Maxwell Institute Podcast #147: Slavery, Sacred Texts, and Historical Consciousness, with Jordan Watkins

Welcome to the Maxwell Institute Podcast. I'm Joseph Stuart. In the decades before the Civil War, Americans appealed to the nation's sacred religious and legal texts, the Bible and the Constitution, to address the slavery crisis. The ensuing political debates over slavery deepened interpreters emphasis on historical readings of these sacred texts. And in turn, these readings began to highlight the unbridgeable historical distances that separated 19th century Americans from biblical and founding pasts. While many Americans continued to adhere to a belief in the Bible's timeless teachings, and the Constitutions enduring principles, some anti-slavery readers including Theodore Parker, Frederick Douglass, and Abraham Lincoln used historical distance to reinterpret and use the sacred texts as ancient anti-slavery documents. By using the debate over American slavery as a case study, Jordan Watkins, Assistant Professor of Church History and Doctrine at BYU, traces the development of American historical consciousness in antebellum America, showing how a growing emphasis on historical readings of the Bible and the Constitution gave rise to a sense of historical distance. Before we begin our interview, could you please be sure to rate, review, and recommend our podcast to others so that others can find it? Thanks so much. Please enjoy this interview with Dr. Jordan Watkins.

Joseph Stuart: Welcome Jordan Watkins to the Maxwell Institute Podcast.

Dr. Jordan Watkins: Thank you, super excited to be here.

Joseph Stuart: We are thrilled to have you here, and we're here to discuss your book from Cambridge University Press, Slavery and Sacred Texts: The Bible, The Constitution, and Historical Consciousness in Antebellum America. How did you come to study this? I understand that this book came from your doctoral dissertation.

Dr. Jordan Watkins: It did. I studied at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and pretty early on in my Ph.D. program, I was of course looking for a dissertation project. In a class I took, I wrote a paper on Ralph Waldo Emerson's approach to history. And as I wrote that paper, I began to examine some of the scholarship on historical consciousness in antebellum America. And I thought that maybe there was more to say there. So I determined, you know, maybe this is what my project will be. And then the question arose, okay, well, how do I attack this? How do I measure historical consciousness, right? And so initially, I started somewhat naively, very broadly. I thought I would, you know, focus on Emerson and some other antebellum writers. I thought I would explore the writings of people like James Fenimore Cooper, who writes both historical fiction or historical romance but also history as it turns out. I would do a chapter on historical painters like Jonathan Trumbull. Anyway, I started much too broadly. But I knew I wanted to write on historical consciousness. And so I started to do that research. I went to the archives, and when I say archives, I'm mostly talking about Boston archives, and I started digging into the sources. And pretty quickly, I discovered that of course, slavery is a prominent theme in this period of American history. And one of the things that I discovered was that slavery was shaping conversations around the Bible and the Constitution. Now, that doesn't immediately answer the question of okay, well, why explore that topic in relationship to historical consciousness. But as I was reading the archives, I came across sources like the papers of Joseph Buckminster, who was a Unitarian and who filled really the first chair of biblical criticism at Harvard. When I started to notice that he was beginning to argue that the Bible should be interpreted and understood through historical examination, through contextual examination. As I read through his papers, I recognized that in the process of providing historical readings of certain biblical texts, it started to indicate what I call historical distance. That there were real differences between the biblical past and his antebellum present. When I noticed that I thought, well, maybe this is the way to measure historical consciousness, or a way to measure historical consciousness.

Joseph Stuart: Now, you've defined historical distance for us, but what do you mean by historical consciousness?

Dr. Jordan Watkins: Historical consciousness can mean many things. At a very basic level, it involves how people think about the relationship between the past, or a past, and the present. Historical consciousness often also involves how one thinks about historical change, and that informs the ways in which the present relates to the past. So it can mean many things. That's what it means at a basic level. When we're talking about modern historical consciousness, we're generally talking about views of historical change that recognize contingency so that that history is based on developments that are not predetermined. When we talk about modern historical consciousness, we're also often talking about a recognition of the discreteness of historical pasts. A recognition that pasts are distinct, that you can't just assume that people in a different time and place thought or lived like you do. These are kind of some of the basic contours of modern historical consciousness. Now, I did not set out to explain how we end up with modern American historical consciousness. So I narrowed in on this idea of historical distance. Bears (5:40) emphasizing that a recognition of historical distance goes far beyond merely a recognition of chronological time passing. It involves a clear understanding of substantial historical differences, right? Differences in thought, differences in relationships, differences, in certainly, technology, that's what I'm sort of getting at with this idea of historical distance.

