember reading it in substance. In it is a perfect example of the prejudices habituated through entertainment, movies, plays, books, stand-up comedy that never tires of lying about religious people, their motives and, seriously, is dangerous as well as unjust.
The fact is that abolitionism in almost all of its effective expression was intimately tied up with religious faith, almost all of that faith Christianity. That's especially true in its earliest period any abolitionism on the part of white People was an expression of religious conviction, famously from Quakers such as John Woolman and earlier among some, though certainly not all Massachusetts Calvinists. Of course People held in slavery had their own experience of injustice as their primary motivation, though often, too they expressed it in terms of the Bible. The fact is that religion was the foremost and most potent weapon against slavery. So much so that when John Quincey Adams argued the Amistad case before the Supreme Court he admitted that he could not base the case for justice for those wrongly abducted into slavery who had fought for their freedom on the slave ship on the Constitution or statutes but resorted to pointing to the Declaration of Independence hanging in the Supreme Court chamber with its declaration that rights are the equally bestowed gift of "nature" and "Nature's God." There is no durable claim of rights anywhere to be found in "naturalism" or secularism or in secular law unless it is explicitly founded on that religious foundation.
Here is the segment of the essay:
I am always writing about that broad area that lies between expert opinion and public assumption. It is broad in the sense that it reflects the state of knowledge in far the greater number of people, not at all in the sense that the difference between expert views and public assumptions is typically great.
The film Amistad is based on an important event in American history and is intended as a serious treatment of it. In 1840 a Spanish ship carrying African captives in the Caribbean was seized by the captives. The navigators, who were spared so that they could take them back to Africa, misled them and sailed north. They were found off the coast of the United States, arrested, and brought to New Haven, which was an important abolitionist center. This came to the attention of Lewis Tappan, who organized a very distinguished legal defense to clear them of charges, including murder, and to free them. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court. When they won, Tappan arranged for them to return home to Africa.
In the film nineteenth-century New Haven looks like a set for the Salem witch trials. There are randomly assorted details to suggest a pervasive religiosity—a troop of nuns pass through the street, a close-up shows crosses on chains dangling from Bibles. Simpering, black-clad women poke crosses at the Africans through the slats in a picket fence. Puritans, as these people are clearly meant to be and would have been, more or less, did not dress in black and did not use crosses, which they regarded as icons. The Africans, watching black-clad people kneeling in the street outside their jail window in some clumsy and unspecific show of sympathy and evangelism, remark, with subtitles, that they look unhappy. This moment hardly seems necessary, since the cliché is so commonplace that even George H. W. Bush was aware of it. When they fell to thinking about it, a great many New Englanders were indeed unhappy about slavery, and about the Fugitive Slave Law, which was germane to this case and which was meant to implicate Northerners in the enforcement of slavery. This is the kind of unhappiness that should be associated with intelligent humanity, not with gloomy fanaticism. But they were Puritans, and therefore, as cliché would have it, cankered souls who simply hated life. I will not pause over the fact that this region at this time was producing a body of literature of great beauty and depth, which is generally considered a sign of cultural health.
So, given the conventions that shape the film, what is to be done with the figure of Lewis Tappan, a great early emancipationist who devoted himself and his fortune to the cause? Among many other things he was one of the founders of Oberlin College, an institution of singular importance in advancing abolition and in asserting the equality of all races and both genders. In New York City, Tappan’s business was burned, his house was ransacked with him in it. He went right on, rather jovially and very constructively, supporting abolition.
In the film he remarks to his black colleague that it would be better for the cause if the Africans were to die. There it is, the stereotypical fanaticism, the inevitable underlying pathology that contaminates what would otherwise be generosity and idealism. There is no truth in this, of course, but it satisfies the expectations of convention and also of cynicism. Movies love the underdog, here a rumpled young lawyer invented to fill this role. But a movie with any claim to historical significance would find the underdog in Tappan and the figures he recruited to the freeing of the Africans. That they were men of standing in their society did not make them powerful against a hostile president or the slave interests in Congress, as the length of this struggle and the larger struggle for emancipation makes clear. The controversy surrounding the Amistad and the determination of the case are very important, so why not give a true account of them? Reality is interesting.
Well, for one thing, to do so would disrupt some deeply entrenched notions. Lewis Tappan, that Puritan, used moral and religious language to make his case against slavery. This may mean he was, as they say, holier than thou. I freely concede that he was holier than me, if we are to be judged by our works. Better, or easier, to reinforce those stereotypes, available as they are, undisputed as they are. Popular culture has its own systems of self-perpetuation.
One of the reasons I despise costume drama theatrical and, especially, movie use of history and historical figures is because they will inevitably lie about real People and real events and, as Robinson demonstrates, they will do so to serve everything from their own ideological, personal prejudices or, as I think so often happens, from the cynical expectation that inventing such lies will have audience appeal. I read the "script" online having to figure out who said what for much of it, I didn't watch the movie, I hate movies in general and "historical" ones absolutely. I don't have to admire the figure being libeled by the show, either. I am no great admirer of Pius XII but the slander waged by those who mounted the play The Deputy, especially the Brit theater establishment and those on Broadway have permanently inserted lies about him into the popular conception of history. And that has become, as well, a fixture in our alleged journalism and among the allegedly educated but merely college credentialed so called intelligentsia.
But lies are lies and it is a responsibility to call them out when they are told and retold.
* The bizarre common received wisdom, as encouraged by everything from popular history to "historical novels" to plays and movies, in descending order, is that the abolitionist movement was, almost exclusively, a phenomenon of white people when those who had the largest stake in it are bit and supporting figures. To show you how dangerously distorting entertainment is. From what I've read of Lewis Tappan and his brother Arthur, it's doubtful they would have held such a distorted view of the fight against slavery.
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