On moral courage

Historian Eric Foner delivered a message on moral courage as Lehigh’s 2015 baccalaureate speaker.

A prolific author, Pulitzer Prize winner and expert on American race relations, Foner drew in part on the stories of Americans in the 19th century who mobilized to abolish slavery “and tried to make the country live up to the creed of equality for all.”

Much of Foner’s writings concern a pivotal era in the nation’s history – the struggle over slavery and the Civil War – and the Reconstruction period that followed. The Dewitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, he won the Pulitizer Prize for History and the Bancroft Prize for his 2010 book, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. His new book, Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad, chronicles anti-slavery efforts in New York prior to the Civil War.
 
Prior to delivering the baccalaureate address on May 17, Foner sat down for an interview, which follows, with Mary Ellen Alu from Lehigh’s Office of Communications. 

Q.  Moral courage, the title of your baccalaureate address, means having the courage to do what’s right at the risk of personal harm. Abraham Lincoln, of course, stands out for his great moral courage. Do you see much of it today?

No, I’m afraid I don’t. There were a lot of politicians around Lincoln’s time also who did not exemplify this. So I don’t think we should despair, so to speak. The one quality that is part of this, and which Lincoln exemplified, is not just the ability and the willingness to stand up for your principles even when they’re unpopular, but the other side of it, which is, the ability to change your mind, the ability to listen to people and to rethink your assumptions in times of crisis and not just to stubbornly hold on to views when it may not be appropriate.

Today if a political leader changes his opinion on anything, he’s a flip-flopper, people attack him. The notion that you might learn something and think in a new way seems not to be acceptable among political leaders today. One of the things I really admired about Lincoln in studying him was exactly this open-mindedness – very strong moral beliefs but a willingness to listen to criticism. Lincoln had a thick skin. He didn’t care if people came in, as they did, and told him, you’re doing this wrong, you’re doing that wrong. He actually thought he might learn something from his critics, and I don’t see a lot of that around in our political leadership today.

Q. Why is it important that Lehigh’s graduating seniors hear this message?

We are a democracy. A democracy requires its citizens to be engaged in public life, not necessarily to run for public office, but to take part in public discussion of things. The willingness to stand up for your beliefs even when they’re not popular, to think independently is very important. These young people are graduating after four years of an excellent education, and I want to encourage them to keep in touch with the values of the life of the mind. Our society today is completely overrun with values of the marketplace. Everything is judged on an economic standard, and that’s not what they’ve learned in the classroom. I want to encourage them to keep the life of the mind as a major value in their lives, and the historical frame of mind is part of that. That’s what I know.

Q. In these confused times, with the police killings of young African-American men igniting the Black Lives Matter movement, what can history teach us? 

What history teaches us are two rather different things. One is that even small numbers of ordinary people, who have this quality of moral courage, can actually change society. The people I wrote about in [Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad], really a handful of them frankly who are actively engaged in helping fugitive slaves, really changed the way many Americans thought about slavery, and they contributed to the end of slavery. History teaches people to avoid cynicism, avoid apathy and to think you can really accomplish change if you want to.

But on the other hand, our liberties are not to be taken for granted. That’s why we need people to be engaged in public life. This is an old phrase but there’s a lot of truth to it, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. Our rights are not self-enforcing. Things that are written in the Constitution are not necessarily real in daily life. There are a lot of rights that African Americans had on the books for a long time and which actually were abrogated in real life. The right to be secure from search and seizure and spying on you by the government is something that’s in our Constitution but it’s violated rather frequently nowadays. So I just want people to think about the need to be vigilant. People can change history but they also have to be vigilant against regressions. 

Q. A recent Time magazine cover had a photo of a black man being chased by police in riot gear. The year 1968 had been scratched out to indicate the photo was taken in 2015, not 47 years earlier. Why does history seem to be repeating itself?

I’m old enough to have been around in the ‘60s, to have seen all that and remembered. One of the things we learn from history is the deep-rootedness of these kinds of problems. Slavery existed a lot longer than universal freedom did in this country, and then it was followed by deep inequalities.  The weight of history is a very powerful thing. That doesn’t mean we have to succumb to it, but that’s one of the things history teaches us – where these problems come from, deeply, deeply rooted in our society. They’re structural problems, and they require a structural solution.

Unfortunately it seems that these kinds of uprisings of violence are necessary to force the issue into public consciousness. I wish there were other ways of doing that, but history seems to suggest that that’s how people become aware of the continued existence of these problems.

Q. You have been quoted as saying, the history of racism still weighs on the present. Can you elaborate?

I grew up in a family which believed that racial inequality was the deepest problem in our society. That was in the 1950s when a lot of people weren’t talking about it very much, especially in the North. An uncle of mine, Philip Foner, was a prominent scholar who wrote important books about people like Frederick Douglass, the great black abolitionist, and other things.