Joseph Staurt: I'm thinking about those sorts of before and after type events. So for my grandparents, that was when John F. Kennedy was shot. For my generation, and I think yours too, maybe it could be September 11th, 2001. And the sorts of things in which we understand, as you said, discrete periods to be different. But in this period, in reading your book, entitled Slavery and Sacred Text: The Bible, The Constitution, and Historical Consciousness In Antebellum America, you first explain what biblical criticism is. Could you give us a brief overview of that term?

Dr. Jordan Watkins: So for centuries, and this extends into the Reformation, many biblical readers approached the biblical text as a historically accurate account of these past periods. Well, they might not have that sort of understanding of the ability to be able to footnote, which is part of the development of modern historical thinking. But they would assume that what they read on the page happened, and that it was an accurate account of these people's lives, or of historical events that are being described. They also generally didn't question the authorship of those individuals to whom the biblical texts are ascribed. And of course, for Protestants and Catholics, and others, the biblical text was the place to go for not just sort of religious understanding, but any kind of moral insight to guide their life. And they may not have seen even a distinction between those things. So and then another thing to say here is that people generally assumed correspondence between their own moment and the biblical past. Meaning, if Moses were to show up in their present moment, he probably would think something like what they thought. Or if they showed up somehow in his past, they would be like contemporaries, right? They would share the same kinds of ideas. But this starts to change. It starts to change in the 17th century with thinkers like Thomas Hobbes and Baroque Spinoza, who question the mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, who also question whether or not the situation of the Israelites has anything important to say about their own political moment. So they sort of set the stage for the emergence of biblical criticism. Now that takes on a new, some new contours in the next century, the 18th century, the rise of deism and deists are prone to simply dismiss the biblical texts both suggesting that they don't have historical value or maybe limited historical value, or religious value. Now, Christian scholars would respond to the deists, and even in their responses they met the deist on the grounds that the deist had sort of set. And some of those grounds were historical. So if a deist wants to dismiss the Bible on historical grounds, Christian scholars were going to say, well, we're going to bend the Bible on historical grounds. Biblical criticism as an autonomous discipline emerges in Germany in the late 18th century. And it's in that period, it's institutionalized in places like Halle and Gottingen, and you have scholars who use philological and historical tools to examine the biblical texts. To try and investigate, okay, who were the authors of these texts? Do the accounts that they described, are those accounts accurate? Does this relate to actual historical experiences? So what they began to do is they were trying to understand the historical conditions in which the biblical narratives took place and the historical conditions of the writers and the audiences. And then they were measuring the religious meaning of the text based on those historical investigations. So this means that in some cases, they were willing to set aside certain biblical texts, Old Testament texts, but also potentially New Testament texts, if they found that those texts lacked authenticity or accuracy of some kind or another.

Joseph Stuart: I think that's a really helpful baseline so that we understand the stakes of biblical criticism. It's not just saying, Oh, I don't like the Bible. It's saying what can be verified? What can be footnoted, so to speak, in the history of the Old and New Testament? What should be kept? What should be understood as metaphor, and what might be discarded in the long run? And this is the setting for the restoration. This is something that David Holland has written about, what counted as scripture in early America. I really see his project aligning with yours and important ways there, too.

Dr. Jordan Watkins: Yeah, absolutely. Perhaps, at this point it bears noting that David was my dissertation advisor. So absolutely, his book shaped much of my thought, at least initially on this project. And one of the things that he examines, is this idea of scripture in early America. And in that process, he does describe developments in biblical criticism in the United States. And one of the things that he notes is that biblical scholars in the United States really adopted this historical, contextual approach to biblical texts. And he makes the point that in the process of reading the biblical texts with historical analysis, that begins to place distance or indicate distance between the biblical past that they're examining, and their own present. Now, David doesn't spend a whole lot of time on that point, it's that's kind of my jumping off point, really. So what I do is I then further examine the biblical scholars of early 19th century America. And I sort of confirm David's idea, this is a point that's also been made by another scholar, but I confirmed the idea and then stretch it further. That is that these scholars, if you have a spectrum of antebellum biblical scholars, from liberal scholars, even you could say, at least in their time, radical or heretical, somebody like Theodore Parker and the transcendentalists, from him all the way to somebody like Calvinist, Charles Hodge, you have scholars who are embracing the idea that the biblical texts should be examined as historical documents. Now, they're going to apply that lesson from biblical criticism differently. And I should also note that most of these American biblical scholars are very skeptical of the Germans. They see them as inhabit—well, they see them as adopting rather heretical religious views or what they would see as irreligious views, right? So they're not willing to follow them all the way and they're critical of much of what the Germans have to say. But that said, even a figure like Moses Stewart, Congregationalist who was hired as the professor of sacred literature at Andover Theological Seminary, which is founded in 1807, it’s founded in response to Harvard's liberal turn to Unitarianism. Even Moses Stuart, he feels the need to learn German to read the Germans. Now he wants to harvest the more benign principles of German biblical criticism. But nonetheless, he embraces the idea that history matters in terms of analyzing biblical texts. He will advance an idea of grammatical criticism that is, that he wants to focus first and foremost on the words of the text. When Andrews Norton called out Moses Stewart, not paying enough attention to context examining the biblical texts, Moses Stewart responded and essentially said, no I take context very seriously. And in outlining his grammatical approach, it becomes very clear that that is also a historical approach. So he would say yes, we have to examine the words and we have to examine how those words function in the context of the times in which they were written. So the upshot here is that all of these biblical scholars are adopting at least the notion that they should examine these texts, historical texts. Now as they do that, their applications vary. Moses Stewart and Charles Hodge, they embrace the entire Bible as the word of God. Unitarians are less prone to embrace the Old Testament. They'll focus on the New Testament. And then more radical figures like Theodore Parker, he's content to maybe embrace some ideas in the gospels, some of Jesus's teachings, and then let everything else sort of drift away into the past.

Joseph Stuart: Yeah, that's really fascinating because Theodore Parker is pretty open about the idea that what we might today call a cafeteria Christian, he takes what he sees is useful and leaves other things behind, and he becomes a prominent abolitionist, one who fights against the institution of slavery. How did his view of the Bible influence his views on abolition?

Dr. Jordan Watkins: Theodore Parker is a transcendentalist. Transcendentalists emerged in the around the 1830s, early 1830s in and around Boston. They often have ties to Harvard. Many of them had been Unitarians. They believe that Unitarianism has embraced what they would see as cool or even cold rationalism. Now, transcendentalists are not, they don’t throw away John Locke's philosophy, his empirical approach, but they also want to privilege individual conscience. And so they find Kant's idealism quite appealing. Transcendentalists believed that there are values and truths that can be discovered through the use of intuition rather than use of the senses. But how does this relate to Parker's view of the Bible and Parker's abolitionism? Theodore Parker engages with the German biblical critics at a level that goes beyond any of his contemporaries in the United States. He reads figures like Wilhelm De Vita in a way that enhances his transcendental views. He reads Wilhelm De Vita and De Vita, one of his arguments— first of all, he provides a critical reading of various Old Testament texts. But he also has this idea that there is this innate religious sense that people have And that very clearly relates to the transcendental emphasis on conscience. So he reads De Vita that he also reads, David Freidrich Strauss and Strauss is quite critical of the New Testament texts. He argues that the gospels were probably written by individuals who had mythologized the historical figure of Jesus. Now, Parker's not willing necessarily to go all that way. He and even Ralph Waldo Emerson, they think that there is some historical basis for the Gospels and for the figure of Jesus. But engaging with these kinds of individuals, Parker shows that he is very much willing to set aside biblical texts, teachings, if and when those teachings conflict with his conscience. So he has no problem in saying, if the Bible supports slavery so much the worse for the Bible, which is a rather radical position. So his engagement with biblical criticism supports and upholds his transcendental emphasis on individual conscience. And he is uniquely situated then to allow the Bible to be a historical text that does not have relevance for his present moment. Now, he doesn't ultimately fully embrace that position, he finds things in the Bible that are relevant, but he's always measuring that not against, not to whether or not it's historically accurate, but he's measuring against conscience. And so that places him in a unique position.