So this does not mean we must wallow in history or become totally resentful about history or that history tells us all the answers to the problems we face today. The accumulation of long years of inequality survives even after the law is changed, and even after much progress is made. I’m not trying to be a pessimist. There’s been tremendous progress. I’m old enough to have seen that. But there’s still plenty of a-ways to go.

Q. Your newest book, Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad, chronicles the perilous journeys that black men, women and children took in their quest for freedom. As you read through abolitionist Sydney Howard Gay’s notebooks, what did you learn about moral courage? What surprised you the most?

The thing that I was struck by in this very unique document, which records the experiences of over 200 fugitive slaves who passed through New York City in the mid-1850s, [was that] it took a great deal of courage to run away from slavery. It wasn’t very easy to do so. There were very strict regulations about that and policing activities and punishments if you were caught.

One of the things that surprised me was…most of these people escaped in groups. I hadn’t really thought of that. Many of them escaped on boats, railroads. The Underground Railroad was also above ground, and there were a number of people who actually managed to get on trains. The train network was pretty extensive by that time. Horse drawn carriages, family groups. It was a much more diversified set of people and methods of escape than I had really realized. I just found it very interesting and striking to read all these very riveting stories of individuals and families and groups and how they managed to get out of slavery.

Another thing that surprises a lot of people – it didn’t surprise me – is that New York was very much a pro-Southern city. It was not a safe place for fugitives at all, but when you got to other places, like upstate New York, then the Underground Railroad was quite open because anti-slavery sentiment was much stronger up there.

Q. Harriet Tubman is synonymous with the Underground Railroad.

She’s unique. By my reckoning, she was back to the South at least seven times. She escaped in about 1849, 1850, and at least seven times she went back into Maryland to try to bring out other people. There’s no other person who did that so many times.  She’s so prominent and so courageous.

Q. Are there others who you believe deserve as much recognition?

Louis Napoleon is a guy I’d like people to know more about partly because he has such a provocative name (laughs) and partly because I had never heard of him, and I’ve studied this period many times. Napoleon is a good example of a black man born into a slave family in New York City, becomes free, and in the 1830s, particularly the ’40s and ’50s, he’s the guy on the street in New York, meeting fugitives on the docks, at the railroad depot, helping them get to upstate New York and Canada.

In my book, I mention in one case, Napoleon vs. Lemmon, the lawyer for [slave owner Jonathan] Lemmon says in court, Who is this guy Napoleon who brought this case? Is he the emperor of France? And the abolitionist lawyer says, No, he’s a much better man.”

Editor’s note: Napoleon had presented a petition to the Superior Court of New York for a writ of Habeas corpus that would free slaves brought to New York by Lemmon. The court ruled that the slaves, who were enroute from Virginia to Texas, should be freed. 

Q. When we talk about today’s racial unrest, where do you find hope?

History does inspire hope. The people like these abolitionists who fought against slavery against very, very high odds [inspire hope]. Looking back, it’s easy to say, well slavery was so evil, of course it had to be abolished. But there weren’t a lot of people before the Civil War who wanted to devote themselves to that. So I’m inspired by the courage of these people, whether it’s Douglass, [social reformer] Susan B. Anthony, [labor activist] Eugene Debs – those are the people who we should be studying, the people who put themselves on the line to make this a better country. They don’t always win, maybe they usually don’t win, but they’re always out there, and that’s what gives me optimism.

Q. Do we need policy changes?

I’m not a policy maker, and I certainly couldn’t sit down and write a draft law to deal with our problems. The job of scholars, the job of intellectuals is to identify problems and to force them into the public dialogue. The job of politicians is to figure out how to address these problems. But if they’re not forced to, they won’t.

Q. There’s no museum about slavery in the United States. Should there be?

Of course there should be. This is an essential piece of our history. People need to know the history of slavery and the struggle against slavery. We’ve just gone through, finished, the 150th anniversary of the Civil War. We have a very complicated relationship to that history. On the one hand, people are fascinated by the Civil War. On the other hand, people are uncomfortable about slavery. People don’t like to hear about it. We need to think about the role of slavery in our history, but we don’t want to, and that’s why there’s no museum of slavery. It’s too uncomfortable.

Q. You have been critical of President Barack Obama, raising concerns early on about his open-mindedness and capacity for growth. As his presidency nears its end, how do you believe history will view him?

It is too soon to tell. Really, come back in 50 years and tell me what the country looks like. Sure, I have criticisms of Obama. I also respect many things he’s done. But his term isn’t even over yet. So I think it’s too soon to judge Obama. The one thing I think is very clear, Obama’s election, the symbolic importance of it, will last forever – the first African-American president in a country where African Americans were held as slaves up to 150 years ago, very important.