Joseph Stuart: Yeah, and I can see how folks on the other side of the theological spectrum. So Parker is a liberal and again, this is not a modern political term. This is an antebellum theological position to keep in mind, although of course, there's some overlap, but I can see how conservatives would say, that's far too squishy. How can we discuss authority in that way? How would they have responded to the question of slavery? Those on the opposite ideological spectrum from Parker, how would they defend slavery using the biblical text?

Dr. Jordan Watkins: So first of all, yes, they found Parker's views very problematic. They thought this idea of conscience was much too airy, squishy. For Parker, it was great because how do you really criticize that fully, right? Well, you do it by again appealing to the Bible in a context where most people find that to be the authority for morality and religious truth. So there are a range of interpretations, biblical interpretations, as they relate to slavery during this period. The most common reading has been outlined by Mark Knoll. That is a common sense, literalist reading. You pick up the Bible, you open it, you read it and your common sense tells you what it means. That readings suggested that slavery was at least allowed and sanctioned, at least at certain points of the Bible. So now that's a—that's a more common approach. I'm interested in this book in examining the approach of these biblical scholars who had embraced this idea that I'm going to use historical reasoning. I'm going to use contextual examination. I'm going to try and investigate and understand the views of the people at that time. And those are the people I'm examining. So somebody like Moses Stuart, he would read the biblical text. He would search its passages, and he would come to a passage like the one in Paul's epistle to Phileman, in which if you take a common sense approach and a literalist approach, it seems like Paul is sending Onesimus back to Philemon as a slave, but Stuart wouldn't necessarily just take the common sense literalist approach, he would provide a contextual reading. In this particular case that contextual reading would render the same or yield the same interpretation. So Moses Stuart for example, when we get to something like the fugitive slave law of 1850, this is passed in relationship to the compromise of 1850. It's a concession to proslavery southerners, in that it makes it easier for them to recapture fugitive slaves. Moses Stuart, when after the Fugitive Slave laws passed, he defends the law. He defends Daniel Webster. Daniel Webster is a Massachusetts senator who gives this famous, or infamous, Seventh of March speech in which he defends the new law. Interestingly, he does so with both biblical and constitutional argumentation. He's immediately attacked by people like Parker and Emerson and others, not physically, verbally. And Moses Stuart rises to his defense, and provides a reading of this passage in Paul's epistle to Philemon and says it provides a very contextual argumentation to dismantle the claim that Onesimus was sent back as anything other than a slave. So he's provided a contextual reading, to uphold what we might say, is a proslavery interpretation. And then he says, this has direct relevance for our present moment. We should send back fugitive slaves just like Paul did. That tells you something about how many of these scholars were willing to embrace contextual readings, but then provide a unilateral application. In other words, their readings— part of my argument is that their contextual readings begin to indicate historical distance, right? That the past is very different from our present. But then individuals like Stuart would ignore that distance and collapse that distance and say that message has direct application to us in this present moment.

Joseph Stuart: I think that this is so foreign to modern readers. And as you mentioned, with the Webster address, he's using both the Bible and the Constitution, which as a US senator, is fascinating that he's given them equal weight in this regard. But asking about the Constitution, when does it start to have historical distance? The Fugitive Slave Act is enacted in 1850. Did it begin before that, or right about then?

Dr. Jordan Watkins: So a little bit before. In some ways, you could say decades before. Sometimes we might think well, what do you mean when did the Constitution become a historical text? Or what do you mean when did people start to recognize distance from the Founding Era? Well initially, Madison, he conceives of the Constitution as an imperfect system of frame of government. Again, yes of course, it's attaxed and it has the potential to be read as a historical or archival text, that remains a potential at the framing.

Joseph Stuart: Yeah, this is something just to note that both the Bible and the Constitution in this way, are serving certain ideological purposes. And the texts themselves don't come imbibed with those meanings, but because we're human beings, individuals read their own way of understanding the world onto them, right?

Dr. Jordan Watkins: Absolutely. So this starts to occur fairly quickly. During the first congress, you'd begin to have debates over the Constitution in which individuals like Madison start to say, yes, we should focus on the words of the text itself, which of course has a relationship to Moses Stuart's reading of the Bible. We first focus on the words. But if something's unclear, we have to appeal to sources beyond the Constitution, and he wouldn't say that any source applies here. He would emphasize in particular the ratification debates. So this is actually an appeal to what we might call original understanding. The earliest originalist appeals were to the ratifiers, not the framers. Now, it bears noting that this serves political purposes, Madison is countering Federalist readings. So this isn't doesn't occur in a vacuum, right? As none of these debates do.

Joseph Stuart: Now to bring it to a much less cerebral sphere, in thinking if folks have seen Loki and thinking about the sacred timeline, right? They are seeing the Constitution as the origin of all things that should happen that directly flow from it. Right?

Dr. Jordan Watkins: Absolutely. And this is part of what I'm tracing is that the texts, as people begin to recognize the differences in beliefs and values, either for the people of the biblical past, or eventually, with the Founding Era, that starts to create that sense of distance and separation. So Madison, and others do start to make these originalist appeals, which makes the constitutional text historical, but at this point, its historical, archival nature actually relates to or corresponds to the ways in which it becomes sacred. So Madison eventually comes to this position that the text is sacred, he has to try and convince Jefferson of that and Jefferson, for the most part, comes around. But initially, their sense of the Constitution's sacrality and its archival nature went hand in hand. Now, what happens when in subsequent generations is Americans imbue the Constitution with even more sacredness than the framers or founders ever did. And they do this in part by saying, well look at all the good that has happened since the Constitution was framed. And so that's a real emphasis on what we would call continuity. Here's an event in the past year, all the good things that flow from it. That mutes any sense of historical distance between one's own present moment and Founding Era.

Joseph Stuart: If I'm understanding what you're saying correctly, the Constitution was always something that could be read as a historical text. But over time, it began to be seen as something that should be read in its original context, much like the Bible.

Dr. Jordan Watkins: Absolutely. And that then informs the ways in which they think about the Founding Era moment and their own present moment. To trace this out a little bit further, so what really makes the Constitution a text that becomes a focus of historical debate, I argue, is the passing of the founding generation, their deaths. And in particular, the death of James Madison who was the last framer to die. He dies in 1836. When he dies, people start clamoring, they want his words, be able to understand the Constitution, which is, you know, somewhat strange. Just not long before they could have asked him or potentially asked him. But it's when they pass from the scene that their words start to take on even more important meaning for Americans. So what you have happen is Madison had kept notes of the convention, right, the Constitutional Convention. He had edited those notes throughout his life, and he had thought about publishing them, but he never had. Well, this made them all the more interesting to Americans, who came to believe that Madison's notes were the cipher to the Constitution. We want to understand this text. We need Madison's notes. So Congress purchases Madison's notes from Dolly Madison, and then they publish them in 1840. And there's a lot of excitement, newspapers are talking about how wow, so much time has passed. And with each successive year, Madison's notes and texts like this become more important for us to understand the Constitution. So it's in that moment, I argue, that historical conversation about the Constitution ratchets up to a new level. And in what takes place after that, slavery, debates over slavery, the growing crisis of slavery shapes so much of the conversation around Madison's paper. So you have a number of readings that emerge. You have the Garrisonian reading William Lloyd Garrison in the 1830s has dismissed the Constitution as proslavery. Famously in 1854, he'll burn a copy. And Madison's notes for Garrasonians like Wendell Phillips just confirmed that fact. In fact, Wendell Phillips will publish excerpts from Madison's notes and say, see it is a pro slavery compact as he calls it.

But then you have other readings emerge other anti slavery readings emerge. You have what is called a Radical Constitutionalist approach. These are individuals who want to focus very closely on the words of the Constitution. And the Constitution does not have the word slavery in it. So they provide a very strict reading of the Constitution to say that this can be read as an antislavery document. The most interesting reading, for my purposes, is the reading proposed by the Moderate Constitutionalists. And they take Madison's papers and they say, okay, our contextual reading shows that yes, slavery was protected in a number of ways in the Constitution. However, it's clear that the framers anticipated that slavery would die out. That it would gradually become extinct, and so they then use that appeal to what I call an original expectation of abolition, to argue that the Constitution can now be read as an antislavery document. And the fact that things did not go as they thought they would, the fact that slavery expanded and extended, is only a greater reason to now read it as an anti slavery document so that we can realize their founding era expectations, and correct the problem that has emerged, which is the spread of slavery.

Joseph Stuart: And this is fascinating, its intellectual judo in a lot of ways, everyone using the others' arguments against them to try and push a point about hypocrisy or about how they are missing the mark, for what the founders originally meant. And one of those who is using both the Constitution and the Bible to make political points is Frederick Douglass. Could you tell us a little bit about Douglass and how he used both documents to oppose the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act?

Dr. Jordan Watkins: In that time period, he's the most famous fugitive slave in the United States. Eventually his freedom is purchased, but initially adopts a Garrasonian approach to the Constitution. He sees it as a pro slavery text and he's right there with Garrison in condemning that text. During the same period, he certainly discusses the Bible quite a bit. He takes a which would have been the most common approach in this period, or maybe any period. He takes a proof texting approach to the Bible. So that means you take the text that sort of fit what you're trying to prove, and you highlight those texts. So there are certain passages in the Bible that could be read as anti slavery. Anti slavery figures often upheld the golden rule for example, as clear evidence that the Bible was an anti slavery text. Now in that process, you have to ignore other texts, right, that indicate that slavery was sanctioned. So Douglas, a hillside even passages in Deuteronomy, from the Moseic law about how clearly for the ancient Israelites, slavery was not meant for life. And he'll use that and say, well, this is clear evidence that we should not have this kind of slavery here in the United States. He even will take on Stuart to some extent, not with a deep contextual response, but he'll he'll look at that same passage in Paul's epistle to Philemon, and he'll say, no, Paul sent an Onesimus as a brother, not as a slave. So he has no problem reading the biblical text in this kind of way, and making these prophets and apostles speak across time to condemn slavery, he does adopt a more critical approach to the Constitution. I indicated that initially, he read it as a pro slavery text. By the late 1840s Douglas is wondering about that. And he's starting to wonder if maybe there's a distinction between the Constitution as it was written, and the Constitution as it had been used. Now, he's very much influenced here by some of those anti slavery constitutionalists that I mentioned, in focusing on the words of the text alone. So by the time you get the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and you start to get these fugitive slave cases in the north, Douglas has decided to adopt an anti slavery reading of the Constitution. And this is a huge deal in abolitionist circles and he's being called on to explain himself, right, because he's now even more Garrison in the sense. But the interesting thing that I find with Douglas, is even though he's focusing on the words of the text, he also makes this appeal to the farmers' expectations of slavery's eventual demise. So he combines both this focus on the words with a historical reading, that emphasizes the founders’ expectations of slavery's demise. Now, part of the interesting thing here is that these individuals who adopt this kind of reading, and I suggest that this reading becomes extremely influential, adopted by Douglas, adopted eventually by Theodore Parker, adopted by Abraham Lincoln, in different ways, but they all adopt this view that the framers had expected slavery to die out. And then they proceed to read the Constitution as an anti slavery text. And so at this point, you're starting to get a reading that suggests that the framers had thought historically in drafting the Constitution, that they had crafted a document that was meant to outlive their pro slavery context into an anti slavery context. So now we start to see in the constitutional discussion, which by the way, becomes the most important conversation, you can see this actually in debates over the Fugitive Slave Act. So that reading really gains credence among a number of important thinkers during this period. And it is a reading again, that acknowledges or that suggests, the framers had thought historically. So now you see the idea of historical distance being used to interpret and read the Constitution. And it's not an argument about sort of reclaiming or restoring a past era. It's rather an argument about fulfilling the ideals of the founding generation that they could not fulfill. I'll just note here this is another way in which constitutional conversation relates to the biblical conversation, is that one of the anti slavery readings that emerges in biblical rounds is one provided by William Ellery Channing, who was a Unitarian. And he made the argument, this contextual argument, that Paul and the apostles could not abolish slavery because it was so ingrained into their society. So what did they do, Channing argues? They planted the seeds of abolition, so that those seeds could gradually emerge and flower in a new age and Channing and others were saying, this is that New Age. They're seeing an original expectation among the apostles, and among Christ in a similar way that these other constitutional readers, Channing among them by the way, are seeing an original expectation of abolition among the founders.

Joseph Stuart: Now, these two views, what we might call the liberal view and the conservative view of both the Bible and the Constitution come into play during what's known as the Dred Scott Decision. What was that Supreme Court decision? And why was it so important?

Dr. Jordan Watkins: What you've had happened during the 1850s, beginning with the Fugitive Slave Act, at least that's where it becomes clearly evident, is that the constitutional debate has come to matter most in these conversations. This is obvious because in 1850, when Moses Stuart defends Daniel Webster's speech, he talks about his contextual reading of the Bible and then he talks about the Constitution and aims to provide a contextual reading there, and essentially concedes that this is the conversation that matters most. So by the time you get to Dred Scott, Americans who are paying any attention, recognize that this crisis over slavery has come to rest on the Constitution and debates about the Constitution. Dred Scott's case dealt with an enslaved man who was suing for his freedom, based on the fact that his prior owner had taken him into territories that congressional act had deemed free. His case works its way through the Missouri courts. And eventually it ends up at the Supreme Court. And in Chief Justice Roger Taney's decision, he says a whole bunch of things, one of which is that Dred Scott because he is descended from slaves and because the framers did not see black people as citizens, that means that Dred Scott cannot be a citizen. This is a very historical argument. It's very much like Moses Stuart's argument in that it provides a contextual reading of the text, and then it unilaterally applies the derived meaning into the present moment, right? So it collapses the distance between the founding moment and the present to say that Dred Scott, you would not have been a citizen in 1789. You cannot be a citizen in 1857. Now, the argument’s faulty. Taney says that blacks were not citizens, and yet some of them voted during the ratification process. But that's in some ways for my purposes, besides the point. What I'm highlighting here is that it becomes very evident and Chief Justice Roger Taney's decision, that history has become the way that you interpret the Constitution. You provide a contextual reading. Those are the grounds of debate that had been set. Those grounds have been laid, and Tani has accepted them, and now he is trying to close the debate. He obviously does not succeed. Chief Justice Roger Taney's decision draws a stronger response including from two dissenting justices, John McClain and Benjamin Curtis. Now, what's interesting here is they provide the same kind of argument that anti slavery figures had been providing for a number of years. That is, among other arguments, they make the argument that the framers had expected slavery to die out. And they suggest that the Constitution should now be read in light of that expectation. So what you see happening is this anti slavery argument has now risen to the Supreme Court. Now, these are the dissenting justices. But their argument is as they've echoed early anti slavery figures, broader public response echoes their arguments, pointing out flaws and the Chief Justice's decision. People, you can tell that they feel very comfortable meeting Chief Justice on historical grounds. In fact, they point out, this is a historical decision as much as it is a legal decision. And I feel comfortable meeting you here. And so you get a number of people who make this argument that the founders and framers expected slavery to die out. I've suggested that this reading is adopted and used by Frederick Douglass, by Theodore Parker, in their responses to the case by Abraham Lincoln. Part of my argument, which I sort of end the book with, is that Abraham Lincoln carries this argument into his debates with Stephen A. Douglas in 1858. One of the things he argues there is that the framers used covert language, meaning they did not include the word slavery. So when slavery was gone from the scene, we actually wouldn't even need to rewrite the Constitution because it's not there. He goes on to in the midst of the Civil War, of course provide his Emancipation Proclamation and then speaks at Gettysburg, and he talks about the nation being conceived in liberty which alies the fact that it was also conceived in slavery. So he has now felt like okay, because I've issued that Emancipation Proclamation and slavery is starting to leave the scene, now he can even elide the fact that slavery existed at all. Of course, this will require the 13th Amendment to officially constitutionally get rid of slavery. But that argument then has risen to the White House and informed Abraham Lincoln in his Civil War decisions. REPEATS

Joseph Stuart: Could you give to us some high level reflections now that you've written this dissertation and then written a book and published it, what are some of the big takeaways that you see as most important for listeners to understand?

Dr. Jordan Watkins: There are, I think, a couple of lessons that we can learn here. One is simply a recognition that we have historical consciousness. That there is historical awareness that it doesn't exist in a vacuum. So once we at least grasping the idea that the way we think about history isn't just a given, that it's the product of historical processes, that it's the product of our religious beliefs. That awareness should lead us to be much more careful in the ways that we approach the past, including our sacred texts. These individuals, these biblical critics that I talk about, they spend a lot of time telling their audiences, hey, you need to pay attention to context because if you don't, you're going to miss apply these scriptures in our present moment. And that's, I think, a really important lesson for all of us to grasp historical contact, which takes quite a bit of work, to rely on scholars who have expertise in these fields. And then to be careful in the ways that we apply scripture. We are a people who believe that the scriptures have meaning for us. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't apply them in our day, we absolutely should. We just have to be aware and conscious of how we do so. And then I think we can provide all kinds of interesting and creative readings about these kinds of texts. One of the important points here is to recognize the ways in which the past is born, is distant, is distinct, even as we also track how the path does relate to our present moment. Now again, it doesn't mean that the past does not relate to our present and to ignore that is very problematic. And here I'm thinking of conversations about race and racism, conversations about the meaning of the phrase “black lives matter”. One does need to understand the historical processes from the period that I discussed and before, up to our present moment. One needs to be very careful, not doing violence to the past, not directly applying something from the past immediately into the present without a lot of thought, research, analysis, and examination. And I think we can also take steps to recognize the ways in which the meaning of our sacred texts can speak to us in new ways over time. We should be very aware of what they meant, but also open to the ways in which they might inspire us anew.

Joseph Stuart: Thanks so much for the time that you've given us today. One final question that we like to ask guests is, what are their three best books in line with the revelation given to Joseph Smith in section 88, that we should learn out of the “best books”?

Dr. Jordan Stuart: Obviously, one could go in a lot of different directions. So I'm gonna say that these aren't necessarily the best books, my top three best books, but these are some of my favorite books. One is a recent read that has some relevance to this conversation, which is Eddie Glad Jr.'s Again and Again, which is his book on James Baldwin. I find it incredibly insightful in following James Baldwin and using his words, to examine Baldwin's life. So it's a biography at some level, but it's also a social critique. So examining Baldwin's life and words, and then explaining the ways in which that still has a meaning today. So that speaks to the point that we're just talking about, acknowledging historical difference, but then recognizing the ways in which the past still does relate to our present moment. Another book is David Reynolds’ Beneath the American Renaissance. He examines the writers of the American Renaissance. So these would be figures like Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville. And what he does is he says that the way to understand what he calls the literariness of these texts, in other words why do we still read them, he makes the rather counterintuitive argument that the reason we still read them is because they uniquely responded to their own time and place. So he suggested, the very timelessness of these texts rests in their timeliness, which is a bit counterintuitive, but I think really illuminating and actually, I think can tell us something again, about sacred texts. I think, in some ways, our sacred texts function in that way. Certainly, with the revelations of the Doctrine & Covenants. These are texts that are very much timely and maybe it's precisely the unique ways in which they are timely that makes them also timeless, or at least, maybe that's one way to look at it. One other book I would point to, and again this has been in my mind recently because of some of my own research, is John Burt's Lincoln's Tragic Pragmatism. Now, this is the work by a professor of American Literature and historians can be anxious about people from other disciplines doing history. But John Burt is very self aware about what he is doing. It's a work of political history, but also political theory. It focuses in on the Lincoln Douglas debates. And it provides a really deep, nuanced examination of these debates. It uses this idea of that there's a concept, there's a conception. A concept is the ideal. The conception for Burt is the actualization of the realization of the ideal. And he uses that to talk about the ways in which Lincoln talked about the founding generation. Can I throw in one more? I just recently— this is actually a forthcoming book. Robert Richardson has written very good biographies of Emerson, of Thoreau, of William James. And I recently learned that he passed away in 2020. He has a forthcoming posthumous publication that I believe it’s called Three Roads Back: How Emerson, Thoreau, William James, Responded to the Greatest Losses of Their Lives, or something like that. It looks to me like it's going to be a rather short book, that makes me wonder if he finished it before he passed. But that— I'm very animated and excited by that. We named our baby Emerson James. Maybe we should have named him Emerson James Thoreau and thrown out the walk and then he’d have to read this book at some point, right? But I'm very anxious to read that text as well.

Joseph Stuart: Thank you, Jordan for stopping by the Maxwell Institute Podcast to discuss your book Slavery and Sacred Texts from Cambridge University Press.

Dr. Jordan Watkins: Thank you for having me. This has been great.

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